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New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

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Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#141

Post by alephnerd »

BeetleB wrote: post #131
aiisahik wrote: post #80

I'm an Australian citizen who has lived in the US for over 20 years, gotten degrees from Yale and Berkeley. I've worked as a software engineer for over 10 years and am currently a cofounder. I'm so put off by the immigration process in the US that I have decided to leave the US permanently. Don't worry - i still work for the same US based company remotely from a more cost effective nation. I just don't pay your taxes…

For those confused: Unfortunately, the US focuses on your origin (where you were born) rather than your nationality. alisahik is an Australian citizen, but was not born there. My guess is he was born in India, which has an absurdly long queue in the US immigration process. Really sucks.

Or China.

But yea. That is what probably happened.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#142

Post by sfblah »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #108
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US citizen interested in improving the visa process who regularly interfaces with policymakers, propose an objective rubric that is better and I will get it in front of policymakers. Can't guarantee an outcome, will guarantee the effort. Patent quota is bullshit, but also "I know talent when I see it" (even though I do and how I hire) isn't going to fly. Sorting hats are hard, Goodhart's Law, etc. High level, yo…

US PhD from top 50 institution in your field with a full-time job with salary over 100k/year. Simple and objective.

100k honestly isn’t that much, and PhDs can be sort of meaningless depending on the field.

Make it 250k for 3 consecutive years and forget about school.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#143

Post by blasphemers »

alephnerd wrote: post #107
edgyquant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.) It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people l…

> a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required. The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens. We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.

So basically you only have open engineering positions in the same few markets that every other tech company does and then you complain when you can't find enough engineers. Engineering talent doesn't only exist on the coasts, despite startup tech culture pretending it does.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#144

Post by manuelabeledo »

bsdpufferfish wrote: post #127
manuelabeledo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... when there are plenty of US citizens in STEM who are underemployed. Where, exactly? Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2]. [0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-unemployment... ). [1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-median-wage-... . [2] https://www.newscientist.c…

Unemployment != underemployment. So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc. The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative. > Where, exactly? The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemis…

It seems that data is not relevant, then?

I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.

> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.

Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#145

Post by BeetleB »

danking00 wrote: post #63

Watching friends work through the decades long journey of citizenship, going to prestigious undergrad institutions, getting PhDs, publishing in journals, teaching part-time while working full time in industry, all just to get the right to stay in the country they’ve lived since they were 18 is fucking depressing. I doubt I’d qualify for EB-1 [1]. I’d have qualified for EB-2 at 28 when I attained five years of work ex…

> Now this hypothetical version of myself waits as short as two years (China-born) and as long as eleven years (India-born)

China and India are the outliers. For most people, pre-pandemic (and post financial meltdown), the wait was under 2 years - almost everyone I know got it in under 2 years (EB-2, MS or higher degree).

If you weren't born in China/India, and had an "advanced degree" in a STEM field (i.e. MS or higher), the green card process was/is fairly smooth. The real bottleneck is the H1-B visa quota/lottery.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#146

Post by alephnerd »

jmyeet wrote: post #49

I'm a little surprised to see a number of anti-immigraiton comments on this thread, some of which you could describe as reactionary. The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way? Let's dispense of th…

> I'm a little surprised to see a number of anti-immigraiton comments on this thread

First time in an immigration discussion on HN? They always bring the "America for Americans (who look like me)" types out of the woodwork.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#147

Post by ndriscoll »

abduhl wrote: post #93
ndriscoll wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many do you have? That seems like an odd retort to me. Like I have zero because I find the whole idea ethically dubious. When I was at IBM, they had occasional patent brainstorming meetings. I remember saying to one of the more senior engineers that everything I worked on was straightforward/obvious, and he told me I'd be surprised, which didn't do much to sway my thoughts on the ethics there. Everyone who had…

How is it an odd retort? If you haven't obtained a patent then the likelihood that you've actually gone through the patent procurement process with the USPTO is extremely low on this website. It's hackernews, not patentexaminernews or patentagentnews after all. It would be like me saying "designing your own operating system is easy" and having someone respond "how many OSes have you designed?" And by the way, your ow…

Perhaps it comes down to an interpretation about what's "easy".

Evidently, based on patents being issued, it is easy to get a patent in the sense that you don't need a novel or nontrivial invention to do so. You don't need to go through the process to observe the results.

Perhaps there is a lot of paperwork, and in that sense it's not "easy". Or perhaps it is not "easy" to convince the patent office to accept trivial patents or patents on nonpatentable subject matter like math, but the volume of these things suggests that it can't be that hard.

If you knew millions of high school students write an OS as a project each year, you could safely conclude it's not that hard, even if you haven't done it.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#148

Post by BeetleB »

alephnerd wrote: post #141
BeetleB wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those confused: Unfortunately, the US focuses on your origin (where you were born) rather than your nationality. alisahik is an Australian citizen, but was not born there. My guess is he was born in India, which has an absurdly long queue in the US immigration process. Really sucks.

Or China. But yea. That is what probably happened.

China's wait times are nowhere near as long as the OPs.

Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers

#149

Post by lp0_on_fire »

alephnerd wrote: post #107
edgyquant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.) It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people l…

> a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required. The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens. We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.

> We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.

(the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.

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