It's the same with the tariffs. My company has a huge "globalization" effort that expands offices and manufacturing facilities in countries with cheap labor and no/low tariffs. Instead of everything centering around the US, almost nobody gets hired in the US, except top management.
New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
201–210 of 353 posts
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#202It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.
It is pretty interesting to watch. "I'm pro immigration EXCEPT specifically the kind that directly affects me"
I'm not a yank but it seems to me the actual argument here is that H1Bs suppress the wages of locals, either directly by hiring foreigners which are less price-sensitive in terms of wages compared to locals or indirectly by moving jobs overseas, thus eliminating the jobs altogether.
You can be pro-immigrant while also being pro-not-fucking-people-over, for example by forcing companies to have a baseline "minimum wage" for H1Bs that match what a local would be paid (or higher!) for the role. It doesn't have to be a "let in a gazillion people or 0", you can choose a middle value.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not my experience in big tech and HFT. We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else. When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
Looks like there is need for 2 separate visa categories: - One to bring top 0.1% talent from across the globe to the US - Another to bring in temporary talent as needed Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out. Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
There are already categories like this if you jump away from tech.
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#204I worked with and hired tons of H1Bs (and non) over the years and the idea that they earn this visa with exceptional talent is a farce. I work in bog standard web services. We fill seats with H1Bs to write ho-hum crud apps and do UX testing work. Some have been great! Others terrible.
Could be wildly different for someone in a very high-tech org or medical field, but at places I worked it was used as a convenience, but not necessary.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, people who didn’t make it in the H-1B lottery go to Canada, try the L-1 and come back to the United States. It’s good for Canada to offer a work permit so quickly, but I’m just not seeing people willing to obtain permanent residency in Canada. After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. In fact I’m seeing Canadian citizens come to the U.S. to get a big salary bump while doing the sa…
> After all, for the same job, the pay in Canada is way worse. OTOH, you have free universal healthcare - and, the best part is that everyone in Canada gets it. You also have gun-free schools, abortions are considered healthcare, and, on top of all that, a sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other. Honestly, I'd take the pay cut (in fact, I did - but I live in Ireland instea…
Canada used to have free healthcare, not anymore.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. My entire problem with H1-B is the coercive nature of it. That is the thing that is ultimately designed to suppress wages. There's a bunch of levers you could pull to stop it from being such a huge negative, faster paths to citizenship, looser requirements for switching jobs, higher minimum salaries. All these things would improve conditions for the H1-B applicant. That's why I call it a bad program.
Put another way I don’t think this policy is a good way to address the issues you’re talking about because it’s just moving jobs out of the U.S. altogether.
Jobs that Americans weren't getting because it was cheaper to hire an H1-B indentured servant instead. The current administration will no doubt find a way to make everything worse, but they didn't start with a good program to begin with.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#207I think this will go hand in hand with tech compensation and jobs falling off a cliff. In the AI world too, we can't have our cake and eat it.
Yeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily. Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic: In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined. There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline. If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the…
I don't think this is surprising given that the US has also lost so much manufacturing due to cost cutting. A service economy is going to need a lot of software engineering. A nice big factory takes a lot of mechanical and electrical engineers.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a MAGA thing. H1-B is a bad program. I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that. What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That…
> What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company They're free to change companies if the new company sponsors them. It may reset the timeline for applying for a green card, depending on the location and job type of the new job. Generally, if it's the same type of job in the same city, it doesn't reset. People (including Indians) do it all the time. Going to a country for employment and havin…
> They're free to change companies if the new company sponsors them.
That's a much smaller pool of companies. The company already has to be participating in the H1-B program in order to sponsor someone.
> Do you know counterexamples?
Most of them happen under the likes of the EU where citizens of member nations have the freedom to migrate.
But even in the US, we have the green card (as you note) which you can get without doing H1-B. Getting a green card means your legal status isn't tied to employment.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#209Good, H1B is just modern servitude. But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
Thet should pay into a tax fund that is applied toward student loans of American grads who are unemployed.
But that would increase taxation over corporations. That won't work for as long as corporations can make the vast majority of campaign donations.
Every citizen should have the right to one vote. Large scale campaign financing distorts that.
Re: New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economics is generally not a zero sum game. At least according to what they taught me in Econ 101, on a macroeconomic scale skilled workers tend to increase job availability. They spend a larger portion of their income on services, which has a positive multiplier effect.
It's really dismaying how many people on this site seem to think immigration and the job market are a zero sum game... and that hasn't changed 12 years after I wrote this: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...
also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy