US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
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Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#2They really should call them "indentured servant slave visas". The H1-B visa holder has to leave the country if he gets fired (and doesn't find a new employer quickly), and if he switches jobs the green card process has to start over.
Because the H1-B visa employee is legally bound to the job, he becomes more attractive than hiring a US citizen, (assuming equal salary and qualification).
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#3i recently saw a table of firms awarded these visas. it seemed nuts to me that a large proportion of the visas go to firms whose primary business line is outsourcing in one form or another.
i typically think of visas as fulfilling unmet hiring needs for domestic US firms - like Facebook! - but instead see they are largely squirreled away by firms whose primary function is overseas labor cost arbitrage.
I would be interested to hear informed opinions as to why so many visas go to these firms. i thought the stated objective is to help american firms meet their hiring needs where the local work force is deficient.
instead, it seems like all the demand is corralled into a few firms which do the dirty work for everyone else. if your primary purpose is outsourcing, how can you plausibly claim to be searching for qualified workers inside the US, and thus deserving of access to these visas?
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#4[deleted]
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#5> Does turning away highly skilled and educated people due to an artificial cap on visas sound silly?
This is a false way of framing things on many levels. First, as Norm Matloff has extensively documented, they are not all "highly skilled and educated people". Secondly, they can be given green cards and other such things, why is this specific visa necessary?
Also, if there's a shortage of talent, then the Silicon Valley CEO's can put an end to things like their conspiracy to drive down tech wages that is playing out in the courts, which is something that would obviously depress the number of engineers applying for jobs. Instead of the federal government cutting loans and grants to college students, they could expand them if they want more engineers.
And if there is some humanitarian concern for immigrants, there are waiting applicants from Africa who have far more of a humanitarian need to get into the USA then an Indian IIT graduate.
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#6A good friend of mine works in the US under a high-Skill visa - as a tenured professor at Cornell, with oh, the Presidents medal for something very clever.
I think high skilled is a term that we coders are happy to apply to themselves, but really folks we are not compared to a genuine elite. The future will be invented by a very small number of brilliant people - the rest if us are just here to fill in the gaps behind them.
let it go, start building a remote-working-orientated company and hire people wherever they live. Stop worrying about the country's tax take.
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#7This is just companies trying to get cheap labor. Work visas are modern indentured servitude.
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#8I"m surprised only 124,000 applications were received. I was expecting the number to cross 200K. It gives more 85,000/124,000 probability which means slightly more than 68% of the people have chances of getting the H1B Visa.
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#9They really should call them "indentured servant slave visas". The H1-B visa holder has to leave the country if he gets fired (and doesn't find a new employer quickly), and if he switches jobs the green card process has to start over. Because the H1-B visa employee is legally bound to the job, he becomes more attractive than hiring a US citizen, (assuming equal salary and qualification).
The H1-B visa really needs to be completely divorced from the company that originally applies for it. At the end of the day, the US government makes a decision if an individual adds value to the country by working for a US company. Which US company shouldn't matter. The only time the visa should be re-evaluated in a way that the employer may be deported is if the worker is fired for cause. Beyond that the visa should belong to the employee, not the employer.
The fact that the green card process resets if the employee switches jobs is crazy. That really does make it an "indentured servant slave visa".
Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week
#10i recently saw a table of firms awarded these visas. it seemed nuts to me that a large proportion of the visas go to firms whose primary business line is outsourcing in one form or another. i typically think of visas as fulfilling unmet hiring needs for domestic US firms - like Facebook! - but instead see they are largely squirreled away by firms whose primary function is overseas labor cost arbitrage. I would be int…
There should be a quota for each company, say less than 500 H1B visas each year. The companies then have the incentive to pick the best candidates. Or there could be different brackets depending on company's sizes.