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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

#121

Post by refurb »

potatolicious wrote: post #60
thingylab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Many H1-Bs work in high-value industries and make a decent amount of money (I should know, I'm an H1-B holder). I don't think many of them consider themselves slaves. The green card process for a H1-B is particularly annoying and restrictive though, as is the arbitrary time limit. Not sure what you mean by "the H1-B visa employee is legally bound to the job". Sure, your company's name…

The H-1B becomes a whole lot more restrictive the moment you apply for a green card, since your transferability just vanished. This is less of a problem for people from non-Indian and non-Chinese backgrounds, since the wait time is reasonably short. The priority dates for Indians and Chinese though make it such that once your green card is started you're stuck for literally years.

Once you've applied for a green card and the PERM and I-140 has been approved and your I-485 has been pending for 180 days, you do have portability. You can leave your current employer, but you must find another position that is substantially similar.

Labor certification and I-140 processing used to be painfully slow. I waited 3.5 years just for my labor certification. However, the new PERM process is much quicker, so you'd probably only have to wait 1 or 2 years to be eligible for portability.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#122

Post by diegomcfly »

dragonwriter wrote: post #109
diegomcfly wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the supply of "highly skilled" people could not keep up with demand (which is what these companies lobbying Congress for uncapped H1Bs are effectively saying is the case), then salaries would be rising. They are not. /end of story. All other propaganda and testimony by these companies that say otherwise is bullshit.

That's not really true; if the supply could not keep up with demand, the companies would throw more resources at the problem of meeting their labor demand -- that might be raising wages (in the most simplistic economic models, that's the obvious thing), but it might equally be putting resources into lobbying Congress to allow increased immigration. If they expect lobbying to pay of greater returns for the investment…

Sorry .. that is totally disconnected from reality. Not only have wages NOT risen, they have stagnated (and not kept up with inflation). Further, if you look at the list (link is in this thread) of the companies along with the # H1Bs allocated to them/their ranking ... you'll see a certain big blue company in that list who is in the Top 5. They have been doing layoffs by the 1000s on a regular basis for years. I know. I work for them. I have seen personally at least 10 people on actively billing customer engagements (i.e., they were billing the customer, not riding the bench or working internally, etc.) layed off. These were highly skilled professionals with good reviews that were doing great work.

Further, I've seen many dozens of "replacements" come in in the form of H1Bs. These were literally DIRECT replacements. They were inexperienced and WORSE at the job.

This is no longer anecdotal. This is happening NOW. All over this country in the IBMs, Microsofts, etc.

It does not take a genius to see what is going on.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#123

Post by mildtrepidation »

I can't help seeing this as a higher level in some grotesque cultural fractal that, somewhere along the line, also involves ticket middlemen monopolizing admittance to most concerts and shows.

I don't know if they're part of the same problem or the same problem expressing itself in different ways, but I have a hard time calling this coincidence.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#124

Post by tsax »

malandrew wrote: post #16
lmg643 wrote: post #3

i 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…

The one job type where these visas should not be usable is consulting. If the employee isn't coming here to work on a very specific product or service, then they are being brought in only to reduce wages and not because the employer can't find someone who is capable of performing a very specific need. Consulting by its nature is the most unspecific need. It's a wildcard need. The most valuable employees to the countr…

This does not square with my perception but that's anecdotal. Nonetheless I work at a very large financial firm and the rates paid for consulting are 70-80% higher than salaries at the same level. Even accounting for 30-50% add-ons for benefits/vacations, etc, consulting firms are still paid higher than employees, at least here.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#125

Post by BenefitOfDoubt »

tommu wrote: post #92
NextUserName wrote: post #24

> 124,000 people applied for the combined 85,000 So if we gave them all Visas - we'd be good for less than two weeks? Sounds like a bigger problem here. On a related note, how many highly skilled and educated people live here already who are currently unemployed? Two observations. * Immigrants will go to where the work is. They will live almost anywhere the work is, they are moving already so it is easier than for so…

Einstein, Tesla and Musk. None of those guys would have ended up in the US if you had any power over immigration policy. Oh.. and are you native? Genuine question as I have no idea.

What kind of argument is this? You can't argue fate. You could also say that without the level of immigration we have, the world trade center would never have been attacked, we would have never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Millions of lives would be saved.

One could say that Einstein changed fate such that a certain person was never even born who would have surpassed his achievements. This is nonsense and illogical.

In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/surviving-p...

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#126

Post by tarikjn »

tarikjn wrote: post #118
nostromo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they should be auctioned off. (Either the company or the individual could pay the final auction price.) The end result is the same: the most valuable workers are let in. It'd also have a small, but nice benefit: a voluntary revenue stream for the US to spend on whatever it would like (perhaps improved education and training for citizens).

This is one of the things I proposed in a comprehensive high-skilled visa reform proposal: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_yEsHOtzN3yZ3JoYXlTdDh0R0k... Never really got around finishing it and pushing it out tough, although I am curious to see what the feedback is on it.

I just made a separate post for discussion on it as it goes a little out of scope of the subject of H1-Bs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7550560

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#127

Post by Bluestrike2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #87
pacaro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This document is hugely important to understand. Thank you for posting. I always found Table 6 to be the most interesting, particularly in debates about immigration — I have a green card as a 9 year long EB3 process (Employment Based, 3rd class - the CIS doesn't value Philosophy degrees as highly as engineering degrees!) To take the last year for which data are published, 2011 A partial breakdown of new Permanent Res…

> In round numbers for every green card issued on basis of employment, 28 are issued to family members of citizens. This is pretty much the inverse of popular understanding of immigration. There are people that don't understand that the US immigration system is primarily family-based? I think lots of people think the motivation for immigration is largely economic (and that's also true, even for the family-based visas…

People may realize that familial relations can significantly shape immigration process, but they tend to greatly under-estimate the extent.

Immigration is almost always discussed in terms of fairness and, usually, "the line." But the metaphor is a bad one; instead of "the line," it might be better to think of the system as multiple, separate lines that are of varying distances from the destination. And honestly, some of those lines have some nasty obstacles laid out in front of them.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#128

Post by hrktb »

ebiester wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

I'll add that part of the US has mild weather, and that makes it more attractive than Canada or Northern Europe to a lot of immigrants (someone from Ghana might not want to spend winters in Sweden for instance).

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#129

Post by tibbon »

thmcmahon wrote: post #77
ebiester wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

Australia has an uncapped temporary migration program for skilled workers ( http://www.immi.gov.au/Visas/Pages/457.aspx ), the situation described in this article can not happen in Australia. On a permanent level, Australia has a permanent program of around 180,000 places a year in a country with only 22 million people.

Given that, why aren't more people trying to get to Australia to work? Aside from spiders (a personal fear of mine) it seems to be a pretty awesome place.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#130

Post by joering2 »

ebiester wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

> There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US.

You need to pull your eyes out of your ass. The countries you mention are far from being superior; perhaps "good enough", but frankly nothing too fancy. You need to visit Hong Kong or Singapore to see how highly qualified immigrants live there like kings.

Japan has serious environmental problems and their government does not stand up to the transparency one would love their government to comply with [1]. They are rolling into huge economical depression too.

Australia. Have you ever been there? Spend couple months you will be surprise how alienated you will feel. My friends live there for 15-20 years and they will never be a part of the community. They will always feel like outsiders; mostly recognized by their accent. Australians divide themselves among those who were born here, and all outsiders who came to steal jobs. Its the mentality. It wont change. Australia has their own environmental problems too and politics & taxation goes through the roof (viva la Queen that fixes everything through more taxes).

European Union is on a brink of collapse; some countries are openly discussing living EU. Its rotten to its core by very well hidden corruption [2]; Ukraine situation that helps Russia shows their real aspirations does not help either.

Canada, they are still under Queen that can suspend the parliment anytime she wants to [3].

Then we come to US. I think its a matter of "the grass that is greener on the other side". I mean, how many of those folks applying for visa know anything about US more than from movies about "land of the free home of the brave?". Politics? How many know who Nancy Pelosy or Henry Reid are? For all they know America has this good man named Obama who gave everyone free healthcare so it can't get better than that. Did they hear about Justina Pelletier, Cliven Bundy, Kelly Thomas or hundred of thousands other cases of governmental abuse?

[1] http://enenews.com/japan-times-sources-reveal-fukushima-radi...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10614864...

[3] http://stevescomments.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/the-queen-of-...

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