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Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

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Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#141

Post by nrmitchi »

jojobas wrote: post #129
nrmitchi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that H1Bs are not just for software engineering jobs. Other professions that qualify are things like accountants, or health care workers. If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.

There's no such thing as "can't fill locally", there's "can't fill locally right now". The sacrifice to the "right now" bit is immense, it destroys incentive to learn pretty much anything.

When you're trying to hire someone, "right now" is important. If I want to hire a nurse, and there are no nurses available, I can't afford to wait 4 years for someone to train as a nurse to be available for me to hire.

If I just keep offering to pay more, then yes, I will eventually be able to hire a nurse that was previously employed somewhere else, but now _that_ person needs to hire a nurse. No matter how many times you go around this circle, there are not enough nurses for everyone to hire.

That is a shortage. A shortage doesn't typically come with the asterisk of "but if I wait long enough then maybe there won't be".

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#142

Post by cactus2093 »

jedberg wrote: post #9

Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.

Genuine question, what type of fraudulent abuse are you referring to? I see this vaguely mentioned a lot without much to back it up, but I'm open to the idea that it happens.

From my own anecdotal experience, I'll admit I have found the rules to be a little ridiculous. Company needs to post a sign in the office advertising the role to any Americans, wait a certain amount of time, and only then can offer it to an H1-B candidate. Of course nobody was following the spirit of those rules, but I wouldn't call that fraudulent abuse. These were companies that needed hires and had a genuinely hard time finding people that would pass our interviews and then accept our offers. We really didn't discriminate at all in the hiring panels between American and H1-B candidates (I think we were probably supposed to discriminate more than we did, and supposed to explicitly prefer Americans?), and it had nothing to do with saving money on salaries.

I recognize that the Bay Area tech boom is very unusual in how competitive it is (was?), but H1-Bs are technical visas and it's often tech companies that get the blame for abusing the system.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#143

Post by arcticbull »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #61
arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. Actually, "more than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexic…

Those are non-immigrants, guest workers or temporary workers. Immigrants are defined, in US law, a green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards to be issued at 366,000 (140,000 for employment based green cards) per year. [edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#144

Post by arcticbull »

dahdum wrote: post #108
arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. The US had 1.8 million new immigrants (legal and otherwise) in 2016 and ~13% of the population is foreign born. Canada exceeds that (~21%) but nothing like the 20X rate you're claiming.

Immigrants are defined in US law as green card holders.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#145

Post by dmode »

flowerlad wrote: post #93

Requiring competitive wages is a good move. They should also have allowed H1B holders to switch to a different employer without requiring a new visa. Along with that they should also have increased the number of H1B visas available. Currently many strong developers are being hired into Amazon and Microsoft but being positioned in Vancouver BC (a Canadian city a couple of hours from Seattle) [1]. These developers take…

Offering competitive wages has always been part of H1 requirement

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#146

Post by kbenson »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #120
jedberg wrote: post #74

I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas. But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.

Wouldn’t that cause a large displacement of the existing labor force and significantly drive down wages?

It depends. Short term and long term there's a lot of shuffling that would happen until it settled into an equilibrium (Maybe. On the other hand maybe it would be extremely sensitive to global issues). Those people all need food and housing and need to buy goods and services, so it's not like you're obsoleting an existing person's job, you're adding demand as you add supply. Whether one eventually outweighs the other is dependent on many factors.

That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#147

Post by [deleted] »

arcticbull wrote: post #83
jandrewrogers wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your data for the US is far off every source I can find. Per the UN, ~20% of all immigrants globally reside in the US. On an annual basis: The US brings in 100-200k refugees. Total immigration is 1.0-1.1M. The US grants citizenship to 700-800k immigrants.

The data I provided for you is per capita. The US has set a target cap of 18,000 refugees next year [1] vs Canada's now world-leading (per capita) 28-33,000 [2] You are correct that I was off re: 140,000 (that's the quota for employment based green cards), the number is ~1M total and I have edited my post to reflect. This is based on the total number of green cards available, as they are the only "immigrant" visa. Ev…

[deleted]

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#148

Post by throwqrm »

dudul wrote: post #140
jedberg wrote: post #74

I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas. But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.

How would you avoid seeing 500M indians/Chinese landing in America on the very next day? I think there is a middle ground between the disaster that are immigration laws today, and full open borders.

[idea retracted; proposed a tax-based solution but maybe too distracting]

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#149

Post by dang »

berryjerry wrote: post #28
arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

The thing to remember about US immigration is that most immigrants simply over stay their visa. The US may bring less immigrants over but there is a reason you can press 2 for Spanish on nearly every single companies help line.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Especially not on classic flamewar topics like immigration, nationality, and race.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#150

Post by arcticbull »

newfriend wrote: post #64
arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

Your numbers are wrong [1]. > The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants. > The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. > More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. What amazes me is how much hate the US…

Let's get some terminology right.

Immigrants are defined in US law as lawful permanent residents, i.e. green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards issued at 366,000 per year. Therefore, the number of new immigrants to the US each year is 366,000. The 140,000 number I initially used incorrectly was the number of employment based green cards as compared to family based. I've updated the math. [edit] It's 1M once you factor in family of citizens.

Everyone else is a non-immigrant visitor, and not relevant to my numbers.

> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.

The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.

> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.

Canada brings in 25X per capita the number of refugees and 10X per capita the number of new lawful permanent resident.

You're simply mistaken.

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