Live data from Hacker News

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

thehill.com

341–350 of 571 posts

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas? PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or p…

This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious. The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that…

I am not sure if your comment is directed at me but I immigrated to the US. In my case there were probably no more than 1000 people in the whole world willing and able to do my job. It was advertised in the industry job boards along with required by law newspapers. Very few people applied and none of them had been a US citizen or LPR. This is what EB immigration is for. You are welcome to lobby for another EB category based on data and tests, but you should not be allowed to commit fraud in lieu of such a category in the meantime.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn’t. There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of c…

Show me the reduction in cost for medical care when 1/4 of the doctors in the US are foreign born medical grads, the bulk of whom came through the H1B program. Show me the American born doctors on the street going hungry while foreigners take their jobs. Show me the reduction in wages or costs. > supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Were drowing in data on both of th…

This is such a weird example. Doctors are a professions with artificial limits specifically to raise the income of doctors in the profession. There are no starving doctors because they don’t let enough people become doctors to lower the wage.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#343

I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is den…

Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ...…

Perhaps that would work, but I'm not so sure. I don't think the employers we're talking about are sensitive to a 20% price premium. And they might find the additional leverage H1B gives them over the employee to be worth the premium anyway. My proposal would give natives a chance to get a real job (not a ghost posting) that was given to a real person (the H1B person), and simply take their place.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#344

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically a…

Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#345
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans) Is this not by itself a problem?

Americans don’t go to graduate school. With a bachelors in an engineering field as an American you can be making close to 6 figures the day after you graduate. With a huge student debt and the clock ticking, do you get a job or do you join a PhD program to get a stipend of 25k/year for at least 5 years? Grad school becomes attractive to Americans only during recessions.

Cries in 2008

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious. The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that…

TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team. ~ I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers. Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a t…

The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time.

What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.

Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#347

So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.

Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King. There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages. The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everyt…

Or you tariff work done offshore and work done by foreigners onshore. We do that for manufacturing and agriculture, why not tech?

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#348
post #319

[flagged]

Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here. The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiousl…

[flagged]

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#349

Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.

At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#350
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.

This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it. Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee? I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train…

>Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?

I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.

However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.

Post reply on HN