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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

#371

Post by madeofpalk »

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?

What has happened in other countries that has similar systems, like the UK and Australia (to name two I have experience with)? I don’t think that happened there.

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

#372

Post by lefrenchy »

Cherian_Abraham wrote: post #117

“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.” This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.

Especially in the midst of a global pandemic, seems a little callous.

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

#374

Post by coding123 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #316
coding123 wrote: post #307

It's a good idea, but it misses something very important. The last company I worked at I was one of 6 developers in the US. The rest of the developers was a team in Pakistan - 30 to 50 employees. The 6 employees were paid about the same as the 30-50 in Pakistan (combined). So before I would support this, I would support the US making remote technical work illegal without also increasing that pay to match the equivale…

You want the US government to step in and start dictating to companies what it pays employees in different countries? If that happened, there is an almost-0% chance you get the outcome you want (which seems to be the staff in Pakistan getting paid more).

We'll let's take a step back just to start here - a company in the US that makes some dashboard widgets for a hospital chain. The hospital chain pays this company lets say $1M per year. Half of this money goes directly to people in Pakistan that are "employees" of the company. The other half goes to US citizens. So overall, things aren't so great. We've just contributed $1/2M per year to a country that's let's face it - has a history of supporting terrorism.

I want that kind of outsourcing to stop. I mean, what amazing things can come from that scenario?

Maybe my original comment didn't capture it, but I would rather force the these remote style companies to not really have that giant pay advantage. I mean what do you think is the total combined amount of dollars leaving the United States per year because of relationships like this.

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

#375

Post by Cherian_Abraham »

ethagknight wrote: post #366
Cherian_Abraham wrote: post #117

“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.” This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.

So this is amusingly similar to the argument against a minimum wage increase. People will lose their jobs, families will lose out. In either case, the employer is the actual baddie being forced to either raise the wage to an appropriate level or send the employee home (and then attempt to backfill the job with the local market, probably not easy). So if you are for an increased minimum wage, legislation at least in p…

There is nothing amusing about families being ejected. That's the nuance.

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

#376

Post by dark »

intrasight wrote: post #332

IMHO, new layers of rubbish regulation on top of old layers of rubbish regulation. Would be better, I think, to throw the whole thing away and start over.

it's easy to say. But it suddenly causes more than a million people forced out of this country after following all the rules for decades. Think of human cost here.

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

#377

Post by not2b »

chrisseaton wrote: post #354
DenisM wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely recall that the "indentured" h1b workers (as oppose to the "proper" h1b like I had) owe money back to home, and that debt becomes instantly due if they bail out. If they were super-stars they would be able to cover it from the Amazon signup bonus (and become indentured to Amazon - your signup bonus is due back if you bail out early). However superstars rarely end up in those jobs. We're looking at people wi…

> We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life. I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.

It depends. There are lots of brilliant engineers and programmers on H1B visas, but there are also job shops, like Infosys, that grabs lots of H1B's for contract jobs. They aren't going for stars, they are going for competent people that they can underpay.

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

#378

Post by chmod600 »

hoka-one-one wrote: post #279
hal9000-tng wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong. It's not a moral issue (except for the big H-1B mills that are gaming the system.) But nothing has changed: these are not an offer of citizenship. They are temporary work visas with no guarantees: an opportunity to do temporary specialty wo…

The decision would be ok in most other countries, where the land is some ethnic group's birthright. America, however, is unique in that it's everyone's birthright. The only reason most educated people don't support totally open borders is because there's so much poverty outside the US, but H-1B holders are not poor.

On what basis are you deciding what someone's (or some group's) birthrights are?

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

#379

Post by outworlder »

muzaffarpur wrote: post #271
mamon wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is by design. You don't want to issue visas to "people early in their career" - those jobs should go to Americans first. You only hire from abroad if there really is a shortage of specialists in some profession, and you want those professionals to prove their worth in their home country first, before allowing them to the US.

Umm no. Everyone but Indian/Chinese H1b holder, get their green card in 1-2 years.

> Umm no. Everyone but Indian/Chinese H1b holder, get their green card in 1-2 years.

That's false. Maybe this was true in the past.

First, they cannot self-sponsor. Which means that the hypothetical company would have to apply as soon as they step foot on US soil. There are no incentives to do so and incentives against it. So they generally won't.

Expect the process to start a couple of years before the H1B visa is set to expire.

Even if started immediately, just for processing time alone you are looking at around 2 years. 2 to 6 months for the PERM process. I-140, similar. The AOS stage can take 10 (or more!) months to process. The last two can be filed concurrently. It's still one year on the absolute best case with no RFEs or audits whatsoever, counting from the moment the application was filed, assuming all documentation is instantly available (like employment verification letters from past workers, translations etc) and assuming lawyer time is zero (which obviously is not the case).

Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.

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

#380

Post by person_of_color »

sedatk wrote: post #319
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #189

Overall, I really support these changes. However, this piece really struck me as a big mistake: "Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering." Some of the best software engineers I know are graduate degree holders from neu…

I’m a high school graduate and a self-taught developer. I got hired by Microsoft as a software engineer to the Microsoft Windows Core OS team based on my skills with an H-1B. I made Microsoft millions of dollars with my work. I’m now writing a book on software development published by Manning Books. None of that would have happened if such a criteria existed. That policy doesn’t make any sense at all.

How did you get hired as a kernel engineer without a degree out of college?
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