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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

#391

Post by gerdesj »

Immigration is a tricky one, regardless of country. Me: UKoGB and an employer: I'm keen on it.

My firm only grades pay on function and time served. We also grant shares based on time served.

I have an employee who lives in Poland and is Polish. He used to live here in the UK. We came to an agreement when he wanted to go home, have a child, get married and get Britain out of his system! His granddad flew and broke several Hurricanes on behalf of the RAF a few years back. Granddad survived quite a few scrapes.

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

#392

Post by mavelikara »

yostrovs wrote: post #257
fizwhiz wrote: post #195

> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile. If you've got an undergraduate degree in CS looking for work as a SWE does that mean you'll need to get paid at p95? W…

The percentiles are hopefully based on the region where a given employee would be working.

They are. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application for details.

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

#393

Post by AQuantized »

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's a big difference between requiring a minimum wage for anyone and specifically requiring a higher wage for existing H1-Bs. In particular, the fact that H1-Bs will have to emigrate if it isn't increased.

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

#394

Post by pneill »

HeavenFox wrote: post #370
pneill wrote: post #364

Across the US, about 20% of the spots to get a computer science degree are occupied by foreign nationals. The research at these universities is funded by US research grants. If there's a need to create more skilled tech workers, it might make sense to tie federal search funding to changing these numbers until the need for H-1B visas falls below a threshold value. Right now, the US taxpayer is funding the education of…

Foreign students typically pay full tuition. Rather than being subsidized by the U.S., they are actively subsidizing U.S. domestic students.

It's not about tuition.

It's about funding of the university.

Typically a university will take 50-90% (Yes, up to 90%) of a research grant to fund the university (keeping the lights on, etc). And universities are the ones making the decision to fill available slots in CS departments with foreign nationals.

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

#395

Post by howlgarnish »

yowlingcat wrote: post #368
chrisseaton wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What makes you say that? From what I've seen, there's an entire cottage industry of cheap, expendably treated labor which forms the WITCH acronym which exists to abuse the H1B visa. I believe that is who they target.

Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell? Weak Interaction Trap for Charged Particles?

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH

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

#396

Post by briandear »

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.

If they are “super talented,” then why not the O-1 visa?

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

#397

Post by temikus »

908B64B197 wrote: post #25

This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path f…

Quotas are per-country. Your scenario doesn’t change either way, no?

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

#398

Post by azurezyq »

person_of_color wrote: post #380
sedatk wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Honestly colleges don't teach you much about practical kernel developments. Most people just learn them as side projects. This is the same for other fields as well, e.g., frontend developments.

Requiring degrees for doing anything is a big step backward. I'm working for Google and lots of my peers are from non-CS majors (Physics, EE, even literature), but they are all excellent engineers.

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

#399

Post by core-questions »

arcticbull wrote: post #154
core-questions wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. > This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. You assert this as though it's just automatically a good thing with no actual analysis as to the impact on Canadians. What happens to the cultural cohesion, wages, and living standards of Canadians when immigration is at such a rapid pace? Is…

The rate has been consistent since at least 1992. The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US. The standard of living in Canada is just as high as the US. Canada's Human Development Index is .922, 13th globally. The US HDI is .920, so a hair lower. 45% of the Canadian population lives in 6 of the 35 most livable cities in the world. "Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.

> "Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.

Again, asserted, no evidence, no argument. Social cohesion is absolutely an issue. We feel it when we have no community organizations, don't know our neighbours, and have nothing gluing us to where we live. The famous Putnam study on social capital is a fine piece of evidence here.

I believe we can surmount Putnam's identified problems, but only if we have a rate of influx that is sustainable. That means each newcomer has a chance to get proper language training, recertification, and actually integrate into a local community, which I'll somewhat arbitrarily define as having made some real friends out of the group of local or fully-assimilated people. This is the core requirement of being able to fully participate in social life.

> The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.

Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.

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

#400

Post by bluedino »

booleandilemma wrote: post #122
jzymbaluk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right. The answer that's best for the economy is to allow more immigration, not less (especially skilled immigration). This move will just make it more dificult for the average company to sponsor H1B workers

Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.

I wish my fellow Americans would push themselves in training and schooling, and explore more opportunities
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