Changes to USCIS policy on eligibility criteria for H1B visa

http://immigrationgirl.com/uscis-rescinds-memo-on-h-1b-speci...

She concludes:

"The new memo issued Friday rescinds that old memo and basically reminds officers that they must look at the particular position and its job duties to determine whether it meets the definition of specialty occupation, rather than relying solely on the OOH. I think the main issue with the old memo was that it gave kind of a blanket statement that all programmers should be specialty occupations.

The new memo does not change the rules, it just reminds us that a petitioner must be able to establish that a particular position qualifies as a specialty occupation in order to be eligible for the H-1B visa."

Except this is already the case?

Hiring a H1B worker isn't free. It costs something like $10K in legal costs alone. Do you really think a lot of companies are indulging in a large-scale conspiracy to avoid paying that $10K to an American instead? If you want the worker to stay longer than a couple years, you'll need to renew the H1B and probably file a PERM application as well. All of this costs something like $20K at the minimum.

Getting a position on a H1B is by no means easy or cheap. If a company could hire an American, they'd much rather do it. And if the H1B thing were all about cheap foreign workers, spouses of H1Bs wouldn't have had so much trouble getting hired in the pre-Obama era. Anecdotally, I know many women with Master's degrees from top-tier US universities who were desperate to find a position, and were willing to take wages well-below par, but couldn't because companies didn't want to pay for the H1B. It's also why if you look at resumes/linkedin profiles for Indians in the US, many will advertise their green cards/citizenship status. They're communicating that employers don't need to file a H1B petition for them.

Yes, it's true there are a few companies which have exploited H1Bs to bring in cheap labor. But from a statistical point of view, this is about as common as the epidemic of violence at Chuck-e-Cheese. In other words, it's a nice news story that plays well as a clickbait headline, in reality, it's a non-issue.

The question here is whether this is going to have any influence on number of H1B visas received by Infosys, Tata, Winpro, Accenture and similar companies.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocume...

So they only need to be cheaper by $20K over a couple of years for it to be worth it?

That seems like a fairly small cost to overcome.

And if there isn't very much demand for H1Bs, even with "bidding" we'd expect the cost to companies to stay the same.

It isn't clear to me why prioritizing the value of an employee (as measured by how much they are paid) would not be an effective way of prioritizing H1B visas.

If someone made a "tech H-1B" bucket that would work, because the training lag is short(er).

Speciality professions have a long lag before policy changes circle back to results - H-1B's wide reach covers anesthesiologists and radiologists too.

The immediate effect of forcing a price war is that you get folks who are at the end of their careers instead of folks in the middle of their careers.

The way this plays out is that the mid-career gets starved - because you get experts even if you don't nurture the 45 year old into being one.

And you end up with a 55 year old expert working with a 28 year old who's on the verge of going back to do some more research, fully knowing that there aren't any 40 year olds who will stick around there to pass their chair to in a few years.

Money isn't time ... and this is one case, where the supply-side needs to be worked on, not the demand surge.