Approval rates have taken a serious hit: https://twitter.com/typesfaster/status/1112836630589534208
H-1B Employer Data Hub
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a front-end developer on an H1 visa. There is a reason for the slowdown. A lot of companies, Indian IT or consultancy firms in the US are abusing the H1 visa process. They use lawyers and high sounding words to make roles such as functional/manual tester or other non-critical non-STEM roles to sound as technical STEM based roles. IMHO these roles can be easily done by American locals without STEM or technical ba…
>But the premise of H1 is to provide visa for people with skills that the American market doesn't have. how does that square with >I am a front-end developer on an H1 visa. So let me get this straight, other immigrant's jobs can be easily done by locals with minimal training, hence it is a scam. BUT your 'front-end skills' are so unique that no other American can do it?
By 'not have' I meant 'shortage' of people. Like literal shortage because there aren't enough graduates. The market might demand say 10,000 people per year but only 3k-4k are present. This situation is what I was trying to explain. I am not saying any other immigrant skill besides mine is easy to train. A person working in Big 3 consulting firm and providing strategy consulting to clients also has skills which are in demand but the existing populace just doesn't have enough MBAs or people with post-grad (that is the requirement for strategy consulting for the most part)
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#43Some initial analysis- Of the top 20 employers, the average approval rate was 76%. Most of the employers are outsourcing subcontractors or accounting firms. But there were five employers in the top 20 with 90%+ approval rates: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.
Just to add some context to this since I was a bit confused. The H-1B goes through the lottery to see which applications get seen by immigration. This seems to be the approval rates of the H-1B after the lottery which makes sense. The FAANG applications are probably mostly legit. 90% acceptance rate for an H-1B before lottery though seemed a little high :)
I am even more confused. Can we infer from any of these numbers what is the ratio for a company between original applicants, and post review, post lottery H1B approval?
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#44Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#45Approval rates have taken a serious hit: https://twitter.com/typesfaster/status/1112836630589534208
Looks like they actually started doing their job at some point.
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to add some context to this since I was a bit confused. The H-1B goes through the lottery to see which applications get seen by immigration. This seems to be the approval rates of the H-1B after the lottery which makes sense. The FAANG applications are probably mostly legit. 90% acceptance rate for an H-1B before lottery though seemed a little high :)
I am even more confused. Can we infer from any of these numbers what is the ratio for a company between original applicants, and post review, post lottery H1B approval?
Don't believe so, no. The lottery is supposed to be blind though, so no company has any edge for any given applicant. That said, one strategy some companies take is to pack in as many applications as possible to get as many people through.
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a front-end developer on an H1 visa. There is a reason for the slowdown. A lot of companies, Indian IT or consultancy firms in the US are abusing the H1 visa process. They use lawyers and high sounding words to make roles such as functional/manual tester or other non-critical non-STEM roles to sound as technical STEM based roles. IMHO these roles can be easily done by American locals without STEM or technical ba…
I feel like there's a misreading of the premise of the H-1B program here. If you'll refer to the USCIS website here [0], you'll note that the main prerequisites for the H-1B visa are a) Educated or Licensed b) Paid on par to American workers c) Not impacting the pay of American workers Upon review, it's apparent that the 'visa for people with skills that the American market doesn't have' argument doesn't fly - the re…
By 'not have' I meant 'shortage' of people. Like literal shortage because there aren't enough graduates. I am wrong though on expecting an H1 role to have a STEM requirement. But the consultancies I talk about pay employees under H1 visa below market value. Same goes for the WITCH companies.
The challenge with finding out whether the process was working before is inherently difficult is what I think. Whom is it working for? And for whom it isn't? Again I could be wrong
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
USCIS is delaying every immigration application--not just H1b stuff. Even though there is no explicit policy to delay applications, I heard officers are told to delay. Since there is no backlash, it is going to be like that for a while.
Genuinely curious: Why don't the applicants give up and go back to their home countries ? H1B processing is very slow, Green Cards are taking decades, so is it still worth it ?
America pays its engineers really pretty well by global standards, even outside the bay. While this continues to be true I think many will think twice about returning, even if they like to talk about it.
Even among countries that are often assumed to have broadly similar standards of living by most people (UK is example I am most familiar with), those countries often pay their engineers substantially less. Many of my British colleagues earn very _substantially_ less doing the same job for the same company in the UK as an equivalent US worker.
Of course money isn’t everything, but it’s not like quality of life in California is completely terrible either for a lot of people...
Also when we talk about long waits for Green Cards, we really mean for the large body of Indian technology workers, broadly speaking. For other nationalities the wait is typically a year or less (for those unaware there are effectively country based quotas for green cards). The gap in earning potential is even larger still in the Indian example vs my earlier UK one, so again I’m not surprised few actually move back.
Finally many of these visa workers have had to battle their way to a job. Unlike a US citizen, they’ve had to brave a complex, often uncertain immigration process, finding a job in a foreign country in which they may have no experience, no network etc. If you put in all that effort, it’s maybe not surprising you want to hang around to get the eventual prize.
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking anecdotally (which maybe the dataset backs up?) - yes. Immigration bureaucracy has slowed to a crawl, processes that used to take 6 weeks are now taking 6 months. It's unfortunate, since the news only talks about the administration's policies on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, not how the administration is dragging their feet on _all_ immigration processes. It's just not worth it to sponsor an H-…
For this reason it's critically important to push back when this administration claims to only care about illegality . They are slow walking all immigrants, focusing the brunt of their enforcement activity on black and brown folks, up to and including turning people away from self-deportation processes if they present as white. It is a coordinated effort to delay demographic shifts.
Causing demographic shifts isn't the stated purpose of the immigration system. No presidential candidate would ever run on replacing incumbent demographics with planetary demographics. Are you suggesting that demographic replacement should be the purpose of the US immigration system or the purpose of the immigration system of any country for that matter? To do so would invite an incredible backlash against all forms of immigration pretty much anywhere it was openly stated.
Re: H-1B Employer Data Hub
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the file size of the 2018 data much smaller compared to the other full years? Are there that many fewer H-1Bs?
Speaking anecdotally (which maybe the dataset backs up?) - yes. Immigration bureaucracy has slowed to a crawl, processes that used to take 6 weeks are now taking 6 months. It's unfortunate, since the news only talks about the administration's policies on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, not how the administration is dragging their feet on _all_ immigration processes. It's just not worth it to sponsor an H-…
I was talking to a few international masters students who can't find jobs in the US because increasingly companies can't sponsor H1-B. The immigration slowdown is across the board, even for EB1 green card applications. I think the wait time for EB1 is currently about 2 years and it is even more for Chinese and Indians.