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India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

bloomberg.com

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Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#51

Post by n290184 »

rupi wrote: post #7

The easiest way to solve this is to salary rank the H1B applicants. Those with the highest salaries get picked; not the ‘lucky ones’ that get through a lottery, which puts a PhD from MIT and a new hire at Tata from a no name school in India on equal footing. And I say this as someone who was on H1B. The current system benefits no one but these visa mills. Edit: for grammar

A better way is to do away with the quotas to stop all the gaming around it. Switch to a price-based system by imposing a tariff on a percentage of the salary either on the company or on the worker. This would ensure a certain wage premium for local workers to ease the political pressure. This type of policy is more flexible since the tariff can vary based on the nature of the job. After a certain number of years or amount paid the worker should be eligible for permanent residency to limit the leverage companies have over these individuals.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#52

Post by blased »

shashanoid wrote: post #3

This is common knowledge. Fucking pricks should be banned. Ruining H1B prospects for many deserving candidates

> Ruining H1B prospects for many deserving candidates

H1B shouldn't exist, there is no shortage of domestic talent for what amounts to standard office work. The sort of things I've seen done by H1B is nothing short of appallingly bad which makes this whole debate all the more infuriating.

Visas do exist for truly exceptional talent.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#53

Post by bongoman42 »

rupi wrote: post #7

The easiest way to solve this is to salary rank the H1B applicants. Those with the highest salaries get picked; not the ‘lucky ones’ that get through a lottery, which puts a PhD from MIT and a new hire at Tata from a no name school in India on equal footing. And I say this as someone who was on H1B. The current system benefits no one but these visa mills. Edit: for grammar

How does this solve L1-A abuse? There are no limits and no salary restrictions on L1 visa applicants.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#54

Post by bongoman42 »

It's kind of interesting that Indian companies and H1-B abuse has been so cemented in people's minds that almost 80% of the comments here are about H1B abuse and what to do about it rather than the L1-A which this article is talking about. L1-A is a bigger source of fraud because there is fewer guardrails and most companies see it as a given if they want to move the employee. The only thing is you have to wait a year or so after hiring the employee to move them.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#55

Post by aleph_minus_one »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #13
rupi wrote: post #7

The easiest way to solve this is to salary rank the H1B applicants. Those with the highest salaries get picked; not the ‘lucky ones’ that get through a lottery, which puts a PhD from MIT and a new hire at Tata from a no name school in India on equal footing. And I say this as someone who was on H1B. The current system benefits no one but these visa mills. Edit: for grammar

PhD from MIT could very well earn less than a mid range developer even though they are contributing much more to the society and country. Also salary war would mean companies face pressure to increase the salary of immigrants over the citizens.

> PhD from MIT could very well earn less than a mid range developer even though they are contributing much more to the society and country.

If this is true, the supply of such people should be reduced (i.e. don't hand out H1B visas to them), so that by the laws of supply and demand the salaries increase for them.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#56

Post by shagie »

thecleaner wrote: post #46

TCS filed 5k H1B visa applications last year, compared to 9.5k by Amazon and 8k by Infosys. Not sure why specifically TCS is being targeted.

> New data show how TCS makes heavy use of employment visas reserved for managers. Ex-staffers say it was to get around H-1B rules.

> ...

> Kini and two other former TCS employees who filed similar lawsuits say the company repeatedly made improper use of special manager-level visas to hire front-line workers who had no management responsibilities. All three cases, which were filed under the federal False Claims Act, were dismissed before the allegations of visa fraud were examined in court; Kini’s is on appeal. The manager visas, known as L-1As, are easier for employers to obtain and have fewer guardrails; for example, they lack even the minimal pay requirements that Congress has imposed for H-1B holders.

> Kini told Bloomberg that as Trump took office eight years ago executives at TCS, an arm of the Indian conglomerate the Tata Group, were trying to make their organizational charts match their visa applications, before any federal inspectors showed up on their doorstep.

And then further down in the graphic:

> Infosys and Cognizant, two similarly sized IT outsourcers, obtained 1,289 and 1,122 L-1As respectively between 2020 and 2023.

> During the same period, TCS obtained 6,682 L-1As, the most across all US companies. That’s over five times more than the second highest recipient of L-1A visas, Infosys.

Note the use of the L-1A visa rather than the H-1B visa.

TCS is being targeted because they're abusing another visa class other than the H-1B visa.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#58

Post by JumpCrisscross »

aadhavans wrote: post #32
cudgy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been going on for decades and everyone in the industry knows it. Articles like these are simply propaganda to make it seem like something‘s being done about the issue. The system is and has been completely broken and, like most of the immigration policy in the US, it is a façade with the sole purpose of providing cheap labor for US corporations. There are plentiful capable US engineers available to be hired…

> There are plentiful capable US engineers available to be hired An anecdote, for what it's worth: My brother graduated from Berkeley last year (CS/Math), and has absolutely struggled to find jobs. His friends have struggled; everyone he's talked to has struggled. Meanwhile, job postings in the Indian job market (we're both Americans, but are Indian by origin so we tend to keep up with things there) are damn-near ove…

> job postings in the Indian job market (we're both Americans, but are Indian by origin so we tend to keep up with things there) are damn-near overflowing

The wild part is there is a market between Indian wages and American wages for the H-1Bs.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#59

Post by yftsui »

simonw wrote: post #28

This story is missing some details about L-1 visas - most notably that you have to work for a year in an overseas office for the company that has a US office before they can use an L-1 to transfer you. Wikipedia is useful on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa

The article talked about L1-A, not L1-B.

Re: India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

#60

Post by DrillShopper »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #50
DrillShopper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all of the profits they're bringing in they could certainly train up people like the old industrial titans of the mid-20th century.

Yeah that's true. But I'm not sure how the costs for that will work out at scale considering software is a high attrition industry with career advancements done mostly through lateral movement.

> software is a high attrition industry with career advancements done mostly through lateral movement

If employees invest in training up employees (and more than just the standard HR pablum anybody who isn't a complete sociopath already know and the sociopaths spend their time trying to game all of the parts of the system) then the incentive will be to retain them else they will have to go through that training from scratch again on whomever they hire.

If you give people a place to work where they don't constantly feel like they're fighting fires, where they're not always begging for a raise, and where they're at an office designed to cater to the needs of employees rather than employers then you'd be surprised how long most workers will stay there.

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