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Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

wsj.com

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

#591

Post by splintercell »

obviouslynotme wrote: post #305
jedberg wrote: post #9

Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.

I remember the first time I walked into the "residence" for a major contractor's H1B visas. They were packing a dozen people in a 3 bedroom apartment in a bad area of town. You then see how they are treated by their companies at work, and it disgusts me. This is why you can't have second-class citizens like this. They are terrified to go for help if they even know how. It's even worse for undocumented workers. At lea…

Almost all of those people you saw there are now living in pretty enviable situations for most Americans.

Calling these 'guest houses' as people living in second class of the society is as incorrect as calling the residents of Pied Piper house in 'Silicon Valley' as 'living like second class citizens'.

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

#592

Post by Spinnaker_ »

jedberg wrote: post #515
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asymmetric access to the work force is probably the most valuable right that most HN readers have. Why should we want to give that up? I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans, except the owner-class.

> I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats. Think of all the services that would need to expand -- markets, restaurants, hair salons, etc. Furthermore, immigrants contribute more to the tax base than citizens because they pay the same income taxes without getting all the deductions, they pay sales taxes and other taxes, and do not get the same b…

You are proposing a huge, non-citizen working class, who's labor is taxed to support citizens? That is not what I was expecting. Yes, that may be good for citizens.

So a thought experiment for you. Can you find any historical precedence where these two-tier systems were implemented. And how did that work out?

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

#593

Post by dasudasu »

jupp0r wrote: post #461
booleandilemma wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.

Most people in STEM outside of CS (including regular engineering) get a degree, never get a good first job (or any job at all in their field), and switch field entirely.

An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...

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

#594

Post by andrewmutz »

mikewarot wrote: post #547
andrewmutz wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US needs way more software engineers than is has, and sky-high salaries are the evidence of this. I think we should make it easier for people to come and work in the US. The existing H1B system works pretty well for employers and employees. When I hear people describe H1B immigrants as somehow taken advantage of, their experience seems far different than mine (I have never seen people mistreated by the system). T…

Does this mean the US needs way more CEOs and Board Members than it has, and the sky-high compensation packages are evidence of this as well? No, programmers are underpaid, deliberately. We just had a story all about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689582 It has been suggested by Eric Weinstein that the H1B visa was deliberately designed to cap wages of PhDs... this is a side-effect.

Sky-high executive compensation is absolutely a sign that the US needs way more competent executives.

Restricting the supply of software engineers to the US will help software engineers at the expense of everyone else.

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

#595

Post by dodobirdlord »

jupp0r wrote: post #562

Can somebody reconcile these points, they seem to be conflicting: - they set the new threshold for acceptable wages at 95% of the distribution for that position - they say that this will affect 1/3 of applicants - they say that h1b workers are underpaid Those can’t all be true at the same time can they? If 2/3 of applicants are in the upper 5%, they’d certainly be earning more and not depressing salaries.

The distribution is complex because visas are awarded by lottery. Many companies are treating the program as expected, and applying for a small number of high-skill high-wage specialists. Then there are a much smaller number of companies that flood the lottery with thousands and thousands of applications each year on the premise that their applicants are interchangeable and the more applications they submit the larger their share of the visas will be. Because most companies don’t have 100x as many qualified foreign applicants as roles to fill or places to put those people if they unexpectedly got a few more approvals than planned, they cannot avail themselves of this strategy. So H1B holders are a bimodal distribution of very high wage workers and below-average wage workers.

Found a cool link elsewhere in the thread. You can see the effect manifest pretty clearly. You see a lot of Cognizent, Tata, Infosys, etc and low salaries, but in CA the largest H1B employer is Google and in WA it’s Microsoft, and in those two states the average H1B wage is much higher.

https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas

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

#596

Post by DenisM »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #294
api wrote: post #27

Fair trade policy has consistently been the one thing on which I agree with the Trump presidency. It hasn't been enough to outweigh all the other absolutely horrible stuff, but it is one thing. I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade that allows corporations to import totalitarianism via near-slave or even actual slave (see Uyghur prisoners and forced labor) wage arbitrage to crush do…

But his trade policies are ineffective and scattershot. Literally nothing he's done on trade has improved anyone in the US's wages, net profits, or way of life, nor has any of it set up the conditions for that to happen in the future. It's all bullshit posturing.

Median U.S. household income rises 6.8% to $68,700 in 2019, poverty rate falls for fifth year

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/09/15/u-s-median-h...

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

#597

Post by andrewmutz »

hansvm wrote: post #545
andrewmutz wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US needs way more software engineers than is has, and sky-high salaries are the evidence of this. I think we should make it easier for people to come and work in the US. The existing H1B system works pretty well for employers and employees. When I hear people describe H1B immigrants as somehow taken advantage of, their experience seems far different than mine (I have never seen people mistreated by the system). T…

The window to get kicked out of the country when layoffs happen is pretty narrow, even for people who have lived here for years. It presents a pretty heavy threat if abused because it might be hard to seal the deal on a new job (especially if you're even a little bit selective) before you suddenly become illegal.

From everything I've experienced in the tech industry the thing you've described is just hypothetical. Everyone I know on H1-B wages freely moves between jobs with no problems.

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

#599

Post by arebop »

andrewmutz wrote: post #530
WillPostForFood wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2020-H1B-Visa-Category.as... It isn't bias, just look at the H1B distribution, it heavily biased to the CS/IT space. Like for every possible biologist you are imagining, there probably 100 IT/CS guys coming in. I'd love to have the biologists and chemists come in, but the big IT consultancies are massively abusing the sy…

The US needs way more software engineers than is has, and sky-high salaries are the evidence of this. I think we should make it easier for people to come and work in the US. The existing H1B system works pretty well for employers and employees. When I hear people describe H1B immigrants as somehow taken advantage of, their experience seems far different than mine (I have never seen people mistreated by the system). T…

In my experience, H1B system works pretty differently for employers and employees depending on whether you're talking about an actual tech company vs. the IT department of an industrial age company.

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

#600

Post by nine_zeros »

The "wages will rise because we harass foreign workers" camp fails to realize that other countries are either actively working hard to allow companies to set up shop in their country or actively attracting tech workers to boost their own labor pool to sustain a large number of tech companies.

All we are doing here is harassing people, businesses and shooting ourselves in the foot by shrinking our labor pool in exactly the industries where we need them to expand: tech, medicine and advanced sciences.

For those still not able to wrap their head around it, we are actively shipping away our ability to tend farms by restricting farm hands for short term benefits.

This story has played out before with factories. Soon, it will be tech and stem work.

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