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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

#621

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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…

All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost.

Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.

The US Visa system sounds completely broken, but this doesn't sound like a good fix. I suspect the way forward is a skills-based immigration system (combined with a robust refugee and compassionate family reunification system) like in other western countries, but that is likely not going to be politically possible from either party down there.

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

#622

Post by pnw_hazor »

3pt14159 wrote: post #206

There is a lot of political science research that speaks to growing xenophobia when immigration is unleashed. I understand the sentiment—I'm very pro-immigration—but with respect to domestic policy my primary goal is stability and faith in government. Personally, I like how my country, Canada, does it. Points based system that rewards multiple factors, including skills, employability, and fluency in English and Frenc…

Early on the Trump administration floated the idea of a point based system and they were instantly savaged for being racists and white supremacists for even suggesting such a thing.

The howls of outrage died out fairly quickly when it was pointed out that many developed countries use a point system.

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

#623

Post by [deleted] »

mypalmike wrote: post #601
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…

*Edit : Apparently I misinterpreted the parent post. Please disregard. Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.

[deleted]

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

#624

Post by aksss »

addicted wrote: post #194
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.

Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules. I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think…

Canada has more restrictive immigration policies than the US.

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

#625

Post by aoetalks »

DenisM wrote: post #281
nrmitchi wrote: post #33

I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status. If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the emplo…

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…

What is "indentured" h1b vs "proper" h1b - is there somewhere I can read more about this?

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

#626

Post by torgian »

This is a good move, I think. If anything, it'll force employers to give higher pay to immigrants, where they typically offer as low as they could go. It'll also give employers a bit of incentive to hire locally, I think.

But, who knows. It could just all blow up in our faces too.

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

#627

Post by bdcravens »

splintercell wrote: post #591
obviouslynotme wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Silicon Valley is satire, and meant to make fun of the idea, and even on that standard, they aren't as cramped as the parent comment is referring to.

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

#628

Post by Consultant32452 »

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.

The whole purpose of the H1B visa program, according to the economists who designed it, is to stifle wages of American workers. All the other stuff you hear about it is revisionist history.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...

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

#629

Post by blazespin »

flowerlad wrote: post #93

Requiring competitive wages is a good move. They should also have allowed H1B holders to switch to a different employer without requiring a new visa. Along with that they should also have increased the number of H1B visas available. Currently many strong developers are being hired into Amazon and Microsoft but being positioned in Vancouver BC (a Canadian city a couple of hours from Seattle) [1]. These developers take…

I think if corps want to have revenue in different countries, they should consider having employees in different countries. Certainly, if amazon wants to have a CA website, I'd be all in favor of booting them out of they don't have employees in canada.

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

#630

Post by ryan93 »

chunky1994 wrote: post #517
davrosthedalek wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple. If it's harder for foreign people to become postdocs/profs in the US, the quality of US research will fall. Quickly.

Citation heavily needed here. I find it hard to believe on face value that foreign researchers are necessarily better than US researchers; especially given the number of both foreign and domestic university graduates from U.S universities is much less than the available postdoc and professorship appointments in STEM.

It’s just a numbers game. America has less than 5% of the worlds population. Why would you think we would have more than 5% of the worlds best researchers
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