Just a query - does an employer have to demonstrate what efforts they’ve made to attract applications at home, first?
To be clear, it is not surprising at all. Rephrasing my post: Rational arguments can be made about reforming the H-1B system, what isn’t rational (but totally consistent with this administration) is the method for doing so.
Brian
No. For an H-1B, there is no requirement for an employer to demonstrate they cannot find a candidate who is already authorized to work in the United States. To qualify for sponsorship, you just need to meet certain criteria and here it is in a nutshell.
- The job must be a specialty occupation requiring at least a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent in the field.
- The candidate must meet the minimum educational requirements for the occupation.
- The employer must file a Labor Condition Application (LCA) and petition on behalf of the employee. (To make sure the employer is not paying less than the prevailing wage.)
This can get complicated later if the employer chooses to sponsor their employee for permanent residence. The employer must obtain a Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) certification which demonstrates there are no US workers available for the sponsored position. Once that’s done, the employer files an I-140 petition to change their immigration status to permanent residence. If approved, you get to file an I-485 to adjust the employee’s status to that of lawful permanent resident.
An H-1B visa lasts for three years and can be extended for a total of six years. You can go beyond that six years if you’re applying for PERM residency. There might be other conditions by which you could extend the visa, but that’s the only one we ever used. It was company policy that we wouldn’t start the PERM residence process until after the first three years.
When you flood the labor pool with people willing to accept the lowest possible wage, and those people are essentially prevented from exercising labor rights, you’ve stagnated the wages of everyone in that job sector.
An H1-B employee is not shackled to their employer. The employee is free work at another company provided their new employer is willing to transfer the H-1B. If most H-1B employees are accepting the lowest possible wage, I’d like to see some evidence for that. Anecdotally speaking, hiring foreign workers costs my employer more though not significantly so.
What happens in the technology industry is that companies post job ads under the prevailing salary for various jobs, then claim the workers aren’t available.
Then they hire Indian guys at these low wages, and drive down wages across the industry. I addition, the H-1B workers are often treated extremely poorly because they’re beholden to their sponsors for employment.
I’m not at all against the H-1B program where it’s used appropriately to allow US companies to hire foreign skilled workers who have skills not available here.
But effectively gaming the program to get below market IT workers who can be treated poorly is so I’m not at all for.
And hearing repeatedly about recent grads in technology fields who struggle to find jobs when companies are importing similarly skilled indian workers kind of irritates me. It’s a market distortion and our people get the short end of the stick.
If you’re able to bind the salary of native workers and imports, then that applies a downward pressure that helps to keep the wages more balanced between the US and India.
If you don’t do that, then you’re better off to send all the work abroad and keep no more than the absolute minimum necessary native talent.
But they’re only driving them down to very good above average wages. H1B’s were working in America when I graduated with a computer engineering degree 10 years ago and it was one of the most in-demand fields. Job markets fluctuate for every industry and Sage is right that letting people come in and work in stem has kept America dominant in a variety of stem-related fields.
This is absolutely not true where I am. The Indian people (they’re not all guys) are making a damn decent living, but they’re available, willing to work, and experienced. We get applicants 1 month out of college who want wages that we pay 10 year developers (US and Indian). Fuck them. They’re useless, lazy, and if you don’t constantly let them work on the newest tech (so they can get higher paying jobs), they quit. I need a person who knows my tech stack and will do the work we have. US colleges are, seriously, the bane of my existence.
The thing is that I keep reading about all the CS graduates that can’t find jobs. How does this fit in?
From my perspective? Because they have VERY unrealistic salary expectations. See above. They want experienced wages when they don’t have experience. You have to do your apprenticeship and what they taught you in college is NOT how the world works. You’re useless to me until I’ve trained you for 6-12 months.
My highest paid folks are in languages/technologies they don’t even teach in college anymore, but, guess what? 90% of our legacy code is in those and I have to teach them to you. Go to fucking Google and pray you get a job with your 2.9 GPA (hint, you won’t make it past first round).
To sponsor a worker for an H-1B visa, an employer is not required to demonstrate to the government they couldn’t find a US worker to fill the position. That step doesn’t come until much later when petitioning for PERM residence. The employer is required to demonstrate the position qualifies for an H-1B sponsor and submit a labor condition application showing they intend to pay the foreign worker the prevailing wage. The prevailing wage varies by factors including education required as well as the physical location where the work is being done. i.e. The prevailing wage in San Francisco for a programmer will be higher than it is in Waxahachie, Texas. The government looks at the LCA and if it’s less than the PW they will deny the application.
The cs market is genuinely down the past year or 2 esp for recent grads.
Down is a relative term and i think people are basically aware of this - unless im missing a trend we’re not seeing cs grads wait tables while they try to figure out their long-term prospects the way tons of people have to do.
The other thing is the arms race to apply to more and more jobs coupled with the trend in cs of many rounds of interviews makes the process feel like more of a chore.
All in all people in computer science still have it really good in comparison to most of the workforce.
Historically there was always a reluctance by employers to train employees for their jobs. This was especially true in engineering disciplines. My son worked for about 20 years for Microsoft and they did train raw CS graduates. But they also put a lot of effort into retaining them. The main tool was options that didn’t vest for 18 months and by the time they had vested you had been granted new ones that would, in turn, take 18 months to vest. If you didn’t get new options, that was a sign that they no longer had any interest in retaining and, even might be about to fire you. Some people posted signs FUIFV (F U I’m fully vested) but they were mostly fake. My son was never fully vested and gave up some options when he finally retired.
- AI is very strong at programming, so that’s impacting things quite a bit. Employers are waiting to see what the new world looks like before hiring a lot.
- The current President is trying to centrally manage the economy. Businesses are generally holding back from doing things (like hiring) due to stagflation concerns.
Limiting foreigners might, admittedly, help to push some local talent back into software jobs in the short term (e.g. long enough to try and delay too much economic shrinkage before the midterms). But, long term, you’re mostly just pushing software companies to fully offshore and giving away India’s talent to the UK, Germany, France, and China.
Reducing the employment issue still leaves you falling behind the rest of the world. Smart companies might decide that it’s cheaper to spend their money expanding their offices in India, rather than spend it hiring US new graduates.
Of course, the right solution is just to stop trying to fucking centrally manage the economy, and forcing the US out of top position on the globe.
It is true
From CBS
The rise of generative AI is making it harder for recent college graduates to get a foothold on the corporate ladder as they start their careers.
Job listings for the kind of entry-level corporate roles traditionally available to young grads have declined 15%, while the number of applications per job has surged 30%, according to data from Handshake, a career platform geared toward Gen Z workers.
I’ve seen worse numbers from IEEE. (A lot of the links were paywalled, this one isn’t.)
It was unclear if they were going to lay off expensive experienced workers or stop hiring new ones, it seem the latter is the case.
The reluctance to train people isn’t new. I saw, 40 years ago or so, a statement by a CIO saying they wanted to hire people from colleges who knew the latest applications, and he was mad that the colleges insisted on teaching the basics, not what was hot now. I did lots of guest lecturing at the education centers of several large companies (as a resident expert) but they all got turned into customer visitor centers and the like.
I hired lots of people in this category. No one is going to pay an extra $100K for a new hire unless they absolutely have to. And 90% of the grad student we would hire would require H1Bs. I had very good visibility into the grad student population in our field, and was our best recruiter of them, and I’m not basing this on resumes.
They would probably take their training back to their home countries, good for them not so good for us, and also stop coming. But the grants were cut, so we can’t afford to pay students any more.
Trump is the best thing that ever happened to our adversaries.
All this talk about prevailing wage - I don’t know what it is like in the STEM fields, but employers in the US love to undervalue workers in general when it comes to pay. So “prevailing wage” means the cheapest we can hire someone.
HR people know the prevailing wage distribution very well, and they decide if offers are to be at 50% or higher - or lower. I always worked for top tier companies who made offer wages competitive, but lower rung companies who just need headcount are not doubt going to bottom feed.
Fun with capitalism.
The prevailing wage is set at a little over 50% of what the average person with that education, experience, and the physical location in making in the same or similar position. My company can’t sponsor a foreign worker at rock bottom prices because that would be less than the prevailing wage. More often than not, employees we sponsor make more than the prevailing wage. My lawyer would advise me if we weren’t paying the employee enough when we file the LCA.