Executive Order signed to increase H-1B Visa Fee to $100,000

Politics & Elections
61

Bear in mind that not all H-1B visas are for new hires. My brother-in-law (44 years old, has worked in computers for half his life) had worked at the Israeli branch of Google for several years; a few weeks ago, he was promoted and transferred to the company’s Seattle-area offices. He was a Google employee before he moved, and he’s still a Google employee now, except now he also has a U.S. visa.

I haven’t asked, but I’m pretty sure he’s being paid the same an American would be paid in his position.

62

I’ve worked for international companies, including in the USA (and one with a supplier in Israel - that got interesting when an online meeting had to be suspended due to rocket attacks… resumed a few minutes later with my colleagues in a bomb shelter!)

But my point is, most of the US business is client service, they farm out the actual coding work to us in RSA and IND. We made good salaries by local standards, but absolutely cheap labour with world class performance.

I doubt I could get a US job that matches my standard of living, living in RSA and earning way less than the equivalent in the USA…. But man, I am in the 1% here. In the USA, at my salary, I would probably be somewhere near the bottom of the 40%.

63

Are you sure he isn’t on an L-1A or L-1B visa? This is an intra-company transfer visa allowing foreign employees working at an American company overseas to transfer to the United States. It’s a temporary visa, 7 years for A and 5 years for B.

64

Shouldn’t H-1B visas be more for established expert workers in their fields, not new hires?

And the presence of so many low-paid H-1B visa holders working in STEM tends to have its own distorting effect on the prevailing wage.

65

A “new” hire is anyone who is new to the company and not necessarily someone new to the workforce. i.e. A new hire could be someone with a Master’s and 7 years of work experience in the field.

They’re not low paid. The PWD is not the lowest possible wage. Though one could argue influx of labor drives wages down across the board.

66

America is in the enviable position that experts in a multitude of stem fields are already in America. Many of them were h1b’s that benefited from our extremely competitive tech industry and our wealth of research universities. Many are native-born and got to benefit from working with immigrants who were the best and brightest during their education in their home countries and get to apply their skills and different perspectives here in America. The world is not divided into Albert Einstein-level geniuses and code monkeys.

67

In the context of the thread, and for the workforce as a whole, “new hire” is being used to mean entry level.

I mean, if I switched companies, I’d technically be a new hire at the new company, but for the purposes of the thread, I wouldn’t be, since I’m a 26 year IT vet with advanced degrees and a senior management role. Similarly, a guy with a PhD in some technical specialty and seven years of relevant experience in whatever esoteric field it is, isn’t what people mean by “new hire”, even if he’s switching jobs.

Never said they were, or that it is. And that’s exactly what I’m arguing.

As I understand it, what’s happening is that companies aren’t wanting to hire entry to mid-level IT people domestically because they want more money than they’re willing to pay. So they’re resorting to either hiring Indian H-1B visa holders who are willing to work for what they’re willing to pay, or they’re outsourcing to contracting companies who employ those people for those wages, because where they’re from, they’re not middling wages.

It’s a symptom of a larger problem in the IT industry, which is that companies and IT management are often focused on the short to medium term, and aren’t people-focused. What this means is that there’s been a shift from hiring people with the intent of training them up and/or promoting them, to hiring them for a specific job without any real expectations of promotion, etc… Because you know, they’ll just hire a manager to fill that role, not promote someone.

This people-as-interchangeable-resources mentality means that they’re also much more likely to contract pieces of their shop out, especially on the support and development side. Which is ok, if your contractor isn’t overseas, and you can poach the best contractors when they get ready to jump. But when they live in Bangalore, and are willing to do that work for $45k, that’s a problem when the local guys want 55 or 60k. It means that those local guys struggle to find jobs, and end up being paid closer to that 45k.

68

I actually have no idea. I’ll ask him.

69

Except for rare cases, established workers are already in the US and have gone through the visa process. Newly graduated PhD students are experts (in knowledge, not work experience) and frequently know more about new advances than those who have been busy meeting deadlines for a few decades.

I did the recruiting for the students of my professor friends, and my boss, who is Indian and went through this megillah, did the paperwork. It did not sound like fun.

BTW back in the old days you had to create an ad for the job you were filling with an immigrant, which as someone mentioned could get oddly specific. In one case we got a resume for someone filling all the specs. We hired him also.

70

The employer is required to post an LCA announcement in two conspicuous work areas informing US workers about the hiring of a foreign worker. The information on the announcement must include the the employer’s name, job title, salary, and work location (maybe a few other things but I’m hard pressed to remember anything else). We had to post these announcements for a minimum of ten days and had to do it within the thirty days leading up to submitting our LCA for approval. We generally posted the LCA announcement in the breakroom on the floor where the employee worked. It wasn’t something the general public could see.

When it came time for the PERM process, we definitely had to post a job opening to the public to demonstrate we were unable to find anyone authorized to work for the position. Because those job postings were oddly specific, I usually didn’t have many people apply for them, and those who did typically weren’t anywhere near being qualified. In one case, I did have a former employee who held the exact same job title some eight years earlier apply for the position. But for the last eight years he had been in a completely different career, so we didn’t consider him for the position.

71

Is there any way some of that $100K is going directly into Trump’s pocket? Trump rarely does anything that doesn’t benefit him directly. And Scotus says anything he does is legal.

72

No. This is just a way for Trump to exert power over American companies. He’ll waive the fees for other considerations.

73

Yep, punishing companies like Amazon which had donations of millions to Harris.

Mind you, the H1B visa system is rife with abuses, and needs some fixing. This, however, is not a “fix”.

74

Why limit it to IT? That’s true of most American companies. That’s the issue I have with the prevailing wage argument. As a whole, Americans are severely underpaid for what they do whether barista, CSR, teacher, field technician, receptionist, lab assistant, website developer, etc. So to look at those depressed payroll numbers and say “Using this metric as the standard, American graduates are worse than Hitler for wanting a living wage. Especially as we can hire non-Americans for this pay that is 70% of what it should be.” seems to be a fallacy.

75

What should the standard be measured against to determine if a company his hiring a foreign worker for less than they can expect to pay another worker? Your issue doesn’t sound like its with the PWD, rather your issue is with wages as a whole.

76

My issue is with how PWD is used to justify underpaying workers. It’s circular … we pay people artificially less so that lower average is the new PWD and we pay people (in this case H-1B) the PWD since that’s the metric. Oh those Americans that want paid according to what they’re worth? We don’t hire them since they want more than PWD.

77

This assumes that the government’s rules about salary is the only factor for an immigrant’s salary and there are no market forces that compel companies to pay them more. H1B holders can go on indeed just the same as you or me.

78

I’ve done no more research beyond this thread. I just am finding the arguments unconvincing like how we have a shortage. But if we have (just making up numbers) 5 million STEM qualified Americans and 50 million STEM qualified non-Americans for 250,000 STEM jobs, we don’t really have a shortage.

79

Nobody here has made a good argument that H-1B visa employees are making less than others with the same education, experience, job duties, and location. What standard would you use aside from the PWD to determine whether a company is paying foreign workers less that other workers?

80

Only 85000 people can come in per year on h1bs total (i.e. across all industries). People can also work in similar fields by working in the first years after college on a student visa or getting something else like a marriage visa.

And as Sage_Rat said earlier - the us has about 1 third of a billion people and under 200k jobs. China has over a billion. So in China there must be 3 times as much competition for the same 200k jobs.