It is obvious why such a bill would be introduced in the current American political climate, to protect jobs for Americans.
It seems to me that the real effect will be to either greatly increase costs for companies relying on H-1B workers that can afford it or cripple those that cannot afford the new costs.
Lots of bills get introduced that are going nowhere and being introduced purely on principle. Is this bill destined for the garbage bin or will it get some support?
What do you think the effect will be of passing such a bill?
P.s. - FYI, it is being introduced by a Democrat just so that nobody thinks I’m trying to blame this on the Republicans, Trump or Bannon.
No one will be able to get into the country, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Looks like a bad idea to me, and I’m sure it’s unpopular in Silicon Valley (as Zoe Lofgren must know), but i suppose one might argue that the minimum salary should have been indexed to inflation in the first place. The article notes that the limit has not been raised since 1989.
Hmmm. I wonder if she sees this as like a minimum wage increase but for tech workers (because let’s face it the H-1B is used for a lot of tech workers). It would seem that raising the salary for H-1B workers would create a natural upwards salary pressure for American tech workers as well.
I guess I need to go look up some data on salary rates for tech works. Have they stagnated, etc.
$130K seems like an awful lot to me though. Again, I should look into how much tech workers make in the US. That’s much much much higher than in Canada so that might be colouring my viewpoint.
The H-1B program is currently being used to underpay foreign workers and to depress the salaries of domestic workers in the IT business. A raise in the minimum salary would reduce that practice.
BeepKillBeep, I can’t provide a cite. My post was based on 30 years experience in IT that includes personal knowledge of salaries and practices of several large employers. Feel free to disregard my post.
I work in IT as well (Boston area) and I can attest to tool. It isn’t some rare thing. It is more like SOP for many if not most companies these days. It is an abuse of the original intent of the H1-B program and that abuse needs to be addressed in some way.
Those of you that are assuming the intent is to give a bunch of foreign workers $130,000 a year jobs are mistaken. The real intent is to keep companies from importing and underpaying foreign workers in lieu of American workers (what they are doing now). If companies really have some ultra-rare, specialized need that can only be filled by on HB-1 visa then they better be prepared to pay dearly for it.
There are plenty of articles about rampant H1-B abuse but here is a good is a good summary from Quora.
This is a honest question. I don’t know the answer so please don’t bite my head off or anything.
It was my understanding that there is a severe skills shortage in the USA in the IT industry and hence the need for the H-1B. Is that not true? Is there no skills shortage?
No, it isn’t true in general in IT. There are plenty of American unemployed, underemployed and potential IT workers waiting in the wings. Many of them had to switch to (often lower paying) industries when the floodgates of (often fraudulent) H-1B visas opened in the early 2000’s. There is nothing special about foreign IT workers in terms of work quality or knowledge. Indian IT workers in particular are often some combination of useless and incompetent but they are cheap and exploitable so the firms that specialize in vast numbers of them get the contracts because that is the only thing that executives usually care about. The H-1B visa program was never intended to have that effect and many of the current, widespread practices are literally criminal even at the largest companies. Regardless about how you feel about Trump and his executive orders, the H-1B program deserves criticism and requires reform due to rampant abuse.
Thanks for the reply. Just FYI, the bill is being introduced by a Democrat from California so really has nothing to do with Trump at this point.
I’ve been trying to find some hard data but I’ve been unable to find much of anything (not because I don’t believe you guys, I just prefer to have a data that I can examine and reach my own conclusions). Does anybody know where such information would be?
And yes I did look at the articles linked to by the Quora article.
As I undestand it, the intent of the H-1B program is so that if there were positions that required very particular sets of skills and no one could find someone with those skills domestically, they could import workers from around the world to do it. So maybe if there was some 50 year old piece of equipment still running some essential system, and the only people in the US who have that knowledge are dead/employed elsewhere/etc but there’s one guy in Scotland who knows how to run it, you could H1B him to get him a work visa in the US. That may be a fairly extreme example, but it demonstrates the principle.
But the way it’s been used is to artificially create a set of requirements that aren’t really necesary to the job but that few people in the US could fulfill. Say, a computer programmer that had 20 years of experience speaking a particular dialect of Hindi, even though Hindi had nothing to do with his job, it’s clear it’s just being used to pull in an Indian programmer who might be willing to work for 30k a year instead of 100k.
So this bill would return it to its original purpose: you could still hire people with rare skills that you otherwise couldn’t find, but you couldn’t use it to simply hire cheap foreign labor since the minimum you’d have to pay them is so high. But if you actually had a case where you needed a foreign worker for an important job because of their actual skill set, you’d have that option and you’d be willing to pay for it.
Not American, nor an IT worker, but the abuses of the H-1B system, importing others to crush the natives as surely as Charley Schwab or Frick crushed the steel unions * have been well-known abroad for over a decade.
I can actually recall some amusing, if somewhat racist in effect, although not in purpose, websites some years ago listing the abuses heaped on the misfortunate Indian imports, ** and the detrimental effects on the careers of those they replaced.
Liberals just told them to suck it up, which has led to the present ‘not necessarily to our advantage’ administration. But hey, Bill has $50 billion, right ? And he does a lot of charity work…
Steel workers were notoriously feather-bedded and led easy entitled pampered lives.
** In that site, experiences were sent in by the Indians.
I work in IT and would support something like this, although $130k is probably too high. During the 90’s and 2000’s, it was common for dishonest contracting companies to hire loads of low-paid H-1B workers so they could low-bid for contacts. I often worked with H-1B contractors who were doing very basic tasks that pretty much any college graduate could do. It was obvious that they were hired because they would work cheaply, not because they had skills which were in short supply.
Requiring a minimum salary would get back to what H-1B visas should be used for–hiring foreign workers who have exceptional, hard-to-find skills. Hiring a foreign programmer who can write his own shared, distributed filesystem is a great use of a visa. Hiring a foreign worker to babysit automated test cases is a misuse and a waste of a visa which could be used on a highly skilled worker.
