Actually it is a bigger problem but not due to H1B visas, other countries have been investing a lot in STEM education and the US has stagnated.
In reference to your example, Mexico is outperforming the US in education but not in wages.
As it is so easy to work remote these days, we will probably see these industries leave if we continue our protectionist policies, as the jobs and companies follow the talent pools.
Not in Chemistry or Engineering colleges, where young Americans get much higher salaries by moving to industry jobs than by staying in academia. Can’t whine about professors being a bunch of foreigners when the locals aren’t willing to put in the bologna sandwich years. Those who haven’t put in the years aren’t qualified.
I’m not the smartest fellow on the block. This whole thing seems okay to me but wouldn’t it just encourage businesses to set up a shop in Mumbai and just hire them there under another “business” and the do business with that newly setup business? That’s what I would do to get around the law.
Then those firms would have to operate under Indian Law, with which they are not familiar, and go through Indian bureaucracy.
That bureaucracy cannot in any way be less efficient than American bureaucracy — which too is not the smartest fellow on the block — but it may have surprises and obstructions.
This is not true at all. Finding rare skill sets is exactly the purpose in academia/research. Because of the way academic research works, every PhD is the “world’s expert” on their cutting-edge thesis subject - their advisor makes sure of that. I want to hire the postdoc who wrote their thesis on highly specialized chemical process and is in fact the world’s expert - but academic salaries being what they are, I’m not able to pay top dollar. There’s no undercutting here - people from the U.S. who stay in academia aren’t making top dollar either and the Universities are strict about pay scale matching and pay scales in general. Someone with N years experience gets an N-years experience salary, and the way we attract each “world’s expert” is having a strong lab, academic environment, promise of publishable results - not salary.
Against this, using a strict “salary” criteria (when that criteria is high given academic pay rates) hurts our ability to create and maintain these “best university” environments in the U.S.
Never mind that many of the folks getting PhDs at the best colleges and universities in the world are foreigners. Nearly 14k out of 54k PhDs (25%) awarded in the US in 2014 were to people holding temporary visas, see NSF survey of earned doctorates. So we’re spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, of tax money training people. Maybe we shouldn’t be paying for them in the first place. But if we are, I’d prefer not to send them away after. For those who stay, I’m not sure what the typical visa situation is.
For foreigner newly minted US PhDs in high-demand professions I believe there is a fast track for green cards. Employment-Based Immigration: First Preference EB-1 | USCIS
Good to know, thanks.
As I posted above, H-1B employers are legally required to pay the prevailing wage for the position, level, and geographic region. Do people cheat the system? Sure, but I see it very rarely - I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve done an H-1B petition for someone whose proposed salary was less than the prevailing wage determined by the Department of Labor. And in almost every single case when we have raised with the employer that this was the case, the employer gave the employee a raise. I’ve prepared, oh, over 1,000 H-1B petitions; maybe I’m just lucky not to have worked for, or with, sleazeballs.
Got an idea for sensible enforcement? I’m all ears. I’ve known a number of clients to get site visits, and I’m fine with that, but keep in mind that site visits from the DOL or USCIS cost money.
Define “supposed to.” There is currently no legal requirement of the sort. If you think there should be one, you are free to lobby your legislators. If employers actually follow the law (and I acknowledge that some don’t - those of us in the field were pissed at Disney because employers like that ruin it for everyone else), you are not saving money by hiring an H-1B worker because employers are required to pay the prevailing wage or what they pay equivalent U.S. workers, whichever is higher. Plus add to that several thousand dollars in legal and government filing fees.
Tons of H-1B workers are graduates of U.S. universities, as has already been mentioned. And the typical process, once an employer decides they want to keep a person on indefinitely, is to run the H-1B concurrently with the employment-based green card process. Who says everyone is being sent back after a few years?
The EB-1 process exists, but is not typically a viable option for someone early in his/her career. The requirement is to show that the person is at the top of his/her field.
I’m not in the IT field but I’ve lived in Silicon Valley and done cross cultural training in that area and know a little bit about the field.
I don’t doubt that there are some cases of abuse, such as fake academies enabling foreign workers to land and ultimately get on with a tech company. There are also probably abuses for moderately skilled jobs.
However, the real reason tech companies hire H1-Bs isn’t always to save money – they pay an awful lot to bring them here to begin with. The real reason is that H1-B workers are virtual slaves. They can’t just take this job and shove it, so they will gladly do all-nighters and intense projects knowing that if they say no, it’s back to India or wherever they’re from.
If we gave immigrant workers more freedom and flexibility to choose employers over a 2-3 year visa period, that might solve the problem without having to artificially manipulate the wages of workers on the free market.
Note that several of my peers who are on the consulting side have claimed that a significant number of their customers have asked for quotation of international rack space and the cost of moving their existing infrastructure. Although it is the other Visa types being restricted that they fear most often.
The H-1B. Or I imagine some stay on a J-1 for a training program, or some marry U.S. citizens and stay that way. But by far the H-1B is the default.
That is going to be interesting in the rest of the country. Silicon valley might work at 130k, but for much of the country that is near a director’s salary.
As Eva Luna said, though, “prevailing wage” requirements are determined by geographic location as well as by position and level. No employer in Podunk is required to pay an H-1B employee Silicon Valley wages.
I am going to disagree a bit. My company has quite a few dev folks from India and they are awesome. I don’t know if they come over under H-1B but they are quite good at what they do. I am just a lowly system engineer* but the Indian dev folks know what the hell they are doing.
Slee
*Funny story. We bought a company. During the integration process one of the directors of the company we bought asked what my title was. No one knew and he got like four different answers. So now I am officially a senior system engineer. Yay title.
Now that I’m not dealing with the complete mayhem that’s going on at my office at the moment, I just wanted to address this. Do you believe that Indian (or Chinese, or Fijian) IT workers who graduated from U.S. universities are also inferior to U.S. IT workers?
In any case, only around half of H-1Bs are used for computer occupations in any given year (see p. 12). Are you trying to tell me that Indian (or Chinese, or Fijian) workers, including those with degrees from U.S. universities, are also inferior to U.S. workers? How do you even know that the Indian IT workers you’ve known were on H-1Bs, rather than, say, permanent residents or U.S. citizens?
For obvious reasons relating to current events, I am not going to be able to spend a lot of time on the boards, particularly during the working week. So debate away, but if I’m not here to answer every post, don’t think I’m ignoring you - I’m just doing things like trying to calm down the professor of pharmaceutical science who is freaking out because he thinks that his career will be ended before he gets to the head of the 10±year green card line created by the quota backlogs, even though he has a Ph.D. and a ton of publications. There’s no other appropriate visa category for someone like him.
I’m not sure we need a flat minimum, or maybe we do to get wages back on track. Here are the requirements for a work permit in Sweden. Maybe we should emulate this to a degree.
(Emphasis added)
https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/Working-in-Sweden/Employed/Work-permit-requirements.html
The minimum salary is less than $1,500 per month in U.S. dollars, but the points I bolded would seem to be a good start to limit the downward pressure on wages due to immigration.
Those are basically the same requirements that already exist within the U.S. system, except the benefits requirement is to offer the same benefits package offered to U.S. workers.
The ones that graduated from U.S. universities tend to be really good. My comments aren’t racial or ethnic. There are also a few good Indian and Chinese universities but those aren’t the norm. Most Indian and Chinese universities emphasize conformity, following strict rules and rote memorization. That doesn’t work well in any type of dynamic environment.
I have worked with a few excellent Indian project managers on H-1B visas and they share the same viewpoint that I do. I let them deal with the reality and it isn’t always a pleasant thing to witness when they switch back to native languages to reprimand their countrymen and women.
I don’t know the exact visa or immigration status of every single one but I know some of them were on H-1B visas because they told me or someone else did. A big tipoff for the others is they just got off the plane after never having been to the U.S. before, shacked up with several other people in the same situation in a small apartment and then go back home in a year or two when the project is over. I can’t say what specific types of visas are used for many of those but I am confident they are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents.