One great potential unintended consequence: a blessing for Canadian tech. I don’t want Canada to gain at the expense of the US, but apparently Trump does. So be it. Larger numbers of bright foreign students in our universities and graduate schools and larger numbers of bright new scientists sounds good to me.
Yeah, a lot of people in this thread are approaching it like the FAANG companies are the only ones in the industry, or that they’re the only ones who count.
Corporate IT, meaning regular companies’ IT departments and I suppose the ecosystem of vendors that support them have to be by far the largest overall part of “technology” as a whole, and generally with very different priorities, outlooks, and general salaries than the FAANG companies.
Corporate IT is VERY… VERY concerned with cost. So they try to squeeze the blood from the turnips, often out of a sort of imagination/vision deprived mindset that IT is a cost center, instead of what the military would call a “force multiplier”.
Anyway, these outfits like Cognizant (the one I’ve got personal experience with), Wipro, Tata, and TCs are an outgrowth of this approach. They provide outsourcing services for development, project work, and support. And they do it cheaper (or why else would companies go that route?) than companies can do it in-house.
But the question is how do they do it cheaper, if everyone’s drawing from the same prevailing wage labor pool? I have my opinions on how that works.
IT is possible to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
There are, but it would take more recruiting work. And cost more.
That was a significant part of his “reasoning” I am sure, as i said before. But who really knows what goes on in his brain?
The H-1B is paid for by employers and the fees cannot be charged to the employee. The employer can have the employees pay the fees for premium processing, that’s expediting the application process, but the employer is responsible for legal and other fees.
Here’s one real unintended consequence:
The visas are widely used by the US healthcare sector to recruit international medical graduates or foreign-trained doctors and other professionals trained abroad.
The American Academy of Family Physicians emphasized that international medical graduates account for more than one-fifth of practicing family doctors and are disproportionately likely to serve in rural areas.
When you consider the hit rural hospitals have taken with the changes to Medicaid, adding a pretty large additional fee to hiring new doctors would obviously make everything worse.
I assume you mean “stayed.” I think it might have led to salary inflation for those with experience in the US, which could have led to even more pressure for H1B visas. But the number of the repatriated was very small compared to those hired in India who never worked in the US.
Not everyone. I catalyzed a tech conference in India, a spin off of one I’m involved with here, and the leaders of that conference, who work for top engineering firms, seem to be pretty stable in their jobs.
Thanks all for the discussion about why not just hire people out of country to telecommute.
And @Horatius I hadn’t even thought about the rural medical care crisis impact. Well those hospitals and clinics won’t be in any worse shape since Trump policies and actions already have them shutting down and if open having to let people go despite the desperate needs.
FWIW here is an article - gift link - today’s NYT. The bulk of these visas has not been for top expensive talent but for the middle. See the graphic.
The New York Times analyzed hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications filed last year, using data on job postings submitted to the Labor Department as part of the visa sponsorship process. About a third were for positions that paid a salary less than or equal to the new $100,000 fee, and most paid salaries that were less than the three-year break-even point of $225,000.
Question. In programming entry level positions are tight. The money is going to the very top AI folk. Maybe not horrible impact … there is no shortage of talent domestically looking for work at those levels.
From the article: “By setting such a high fee, the visa program would make sense primarily for the highest-paid employees because they are likely to generate the most revenue for their companies.”
Here’s my continued drive-by rant that not everyone that uses these visas is in the for-profit commercial sector. No one seems to show numbers for H-1B visas issued to cap-exempt institutions (typically educational and research institutions), but it’s significant. Looking at the .gov database, I see that the data isn’t sliced in that way. I went through the most populous states’ listings by employer and extrapolated from there, landing on a rough estimate north of 10,000 H-1Bs across the country each year in the non-profit educational and research sector. This is a chunky usage of the program.
The problem isn’t that the money is going to AI folk, who work for only a small set of companies, but that companies think AI can do programming better than entry level people. If someone defining a job can implement it quickly with AI versus giving it to coders to do, they are going to do so and save a lot of money - and time.
And sure the bulk of visas go to people in the middle. There aren’t that many high level workers or students at the high end.
I don’t know if it still exists, but at one point, Microsoft opened a branch office in Vancouver maybe 30 years ago because they ran into visa problems and Canada was more cooperative. This could happen again.
“Could” happen again? Absolutely will happen again!
Here is a story that one of my professors told me 60 years ago. I can’t cite a source, but it is unlikely that he made it up.
Apparently it is worth spending some effort to sex day-old chicks of a variety used as layers.. The males are unneeded (mostly) while the females can be raised as laying hens. There was some group of people (Asians, IIRC) who were experts at this. But they couldn’t get visas for them. Canada was quite willing and so they set up an operation right at the border in which the chick sexers reached across the border and sexed the chicks, while the chicks never left the US (because they would dutied on the way back).
I know someone who wanted to work in the U.S. at an academic institution, namely a university (therefore nominally not-for-profit), and they needed (and got) an O-1 visa, not an H-1B visa. (Apparently O-1 visas are easier to extend indefinitely? I am honestly not sure.) So I am not sure what the exact overlap is. This was also a while ago.
As a Canadian who is going to a university right now, I wish. Unfortunately, it seems foreign students were having a negative impact on housing so the government has slammed the door on how many foreign students can be here right now. Foreign students were a huge source of revenue for universities and this has had a corresponding impact on budgets which is to say lots of schools are now flat broke or worse. My university is way over budget now and has made big, unpopular cuts and is still nowhere near balancing the books. The government’s response so far has been “too bad, figure it out.”
CTV article with more details:
CBC article from when the government changed the rules:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/intl-student-cap-restrictions-reax-1.7328052
My husband was initially in the US on an O-1 visa, because of this theory and because it was an appopriate category. When we went to extend it, he interviewed at an American embassy. The interviewer thought that we weren’t being honest about the situation (we were 100% honest and following all rules correctly)—because he was unfamiliar with my husband’s career field. He gave us a one-year extension and a warning instead of the requested three-year extension. We used that time to make our plans to leave the USA permanently, because who can live like that?
Yeah, H-1B visas are usually for the postdoctoral career stage given the hard time limit on those visas. More senior positions will usually go through EB-1 or O-1.
In theory, O-1 visas can be extended indefinitely. In practice, they do not allow for immigrant intent, and the criteria for an O-1 overlap quite nicely with the criteria for various categories of immigrant petitions (a stage in the permanent residence process), so people who qualify for an O-1 generally find a route to a green card. Permanent residence requires some strategizing around timing for extensions and international travel, though.
The person I had in mind had tenured positions in both the U.S. and in Europe, and there was a lot of international travel in any case. I do not know the final outcome, so I cannot tell you what she did, but IIRC she was looking to buy an apartment in the US which indicates some intention to stay, so a route to permanent residence seems like it would make sense for someone who would be working at a full-time position in the US but also travelling frequently.
An O-1 visa generally requires a higher degree of qualification/ability (“extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics”) than an H-1B (“highly specialized knowledge”). Think the difference between a PhD and a BS.