If you are in tech in the US and don't mind making less money for what you do keep supporting legislation for more H1B's. Just don't complain when you become a commodity, are required to dress "business casual" and cannot work remotely. The reason it is good to work in tech is because companies have incentives to make it a good place for you to work.

If your skills are something that is easy to find those benefits will go away. Most companies are not going to give you these benefits out of the goodness of their heart in today's environment. If they did then the average Wal-Mart worker would be making a lot more and have much better benefits.

The solution, IMO, is to try remove causes of wage depreciation due to H-1Bs. Right now, tying the petition (and GC) to the employer is the primary cause for this. Opposing this, instead of a blanket disapproval of H-1B program as a whole, looks to be a more tactically sounder approach. The employers who are asking for H-1Bs as a form of cheap labour will oppose this, showing their true colors. But those employers who are genuinely seeking smart employees should have no problems with it.

The H-1B program, in its current form, suppresses wages because employees have no leverage or bargaining power with their employer. The visa is held by the employer, and if the employer wishes to terminate the visa, the employee may face immediate deportation. If employees had some more flexibility in changing jobs, the power balance wouldn't be so one-sided.

On a side note, there's a question as to whether the H-1B visas are actually being used by employers to attract top talent, since the majority of H-1B visa applications are for the lowest wage bracket. Also, from U.S. News and World Report:

"Between 2007 and 2009, Accenture hired nearly 1,400 H-1Bs, yet during that same time it sponsored a mere [2 percent] of its H-1Bs for permanent residence. Clearly, many employers choose the H-1B program for cheaper temporary labor rather than permanent immigration."

However, I don't equate H-1Bs with permanent immigration. There are limitations on duration of stay, what happens with your spouse/family, switching employers, etc etc. That really doesn't lend itself to people moving their whole family to the US and buying into becoming permanent residents. If all we get out of the H-1B program is downward pressure and wages and people that will come for 5 years, make a bunch of money, go home and not come back, then I am against the H-1B program.

Note that I 100% put the blame for this situation on the US immigration policy and not the people that are H-1B holders. I am sure most of them would love to get a green card or even become a US citizen, but for some reason we've gone from 'Give me your tired poor huddled masses' to 'Oh you have a masters degree in an engineering degree and want to move here to start a business? Too bad!'.

It is a net win for the country but not for the individuals who make up the country. You are probably able to compete with outsourcing now, but do you think this will last forever, or for your descendants?

Having h-1bs, as they are implemented now, comes with more problems than benefits.

It is extremely likely that companies such as Google still would have been created without h-1bs. See China for example. They are doing fine with Tencent, Baidu and the other host of late coming clones.

The economic dominance of the US is mostly caused by not being demolished in WW2 and many natural resources as it was only populated for a few centuries. It is not really because the US has the smartest and most hardworking people (not saying they don't help though).

If you are worried about competing with more citizens, then you should also be arguing to make our schools worse and make college more expensive.

I personally think what is best for society as a whole is best for me. The more economic growth there is, the more opportunity there is for me to get a raise/promotion, or find a company that really needs a person with my set of skills.

In one case you are sending the work to the workers, in the other, you are bringing the workers to the work.

Competition within the country is fair. Companies exploiting the ability to outsource/h1-b their work is not fair. Workers that were grown and educated here cannot go back in time and move to a different country with cheaper living costs and education.

If society is being replaced by people that aren't you, society can benefit while leaving you in the dust. It is not a win-win situation. It is easy to feel that you or your descendants will never be marginalized when you are making 100k+ in silicon valley.

Exactly, so let them. Employer is responsible and liable for the H1-B security check, and, if it passes, in one year the H1-B converts to a green card.

Even better, the H1-B cap gets cleaned out so new people can come in every year. Good solution, no?

So, why don't we hear this? Because H1-B's aren't about filling jobs, they're about downward pressure on wages.

Instead of posing a question, answering it yourself, and then attacking the answer I am proposing to do something which I think will lead to better results for almost everyone involved.

When some corporation proposes increasing the H-1B quota, tell them that you agree with them but ask them to include the stipulations your outlined above.

This is a political non starter. They'll ignore you.

Those individuals and their families are here temporarily unless they can secure a green card (a tremendously difficult process that requires limiting their employment choices, handicapping them in their earning potential compared to you). Most Americans expressing your sentiment have no idea how much hassle immigrants have to go through in this process or every time they cross the border.

Historically, the United States has relied on this enrichment process to invigorate its economy with not just cheap migrant labor, but cheap entrepreneurial, technological, and scientific expertise. Many countries have suffered severe brain drain at the hands of the US precisely because of H-1B and other immigration policies. The US owes its technological and scientific leadership in many, many sectors to these skilled immigrants, who had to come here to get the environment they could thrive in. Their potential would have been wasted elsewhere.

Look around you. Many of the companies that constitute your labor market are built by people who took a chance and risked everything to move to the States, or people who moved here as their children. They helped the technology industry and the US as a whole to innovate its way out of the anti-utopia you describe, and will continue to play a key role in our worldwide technological leadership. They deserve to be here.

Exactly. Most Americans don't seem to know how incredibly hard it is to immigrate to this country. They think it's as easy today as it was for their ancestors who came here a hundred years or so ago.

The fact is, if you are not seeking refugee or asylee status, and if don't have close family (a parent, sibling, or child) in the US, it is incredibly fucking hard to immigrate here.

Most of the rest of the immigrants, in the Employment-Based Green Card quotas go through a process that starts with them entering the U.S. on an H-1B or an L-1, and then doing work of such high quality that the employer may be persuaded into going through the arduous process of securing him/her a green card.

In my opinion what we're seeing here is just the plain old anti-immigrant fear mongering that been around since a very long time -- except that instead of bitching about Irish laborers pushing down wages in the low-income segment, it's about how smart, highly-skilled, college-educated immigrants are "destroying" the American economy and culture.

On one level, it's stupid -- because these people actually contribute to the economy. On another level, it's plain old die-hard racism cloaked in a fable about job-theft. If you disagree on the race part, just run through some comment threads on this topic, and invariably there are many whose concerns have more to do with the fact that the would-be immigrant is of Indian (or some other foreign) heritage, rather than their claim about how he or she "stole" their job...

Unless we discuss this with hard numbers in front of us, it is just arguing from our internal fears/demons.

If they don't, it's probably because Microsoft selected the most talented of the most talented for H-1B and EB-2/EB-3 sponsorship. Microsoft is known to concurrently apply for an EB-based green card along with an H-1B, and most employees simply remain on H-1B status while waiting for their EB-based green card (which for certain nationalities, can take a decade to procure).

On the other hard, Microsoft having to cut jobs today, doesn't mean that all its arguments in the past decade have suddenly been undermined. A sudden bout of misfortune doesn't mean that its and Bill Gates statements on the utter brokenness of the U.S. immigration system was a lie, and in bad faith. If you remember, Bill Gates first testified in Congress about the problems with U.S. immigration system back in 2007, before the recession.

You know how Congress works. If you had your way, and the US government ceased issuing H-1B visas, you'd see a significant drop in EB-based green card applications. Far fewer companies would be applying for them. That's because, under the current system, an H-1B allows a company to temporarily hire someone, assess their performance, and decide whether they really want to sponsor them for permanent residence. You'd likely get lower-quality immigrants (as the companies haven't had a chance to fully assess them), and most likely would disproportionately favor mutlinational companies with offices elsewhere.

If you don't fix the system first, you'll end up with a even more broken immigration system. (I'm sure anti-immigrant types would love that though.)

If you want to fix things, fight for an easier pathway for skilled immigrants to come to the US (like an easier/quicker route to permanent residency), before fighting to shut down what is currently the sole vehicle to the U.S. for the vast majority of people who receive EB-based green cards.

But tech people seem quite okay with buying things made in China, and third world countries. When was the last time someone bought a router that was 40% more expensive but made in the USA? How many of the people who upvoted your comment made it the top comment ever check for a Made in USA sticker for their clothes or furniture even if it was expensive? Screw the low skilled compatriots so that you can afford higher spec MacBook and a Starbucks coffee, right?

Google/Motorola learnt the above lesson very fast with the Moto X which was assembled in the US and now that facility is closed because of bad sales inspite of a big advertising campaign.

So tech workers take full advantage of everything else becoming a commodity and now want to prevent the global tech labor supply affecting their already comparatively high wages so that computing/software stays expensive for the rest of society?

Next up, restrict open source software and remote work from other countries so that there is more work for tech workers and wages stay high?

Won't artificially high salaries affect startups, where a few thousand bucks can easily kill a promising startup that needs time to grow?

Restricting H1B visas will increase offshoring, which means the folks won't be paying local taxes in the US including State Unemployment, Social Security and Medicare taxes(they're not eligible for benefits though).

Actually something I have seen twice now and heard about being a common occurrence is H1-B people come here. Get sent home eventually after they are all trained up by the company.

Then they obtain an offshore contract with the company and any of there other contacts they made while they were here.

So its a big win for the company because they get someone offshore that is trained in their ways and now that they are offshore they work for even less than when they were here.

I don't think that many people would argue for restricting open source software.....except for some risk averse enterprise types.

"Won't artificially high salaries affect startups, where a few thousand bucks can easily kill a promising startup that needs time to grow?"

Keep in mind that this would not just affect an engineers salary with a startup, but also their equity grant which will probably equal a lower ownership in the company.

With offshoring, if it was going to actually have an effect on salaries it would, but more jobs are still kept in US and/or same time-zone.

I think it's very selfish to oppose H1B visas. America is wealthy compared to almost everywhere, and phenomenally wealthy compared to many of the places these H1B workers come from. Furthermore, the best thing for the US in the long run is to import as many smart people as it can. The best thing for us in the long run is to import as many smart people as we can. There are economists who dispute increasing immigration, but there is to my knowledge no serious argument against importing smart people.

Again, there is to my knowledge no economist, who anyone takes seriously, who would say "The USA needs to import fewer tech workers". It's a gain for everyone except the worker being "replaced", and that's a fallacy anyway because the economic pie is not zero-sum.

> In particular, it seems to be common among hackers to be very libertarian except when they feel threatened in their jobs, then you hear them talk about unions and protectionism and regulation and so on.

It seems you are in favor of open borders and ascribing extremist views--non-sovereignty of nation-states--to those who simply might not toe the liberal party line.

> Again, there is to my knowledge no economist, who anyone takes seriously, who would say "The USA needs to import fewer tech workers".

Since when did economists have tech worker interests in mind? All bow down at the altar of GDP, everyone else can burn.

Good straw man, but most economists are left-wing academics who chose a low-paying career track despite having a very marketable degree. I don't know of a single economist, not even any Austrian nut-jobs, who seriously think GDP is more important than human welfare.

But hey. Tell me, seriously, why it is good for the world to take this enormous pool of potential high-skilled workers and shut them out, leaving them in countries they don't want to be in, in places they will be less productive. Explain, in terms of the human interest you care so much about, the benefit of this. Explain how it produces more value for the world.

Hint: as you correctly noted, money != wealth. In particularly, allocating more money to us does not make the world richer.

However, having an economics degree is still a good way to make money and academia not a good way to make money. The point is people stereotype research economists as corporate shills or something, when they tend to be left-wing and most research economists consciously gave up money to work in academia.

They tend to poll Democrat more than Republican, but that certainly doesn't mean that they're left wing or anti-corporate. Quite the opposite in fact.

There is a near unanimity on the benefits of CAFTA, NAFTA and immigration, for instance. Also against government ownership of enterprise.

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/KS_PublCh06.pdf

Do you see the difference? If MS, Google, Cisco et al want to import workers, they should be paying them the same amount as their American counterparts, rather than pulling them in to be temp workers and lay off higher cost employees.

They are. You're pointing the finger at the wrong people. I've met many a Google/MS/Amazon/Facebook H1B and they are all making very good salaries, on par or better than their American peers.

This list should be enlightening:

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

The top 6 places are all outsourcing and consulting shops, and as expected their average salaries are dramatically lower than the "real" tech companies in the mix like Google, Microsoft, et al.

This trend holds true as you go down the list. Companies that do their own tech are paying on average high wages (even Wal-Mart, heh), while consultancies are the ones hiring people in the $60K range.

H1Bs are a bimodal distribution. One the high end you have Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the such, who are paying their employees well into the six figures and anecdotally, competing for top talent. On the low end you have Infosys, Wipro, Tata, Accenture, etc, who are importing vast numbers of low-pay engineers. Note that Infosys imported in a single year 15 times the number of people Google did, at only 60% of the salary.

If you want to start somewhere, it'd be useful to look at Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, and the rest before you start rapping on Microsoft's door.

This probably all circles back around to the social and employer pressure against sharing salaries thats been circling around HN the past couple of days.

H1-Bs are the very antithesis of freedom, which is apparently what libertarianism is about (I have my doubts its supposed adherents sometimes).

Giving corporations the near instant legal ability to revoke your immigration status (this is what H1Bs are) reduces you to a state of semi-chattel worker. In turn THAT pressures the wages of other workers down.

It's ENTIRELY consistent with libertarian views to oppose H1-Bs and the companies that push for them if they're pressuring your wages down. It's not an anti-foreigner view. That's not EVEN an anti-immigrant view. It's an anti "letting companies dictate the right of ANYBODY to stay in the country" view.

If tech companies OR you want more skilled tech workers they should lobby for more green cards or shut the fuck up.

Of course, what they really want is more easily controlled tech workers. That is, tech workers they have under their thumb. Tech workers they can say "I need you to work late tonight... unless you'd like to be on a flight back to your home country next week that is."

>I think it's very selfish to oppose H1B visas.

Don't call yourself a libertarian then.

Use the phrase 'anti-freedom corporatist apologist' or something.

I don't really care for whatever else you have to say. Try speaking to me like a rational adult instead of telling me to "shut the fuck up".

EDIT: I find it incredible that, judging by the downovtes, people seriously think I am obligated to respond to someone who has shown so little respect to me.

I feel the same as I do now: that if it looks like people are using the downvote as an "I disagree" or "I don't like you" button, people are entitled to call this out and ask for an explanation. If no good explanation is forthcoming, this suggests the downvoters might be in error.

"I find it incredible that, judging by the downovtes, people seriously think I am obligated to respond to someone who has shown so little respect to me."

This is not seeking clarification. You didn't even assume people were mistaken. You made a judgement call. You were complaining about down votes. Don't do it.

Laws restrict freedom, that's their entire point. Whether a society, political ideology etc deems those limitations in freedom necessary is a different story. Visas put a wedge in the law to allow someone to work at a business. Global immigration laws prevent people/workers from moving freely to other areas of economic opportunity. By making immigration controls more restrictive (denying visa grants) you leave people with less opportunities and ergo freedom.

Should we create inter-state immigration controls? Should I need to apply to the state of New York to move there? By supporting immigration controls and denying H1-B visas you're in essence saying, yes I should have to apply to the state of New York to move there.

I see what you did there... which is, you jumped from the particular restrictions of the H1-B visa to the generality of "laws". The point the parent ultimately points to is that creating a situation where your visa ends when a particular company says it ends makes you beholden to that company in a fashion which would be different than if, say, you visa ended at a fixed time.

All law may to an extend restrict people's freedom of actions but a law which facilitates indentured servitude would create a situation of greater concrete unfreedom than a law restricting a person from going to some fraction of the globe.

Are you saying that foreigners cannot think for themselves and that a slow, innovation-lacking, bureaucratic government is smarter and knows better than them?

The point of laws is to ideally balance freedom and security. You are not free to rip me off because doing THAT infringes upon my freedom/security.

In the case of H1-Bs there is nothing gained by restricting workers' freedom to switch jobs freely - EXCEPT, that is, by the company employing you.

That is why they're so toxic to everybody else and such a perfect way to keep labor in line for the company.

"I think it's very selfish to oppose H1B visas. America is wealthy compared to almost everywhere, and phenomenally wealthy compared to many of the places these H1B workers come from."

Your reasoning applies to immigration, not to H1B visas. If America is wealthy and should share its wealth with others, then it should have open borders. H1B visas bring in foreign workers on a temporary basis, tie them to a specific job, and therefore leave them in a precarious situation, unable to demand pay increases. If you believe that America should share its wealth via immigration, then you should be fighting for a more generous availability of green cards, not H1B visas.

About this:

"The downvote button is not a disagree button. If I'm wrong, tell me why."

Paul Graham has specifically said that the downvote button can be used to express disagreement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."

I am a US citizen. As you point out, I don't need to dress "business casual" and I can (and do) work remotely, and the pay is good.

But in some specialties, developers are scarce in the US. They're probably also scarce worldwide, but the greater wages available here could entice them to immigrate.

In my niche in particular it's hard to find good developers for anything like reasonable wages. And in my specialty, it's not possible for a typical "generalist" to just hop in and learn quickly; for what I do, you'd need a broad background in C, C++, cross-platform issues, Windows, Android NDK, and Unix-ish development environments, as well as real-time/game experience. Someone missing any of those would have a steep learning curve.

I hear stories of developers making $500k+ per year, or getting job offers worth millions. At that level, then yes, I think we could stand to see a bit of downward pressure on salaries. I'm not quite there myself, though at my salary's current rate of growth I could see hitting that threshold in ten years or less.

That said, I do actually agree that H1B workers are often illegally used to pay below-market salaries. [1] I don't know how to combat this other than through better monitoring and stronger enforcement of the law. (For example, if an employer is found to be paying less than they should, forcing them to retroactively pay the difference in wages+penalties to any affected employees would be a strong motivator to pay them enough.)

Currently, H1B workers need to be paid 100% of the "prevailing wage"; maybe a higher threshold like 110% (or pick a number that makes sense) would convince critics that these workers are really hard to find in the US? Because if you can't find someone locally for 110% of the "prevailing wage" then that's a compelling argument that they aren't here.

[1] "Employers affirm in the labor condition application that the wage offered to the applicant is at least as high as that paid by the employer for the same type of job, and the number equals or exceeds the prevailing wage for the job in the same geographical area" http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1b-visa-requirements.html

[edit] added comment about "hire a generalist" not being good enough

Why? If some developer jobs are as hard as brain surgery, why shouldn't those developers be paid as much as brain surgeons?

Not capping wages also encourages employers to rethink their employment strategies. Maybe that sort of employee should be promoted to partner. Or maybe longer-term contracts should be signed to so that employers can expect a reasonable payback from helping the employee over the learning curve. Or maybe they can rethink their development process to allow more remote workers (thereby increasing the talent pool to draw from).

If developers are scarce, the solution is to allow wages to rise and let the businesses figure out how to compensate.

Do they actually make that much? Should they get paid that much if they do?

Of course, treating workers as long-termers means changing the incentives. The current set of incentives are oriented around cheap perks to lure in new workers, rather than the more expensive measures necessary to keep people around for the long haul, like pay raises to keep salaries industry-competitive or other serious rewards for long term service. (one could imagine a partially paid sabbatical year or something...)

I've personally interviewed multiple dozens of graduates from top-notch computer science programs. Of those I've had the opportunity to interview, only a very small percentage (1-2%, give or take?) seem to even have the right aptitude to learn the more advanced skills.

Sure if you're hiring for web development you can train anyone with even mild programming aptitude on your stack in a month or two. But there are quantum levels of aptitude: If you just hiring someone because they're competent in one task with the intent to "train them" on another, there's no guarantee that you'll hit that 1-2% who can hack it.

It's far safer to find someone who has (at a minimum!) proven they can do something of similar complexity. And guess what? The kinds of skills I'm talking about can be self-taught (that's where I got them!), so it's the potential employees who need to take their future into their own hands and just learn the niche skills that interest them. (Or better, the ones in high demand.)

I don't believe thats a 100% apt comparison. In the 80s, tuition at MIT, a private school, was less than 10k/yr (according to wikipedia). Considering to do the same now would cost nearly 5-6x as much, its no surprise that corporations haven't continued those programs.

Are you suggesting corporate profits have remained flat for the last 30 years? http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP/

In the past the cost to send someone to college was "x", and the benefit to the company for doing so was "y". The rising costs of tuition has now caused "x" to surpass "y", making that avenue uneconomical. Corporations aren't public entities and shouldn't be expected to continue programs that result in a net loss.

Why??

If you're a lawyer specializing in sovereign debt restructuring and charge $2000 an hour, we don't hear about downward salary pressure.

I've never heard anyone complaining that petroleum engineers are too expensive, even if it takes them a Master's degree and an extremely costly speciality to understand their profession.

If we're playing the all-out capitalist game, then as a salaried employee you should go for all the leverage you've got, because your employers are doing the same through these and similar maneuvers.

It hurts innovation. People that good will be locked (with golden handcuffs) into large companies that can afford them.

Start-ups rarely can offer large fractions of a million dollars a year in salaries. Maybe they need to bring the entire initial development team on board as co-founders; I don't know. But right now getting good people to work with you in a start-up is harder than it ever has been before.

Software engineers might be well paid on average but they're not better paid than many other professions requiring similar levels of training. If this is such an issue, companies should spend resources training staff for the roles they need. Like they used to.

If anybody spoke up or didn't tow the line they were fired. I took a short term contract there during the peak of the recession and quickly moved on to something else, but the H1B's had no choice. Because of the economy a lot of Americans stayed because it wasn't obvious that there were other choices to them given the recession.

When I was a kid my dad told me that in this capitalistic society, in business expect people to treat you the way they can afford to treat you. In the case of this company they could afford to tread you poorly at that point in time and they did. Was it wrong, yes. But if you are a commodity that has no options but to either get fired or shut up and tow the line more companies than not will treat you that way.

H1B's are basically another form of indentured servitude the way they are currently implemented in the US. I'm not sure how to change that, but increasing their numbers is not the answer and is only going to make thing worse for everyone.

I don't think that's the case at all. I think its workers who have seen the job situation get progressively worse in the US over the last few decades, and are trying all avenues to prevent it from getting worse (in this case, depressed wages).

If workers had more protections (as it is in other developed/first world countries, for example), I don't think you'd see such a strong backlash against H-1B visas.

The H1-B is a "dual-intent" visa -- you can be on it while pursuing citizenship. This differs from the TN status available via NAFTA, for example.

Additionally, the H1-B has a 6-year limit in theory (3-year limit, renewable once), but can be extended past that limit if the holder is at a certain stage in the permanent resident application.

Most of these workers strongly desire to immigrate to the Untied States on a permanent basis, and the truly skilled ones (I'm not talking about ones hired by outsourcing giants) work really hard (and usually get paid really well), and contribute significantly to the company (and as such, to the United States as a whole).

(And certainly the temporary status factors into the fact that they exist and how many are granted and all of that stuff. FWIW, I think the U.S. immigration policy is a disaster, we should be letting far more people in and looking for ways that we can help to improve the situation in Central America (because presumably that will reduce the most common sort of illegal entry).)

No,artificial increase of supply through government intervention to drive down wages. It's a bit like "reverse protectionism",but at the expense of local workers. But hey i'm sure if you could own slaves you'd still be bragging about "supply and demand".

The whole "H1Bs are getting the same salary" is very popular but I have not seen it supported by anything. It also seems contradictory to common sense since H1B's have the lowest bargaining power of all possible workers. How can they manage to negotiate salaries on the same level as Americans?

PS. I had been on H1B too. My salary doubled in about 2 years after getting GC (I had to stay a bit more than .5 year with the company that made my GC).

As you discovered, there is a hidden wage pressure anyway. Over your career, it's your mobility that helps drive your wages up: either because you leave for greener fields, or just because you can. While you're on a H1B your mobility is so limited which can put your career in low gear until you get your GC. If your on lame project or a cheap company you just have to put up with it.

The dumb thing is that the solution is absurdly simple: just allow H1Bs to transfer sponsorship with zero penalty. If that means that they work for 5 different firms before they get the GC, so be it. Labor market dynamism is a good thing, embrace it. You also could scrap the whole auditing process; if a company starts underpaying their H1B's the problem would sort itself out very quickly as they start getting poached by the competitor down the road.

Any source for this? I have never heard of such requirements (as well, as often cited need to prove that no citizens available for each H1B position). All you need is to pay above the prevailing wage. Which is ridiculously low anyways.

>The dumb thing is that the solution is absurdly simple: just allow H1Bs to transfer sponsorship with zero penalty.

What is preventing you from transferring H1B now? I had no penalties transferring my H1B twice. The mobility problem with H1B is not the transfer per se. It's the fact that to do this the company need to have immigration lawyers and have the paperwork in order (e.g. one company that wanted to hire me did not have their tax returns). So the number of the companies you cold transfer is limited. Another issue is that H1B has maximum term of 6 years, which can only be extended if there is an active AOS process (green card). Somebody with 4 years on H1B is not a very attractive hire for a company that wants more commitment from their workers.

Just googling a bit now about H1B audits I found this: http://www.raminenilaw.com/h-1b-wage-and-hour-audits-dol-aud... They mention that the auditors can demand 3 years of wage data for both H1B and non-H1B's in the same employment classification.

Further, see http://www.greencardapply.com/h1b/h1b_pwages.htm#sthash.DNRi...

"in certain programs, such as H-1B (temporary specialty occupations), the employer is required to pay the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid by the employer to workers with similar skills and qualifications, whichever is higher"

I'm sure there are places that skate as close to the line as they can and do try to save money on H1Bs. However, the law is set up to avoid this and audits are much more frequent than a decade ago.

> Another issue is that H1B has maximum term of 6 years

My understanding -- and correct me if I'm wrong about this -- is that transferring early on isn't a big problem. If your GC isn't far along anyway then a job switch can't cause much of a delay. However, if your GC seems just around the corner (a limbo that can take years to get through) you're unlikely to risk moving jobs and throwing a wrench into the works.

I can understand that the H1B process would want an employer to demonstrate that they're not bringing someone over to flood an already over-supplied local labor market. However, once an immigrant's first employer does that I don't see any reason to restrict them further. As far as I'm concerned, they've earned their visa and they should feel free to work anywhere they like. The entire concept of a human being having to be "sponsored" by a company is distasteful.

Further, what possible reason could there be for a 6 year limit? If they were suitable for employment in 2008, they should still be in 2014 given that they have more experience. It's insane that we'd even threaten sending them away. It would be simpler to just start the GC process automatically with their H1B.

The LCA itself contains a promise that the wage is "average" for the employer. It is not the maximum so even if it had been enforced it would be absurd to claim that H1Bs are paid no less than citizens based on this alone.

>However, if your GC seems just around the corner (a limbo that can take years to get through) you're unlikely to risk moving jobs and throwing a wrench into the works.

It might be so in some cases. It's not related to H1B. H1B is a temporary worker's non-immigrant visa. Green Card is an immigrant visa. They are entirely orthogonal and you can get a GC without H1B and vice versa.

>Further, what possible reason could there be for a 6 year limit?

It's a temporary visa so it has to have a term. For permanent immigration there is the EBGC.

That's true in a technical sense, but they're effectively part of the same process for many, many skilled immigrants. Come in on H1B -> Start GC process -> Use ongoing GC application to get the H1B extension -> Finally get full GC.

> It's a temporary visa so it has to have a term.

That's answering it with a tautology. My question remains: why would we want any skilled-worker visa to be temporary? If they're skilled enough today, won't they be even better qualified after six years of work experience? It just seems ridiculous.

I'm sure plenty of people would love to skip the whole H1B and go straight for an EB3 or something, but since they're capped by country it isn't really an option for many people.

Sure. Does it make it okay to talk about H1B when you mean GC (or, more likely, immigration in general)? There are much more people on H1B than there are skilled immigrants. It's not designed as a vehicle for immigration any more than any other non-immigrant visa. Some people are confused with the "dual intent" but all that means is that to get the visa stamp you don't need to prove to the Department of State that you are not going to stay in the US illegally. And you can apply for AOS the same day you arrived instead of waiting for 60 days due to the 30/60 rule. It does not open you any special immigration doors.

> My question remains: why would we want any skilled-worker visa to be temporary?If they're skilled enough today, won't they be even better qualified after six years of work experience?

H-1B is not a prize for being skilled. The H-1B law was made to provide a relief to temporary workforce shortages. The limited term of its status and the limited number of visas allow Congress to reasonably control the number of temporary workers entering the country through this program.

[1] http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Tata-Consultancy-Serv...

Look at the damage that deflation did to japans economy.

Wall street salaries are never going to happen. Look at computer science enrollment by American students. Surprise, people respond to incentives. Turns out Americans are willing to program.

I think the real problem here is that the tech industry does not know how to manage their workers. I'm not talking about managing projects, or how to coach or train. I mean the whole thing. The technology sector of the economy has no idea of exactly how many workers, in what configuration, it needs for accomplishing any job.

Weird situation, I know. But where that leaves us is a lot of "open" job positions that are little more than unfulfilled wishes. Sure would be nice to have another 40 guys on the helpdesk. Would that be as nice as 10 more developers? Who knows? Or -- we've got that big government project coming up, so we'll need at least 500 IT workers. Why do we need it? Who knows? It's a big project. It should have a lot of people on it, right?

The implications of this is that there's a huge downward pressure on wages. People want a certain number of tech workers, but there's no market pressure to hire them or even to lay them off if they've hired too many. They just want a certain number. So what they really want is really cheap, disposable workers that they can easily swap in and out as the political winds inside a company changes. The U.S. labor market isn't really geared for that.

This is a very underestimated point. most hiring is not about skill or productivity. But about building a political base within an organization.

In some areas, this means hiring friends, fraternity brothers, or members of some other in/niche chohort. In other areas it means hiring people of a different stripe. It also shows up in HR very often as the term "head count", which an asset quota that is horstraded amongst managers. Headcount brings with it both momentum and inertia. And is a favorite tool useful for building subtle forms of leverage in an organization.

Its useful to be aware of these dynamics in places like startups and politics because they exist there, too.

It's not just the tech industry, almost all companies struggle to measure productivity, especially as a comparative measure. People like salesmen do have defined metrics like sales, but it's harder to do that for people in HR and Accounting, for example.

Not everyone with a STEM degree is a computer scientist or an engineer. If you are one of the countless thousands of people with a low-value science degree then not only are there few jobs at any pay scale but you will likely make more money doing something else in any case.

You see this in practice. STEM graduates do 3 things, in my experience. Work in management, work in IT, and work in academia. I wouldn't count on any of having up-to-date science knowledge except the academic ones.

Wall Street does draw some students from the math/physics/EECS departments of the very top ranked schools, but this represents a tiny percentage of students graduating nationwide with STEM degrees.

"'When I go down to the market to get some workers, I always check the label', says the Senator, 'it's our patriotic duty to acquire locally produced workers'"

Organic might be nice for a few more decades, but let's not discriminate against our upcoming robot overlords too much.

The main problem is that the majority of people on this visa are being used as tools to drive down US wages. These are the people working for consulting shops in the middle of no where making below market wages while being forced to do mind numbing work.

It is very hard for someone in a situation like this to switch jobs. Their is also no incentive for their employers to sponsor them for a green card until they absolutely have to. It's not uncommon to find people spending close to a decade being one step away from being deported.

I want immigration reform not the perpetuation of a half baked visa that favors big companies and allows immigrants to be easily exploited. In summary I think talented people should be encouraged to work in the US but on an equal footing to everyone else. Raising the H1B cap is not immigration reform.

While there might be a good argument for this, I've never seen proof that it was not being abused.

2) These visas do not incentivize corporations to RETRAIN their employees. Yes the specific technology changes but the ability to understand how to interact, program, maintain, etc do not (in relation).

3) Is AGEISM a management or a worker problem? Sure, it's up to the worker to keep up to date, but I've seen plenty of examples where ageism is more a problem of the industry. Somebody who is 40+, has a CompSci degree, worked in the industry for 15-20 years, gained wisdom is somehow worthless because they don't know the exact specific technology.

These visas are a bandaid to a problem that tech corporations themselves created. They don't retrain their valuable workers with outdated skills and instead look to foreign countries for a quick-fix out of their mess.

Keep up the high wages and you'll continue to see an increase in CompSci enrollment. Then pay to retrain your (good) employees for the latest technology and you'll keep them. Corporations have options, they're just more motivated at the H1-B candy then something that benefits everyone.

In addition to this, requiring companies to sponsor greencards for all H1-B workers would go a long way toward stopping those who are simply looking for cheap captive labour and would leave the pool open to those companies who are legitimately looking for skilled workers in good faith.

UK perspective: absolutely no chance of visas for people outwith EU if you are in a redundancy situation locally. Endof. I'm surprised this could even be happening.

Disclaimer: I live in a 50:50 city, in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood where the 'recent immigrants' are Polish.

[1] http://minimsft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/18000-microsoft-jobs-...

And it's kinda funny that Satya would've himself been on a work visa when he worked at Sun or at Microsoft, perhaps the senator is implying that poor Ballmer shouldn't have been laid off and replaced with a foreign worker? :)

Looks like a flamebait headline and article by the same guy at ComputerWorld who seems to be on a crusade against H1B, as part of a personal crusade or for page views (these articles seems to invariably make it to the Slashdot front page).

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=computerworld+h...