Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year(npr.org)

304 points by augustocallejas 6 years ago | 632 comments

codelord 6 years ago |

Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant.

There are companies like Cognizant/InfoSys/Tata/... whose business model is based on abusing the H1B system, and that's obviously wrong and I'm quite surprised they get away with it. I'm not defending that.

To those who broadly argue against skilled visas, consider this: Most H1B immigrants are between 20-30 age range. The prime age to join the workforce. Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce. It would at least cost you 1$M and probably much more. Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy. Why would you not want that? People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale. If they have more workforce they can do more. Things get done faster and they just make more profit. Stopping immigration obviously would dent the economical growth. Never mind that many top tech companies in the US were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.

To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce? As if allowing immigration would reduce the amount of money for investment, while in reality immigrants pay taxes. I personally have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so far. I'd be happy if this money was used to educate the American workforce. However I know that it doesn't. I would like to see that change.

hintymad 6 years ago | |

I know this will probably be flagged or voted down, but at least please understand that I truly want to see people in the US get better and more equal. Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education. And I'm not talking about an-iPad-per-kid kind of investment, but investment to hire great teachers, lots of them, to public schools to the point that tutoring schools become a joke, investment to set up a system that can fire bad teachers -- the kinds who ask students in grade 9 physics class "which is heavier, pound or kilogram". Investment to ensure that even the poorest area can have public schools that are at least as good as KIPP. Investment to really keep students in their discomfort zone so they can learn every day. Investment that builds a system that really pushes the limit of every student instead of being complacent with the craps like "Kids can discover most math by themselves" or "left no kids behind" or "challenging math is systemic bias against the poor" or "math is racism" -- maybe they are, but then they are because our governments offer such low-quality education that family with means can get ahead by going to soul-sucking tutoring schools.

Education is the key to local talent, and is the key to equality. Yet, what has the US done to make our education better?

john_moscow 6 years ago | | |

This comment is the reason why we need to rethink our current culture of censorship and social media outrage.

It explains a non-trivial logical connection, showing how something that could look unpopular from the surface, would pay off in the long run. Except you cannot make comments like this in public anymore. Because all it takes is an angry mob leader shouting "%USERNAME% is %CLICHE%ist" and that's it. Your employer fires you, your friends abandon you, you are socially bankrupt in an instant.

There are many bright people our there with great perspectives to share. Except they have to maintain radio silence, because they are not willing to take that risk. So the only voices to be heard are the most extreme ones that have nothing to lose.

I sincerely hope we can overcome this and get people to discuss problems and work together on solving them before our civilization sinks into medieval barbarism.

scarface74 6 years ago | | |

I’m going to go off the rails more. You can’t reform the education system in a vacuum without dealing with larger societal problems that affect the US.

The war on drugs - have unfairly targeted minorities breaking up families and when they get out of jail, its harder to get a job because of their criminal record. No matter how good the education system is, if the students home life is unstable, education suffers.

Government funding through court ordered fines and tickets that also cause people to enter the criminal justice system when they can’t afford to pay. They end up in jail and lose their jobs. Again an unstable home life.

Lack of affordable higher education. Also, colleges love to give spots to non US citizens because they pay the full tuition costs.

Education funding is based on local property taxes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

pascalxus 6 years ago | | |

Why are people so quick to always blame teachers? What makes you think throwing even more money at the problem will make things better?

Growing up in a poor area, I went to some of the "worst" schools you can imagine (one even had to get shut down) and I had one of the most inspiring history teachers there, that I still remember to this day. And all the other teachers were great too. It's not the fault of the teachers when students are too busy pencil fighting and throwing basketballs at the teacher's head, rather than studying.

What on earth do you mean with "low quality education"? I certainly didn't see that in the worse schools I went to. I think people misunderstand term "bad schools" and take it literally to mean that the schools are bad. this is completely incorrect. When people say "bad schools" it means the students who went to the school performed bad on standardized tests. It's not a reflection of teachers, or schools or funding. I went to such schools and still did just fine, so did many others.

kamaal 6 years ago | | |

>>Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education.

As some one who worked in US and returned to India. Let me tell you immigrants will support this as soon as they get their US passports and Green Cards.

It's just which side of the fence you sit on. Once these people have a stake in your country, they magically shift their loyalties to the exact opposite position to what they had before.

In India itself, many of these elites oppose policies like Right to Education Act. knowing well they can fund their kids higher education in foreign countries, and eventually their kids getting settled in US. They don't want poor people to have literacy or any edge in education. Meaning, less competition the better. Why work for Right to Education, when your kids go to expensive private schools, tuitions, coaching classes and then foreign universities, with jobs and citizenships overseas. You want less competition and lesser poor people and underprivileged people studying so that more opportunities are freed up for your kids.

People are deeply selfish at a personal level and unless they have a stake they feel no need to change. I honestly feel things in India will improve with fewer visas. People will work for good domestic education facilities once they realize they are trapped in their own country.

pps43 6 years ago | | |

> the US had better invest heavily in education

At this point, more money is not going to help. Education in the US is fundamentally broken. Combination of "no child is left behind" and standardized testing (because everything else will be called discrimination) ensures uniformly bad results. If you pour more money in, it's just going to be wasted on bureaucracy and busywork.

So H1-B is actually a great idea. If we can't educate, let's attract well-educated people from elsewhere. They want to live here, so we can choose.

We don't mind buying electronics made in China because they can do it better and cheaper, why not do the same with people. Finland seems to be doing just fine with education at a fraction of US cost, let the market do its thing and flex the comparative advantage.

x87678r 6 years ago | | |

It already invests heavily in education. USA already spends ones of the highest level of funding per school pupil in the world and for college its by far the highest spender.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf

perfmode 6 years ago | | |

please lend your support to the ongoing movement to shift investment from the prison-industrial complex into health and education.

wiseleo 6 years ago | | |

There are not enough such teachers to teach 1:1. There are not enough people who could be drafted to be such teachers either. It would require a lot of altruism to work as a teacher whereas there are much higher paying positions in the private sector.

We have the technology to amplify a great teacher's lecture to millions. However, the education system relies on the model of interactive lectures given to a class of people of whom many are not acutely interested in the subject. Following that lecture, parents are drafted as involuntary teachers to help their kids with homework. If the student's parents have sufficient background, this works. Else, we end up with the situation where students continue to fall behind as their parents are unable to teach them.

We need to bootstrap our students' learning to the minimally accepted level that sustains self-directed learning. I would define that as mastery of arithmetics as first phase and algebra as second phase. However, we are talking about mastery that does not require a review, which means spending more time on in-depth training without jumping ahead.

Such classes should be separate from mainstream math classes so as to not to bore those of us who already have achieved that mastery.

I am working on this.

foogazi 6 years ago | | |

Look, the people coming over on H1B are the top picks from other countries in terms of motivation and willingness to work - people that see tech as their golden ticket

What you are saying is how can the US turn their bottom tier performers to match this

Nothing lights a fire under your ass as realizing you are a layoff away from leaving the country and having to start over

david38 6 years ago | | |

Yes, put money into edu but that’s very different from giving teachers more money. Teachers do relatively little. The major influence is parents.

You need to change the cultural mindset. You need to build more colleges. Computer science programs are already maxed out. You need more professors.

somurzakov 6 years ago | | |

problem is not in teachers. Problem is parents. Yeah parents.

Good parents with good parenting skills raise good kids. Bad parents/single parents - it is much harder to raise kids and give them good education.

if you want reforms - you need to adopt Scandinavian policies in America (high taxes, universal healthcare, universal childare, universal K-12, universal college system) - that way it will be easier to raise well educated kids

okapple 6 years ago | |

H1B Employee with 100k Salary contributes $12,400 to Social Security and $2,900 Medicare every year. (Total:$15,300 per year).

Majority H1B from India and China are stuck in green card backlog; with the current immigration system, they will never get the green card. Option for them is to stay in the USA on H1B in green card waiting queue or return home. (I do not think this is right or wrong people who are stuck in the queue, they chose to come to the USA and work here, it is up to that person to decide if they want to stay or go back or go to another country). After returning to home country from the USA, Social Security and Medicare deducted is a contribution to the USA (I am not saying this is right or wrong, just a fact).

winter_blue 6 years ago | | |

Just wanted to say that Social Security's Old-Age Income program is available to all non-citizens, regardless of immigration status. It is a good thing to be aware of.

The only requirements to meet is 10 years of work in the US (i.e. "40 quarters of coverage (QC's)"). I spoke to someone from India sometime ago, who had come to the US in their late 40s or early 50s. They were planning on going back to India after they had accrued 10 years of tax-paying years in the US, so they could collect on Social Security Old-Age when they retired in India.

With the exception of a few countries,the US government will in fact directly deposit money in your foreign bank account. [a] You don't need to have any ties to the US. The whole thing is actually quite profitable, if you've only worked in the US for 10 years. Per the formula [b], if they earned $130k per year, in 10 years they made $1.3 million (and contributed $198,900 at 15.3% in FICA taxes), which divided by 420 yields $3,095 - the AIME (Average Indexed Monthly Earnings). The benefits payable for it is: 960 x 0.9 + (3095-960) x 0.32 = $1,547. They can get $1,547 from age 67. If they live until 87, that's 20 years. And 20 * 12 * 1547 = $371,280.

All other federal benefits, plus the other programs funded by FICA taxes (ie OADSI / SSI + Medicare taxes) including SSI, the other parts of OADSI, and of course Medicare, are not available to non-resident non-citizens (with a few exceptions).

[a] https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10137.pdf

[b] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/piaformula.html

cromka 6 years ago | | |

Social Security contributions are not forfeited, they're your for life.

bdcravens 6 years ago | |

Much of what you say is true, but it's important to realize the H1-B is not designed with any of those benefits in mind. Its only purpose is to fill roles where there is no local talent.

ReticentVole 6 years ago | | |

The H1B is also not designed to support diversity or equality, which is crucial if we consider it a stepping-stone to long-term immigration (which many people want).

It would seem reasonable to place an intake limit of 10% from any one country, and limiting males to a maximum of 49%.

Right now, lets be honest, the H1B is giant immigration scheme for Indian males to get into the USA: 75% of applicants are Indian, and roughly 70% of applicants are male.

https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/people/three-...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050365/how-many-h-1b-...

With these kind of diversity requirements, it would also be much harder for crooked companies like Infosys to racially discriminate against non-Indians:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/infosys-faces...

The green card lottery visa has diversity metrics built into it explicitly, which is probably why it receives minimal negative attention.

downerending 6 years ago | |

Here's a frank answer. I've worked with various foreigners and H1Bs over a long career and always enjoyed it. I worry sometimes that they're being seriously abused by their employers, but I figure that's for them to decide.

I feel less positive about the program these days given that a number of companies have made it a point of pride to emphasize hiring of "diverse" employees, which seems in reality to be a pretext for H1B hiring that would not otherwise happen. This stings a little bit for me personally, as it's become clear that I'm losing some jobs to H1Bs. And I'm sure it really stings for native techies that can't find work during this incipient economic depression. (I'm old enough that being whacked by H1Bs just means unexpected early retirement.)

For whatever reasons, I suspect the American base will continue to hollow out and turn into something different. It's a bit like British cuisine, which has (in my impression) been essentially overrun by Indian cuisine and that of other countries. Is that bad? I guess it depends on your point of view.

Anyway, as long as the hiring is legal, I'm good with it. Certainly I've never met a colleague from another country that I didn't enjoy working with.

FuckButtons 6 years ago | | |

I’m English, there was no English cuisine before Indian food. The closest thing we had to a national dish was fish and chips, which frankly, is fucking awful. About all you can say for English food is that we make nice beer.

yibg 6 years ago | |

Also (if we leave aside the abusers like InfoSys etc), employers pay an additional cost for H1B visa workers (comparable salary + the cost of sponsoring the visa itself). Presumably this means there is a net benefit to the American company doing the hiring to be hiring these H1B workers. Seems like a win-win situation here all around.

If the concern is with abuse, then let's crack down on that.

amznthrowaway5 6 years ago | | |

HN needs to stop pretending only companies like Infosys and Tata abuse the h1b.

Even big tech companies like Amazon and Facebook hire h1b workers so they can create sweatshop environments. H1b workers are afraid of being deported if they do not perform well, and a certain percentage of workers are forced to be on the PIP plan every year in the stack ranking.

Can even lead to suicides or suicide attempts. Ex:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/facebook-employee-i-was-fire... https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoug...

tekknik 6 years ago | | |

What about the increased cost associated with an American not taking the same position? We have to pay their unemployment

dragonwriter 6 years ago | |

> Most H1B immigrants

There are no H-1B immigrants.

There may be H-1B holders who plan to become immigrants, but H-1B is a nonimmigrant work visa.

> Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy.

No, they are competing to come and reduce the market clearing cost of labor and increase the returns to capital in our economy. Which is good for you if you are (1) one of the incoming laborers, or (2) a person whose main interaction with the US economy is via capital investment, not labor income.

> To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce?

You don't have to stop immigration.

You do, on the other hand, need to stop importing labor in a manner specifically and selectively designed to avoid upward pressure on wages (and thereby, stop the incentive to develop domestic supply) for high-skill, high-demand positions and to terminate temporary residency when it no longer serves that purpose.

Or, you need to better capture the returns produced by those means and direct them to domestic workforce development.

I'm one of the most pro-immigrant and pro-immigration and anti-Trump, people you’ll find, and I would shed not a single tear if Trump managed to permanently kill, rather than merely temporarily suspend, the H-1B program.

raj_khare 6 years ago | |

Exactly. H1B is great. Most people don't come to SV just for money. They are seeking interesting applications of technology, researching on breakthroughs, climbing corporate ladder etc. Whether you like it or not, most tech companies are run by immigrants. If someone is against that, I don't know whether you're afraid of competition or think that only natives have the sacred right to work on interesting stuff.

I'm not saying I'm not against people who are abusing H1B. That should be banned NOW.

pascalxus 6 years ago | |

I can understand how this might seem unfair to immigrants.

this part is completely wrong: "If they have more workforce they can do more".

The demand for labor is not determined by the supply of labor, it's determined by the demand for those products. When companies higher engineers for example, they don't just go, "hey, we just had two brilliant engineers interview, so instead of highering 1, we'll higher 2." It never works that way. Companies need the amount of labor they need, and not one person more.

The reality is there's a vast oversupply of labor right now in most fields. Wages have been stagnant for a long time. And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.

Furthermore, the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built. Even with the population we currently have, there's no where near enough housing. this problem is only getting worse. Sure, it's just politics, it's a choice voters have made, but we're stuck with that choice. And, having more immigrants/increasing population makes it worse.

winter_blue 6 years ago | | |

Let's talk about immigrants that are being paid well, for a moment -- since Trump is seeking ban those people as well. (Also since I myself am one such immigrant, and I know several immigrants who were being paid extremely well, whose H-1B cases were denied by the US government under the guise of software engineering not being a "specialty occupation"[1]).

A friend of mine last year got a job as a L5 at Google, for around $380k a year in total ($190k base + $28.5k bonus + approx $160k stock). Plus a sign-on of $50k. First year pay is $430k. He's not doing rocket science, or managing. He's an individual contributor writing back end code.

Meanwhile, there are folks doing a similar jobs in Canada, who are making 100k CAD (on the high end), which is $73k USD. And the cost of living in big cities in Canada is shockingly high.

Now, you were saying something about bay area salaries being low? The salaries are, if anything, over the top insanely high.

Also, I'm trying to understand why companies go through all the processing delays, legal costs, frequent unjust denials since 2017, to hire someone who is not a citizen, while paying them well above the median for the job, if there is a supposed oversupply of talented top-tier skilled people who are looking for a job. The truth i that oversupply myth is just a lie, spun by people with anti-immigrant animus, plain and simple.

I can't fathom the head space you would have to be in to think that salaries are low. Incredible arrogance and entitlement, combined with a generous dose of xenophobia probably. Instead of being thankful, there are people who want to cut off / deport / exclude people from working in the US (and I mean people making these high salaries).

Also, I know a lot of H-1B holders with high salaries. I myself am one of them. (In fact I don't know any low-paid H-1B holders, but my social circles are all folks working at top companies or friends from other social groups.) The intense amount of hatred for immigrants on HN always continues to appall and amaze me.

I usually tend to refrain from commenting on these threads, because the toxic amount of contempt and hatred for immigrants that I come across in these threads is extremely upsetting, but sometimes it's better to speak up, than be silent.

[1] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20671424

triceratops 6 years ago | | |

> And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.

> the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built

You don't see the connection here? Why do you think there will be enough housing even with less immigration? The "housing must increase value at all costs" mantra is responsible for this.

c22 6 years ago | | |

There are 17 million vacant homes in the US[0]. With the exception of the half a million of us that are homeless at any given time[1] we all live in one of the other 121,520,180 homes that currently exist in the country. How much housing is enough? What if instead of focusing on how much of the population we can cram into the fewest (constantly under construction) places we figured out ways to incentivize commercial development and rehabilitation of derelict communities?

[0] https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...

[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

artificial 6 years ago | |

O type Visas have no quota [0]. This is what the H1B are represented as though in practice suppress wages[1][2]. This issue is decades in the making and companies exploiting these programs earned their scrutiny. Especially when there's massive unemployment companies importing labor under these auspices need to be called out.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro... [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-v...

peripitea 6 years ago | | |

O visas are much harder to get than H-1B. I've hired a bunch of people via H-1B that we could not have hired via O. None of them were displacing American workers -- we would have hired just as many (or more) qualified American workers if they had been available too. So it seems disingenuous to imply that O covers the intended purpose of H-1B. (For the record, I agree that companies like Tata abuse H-1B and that sort of situation should be banned.)

president 6 years ago | |

> People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale.

This is completely wrong. Jobs are zero-sum. One H1-B worker hired is one lost American job opportunity. It's not that hard to understand and taxes have nothing to do with this. Yes, companies can scale jobs but how often are they doing this and how does it help if they are also scaling up the number of H1-B workers?

SomeoneFromCA 6 years ago | |

It is very strange that people in this comment section shout "nationalism, BAD" when someone says that skilled people should stay in their own country and potentially help these countries to grow out of poverty, and statements like the one you just made - essentially rob these country of talented people and bring them into US - is somehow not nationalistic and good.

codelord 6 years ago | | |

I left my country to escape a totalitarian regime. I think just because you are born in a place doesn't mean you have the responsibility to completely sacrifice your life. Humans collectively have an obligation to help lift poor countries out of poverty. The question is are you against immigration because you genuinely care about the poverty in my country?

shuckles 6 years ago | | |

By the very nature of a highly skilled worker, they likely cannot realize the full value of those skills without a certain economic and commercial context. It is definitely not the case that for most H1-B employees the counterfactual is "growing their own countries out of poverty." Most likely, the counterfactual is being another 75th percentile wage worker in a low income country.

In addition, this line of reasoning totally discounts the very real benefit of foreign transfer payments from workers in the United States to their international families, often supporting large extended families.

gizmondo 6 years ago | | |

Why don't you go to one of those countries and help it to grow out of poverty? It's pretty easy to be generous at the expense of others.

pbhjpbhj 6 years ago | | |

Can you see how someone emigrating of their own volition and bringing their skills is different to a country purposefully trying to encourage immigration of skilled workers from [poorer] countries where there is a skills shortage.

The end result looks similar but motivation matters.

zerr 6 years ago | | |

What we forget is actually an individual - relocation is a basic human right. There should be no lottery of birth.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6 years ago | |

> Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce.

Let me fix that for you:

Think how much investment you miss out on — investment in a child's education to make them into a citizen who will carry your country's patrimony into the following generation.

neximo64 6 years ago | |

Your description lacks the implications of being a market participant in the labour market.

AndrewKemendo 6 years ago |

All data indicate there is no shortage of US Citizens that could fill STEM positions and that H1-B holders on average make well below market rate. Outright ban is the wrong tool and I can't imagine that this is a reasoned policy response to a well understood abuse of wage-arbitrage. The right answer would be to mandate comparable wages for H1-B immigrants as for median employee with the same experience/tenure etc...

"A comprehensive literature review, in conjunction with employment statistics, newspaper articles, and our own interviews with company recruiters, reveals a significant heterogeneity in the STEM labor market: the academic sector is generally oversupplied, while the government sector and private industry have shortages in specific areas."

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste...

"Our examination shows that the STEM shortage in the United States is largely overblown. Guestworker programs are in need of reform, but any changes should make sure that guestworkers are not lower-paid substitutes for domestic workers."

https://bloustein.rutgers.edu/new-analysis-finds-no-shortage...

"Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation."

https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...

Forgeties79 6 years ago |

This has gotten very old very fast (beyond the obvious cruelty). I have several friends who keep watching their colleagues just have to up and leave over this and it’s causing a ton of issues for businesses that employ folks on work visas in general. It’s just disruptive to be disruptive/feed the base.

x87678r 6 years ago |

Reminder of the top H1B employers. Its not about high tech workers in SV.

https://www.h1bdata.org/employers

Employer Name Employees Hired (All Years) Infosys Limited 182,945 Tata Consultancy Services Limited 102,722 Deloitte Consulting Llp 65,976 Wipro Limited 63,354 Accenture Llp 51,360 Ibm India Private Limited 47,839 Capgemini America Inc 40,954 Microsoft Corporation 40,828 Ernst Young Us Llp 38,631 Cognizant Technology Solutions Us Corp 34,138

progers7 6 years ago | |

This is for all years, but the numbers for 2019 seem to indicate SV will be affected: https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp... Google is #8. Amazon, Facebook, Apple are in the top 20. I don't know how accurate this list is, but I am worried for my colleagues.

x87678r 6 years ago | | |

Actually that site is interesting, if you add up the Bay Area it would be the #1 region. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Category.as...

shuckles 6 years ago | |

Your argument would be more convincing if Microsoft wasn't on the list. Even by the evidence you present, _both_ high tech employers are large H1-B consulting firms would be impacted.

fredfoobar 6 years ago | |

Shut them down.

retortio 6 years ago |

H1-B was intended for highly skilled workers that the US had a real shortage of. But now it's just being abused to bring in captive workers that are willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions than otherwise while crowding out US workers.

What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.

Scaling back H1-B in this way is the common sense approach. And it benefits other countries too by reducing brain drain.

It's a win-win.

addicted 6 years ago |

I’m curious. HN has largely agreed that the current pandemic showed that remote work is absolutely doable. At the same time, people are claiming that the H1B visa, which allows immigrants to work in the US at largely American salaries, are taking away American jobs.

So the stated solution is to do away with the visa and send those people back to their home countries.

So why does anyone believe that when those people go back to their home countries, their employers would choose to hire someone else instead of keeping the same people hired at a fraction of the cost?

I mean, people seem to think that companies would be unhappy about paying someone 75k/yr who was costing them over 200k/yr (salary + payroll taxes, etc) in the US.

It makes absolutely no sense that the job would go to an American. The likelihood is that the job would remain with the same person but now they would pay taxes and spend dollars in their home countries at a fraction of the cost.

satya71 6 years ago | |

Yep. This is already happening. As US becomes a less inviting destination for the best talent, the talent will find home elsewhere. This might be beginning of the end of US tech dominance.

2ion 6 years ago | | |

That's a long road. Very few tech firms generate the kind of money from tech abroad like many US firms do. You won't be earning 300k in a non-US company in Germany very very likely when looking at similarly-levelled roles (to exclude high-powered roles) compared to the US. You'll be looking at 1/3rd the total comp max in many cases and that'll already be a very good salary in the field. And possibly higher taxes, no effective investment-based retirement schemes, and other disadvantages.

US firms have a very long way to fall before they get even the least unattractive, relatively. A young person emigrating from Germany to the US working in a (now) good tech job there making 150,000 plus benefits will be out-earning their age cohort back in Germany 2-3x at the start of their career. Heck even at 120,000 that's likely 2-3x what a somebody with a Bachelor's here would get. That's a tremendous difference no career-focussed person would shy away from wanting.

downerending 6 years ago | |

Flipping that around, if a company can hire someone for less in a foreign country and get the same result, why bother going through the H1B process? Why the drama? Just do it.

vishakh82 6 years ago |

So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty. So many visa holders in this country will be unable to leave and enter the country for the foreseeable future. If they have sick parents abroad they will not be able to visit them or, in the most tragic circumstances, say goodbye in person. It won't matter whether someone is a world-class researcher with extremely niche skills or database administrator using commodity technology. They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty. One wonders how many proponents of these measures would be willing to uproot their lives and leave the place they call home at a moment's notice. Life is about get a lot worse for hundreds of thousands of hard-working, highly-educated immigrants and there are comparatively few who will shed a tear for them.

belltaco 6 years ago |

This is great news for Canada. Once the Covid situation resolves, if Trudeau doesn't give a lot of incentives for tech companies to build offices there Canada will miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Canada has already been benefiting from the recent restrictions on work visas and rejecting visas for no reason, for example by saying a forensic pathologist isn't a specialty occupation.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/799402801/canada-wins-u-s-los...

https://insights.dice.com/2020/02/11/canada-continues-benefi...

tinyhouse 6 years ago |

Not clear from the article what this means. Would it impact existing visa holders already in the US? What about those who got an H-1B in this year's lottery? Is their visa canceled or postponed to a later date not known yet? (normally for a given year October is the earliest people can start working on H-1B)

blntechie 6 years ago | |

No official details yet but apparently 1) all issue of new visas will be delayed 2) current visa holders won’t be allowed at port of entry

So it doesn’t affect current visa holders in the country unless they travel outside the country and have to enter back.

Need to see what are the broad exceptions.

tinyhouse 6 years ago | | |

Not letting people in status travel and come back is crazy. It just shows the lack of common sense of the US government. It's the same lack of common sense of the US police and why it's such a mess (besides the systematic racism). Those people wouldn't leave the country as a result - all it means is that you prevent them from visiting their family, sometimes even in emergency situations. It has nothing to do with jobs, just pure stupidity.

bradleyjg 6 years ago | |

It hasn’t been issued yet, so no way to know for sure but the rumor is that no one will be able to enter (including re-enter) if they fall under the executive order but those in the country in status will not be immediately impacted.

dilyevsky 6 years ago | | |

The rumor is even opt will be canned which is fucking crazy. Wont surprise me if PERM or even N400 are next...

tinyhouse 6 years ago | | |

My educated guess is that the majority of this year's H-1B are already in the US. I wonder what it would mean for them.

dx87 6 years ago | |

From the article:

The order is not expected to immediately affect anyone already in the United States.

armada651 6 years ago | | |

Visa holders already in the US still need to renew their Visa. If this order also suspends renewals then people are going to get kicked out of the country.

tra112233 6 years ago |

I am on H1B visa currently, one of those with high paying jobs in my current geographic area. I did my Masters in EE and have been on H1B since 2008, waiting for my GC, which may or may not happen.

I want to ask a question to those who feel that I should not be here. Why is it wrong for someone like me to move from my home country legally as a student, then decide to work and live here, since it is legal and that option is provided by the government. My employer is also willing to bear all costs of making that happen. Of course, USA is a great country, maybe the greatest, and people want to live and work here. Is it wrong to have such a desire, and go about fulfilling it in a legal way? I am genuinely interested to know, since I get the feeling that folks like me aren't exactly welcome, and would like to understand why that is.

On the ethical side of things, I have wondered if I have denied an American citizen a good life.I get the feeling that maybe I have, by the mere fact of me existing and being present in this country, since I haven't misrepresented, lied or cheated anyone to get my job. I have no doubt that given enough time, my company will find someone like me, but how long it will take is anyone's guess.

Ghjklov 6 years ago | |

I don't have a strong opinion on whether you should or shouldn't be here, but I wanted to give a different perspective. It's really only tangentially related to this whole discussion.

A lot of Americans have been taught that the U.S is the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can come and through hard work can make something out of themselves. What people probably imagine when they think about this is poor immigrants coming and starting from the bottom, starting in food service jobs or doing janitorial work or something and working their way up. That's the American dream they were told about. None of them would imagine that through an H1B visa, we'd be allowing some of the most highly educated immigrants from other countries to come and immediately work in high level positions with salaries of 6 or even 7 figures.

I find it understandable that some amount of Americans feel that this is wrong and that they were told a lie.

tra112233 6 years ago | | |

Thanks for that perspective. I understand that it can appear unfair for someone whose ancestors had to build everything from scratch, to watch folks start leading a luxurious life, right from the moment they land here.

greatwhitenorth 6 years ago |

In this thread, people who have no clue about how H1B works are making dumb comments (both for and against) with such confidence. Before some one asks me, I was a H1B visa holder and know how the system works. It makes me think how many such people are commenting in other threads that they've no clue about. Never ever follow any advice from a HN thread is a good rule to follow.

noncoml 6 years ago | |

Maybe, but your comment doesn't help much either.

If you think someone made an erroneous comment, it would be good to correct them by replying to it, or just summarize the common misconceptions and share your expertise in a top level comment.

Saying that people are making dumb comments, I know how it works, but then not following up, is not in the spirit of HN

greatwhitenorth 6 years ago | | |

My point was to make people go do their own research and not believe what some random person writes (including me). If some one doesn't want to know the truth and here only for spicy half-truths/lies, it's up to them. Don't give me the spirit of HN crap, this is just another website.

noobermin 6 years ago |

Some of these make no real sense, like L1 and J1 visas, which are so few and uncommon and are often granted to individuals. J1's for example are for researchers coming abroad to collaborate with scientists here, there isn't a real argument that J1's are taking jobs from anyone else that I can tell. Not that anyone should be travelling at all this year but one would have to see if they get extended after covid dies down.

L1s also look like they're geared towards essentially overseas managers moving to the US, particularly in the case of a single international company moving their executives around physically.

GhostVII 6 years ago | |

J1 visas are what all the tech companies use for interns from Canada. Technically you aren't allowed to work under a J1 visa, but everyone seems to be doing that anyways - tech companies will always say that you are going to be treated just like a full-time employee during the interview, and then say you are only in the US for training when applying for the visa.

Jommi 6 years ago | | |

Well you're not completely truthful here. Yes you can work under J1, its an internship or traineeship visa. J-1 in general is related to learning tho. But there is nothing against doing something for money.

noobermin 6 years ago | | |

So may be I'm showing my ass here but I'm an academic. Our group was planning on collaborating with a French group who regularly performs nature-tier scientific work and we were planning on exchanging a graduate student and having them get their degree here, but if this holds it looks like they won't be able to do that. I don't doubt there are abuses (look up the thread, I see some iffyness around H1B's but the program itself being corrupt I don't think is true) but they're going to hurt everyone to score political hits for right wing xenophobes.

Look, my honest opinion is the abuses are generally bad, especially for immigrants who are being put in bad situations which because yet another thing the companies have as leverage over them, but then the people who should be targeted are the companies who are abusing the system, not the programs themselves which hurts everyone, especially the immigrants.

GaryNumanVevo 6 years ago |

The Silicon Valley was built on the backs of H1-B workers. There’s the bay wouldn’t be the technical hub without access to the global workforce.

exsf0859 6 years ago | |

That's simply not true. SV was built in the 60's thru the 80's long before the H1-B visa program started in 1990.

tartoran 6 years ago | | |

Maybe the OP means the modern SV aka FAANG and that is not far from the truth or very hard to disprove. Things turned out the way they did for a lot of reasons and none of them can be really discounted.

ojbyrne 6 years ago | | |

A little too specific, if you change "H1-B visa" to "immigrants" its most definitely true.

GaryNumanVevo 6 years ago | | |

Correct, I meant all immigrants, not just H1-B.

akira2501 6 years ago | |

The biggest employers of H1-B workers have almost always been consulting companies, most of them located well outside the valley.

shuckles 6 years ago | | |

That claim is no way incompatible with Silicon Valley having a large, prosperous, and essential H1-B workforce.

snovv_crash 6 years ago | |

The bay area doesn't vote Trump. This is a natural response to the voting mechanism. Only swing states get pandered to.

hysan 6 years ago |

If you step out of the tech (STEM) bubble, you’ll see that this is going to have a lot of collateral damage. There are niche industries where H-1B is an actual necessity. I know that what people complain about, especially on a tech centric site like HN, is how it’s used in the development industry, but I hope that people remember that there is a world outside of tech that this negatively impacts.

rhexs 6 years ago | |

And what are these niche industries?

hysan 6 years ago | | |

Social work organizations that require multilingual speakers is one that I know of.

somurzakov 6 years ago |

if US bans H-1Bs these jobs wont go to americans, these jobs will just be offshored. Large american enterprises already have gigantic offices outside US to manage IT/midoffice/backoffice or have relationships with contractor firms like Cognizant.

It is so much easier to send one/two americans as expats to India/East Europe to manage outsourced staff and the trend will just accelerate.

supercanuck 6 years ago |

Here are the top 10 employers of H1-B.

With the exception of MSFT, all of these are "consulting firms" or "service" providers.

So while everyone is having "ideological, values" based discussions, here is what is really happening

Employer Name Employees Hired (All Years)

Infosys Limited 182,945

Tata Consultancy Services Limited 102,722

Deloitte Consulting Llp 65,976

Wipro Limited 63,354

Accenture Llp 51,360

Ibm India Private Limited 47,839

Capgemini America Inc 40,954

Microsoft Corporation 40,828

Ernst Young Us Llp 38,631

Cognizant Technology Solutions Us Corp 34,138

bdcravens 6 years ago | |

To directly turn labor costs into a profit center, you need a business model that allows you to bill per unit of work.

Perhaps this is where H1-B restrictions need to be focused. No third-party employment.

remote_phone 6 years ago |

Anyone who thinks this is good for the US is stupid. In the era of remote working, all this will do it hasten the retreat of software engineering from the US. Facebook and Google do not care where their employees live, they want the best in the world. This will just mean that jobs will truly flee the US.

Right now the US is winning because of such a high concentration of talented software engineers compared to the rest of the world. It’s the same reason why there is only one Hollywood, the same goes for Silicon Valley. If you prevent people from coming here, the top companies will find them in their own countries and then those are jobs lost forever. And then the drain begins. This is a stupid self-defeating move by a self-defeating president.

theduder99 6 years ago | |

Facebook and Google could have converted their entire software dev workforce to Indians in India any time they wanted. But they didn't, I wonder why hmmmmm.

remote_phone 6 years ago | | |

Because all the best Indian software engineers went to US grad schools and then went to Silicon Valley. It sounds like you don’t live in Silicon Valley.

noncoml 6 years ago |

Xenophobia is a bitch. A few years ago I experienced an atrial fibrillation while exercising, so I called an ambulance, as I didn't know what was happening to me and thought that that was the end.

Once in the ambulance the paramedic started asking me where I am from and if I came in on one of "those visas".

I was afraid I was about to die, and this fucker was being xenophobic.

buildbot 6 years ago | |

Hey that’s awful, I’m sorry you experienced that.

noncoml 6 years ago | | |

Thank you. Not everyone is like this however. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing, friendly and compassionate were the staff at the hospital(Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara). They definitely made up for the awful ride there.

downerending 6 years ago | |

I wasn't there, but this sounds more like cluelessness than anything else. I could imagine making small talk like this to keep someone's mind off of their pain or anxieties. Did it really seem like the gal or guy was hating on you?

noncoml 6 years ago | | |

I get asked where I am from all the time, because of my strange accent. However I've never before been asked about what visa I came in on.

The way he talked about the Visas, gave me the impression of someone who has been conditioned to believe that "those Visas" are evil.

Or maybe I completely misread it, and he was just trying to make conversation as you said, to calm me down. But choosing the Visa subject seemed quite odd. Usually when I mention my home country people chose a subject like history, mythology, holidays or current affairs.

rantwasp 6 years ago | |

this is a textbook example of when someone should lose their job on the spot

2ion 6 years ago | | |

Because somebody's feelings were hurt? That's a useless argument to make against a professional who's basically effective at his job and very useful to society. The US is useless at civil rights these days precisely because it's all between "my feels" and straight out looting. Conditioned knee jerking all over the place.

aparsons 6 years ago |

Terrible idea. Upping the salary requirement for H1-B achieves the goal of using it only for highly-skilled workers. Instead, now employers have to make do with bootcamp grads instead of foreign engineers at lower level positions, hurting businesses.

NotSammyHagar 6 years ago | |

Yes, thanks, that summarizes the whole situation. Just make min salaries 200k, it could push up us salaries a little, but would mean many or most of those people like those laid off from us universities working in it would not have lost their jobs.

downerending 6 years ago | |

It does seem like the main point of H1Bs would be to make use of highly-skilled workers. We have plenty of low-skill workers already--we don't need more.

cylinder 6 years ago | |

is this satirical? that's entirely the point, they have to train Americans rather than hiring foreigners. the entire point is to benefit WORKERS, not businesses.

zomglings 6 years ago |

I wonder if they can make an exemption for the tech industry.

Feels like this is just going to accelerate the moves we've seen in the Bay Area towards companies going fully remote.

If this happens, the administration could see a lot of that money just leave the country altogether.

raverbashing 6 years ago | |

Tech is what? 90% of H1-Bs?

No way they're going to make an exception for that

zomglings 6 years ago | | |

Around 68.7% in 2017.

Going by these numbers (WARNING: PDF download): https://immigrationhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/h-...

That shows what a short-sighted move this is on the part of the administration - just re-election theater, I guess.

ixtli 6 years ago | | |

The point is, in part, to attack tech.

pramttl 6 years ago |

I can see how some people see this as positive but the premise that a talented and hard working foreign worker takes a job away from a citizen is short-sighted. Zoom out a little and instead of a talented and hardworking foreign employee taking a job you will see (on an average) that they help grow or expand projects and companies that opens door to hiring more people. Not only do they pay tax here and support social security benefits that many enjoy, they also help businesses survive and grow and help them stay competitive in a global market.

I'm not calling for open doors to everyone, this certainly needs a balanced approach. However, with such suspensions I think we seem to be going one extreme path. Global talent has helped develop industries and businesses here. Increasing restrictions to this extent and suspending these visas is going to push this talent out and promising businesses who want to get the best talent to work with them, will not-immediately but definitely follow their way out too. I hope the people who are celebrating this, at-least for a few minutes, come out of the myopic view and look at the long term economic consequences.

andrewgodwin 6 years ago |

I'm (worriedly) curious how this will affect people trying to change jobs on a H1-B, as technically you need to file a new petition each time, and I can see them somehow denying those too.

ra7 6 years ago | |

Extremely risky, I’d say. There would be people who have already changed jobs pending H1B transfer authorization (since premium processing was suspending earlier), also called joining “on receipt”. Normal processing takes weeks to months and if their transfer applications end up getting rejected now, they lose visa status.

cylinder 6 years ago | |

the entry ban will be for visa issuance at Consulates and entry into the US from abroad.

what you are talking about would require a rule-making process and/or statutory change. they are going to try that, but it will take longer and will be subject to judicial review.

AC21 lets you change employers without waiting for the petition to be approved. that's statutory. much harder to change as it would require Congress.

eventually, your visa label will expire. after that, if you need to travel overseas, you will need a new visa label and under this proposed exec order, if it's still active you will not be able to return. so you will have to avoid overseas travel entirely until the ban is lifted.

tartoran 6 years ago | |

Thats probably nightmare as H1-B holders are kept on a tight leash already

iaw 6 years ago |

So highly paid permanent resident tech professionals even more highly paid and a lot of non-permanent residents get even more harmed because of their country of birth....

I personally feel that the H1-B system needs to be rethought to encourage a healthier but not at the expense of bringing hard working immigrants into this country.

jdean677 6 years ago |

This will definitely expedite tech jobs moving to India. At current market rates, companies can afford to hire 3-5 engineers in India compared to 1 engineer in US with equivalent interview standards. I already see this happening with Amazon(with new hyderabad campus), Google & Uber.

dzink 6 years ago |

This could be a knock-out punch for many US universities. H1B is the visa International students pursue after paying full out of state tuition to colleges here.

boruto 6 years ago | |

Hasn't covid already done that. I think we are going to see a high upsurge in competition for masters in my home country. Which is very good.

saltedonion 6 years ago |

This and eroding section 230. I wonder if tech companies are going to fire back at trump.

godzillabrennus 6 years ago | |

If Facebook/twitter/google wanted to play with fire they could use their platformS to basically vanquish the GOP.

Those three companies control a significant amount of what people see online.

saltedonion 6 years ago | | |

Certainly. But the risk is incredibly high. If trump gets re-elected he’s going to go after these guys big time. Breaking them up would not be stretching the imagination.

Censoring trump is the nuclear option.

samfisher83 6 years ago | | |

Trump won the election largely by leveraging Twitter and Facebook.

downerending 6 years ago | |

Pretty sure they've been "weapons free" since election day 2016.

licebmi__at__ 6 years ago |

With all the push for remote work, won't that also accelerate these jobs leaving US? Well, good for us outside the US.

austincheney 6 years ago |

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income.

So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?

rootsudo 6 years ago | |

1. Developers dying, aging out, retiring.

2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges.

3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem.

It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.

hogFeast 6 years ago | | |

It isn't that easy to get a job in IT. It is easy if you have the right background.

I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday.

I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people.

Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens.

(Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).

austincheney 6 years ago | | |

> 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr.

Isn’t that irrelevant? People working in the US on an H1B are not earning such low foreign wages.

NotSammyHagar 6 years ago | |

There are just too many jobs and not enough qualified devs. Even in the pandemic. It's worse if you block our international people by limiting visas.

There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs.

If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++).

I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).

austincheney 6 years ago | | |

You are replying to something not stated.

Why is there such a shortage given the high wages, population size, access to education, and so forth?

proc0 6 years ago | |

It's a tough job no one really likes. I've tried to make programmers of almost everyone I know, almost nobody wants to even try it out.

austincheney 6 years ago | | |

This is my experience as well. High pay, accommodating working conditions, and great benefits are clearly not the right motivators.

I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.

joubert 6 years ago | |

“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.”

— https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...

noobermin 6 years ago | | |

College courses aren't necessarily zero sum if SV would considering hiring from state universities.

hyper0perator 6 years ago | |

The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this.

'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers'

https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...

NotSammyHagar 6 years ago | | |

Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now.

There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.

I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.

austincheney 6 years ago | | |

I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression.

Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:

* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?

* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.

hogFeast 6 years ago | |

I think the issue is some combination of: cheap alternative, unwillingness to train, unwillingness to consider a certain type of person, and unwillingness to take a risk (even if the alternative only secures you mediocre product).

Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ?

I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job.

Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).

bdcravens 6 years ago |

It won't happen, but it would nice to see a comprehensive plan to address the talent shortage that the H-1B is designed to address. Disadvantages faced by people of color is front of the mind right now; it's the perfect time to announce a detailed plan of training and education that would accomplish 2 purposes.

tibbydudeza 6 years ago |

I think it is a very good idea ... poaching of the best and brightest talent from less developed countries who invested in the education of these people is a form of robbery.

If you need them , then let them work remotely and pay them fair wages as they would have received in the US and let them contribute their tax to their own country.

stickfigure 6 years ago | |

Robbery? I'm guessing you also feel that the people who escaped across the Berlin Wall were "robbing" the Soviet Union of their labor? I don't suppose the actual humans involved get a say in this, do they?

fredfoobar 6 years ago | |

My dude, the people who came here to work and make their living are individuals, they have desires of their own to trade their services for a good life. Countries don't own their citizens, they are entities organized by people interested in living there.

SomeoneFromCA 6 years ago | | |

Of course they do not own their citizen, that is why you can take them to the US or other developed countries. However yes you do rob these countries of skilled workforce, and yes you do create an environment, which stuntnts the growth of these countries and yes you do increase the misery of the other citizen who is left in that countries. You just have to be honest, and say that benefit for US outweighs the loss for say India or Ukraine.

SV_BubbleTime 6 years ago | |

I look at it the other way. FAANG has more than enough money to invest in domestic training.

Either way it’s a win.

amaajemyfren 6 years ago |

In the last few weeks many technology companies have been able to have their staff work remotely.

I wonder what suspending Visas means in so far as remote working is a thing.

stunt 6 years ago |

There are solutions to the problems we discuss these days. We have experts and researchers who are dedicated to find better solutions.

But sadly, Politics are focused to win the election and next elections. Populism and non-populism, left and right, social-networks and media, we all made it so hard for experts and scientist to be heard and to be trusted. We are so loud that we are only hearing ourselves. We can talk non-sense with insufficient knowledge and call it open discussion.

ojbyrne 6 years ago |

Most tech companies are WFH right now, so if the government does this, there'll probably be lots of work for foreign lawyers setting up subsidiaries in other countries so that all the people affected can literally work from Home.

vsskanth 6 years ago |

This is going to have a chilling effect on international students thinking of coming to the United States.

Many people who do end up getting kicked out will probably take their jobs with them back home, especially in tech.

theduder99 6 years ago | |

Many international students come to the US to get a world class education. That won't change.

kondu 6 years ago | | |

Not at all. For most of the universities, grad schools are absolute cash cows. International students come here for grad school largely because of the associated 3 year(2 for non-STEM) OPT period and ease of getting a H1B during it.

boruto 6 years ago | | |

They take loans to pay for the world class education. If they have no option to repay those loans would they come to US?

bebc 6 years ago |

2020 is the election year.

victor106 6 years ago |

I am not exactly sure how this would help people working in tech (and other tech related areas like business analysts, PM's etc.,)

This makes it easy for companies to outsource work.

When all employees are remote what's the value in bringing someone onshore? And once jobs are outsourced I don't think they will come back.

So this could be marginally beneficial for onshore workers or it could be very bad.

dk8996 6 years ago |

I worked in the finance industry, IT side. I can say that these work Visas are abused in that industry. Less so in tech and startup space. I think having a min salary that's 2x average for the job would also solve this. I'm will to see what type of data this pause provides.

crispyporkbites 6 years ago |

All my friends in the US are staying put now, they can’t go see their families after covid because they have no idea if they’ll be allowed back in.

Bad for america, good for the rest of the world though- maybe by restricting American foreign policy we’ll see more competition for SV open up globally.

seibelj 6 years ago |

Simple solution - auction off the H1B visas. This will ensure only the most needed, highest-value employees get it. Works with any number of visas. I fail to see why this easy, simple fix that also earns money for the government is not applied.

bguillet 6 years ago | |

Because then no small company can compete with the big ones in the auction...

rhexs 6 years ago | | |

If your small company needs H1bs to survive, it doesn’t sound like a very sound business in the first place.

QuixoticQuibit 6 years ago | | |

Reserve an allotment for smaller companies using the existing lottery system.

known 6 years ago |

Indians are running an Organized Mafia in America https://archive.vn/XTZ5f

sys_64738 6 years ago |

You need highly skilled immigrants to pay for taxes and healthcare+SSA for the economy and those retired. If you don't fund retirement programmes then you're in trouble.

juskrey 6 years ago |

BTW any horror stories about H1B people stealing good jobs from locals?

fsociety 6 years ago |

Honestly I’m so tired of this shit. I can’t leave the US without the risk of not being able to come back, and my Mom is in a different country in a high risk category for COVID-19.

If she is infected and hospitalized, I have to quit my job and leave my home to spend last moments with her. Fuck Trump.

coreai 6 years ago |

If this is true then next year the chances of getting an H1B would become less than half while the applications would double.

kache_ 6 years ago |

This is great news for Canadians who would like to move and work in America. A lot less competition

black_13 6 years ago |

If you really need ppl to do the work make them here. Lots of ppl are available currently.

grad_ml 6 years ago |

I guess there won't be any protests like muslim ban, this time.

MangoCoffee 6 years ago |

i have no dog in this fight but the comments in this thread...

the amount of layoffs and unemployment since covid 19. this move is not to please you. it is to please the American people. only employers will care. the middle/working class American won't care (this is the biggest voting bloc that Trump needs)

this is a persuasion for Nov.

MintelIE 6 years ago |

Tech hiring and salary suppression cartel's going to have a rough time.

noip 6 years ago |

I think H1B visas should be obliterated. One of the justifications is that they bring in international talent to fill in "shortages" in America. However, according this article by the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/05/the-h-1b-visa-debate-explained

- There is mixed evidence that there are actually shortages in STEM - People are graduating from STEM fields at a rather high rate than in the past, but only half of them end up utilizing their degree; in sectors such as IT, one reason being why graduates aren't entering the field is due to a lack of job openings - Despite all the clamor about "shortages," some STEM fields pay embarrassingly low, and in fact pay STEM workers less than they have in the past - There is no requirement that entities show proof of workforce shortage before hiring workers on H-1B visas - Some workplaces have already had American workers train in their H1-B visa replacements and then were out of a job

Not in the article, but some of my own experiences having been in the STEM field - Many internationals seeking to get hired in the US STEM force don't actually have the "everyday technology" that the US uses, such as in molecular biology labs; this means quite a lot goes into training H1-B visa holders. Couple that with poor English-speaking skills. I found myself having to explain to an H1-B visa holder what a "pen" was, or a "shelf." Granted, some H1-B visa holders underwent formal education in the US, obtaining PhDs and whatnot, so you'd imagine their English would be better, however... - Many countries look down on the US. I have worked for many foreign employers in STEM, and have been insulted just for being an American, and their views of America are largely stereotyped (Americans love guns, they eat hamburgers and pizza and are fat, etc.) - It changes the workplace culture; I've worked in a variety of STEM environments that had a lot of internationals, and more than once I was out-grouped for being an American. I have had opportunities closed off to me simply because my group's sense of belonging was rooted in being "non-American." This was detrimental to my aspirations in entering the STEM field as an American.

I don't believe there is a shortage in STEM. The fact that it's hard to even get a well-paying job in STEM, especially tenure positions in STEM, and that once you do land a STEM position you can face discrimination for being an American in AMERICA, H1B visas should be obsolete.

Get rid of the internationals. Focus on your American workforce and create incentives to enter STEM. Create a better system for learning math, and inspiring aspirations in science Create environments that will nurture American students instead of block their opportunities. Give Americans a chance to contribute to their economy instead of shoveling money down the pockets of people who don't even like America or Americans and would go back home if they could.

femiagbabiaka 6 years ago |

we need to get rid of the executive order or at least severely limit its scope. both Obama and Trump have abused it -- presidents should not be able to hand down sweeping regulatory change like this at the drop of a hat without going through the legislature.

jakeogh 6 years ago | |

By abuse do you mean use? If not, O admitted he was doing something unconstutional with it, numerious times. Which T example are you thinking of?

Many laws are written to deligate rule making authority to the executive branch, clearly the president has ultimate authority there. Perhaps you want the legslative branch to write more specific language?

femiagbabiaka 6 years ago | | |

The constitution is not the end all be all —- I’m saying that the use of executive orders to accomplish partisan policy objectives is overreach by the executive branch and should be curtailed. I don’t care much if it’s the legislative or judicial branch that does it.

ceo_tim_crook 6 years ago |

thank god, I've seen a lot of americans rejected especially POC of varied backgrounds turned down in favor of some H1B nonsense to often it really impacts the ability for folks to rise up and move to new industries

fsociety 6 years ago | |

Please explain more, your comment is suspicious given your sign-up time.

ceo_tim_crook 6 years ago | | |

what's to explain? h1bs are widely used to gain access to bodies instead of training/developing local talent it's a joke every interview template i've been given seems like it was made to exclude many people who would otherwise be fine

it's not like immigration is bad or anything but the balance is screwed up and and it's causing long term damage it's bad for immigrants and bad for americans

tathougies 6 years ago |

Most countries have suspended immigration at this point havent they? Hard to argue against such a thing amid covid.

joelbluminator 6 years ago | |

I don't know that that's true, any source for that? If countries are opening up for tourists (!) I don't see why not for immigration.

infamouscow 6 years ago | | |

Name one country that has opened for tourists or has recently (as in the last week or two) said they will open for tourists.

m0zg 6 years ago |

As a former H1-B: makes sense. H1-B is abused a lot, and importing new entry-level workers when unemployment is at record highs after COVID makes zero sense. Although I'm sure Hawaiian judge will disagree.

ixtli 6 years ago | |

Stopping workers coming in from one place isn’t about making sure Americans have jobs tho. It doesn’t magically change the cost of rent. It doesn’t magically educate the uneducated. Nor should it. This is about being able to report to middle class white people that ‘immigration stopped’.

pelasaco 6 years ago | | |

I'm not sure if you are right: https://www.blackenterprise.com/will-limiting-h1b-visas-help...

BTW 500k people on the H1B1 visa is a hell lot of "skilled people": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/foreign-workers-visas-...

nine_zeros 6 years ago |

Erratic government decisions can have severe consequences on businesses.

About time US companies realize that they need to have more fault tolerance to support their employees by open more global offices. This is especially true because the world outside is becoming more competitive and erratic business decisions like this will destroy product competitiveness.

As for foreign companies/entrepreneurs/would be business owners with capital, the US is shut. There is no need to do business here.

joelbluminator 6 years ago |

And yet everyone and their mother wanna move there no matter the price paid in uncertainty, pressure and mental health. They could try go to a country with a straight forward immigration process like Canada, but money is more important than anything else to some people.

toast0 6 years ago | |

If you're immigrating for economic opportunity, it would make sense to try to make the most of it.

A lot of people have a plan to make a bunch of money for 10-20 years and then go back and be entreprenerial in their home countries etc. Canada may (or may not) be a better permanent home, but if the goal is to make a bunch of money, that's not the best place to do it.

joelbluminator 6 years ago | | |

That's fine, as long as they realise there's a big price to pay.

SV_BubbleTime 6 years ago | |

The immigration restrictions to Canada are more strict aren’t they?

Is there a minimum asset requirement? Is there a requirement that to apply have have to have been there for 3-5 years? An English language test? I don’t know for sure; asking.

joelbluminator 6 years ago | | |

I don't think Canada is more strict, not at all, but would like to hear from commenters who moved to Canada. Especially draconian is the fact that the spouse of a h1b holder can't work (last I checked). As an immigrant in the Netherlands that's not the case there and it's a huge deal breaker for me to ever think of the U.S.

triceratops 6 years ago | |

Do you think that's not already happening?