H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation(h1bexposed.tech) |
H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation(h1bexposed.tech) |
In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
US laws aren't meant to solve the lottery of birth.
Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas:
- "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are.
- "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country).
I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
(I'm not from USA)
should be pretty obvious
our corporations have been systematically ruining things for the average American for quite a while now
Finding employers who will sponsor is not easy so the employees are essentially locked to the sponsoring company, dont complain too much.
If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc.
i.e skill issue.
Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along.
Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.
I have learned a great deal and been enriched by my friendships with foreign born workers, but to act like h1b workers come “ready to perform software engineering duties” at any higher rate than new grad higher is funny.
This, I don't understand how we have tons of un- and underemployed American workers and yet somehow businesses have convinced the government that they need to import workers.
As far as PII, any reasonable company only lets a select few developers see production data anyway. You just don’t let non Americans go near production if you work in an industry where that is necessary
1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers. It’s absolute protectionism, which means you just shift the negative trends (“credential” mills in particular) onto domestic shores. Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
3) Unionize the technical trades. This lets the professionals set skill and comp floors, potentially offload benefits burdens to the Union itself rather than the fickleness of the employer, and even undermines the “contractor class” of companies deflating labor through precarious contracts by setting floors industry-wide. The downside is that Unions, like any power structure, can and will corrupt with time and incentive, leading to jams in the marketplace - less an issue in the age of AI, but still one worth noting.
4) Taxation. Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American? No tax breaks for you, pay up. This is a very bad idea on its face, because companies will just shift the transaction offshore to dodge that rule and gum up everything else in the process, but some form of punitive tax scheme for exploiting social safety nets in lieu of fairly compensating workers is sorely needed to stop, if not begin reversing, the current wealth pumps. For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program as a means of depressing their pay has robbed taxpayers of billions, increased the national debt, and robbed workers of the fruits of their labor. It must be fixed, somehow.
There’s a number of other policies to get into, but that’s the “highlight reel” as it were. The important thing to keep in mind is that the status quo only works for the monied interests, and neither the H-1B workers coming in nor the Americans being shoved onto welfare programs for corporate greed. If a program or system enriches the rich while harming everyone else, it’s a bad system, and needs to be replaced rather than overhauled. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it piss people off? Of course. Will it feel like nobody really won? Ideally, because that means it’s balanced compromise rather than a gift package.
2. Rural states were what you state already historically. Hence the existence of the rust belt. The existence of lots of towns who's manufacturing was outsourced from Clinton on. They were already this model, just with small/midsize factories and/or call centers.
Depressing labor costs, but only to a point, no? They would be subject to American minimum wages; and, presumably, American labor, even at its cheapest, is more expensive than the offshore alternative.
And, assume there is no price differential... Would Americans not be better off if companies outsourced to other American (i.e., not foreign) companies? Thereby keeping currency within the U.S.? I've been hearing that remittances represent a substantial outward cash flow nationally.
I've never heard of such "Data Sovereignty Schemes," but they seem like far and away the best option. And thanks for writing this up, btw.
How would this work with basically any foreign service?
Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?
I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program
H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
In my own country we are actually seeing people GO BACK to Asia because places like Vietnam now have a viable middle class lifestyle.
But not all people otherwise we would all live in one giant city. Some are willing to greave the frontier in search of better outcomes: the early American Colonists, those that expanded west-ward into California, even the early Silicon Valley workers were all willing to move
H1Bs and international workers are not most people
Maybe AI changes everything, but there is no evidence that immigration has hurt Americans working in software over the past few decades given that software salaries have been growing faster than any other job in the U.S., but also (and this is critical), it’s been rising faster than salaries in any other comparable country as well, including countries with strong tech industries but limited immigration in the industry such as France (the other country with almost as high growth as the U.S. in software dev salary is the UK, which also has high immigration).
a foreigner worker pays taxes, rent & other bills thereby contributing and circulating money in the economy
now if that foreign worker stays in their home country - yes - they might get paid less - but who losses overall ? the country that would've imported labor or the worker ? - it's always the country - hence why brain drain is devastating.
remember the foreign worker only gets a better life - but losses social connections, culture etc
the countries & companies wouldn't be sponsoring these things if ultimately it didn't benefit them & them only
Is it worth taking a hit on higher compensation for longer term peace of mind?
The Americans you work with (along with your other co-workers) meet the bar.
If there were more Americans that met the bar they would employ them before taking on all the extra work and cost of immigration.
I'm not talking about Americans you work with. I'm talking about the mythical ones you don't work with that are somehow disadvantaged by H1B and thus unemployed/underemployed. You don't work with these people because they don't exist.
"Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.
Is your argument that the H1-B folks are better? That hasn't been my experience.
There are only so many American engineers that meet said bar, they are all either employed or choosing not to be employed.
The ones that don't meet the bar are either employed by smaller employers with lower bars that don't use H1B anyway or yes, maybe unemployed or transitioning to a new industry because they couldn't hack it.
The mythical group I am saying doesn't exist is engineers that are somehow perfectly capable of meeting FAANG bar but are somehow being displaced by H1B. That group doesn't exist.
Interesting lack of evidence for someone who calls themselves "Principal Software Engineer".
Joseph Glanville your name is in my notes in case I ever come across your application. Signed, a hiring manager.
Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.
All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
Should we boycott anything from India because of the on soil laws?
> Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
I do, actually. I've navigated the immigration system as a sponsor, and it's hell. It's deliberately engineered to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to navigate successfully, and it's needed an overhaul for half a century. Using that as a wedge issue to deny reform, however, also hasn't worked for half a century, and has only resulted in a fatigued populace embracing fringe populism and naked fascism in an effort to see any movement at all on the issue.
Seriously, this was a big topic leading up to the 2008 election. Congress has dropped the ball dozens of times.
As for self-sponsoring, I'm not ready to open that can of worms given the immense exploitation it allows (essentially indentured servitude - which, to be fair, so is H1B, so let's not shift that exploitation further down the ladder either).
> I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
Yes, I do. If an employee decides not to Naturalize, then they're free to seek other employment on the job market with employers not phased by such penalties. Employers will naturally shift to only hiring Citizens or permanent residents pending Naturalization, not Green Card workers. This shifts the exploitation further down the chain rather than up front via temporary visas with no direct pathways to Citizenship, but to be clear, it does not eliminate exploitation of immigrant labor.
Immigration to another country is a serious decision to make. It comes with tradeoffs. We should want people willing to integrate - not assimilate, necessarily - into the country's fabric, put down roots, raise kids, contribute back to communities, and be good citizens. We don't want or need more rich tourists stopping by for a decade or two as permanent residents before fucking off back to their home country where the cost of living is cheaper, not when so many of our problems require long-term thinking and strategizing to solve - something citizens are best equipped to see through.
> H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
I'm aware. You're conflating every single proposal after the H1B point in bullet 1 with all of them targeting H1B specifically. In this case I'm referring to the fast food industry, the retail industry, the service sector, the multitude of American enterprises who refuse to pay livable wages by design, so that taxpayers have to spend more on SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, and other welfare programs for the working poor just so Walmart, or Amazon, or McDonalds can pay their shareholders and leadership panels even more money. This isn't even an "open secret" anymore, it's literally the business playbook for some of America's largest employers.
You're making decent enough arguments, but you're not doing the barest minimum research before making them. C'mon, you can be better than this, I know it.
But to throw out one idea: a "safe harbour" style scheme that allows exporting this kind of work to places with equivalent policies could work.
As your main point.
More educated or not doesn't actually matter, whether they meet the bar or not is all that matters no?
My over-arching point is if there were more Americans to be hired that meet the bar they will usually be hired before immigrants because they are less paperwork and money (immigration lawyers fees).
Also I think comparing to immigrant education isn't necessarily a great idea, immigrants need more on-paper education to simply clear the immigration requirements because most governments around the world place a higher emphasis on that than work experience or their salary. US in particular values years of education at a roughly 2:5 ratio vs work experience with 10 years of work experience necessary to qualify vs a 4 year degree.
If you are somehow implying immigrants are fundamentally less intelligent then yeah I don't know what to tell you but that is probably not correct.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...
Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.
My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.
There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.
The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.
In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.
They generate revenue all over the world. Seems only right that their costs should be distributed around the world too.
H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.
Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.
These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.
Of course using AI is a skill. But the effort needed to get there is becoming lower and lower.
For context, my take home was $650 every two weeks - my total quarterly tuition at school and the next year the cost to rent a one bedroom in the northern burbs of Atlanta.
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.
Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?
At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
https://share.google/aimode/k9blzn3HX1PvqOTFO
Maybe Apple wouldn't be founded anywhere else but it wouldnt be what it is without immigrants.
Even Steve Jobs was an immigrant.
The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications.
Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
No. It is stupid politics to blame Indians or other Asians for this when they are just following company policy to hire cheaper labour. Like it or not, H1B Asians (in IT) are hired because they can be exploited - they work cheaper and longer hours than their American counterpart ( US companies save nearly $100,000 per H-1B hire as workers earn 16% less: Here’s why demand stays high - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/us-compan... ). Blaming immigrant Asians for this kind of exploitative politics that exists because American businesses lobby for it is irrational. (Also, do not forget that America is a country of immigrants. The H1Bs also act as a "vetted" immigrant pool from which American citizenship can be given). By demanding $100,000 to hire an H1B, the Trump administration has now tweaked this policy to make it costlier for businesses to hire them (and force them to seriously consider AI). But immigrant workers are still cheaper and can be made to work longer hours.
The only reason you see Indians is because Indians knly hire Indians. It can’t be anything else.
Completely unrelated, have you walked into a non nuclear/biomedical engineering engineering department in any IS college in the past 2 decades? I’m guessing those are also filled with Indians because their managers are insisting that only Indians can study engineering.
Australian universities make billions and lobby the government to import students from developing countries, the agents of these universities tell the students that getting jobs and a permanent resident visa is easy, just pay the huge fees and you will get the chance to live your dreams in a developed country.
Is our discipline so trivially easy that the only barrier to being hired is choosing to do so?
Yes I know what BigTech an adjacent makes. Been there done that.
Edit: This is not meant to support h1b.
Ideal case - people that are not on H1B and work in these companies - contact your CEO/managers. People don't do that. Instead are happy to argue (or downvote) here.
And that to you is evidence that they only wanted to hire Indians?
Despite the fact that everyone but this 1 mid level guy clearly wanted to hire a non Indian?
I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.