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Feds Consider H-1B Changes After Uncovering Fraud
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:53 AM
from the evidently-some-people-lie dept.
from the evidently-some-people-lie dept.
CWmike writes "A Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman said today that the agency is weighing a series of reforms to the H-1B application process, including the use of 'independent open-source data' to obtain information about visa seekers or the companies that file the petitions on their behalf. The move follows a report by the agency that found widespread problems and evidence of fraud in the nation's H-1B program, including forged documents, fake degrees and shell companies being used in H-1B applications. It also comes after the controversy caused by changes to the H-1B rules earlier this year."
Related Stories
[+]
Your Rights Online: H-1B Foes Challenge Bush Administration In Court 464 comments
theodp writes "Computerworld reports that the Bush administration's recent decision to extend the amount of time foreign nationals can work in the U.S. on student visas is being challenged in a federal lawsuit by H-1B visa opponents. The suit, filed in US District Court by the Immigration Reform Law Institute and joined by The Programmers Guild and other groups, charges that the administration — acting through the Department of Homeland Security — exceeded its legal authority with a no-notice-no-comments 'emergency' rule change that extended the Optional Practical Training work period from one year to 29 months. Critics say this is little more than an effort to skirt around the H-1B cap limit. Because extended stays are limited to those whose degrees are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields, educators are speculating that the rule change will drive international students away from non-STEM majors."
[+]
Your Rights Online: Judge Rejects H-1B Visa Injunction 442 comments
theodp writes "Judge Faith Hochberg has denied a preliminary injunction sought by the Programmers Guild to put a hold on a controversial 'emergency' rule change by the Department of Homeland Security to permit foreign students to work continuously in the US for two-and-a-half years after graduation without an H-1B visa. Hochberg indicated she failed to see how an increased labor supply could result in wage depression for engineers and computer workers. That seems disingenuous, since in Andaya v. Citizens Mortgage Corporation, Judge Hochberg recently saw first-hand how a US employer got away with paying an H-1B computer engineer as little as $15,000 to do a job with a 'prevailing wage rate' of $41,000. In that case, Hochberg ruled against Filipino H-1B visa holder Almira Andaya, arguing that 'nonpayment of wages as listed on the H-1B visa petition ... does not raise a substantial question of federal law.'"
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H1-B fraud? Tell me it ain't do! (Score:5, Funny)
H1-B fraud? Shell companies? Fake degrees? You mean it really does come down to cheap labor?
I'm shocked. SHOCKED!
Well, not that shocked.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes because corporate lawyers who put out videos like this one [noslaves.com] were all just telling lies. LIES! Seriously though,who DIDN'T know that the H1-B was being used to turn a college education into a McJob?
I personally loved how they told everyone "Get a tech education! All the manufacturing jobs will be shipped overseas so you need a degree!" and then once folks graduating high school did just that they bring in the H1-Bs who can work the same job for peanuts. I'd love to see one of those congress critters lo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see one of those congress critters look the camera in the face and try to explain how someone who has to pay 60-100K for a degree is supposed to compete with someone who pays 25K or less.
The solution isn't limiting H-1, but reducing tuition fees.
Tuition rates in public universities are too high. And most university funding doesn't even come from it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what you think universities cost today, but $40,000 per year is not uncommon. Whether or not it is worth it is another matter, but you can find somewhere willing to charge in that range easily.
The university that I went to is now up to $46,000 per year, although only $34,000 of that is for tuition and another $1,000 in required fees.
There's a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the H-1B program had no fraud it would push wages down in the US by artificially changing the demographic in the workplace.
Older experienced high tech workers are more likely to stay at home with their families. Younger recent graduates are more likely to travel for work/opportunity. They also earn less because they have less experience.
But, it doesn't surprise me that greed leads to fraud in a situation that already drove wages down.
Look at how greed is affecting the economy now. Greedy people want houses they cant afford, greedy bankers want to make money by giving risky loans and turning them over. Greedy companies want to reduce wage costs by defrauding the H-1B program.
It's just par for the course!!
Re:There's a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
However, when it comes to real specialists I don't see how low entry barriers will affect wages, because those people will move to wherever they earn the most. If you look at wages for IT-specialists* in Europe for example they are not much lower in Poland than in the UK, even though the general population earns much less in Poland. The reason for this is that if the employers would offer less those IT workers would just move on to Germany, France, UK etc..
*Not talking about the guy who runs the Exchange server or fixes your printer problems.
Parent
Lower wages (Score:5, Insightful)
"On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more competitive"
If this is true, why don't the CEO's set the trend by taking less? I'm not asking for a lot, just limit you total compensation (salary & bonuses) to something reasonable like a million dollars per year. A million dollars is an amount that many people can't achieve in a lifetime but some CEOs get more than 100 million each year.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If this is true, why don't the CEO's set the trend by taking less?
Because CEOs are important. No board of directors wants to skimp on the CEO offerings, let they get a "cheap" one that runs their company in the ground.
But, there have to be some limits. While paying $dirt means you won't get a good CEO (even for large values of $dirt), paying $bucks doesn't guarantee you a good one, either. The idea is to pay CEOs for their performance, just like any other employee.
Problem is, how do you measure a CEOs
Re:Lower wages (Score:4, Interesting)
"But, if you pay dirt, you will get a bad CEO. "
Who says so? I'm not saying pay them dirt (which is what the janitor gets) just pay them reasonably. 100 million does not guarantee that you will get a good CEO. Conversely, paying 1 million may get you a good one because you might get one that looks at things differently. Often the amount paid for someone (or something) is not related to the price you pay.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, I'd take a CEO job for under $1m[1], and there's no way I could do a worse job than, say, Carly Fiorina, and she got a $21m golden parachute (with HP's share price jumping 7% when it was announced that she was leaving).
[1] Actually, I'm not sure what I'd do with $1m - I don't seem to spend most of the money I earn even at the moment, but I'd take the job if it looked interesting.
Re:Lower wages (Score:4, Insightful)
But, if you pay dirt, you will get a bad CEO.
I don't think anyone is talking about paying CEOs dirt here. Just, you know, moving it back closer to where it has been for years and years (and what it is still like in many other countries).
Is the best guy always going to say: "I'll do this job for $3 million a year, but if you pay me $2 million a year I'll walk away." Do you really want a guy that is so greedy that he would forget all his co-workers and probably move his family just so they could live in a $20 million dollar house (as opposed to a $10 million dollar house)? Someone to whom making as many $ for themselves in their overriding concern?
Or is he just asking his friends on the board of directors for a raise because another CEO is paid X and hey, it's free money?
I just can't believe that there wouldn't any competent people willing to do the job for reasonable pay.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That statement is clearly untrue. As is always the nature with greed, it is insatiable. No matter how much they get paid they will always, I repeat, always want more and more and more. The biggest lie of all is that somehow paying a greedy person enough means they wont steal and that flies in the face of reality. If a persons sole motivation is greed, then logically not only will the work 24/7/365 to increase their salary by what ever means possible but they will also spend every free moment coming up with
ALL YOUR GENIUSES ARE BELONG TO US! (Score:5, Insightful)
when it comes to immigration they [congress] are doing exactly the opposite--trying their best to keep the world's best and brightest from darkening America's doors.
Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so. The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low--at 85,000--that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st. America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery. The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people--entrepreneurs who want to start companies, doctors who want to save lives, scientists who want to explore the frontiers of knowledge--are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel and then, more often than not, denied the chance to work in the United States.
This is a policy of national self-sabotage. America has always thrived by attracting talent from the world. Some 70 or so of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. Great American companies such as Sun Microsystems, Intel and Google had immigrants among their founders. Immigrants continue to make an outsized contribution to the American economy. About a quarter of information technology (IT) firms in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of all the patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.
These bright foreigners bring benefits to the whole of society. The foreigner-friendly IT sector has accounted for more than half of America's overall productivity growth since 1995. Foreigner-friendly universities and hospitals have been responsible for saving countless American cities from collapse. Bill Gates calculates, and respectable economists agree, that every foreigner who is given an H1B visa creates jobs for five regular Americans.
There was a time when ambitious foreigners had little choice but to put up with America's restrictive ways. Europe was sclerotic and India and China were poor and highly restrictive. But these days the rest of the world is opening up at precisely the time when America seems to be closing down. The booming economies of the developing world are sucking back talent that was once America's for the asking. About a third of immigrants who hold high-tech jobs in America are considering returning home. America's rivals are also rejigging their immigration systems to attract global talent.
Canada and Australia operate a widely emulated system that gives immigrants "points" for their educational qualifications. New Zealand allows some companies to hand out work visas along with job offers. Britain gives graduates of the world's top 50 business schools an automatic right to work in the country for a year. The European Union is contemplating introducing a system of "blue cards" that will give talented people a fast track to EU citizenship.
The United States is already paying a price for its failure to adjust to the new world. Talent-challenged technology companies are already being forced to export jobs abroad. Microsoft opened a software development centre in Canada in part because Canada's more liberal laws make it easier to recruit qualified people from around the world. This problem is only going to get worse if America's immigration restrictions are not lifted. The Labour Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2m job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans g
Parent
Re:ALL YOUR GENIUSES ARE BELONG TO US! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, we're losing sight of that because of post 9-11 hysteria. Yes, some of those foreigners might want to blow up your house. But I'll bet that the vast majority just want to work hard and to see their kids do better than they did. Ivy League schools are just packed with the children of immigrants for that reason. And I'd be willing to bet that the people who legally arrive in this country are vastly less likely to cause problems than the average American. We have no shortage of home-grown murderers, drug dealers, serial killers, sexual predators, white collar criminals and domestic terrorists... it's arguable that a group of carefully screened legal immigrants is vastly less of a threat to the American way of life than a group of average Americans.
Parent
H-1B workers are NOT "immigrants" (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a big flaw in your reasoning. H-1B workers are NOT "immigrants". They are "guest workers". Thus, your founder examples are misleading. If they were made immigrants, maybe companies would not treat them like indentured servants.
Further, even if visa workers benefit the average person in the US (perhaps disputable), it may still hurt those in *specific* careers. Foreign cars don't help factory workers in Detroit, for example, even if it benefited car consumers in general.
Parent
Re:H-1B workers are NOT "immigrants" (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct, it's a non-immigrant visa, but it has the capability to lead to a green card with sponsorship which many other types do not have ... and just to correct you, it's a "specialist worker program" not "guest worker". Guest worker is a term typically applied to people who undertake non-specialist labor such as farm labor work at harvest time, these are not eligible to become immigrants. To have a H-1B you need a degree in the field relevant to the job you are applying for (or 12 years expertise).
Parent
Re:H-1B workers are NOT "immigrants" (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is where the USA is reaping what is sows. By making the first-step a non-resident visa the government is simply encouraging companies to abuse their position as H-1B employers. As a soon-to-be H1-B (if all goes to plan) I dread the thought that my employer will be able to lord this over my head for 4-5 years before I get a Green Card and am "free".
The American government needs to offer a direct-to-PR track for skilled immigrants. While my employer seems to treat H-1Bs no differently than domestic employees, I know many companies that will work the employee like a dog while they can.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people are there in the USA? How many people are there in the world? If you assume random distribution of geniuses then each one has a 4.5% probability of being in the USA. Even if you restrict your search to people likely to have received the kind of education needed to foster creativity, you're only looking at, maybe, a 20% chance of being in the USA.
If you want America to be home to the big corporations that benefit the economy then you want to get a significant number of the remaining 80%
There's nothing wrong with *legal* immigration (Score:3, Insightful)
America has forgotten that it built its success on the back of the geniuses that migrated there.
Not really. The real problem is that certain people are blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
What really pisses me off in the current public "debates" regarding immigration and housing loans is that the people who are getting screwed the hardest are the ones who have obeyed the law and applied common sense.
That's just wrong.
look at history (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:look at history (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a grip. This is about corporations wanting cheaper labor, and about corrupt politicians aiding and abetting them. It's not about immigration, not about improving our society by bringing in worthy people from other cultures and assimilating them into our own. Not by a long shot.
Furthermore, if it were about immigration, we'd be perfectly justified (by your own logic) in being selective as hell and only allowing the best and brightest of those people to work and live in our country. But we don't: we just want them cheap. Period. If they happen to be good, fine. If not
You can't put a price on an Einstein, or a Tesla, or any of the other great men who came to this great nation and more than repaid our generosity. You can, however, put a price on yet another Unix server admin, database consultant or Web developer.
And that is what this is about. Don't try to make it any grander or more poetic than it is. It's down and dirty politics and money-grubbing, and none of your references to intellectually accomplished immigrants will ever change that.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
KKKHHHAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't need lower wages, we already beat the hell out of the rest of the world on efficiency. Wages are supposed to rise and efficiency rises. That held up pretty well until a few decades ago. I'm not sure when exactly, but it was sometime in the late 70s or early 80s that that started to go south.
Having an income gap isn't in and of itself a problem, but when you look at what the people at the bottom are having to put up with because they're not being paid enough, that's a problem. The numbers frequently
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more lopsided, which could lead to a higher amount of wealth concentration.
Sure the employment rate might be higher, but the employment rate on a slave plantation was 100%, that didn't make it a great place to work. High wages and lower wealth concentration make for a strong middle class; which leads to low
Re:There's a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right there is nothing wrong with someone wanting it. But, they shouldn't take a mortgage they can not afford to do it!!
The loans should also have never been offered to them.
Greed at the top greed at the bottom, everyone trying to get a little more.
Same with the H-1B.
Until people get some integrity this just goes on and on.
Parent
Re:There's a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
And "everyone" was betting via the CDS that the loans wouldn't all go poof at once (like they'd believe that was impossible, I mean just think about it).
And "everyone" was saying it was ok to do all that.
Because "everyone" doing all that got quite a bit of money for doing so - bonuses, commissions etc.
But when it all went "poof", _everyone_ has to pay for it.
Except the trouble is _everyone_ != "everyone".
Parent
Re:There's a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Its called inflation and is a godsend for a debtor nation like the US. With household debt at 100% of GDP and over $10 trillion on national debt, the policies of this government will inevitably be geared towards inflation. The need to keep inflation numbers low for now is simply to sucker people into lending us money at a low interest rate. At some point in the future, the US will inflate its way out of its debt. (Do you really think we'll ever actually pay back what we've borrowed?) When that happens, those who own debts will benefit, those who hold cash will cry.
Parent
Re:There's a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
While it may make debts easier to pay, it ultimately makes the money worthless. Inflation by printing more money to pay off obligations is what the Weimar Republic did, and we all know how well *that* worked out. With Obama looking like he can win the Presidency, the fringe lunatic end of the Republican Party is showing its vile, racist hatred (*). I only hope we in the U.S. don't wind up having to go to the grocery store with our money in wheelbarrows and simply having it weighed to determine if it is enough to pay, along with outlawing the possession of Euros and other stable currencies.
(*) Yes, I realize plenty of Republicans are not racists, but there is a lunatic fringe of Republicans who are both racist and violent. If they think they have nothing to lose, who knows what could happen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
there's an adage if you owe the bank $100,000 You are in trouble...if you owe the bank $10 million then the bank is in trouble.
That's exactly what happened here. The banks made MILLIONS of high risk home loans and LIED about the risk and invented "swapping" instruments to skirt securities and insurance laws. Only about 6% of even the high risk loans are failing... and that's an all time high (that's less than the unemployment rate!). Why did the bankers so mismanage their money that losing 6% crashes the w
Re:There's a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The other question is: Was there an option to buying a McMansion? Are there enough smaller affordable homes in non-shitty school districts to house the working class? No, but no builders wanted to build the affordable homes because they weren't as profitable as McMansions and the banks were willing to make the loans, so they were able to have potential customers for the oversized houses. The median price of any housing with under an hour commute time to NYC is $450K. [blogspot.com] The median income in NYC is about $48K, so that's ten years wages before tax for just somewhere to raise your family. Yet every new construction project I see is luxury apartments. Back in 2000 the median price was just $148K and the median income was about $40k. [census.gov] So housing was about 3.7 time annual income just eight years ago, and now it is 10 times annual income. The banks offered people the possibility to be in unimaginable debt, and people need somewhere to live, so they got in over their heads, because the only other option was to up root their young family and hope that life was affordable somewhere else. That's not always an option personally speaking, NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in. I'm 33 and I make over twice the median annual income, yet the only housing I can afford to buy would be a 600 sq ft studio apt. A $300k studio costs $1750 a month mortgage plus a $650 maintaince fee, and would only be getting one room. Two bedroom apts start at about $500K, so now that's $2917 a month mortgage and an $800 maintaince fee, for 1100 sq ft that's a 45 min subway commute to midtown. So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
Parent
You can get a degree in collage? (Score:5, Funny)
....for the career my collage degree is in....
Look, I can accept a degree in art, but one which covers only collage seems to be rather limited. Does it include the use of different adhesives to stick the pictures to your chosen background? Do you study the pros and cons of using dried leaves as opposed to, say, petals or seed pods?
OK, I'm sorry, but it just made me chuckle to read what you had written.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course all the new apartments in NYC are luxury apartments. Anything built to be affordable will end up being rent controlled [wikipedia.org], at a huge loss to the landlord. Why take the risk? Either build luxury apartments or don't build at all.
Re:There's a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
While that argument might hold water for someone building rental units, it is meaningless for building condos with the intent to sell, not rent. The financial crisis wasn't trigger by people failing to pay their rent, it's about an artificially high barrier to property ownership.
A word on the "evils" of rent control:
I'm renting a non-luxury non-rent controlled or stabilized apt right now. My last apt wasn't luxury or rent stabilized either, and my rent went up 48% in three years because my neighborhood gentrified. So I had to move (and pay a broker for the privilege). Rent control isn't the huge loss that landlord try to hack it up to be, if the building is turning a profit when they build it, it will be turning a profit ten years down the line even if the apts are rent controlled, because the landlord's mortgage didn't go up and the rent control with keep property taxes down, what the landlords are whining about is that they can't maximize their profits (and boot out long time tenets) with every neighborhood gentrification wave, there is a big difference between making a modest profit and taking a loss, and no landlords are actually taking a loss on buildings with rent controlled apts. Added to that,rent stabilization doesn't apply to anything built since '84. [tenant.net]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
Perhaps you don't "need" to live in NYC.
NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in.
Best paying is only the best paying if you include salary AND the cost of living.
A positive outcome for this credit crisis will eventually be that credit will not be given to those who cannot afford it. When this happens, the cost of housing and cost of living will eventually come into balance. One of three things will happen: Economic conditions will lower the cost of living; companies will pay their people more; or companies will move operations to places that are
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The fault is entirely with the expectation that house prices will continuously rise, or that they should be traded like company shares. "
Nothing wrong with wanting extra room, etc. BUT...it has to be tempered with realistic expectations of income, and a realistic view of what ones means truly are, and to live within them!!
People over the past few years have gotten to assume they are ent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not conservatives but Neocons, personally i don't see much difference between being anally probed by big government, big religion or big business; at the end of the day I feel violated and am expected to kowtow to the fuedal lord du jour.
Re:There's a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly so they should buy a house they can afford or rent. I am sick and tired of people making excuses for "ordinary" people. The people who gave the loans suck, the ones who took ones they could not pay suck too.
If you can't afford to buy a home then rent an apartment. I rented for 6 years after college. Didn't want to, thought it was a waste of money. But, it's what I could afford. Then when I could afford to buy a home. I bought one that I could afford to make the payments on.
Everyone is looking for a get rich quick scheme. Or wants to look richer than they are by taking a negative interest mortgage and maxing out their credit cards rather than living within their means.
American financial habits have to change or the $ will eventually be worth nothing. The consumer culture has to change or we will all be broke.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
With your masters you should be smart enough to know that not everyone falls within the standard deviation....
Your not typical and if you think you are your not being honest with yourself. There are some older, experienced, legitimate H-1B workers. I never said there were not. But, the vast majority of them are fresh from school and drive down the prevailing wage.
Fraud involving cheap labor? (Score:4, Insightful)
No! It can't be! paying a resource 10k USD/yr to replace a 70k/yr resource offers a lot of incentive to skirt the rules. You would have thought that the sub-standard work would have been outrageous enough, but companies keep offshoring.....
Re:Fraud involving cheap labor? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some companies find it cheaper to outsource the programming offshore with the expectation that the local staff will have to "fix" the program when it gets back to the USA.
It is still cheaper for companies to pay 10% of the prevailing wage oversees for 90% of the desired result and have a few highly paid talented programmers clean up the mess that they receive.
I have visions in my head of hundreds of programmers chained to their desks with taskmasters standing above them with whips shouting "Faster, code faster".
Parent
Why reform? (Score:5, Informative)
Just get rid of it.
There is no labor shortage to begin with in the first place:
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/itaa.real.html [ucdavis.edu]
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/essay.html [fastcompany.com]
http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?708&bus [upenn.edu]
http://techtoil.org/wiki/doku.php?id=articles:shortage_myth [techtoil.org]
Right, ain't NO SHORTAGE (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen! Mod parent up to the clouds. There is no objective evidence of a "shortage". It is a lobbyist gimmick for cheap labor pure and simple.
Sure, some companies complain about finding an exact fit, but that's because they are unrealistically expecting an exact fit. Pay for somebody smart and flexible enough to adapt.
Parent
h1b and L1 (Score:5, Interesting)
L1 is the loop hole. It is the top secret one. I agree that there are about 30% h1bs who fake their experience(h1b criteria is 16yr edu + 3 years minimum work exp or 15 yr edu + 6 years work, 1 year education = 3 year work). 90% people on L1 have 15 year education or less and just 1 year exp. In any economy downturn h1bs are the first to be fired because 90% of them work on corp to corp contracts which are very expensive. Example for a unix admin - 100+ per hour is paid by company A to vendor V, V keeps 35% and gives 65 to H1B holding company H, H pays about 30 to the employee who is new in USA or 40 if he is more than 2 years old in usa. H1b end up getting exploited till GC(6 to 8 years). L1s too get exploited but they are happy because they are rotated every year. So they have less expenses(no need to buy car or family home) in usa and carry all money as savings to india/china.
Since h1b corp to corp is expensive, candidate has to be really skilled, but some do manage by changing clients(A) every 3 to 6 months by slipping through a phone interview(some one else giving the phone int in their name). On being found out they are fired in 3 to 6 months. Yet they manage to settle in low tech areas like managing remedy tickets etc in about 2 years of hire-fire cycle. So in downturn, h1bs are fired first, then the citizen employee and are replaced by L1. L1's don't get overtime pay. They get about 3 to 4 k per month and yet that is a very good money because in india they get max 1k per month for 1+ year experience.
Re:h1b and L1 (Score:5, Informative)
Example for a unix admin - 100+ per hour is paid by company A to vendor V, V keeps 35% and gives 65 to H1B holding company H, H pays about 30 to the employee who is new in USA or 40 if he is more than 2 years old in usa. H1b end up getting exploited till GC(6 to 8 years). L1s too get exploited but they are happy because they are rotated every year. So they have less expenses(no need to buy car or family home) in usa and carry all money as savings to india/china.
Since h1b corp to corp is expensive, candidate has to be really skilled, but some do manage by changing clients(A) every 3 to 6 months by slipping through a phone interview(some one else giving the phone int in their name). On being found out they are fired in 3 to 6 months. Yet they manage to settle in low tech areas like managing remedy tickets etc in about 2 years of hire-fire cycle. So in downturn, h1bs are fired first, then the citizen employee and are replaced by L1. L1's don't get overtime pay. They get about 3 to 4 k per month and yet that is a very good money because in india they get max 1k per month for 1+ year experience.
None of this sounds right to me. I'm a 17 year IT consultant in chicago. What I've seen is that the majority of H1s can't find their ass. Typically two or three are needed to replace the american being fired. Obviously there are exceptions. But the vast majority are really quite useless. They're hired because upper management thinks IT workers are lego bricks. You can just unplug one and plug in another with no intangible cost to the company. Gardner told them so.
Also, the bill rate numbers you quote are way off. I've never seen an H1 anywhere hired for $100 an hour. I'd say $60 is pretty much max. Otherwise, why wouldn't the end client just hire an american? There's a financial incentive for the client to hire an H1.
Usually, there's no extra middleman for H1s. The consulting firm billing them out is host for the visa.
I agree that L1s are a huge loophole. But usually, they come in when an indian corporation like TCS (tata) comes in an takes over an entire IT department. Then they can place an army of indians at the client because the project manager probably works for TCS also. I seriously doubt consultants on L1 visas get sent alone to a client.
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So when that recruiter looking for (Score:3, Funny)
So when that recruiter called me in 1988 looking for someone with 10 years of DOS programming was really a company trying to justify an H1B? Say it ain't so.
Make them buy stocks! (Score:3, Insightful)
The least they could do is require H1-Bs to buy a portfolio of stocks and keep it all until they leave the country. I'm sure Wall Street would approve of this plan!
From an actual H1B holder (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been living in the US for less than a year now. I have been working for more than ten years. This is the first time that I have been living in the US. Here is what I think of the whole matter.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
5. In my professional career, I have worked with some of the biggest bozos and some of the most exquisitely talented engineers. Race or geographical location had absolutely nothing to do with their abilities. There are smart people and idiots everywhere. Supposing that a H1B worker to be inferior in terms of ability, is not a very clever viewpoint.
Re:From an actual H1B holder (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
I think it's great you can travel around the world and work in different places.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
The problem here is that MOST of those hired via the H-1B program are not hired to fill a labour gap, per se. Instead, they are hired to fill in a gap of people who are willing to work for substandard pay levels, and work extreme workloads and longer hours.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
Not all of the abuse is like this. In one case I know of in the past, a major american company primarily involved in high-technology engineering and manufacturing hired someone for a position as a Unix system administrator, despite a few dozen of them in that city being available for work (who were presumably US citizens). It turns out the person actually hired did have a graduate degree in a field unrelated to computers or engineering. She was then trained on Unix system administrator by that company, and she also sought out outside help to speed up her learning of Unix system administration. That's how I ended up meeting her.
The problem here is that this major company knew what they were doing. If they really had a true need for people in very specialized fields for which the supply of skilled and experienced people here had been exhausted, they would not have been trying to hire someone for a Unix system administrator job (which has an abundant supply of people available in large and small cities, and has for at least a decade).
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
This is not true. If someone with an H-1B visa is let go from their current job, they have a finite period of time to find a new employer who can sponsor them before their visa expires. The visa lets them in the country. The sponsorship is required for the visa to remain valid. Maybe they can work at any job for the month or two they are allowed to stay when losing sponsorship. But they must find that sponsorship by a deadline to keep the visa.
Apparently, part of the big picture of abuse is that the "recruiting companies" that they get their work through is carrying out some fraudulent practices to keep them here. The shell companies may be part of that. That fact is, the free mark
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Re:Dunno about your intentions on posting, but... (Score:5, Funny)
When citizenship is no longer burdened by labor consultants that abuse this, then immigration can be considered. Otherwise:
Stay Home.
Naaah. I graduated out of the H-1B program, got a green card, applied for citizenship and married an American. I intend to take over your population with hybrid half UK/US citizens. My invincible army is already TWO strong. We'll own all your jobs, and fill your TV channels with cricket and endless re-runs of "Are You Being Served".
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