Feds Consider H-1B Changes After Uncovering Fraud 254
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."
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!!
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: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.
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".
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.
Re:Republicriminals? No Way! (Score:2, Insightful)
And this is why the government is out of control. People would rather blame "the other side" than call a spade a spade.
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!
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
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".
Re:There's a surprise (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 stated for inflation are bogus, and only include portions of the cost of living.
I've seen people suggest that a 150k mortgage isn't appropriate for a family of four making 40k, but the reality is that in some parts of the country a family will be spending more than that just to rent. And yes that does include most of the additional costs of owning.
Re:Republicriminals? No Way! (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)
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.
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.
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.
Re:There's a surprise (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 lower crime, better education, and better economic diversification. Take a look at life in countries or even US cities without a middle class, that's where "lower wages for economic competitiveness" leads. Sure maybe the GDP would go up, but if 90% of the population is getting less take home pay to make that happen, why is that touted as a good thing? Even the elites who profit more would have to live with higher crime and more social tension. If you want that move to Sao Paulo or Mexico City.
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.
Re:Lower wages (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:ALL YOUR GENIUSES ARE BELONG TO US! (Score:1, Insightful)
I completely agree... if we turned down educated and hard working immigrants, it'll hurt us more in the long term. The next administration needs to take a close look at the legal immigration process and should make it easier for an highly skilled immigrant to get permanent residency
Re:Dunno about your intentions on posting, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Hey seth: you are a bigot.
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).
Re:There's a surprise (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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Lower wages (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: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.
Re:ALL YOUR GENIUSES ARE BELONG TO US! (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% of these people in to the USA so that they form the start-ups that go on to become companies like Google there. Otherwise you're going to find it increasingly hard to keep consuming over 25% of the worlds resources...
Re:There's a surprise (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 more affordable for their employees to live.
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.
Re:H1-B fraud? Tell me it ain't do! (Score:1, Insightful)
Immigrants once came to the US for opportunity (Score:2, Insightful)
though now, I'm willing to bet that bright Americans may be looking to do the same and flee the US for better opportunites in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Anyone with a feel for numbers need only look at the debt being hoisted onto young Americans via Social Security, Medicare, etc. The system is nothing more than a huge pyramid, and the sucker on the bottom (Gen x, y, millenials) will be the ones left to pay. Add on a few trillion more to bail out Wall Street, foreign wars and other adventures, defecits, etc. and the average young worker in the US starts their career out already in the hole for half a million dollars.
One needs only look to other countries (e.g. Chile, Argentina, Russia) that have had this same problem recently, and the conclusion is that those that are bright will see the writing on the wall and look for greener pastures abroad.
The ironic thing is that the typical American loves to spout the mantra about how immigrants left their facist and corrupt homelands in 'Old Europe' in exchange for the freedom and liberty of America. Work hard and you'll do better here was how the story was sold. Of course, when young Americans realize they've been sold out and decide to do the same thing, they'll be labeled terrorists and traitors by the Boomers who need them to support their retirements...
Re:H1-B fraud? Tell me it ain't do! (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.
Re:Lower wages (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 additional ways of lining their own pockets at the expense of the company, it's shareholders, it's employees and, it's customers.
So what you are really after is a person who takes pride in the quality of their work, who demonstrates a clear record of honour and integrity and who has the requisite skills, knowledge and experience. Here is a hint for hiring executives, any CEO etc. who is willing to rip off the customers to inflate the profits of their company is even more willing to rip off their company in their own favour and, if for a second you don't believe that to be true then you are allowing greed to blind good judgement.
In fact logically speaking keeping the salary of executives as low as possible whilst maintaining a strict review of qualifications and experience means you are more likely to attract executives who want to pursue the position for reason other than greed ie. job satisfaction, job challenge, they choose to in part define themselves by the qualities of the company they are a part of and in part pride of placement.
In fact greed is about the very worst motivation that you could use to attract a corporate executive, unless of course you are an existing company director specifically seeking executive officers who will assist you in stealing as much as possible from the shareholders and customers and how many times has that and is that happening, we all know the answer to that, all far to often.