Study Questions H-1B Policies 361
An anonymous reader writes "One of the arguments for continuing and even expanding the H1-B visa program (pdf) is that it enables highly-skilled immigrants to work in the U.S. and grow the U.S. economy. Counterarguments state that the H1-B visa program does not bring in the 'best and brightest' and is used to drive down wages, particularly in the STEM fields. This Bloomberg article, discussing pending H1-B legislation, quotes some of the salaries of current workers in the U.S. on H1-B visas: $4,800/month and $5,500/month which work out to $57,600/year and $66,000/year; only slightly higher than the average entry-level salaries of newly-graduated engineering or computer science majors."
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Solution: Issue H1-B visas only if there is a contract with a wage of at least 80kUSD/a. (the value of this limit is just politics...)
It is OBVIOUSLY cost reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
We want more scientists and engineers.
Why? There is no shortage of domestic supply. If you disagree, please cite some objective evidence to back your claim.
it keeps the US competitive and makes my relatively high salary more sustainable in the long term
Stockholm syndrome.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can law books not be shipped internationally?
This H1b lawyer does not need to know the laws of his own nation, only the one he wants to practice in.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need or want more lawyers or politicians. We want more scientists and engineers. It probably holds my salary down in the short-term, but it keeps the US competitive and makes my relatively high salary more sustainable in the long term. $60k right out of school is a very comfortable wage.
But why would a company pay you $60K right out of school when they can hire an H1B worker with years of experience for about the same wage?
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, H1B is the government bailing out these companies. It is an artificial way to lower wages. If they want to let these best and brightest become citizens far less would object. Instead they want an H1B they can underpay and send home if he demands anything like a fair wage.
There's already a proposed fix for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been suggested that rather than abolish the H1-B program that in order to sponsor one the company must pay 120% of the 90% percentile wage in the area where the person will work. If the 90% percentile for a cornfield in say Iowa (You hear that IBM?) is $100,000 then they have to pay the person $120,000 exclusive of any living costs and fees associated with the H1-B program. There has also been talk about surcharging H1-B sponsors for inspections by the Feds to ensure that the workers are getting paid correctly and are working with the sponsor. Right now it's an honor system and there's no honor at IBM, Wipro or Infosys.
Re:H1B or Outsourcing, choose one. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that the H1B is being used to support and expand outsourcing. The big outsourcing companies send developers with H1B to clients in the US to provide an on-site presence to coordinate with the larger development teams in India or China. Without the H1B program being used like that, either the entire project would be done in the US, or American developers would fill the roles of the on-site technical leads.
Re:but why do they need H-1B workers? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about profit
It's about work ethic/culture
It's abut indentured servitude
You can get 80 hours a week out of a HB-1 for a salary
A US citizen is not going to sign on to that ball and chain
Furniture movers given H1-B visas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Major Cities Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
NYC has one of the highest COL rates in the country. 100K may equate to say 50K in a suburb in Atlanta or 40K in a rural location in West Virginia. It is the they amount of the paycheck, it is the amount paid in relation to the regions COL.
I'm not certain the tone of your comment though it implies that perhaps teachers are over paid for their work. This view I've not understood (if that was the backhanded point). Educators serve an important and vital role in society. While there can be examples of "bad teaching" from a few, most teachers are there because they truly want children to learn. That is a noble effort. Waste, fraud, apathy; they can be found in most walks of life, but for some reason we pull a few bad apples in education and then cry out "see, we pay these loofers to much". We don't pay them enough.
If a child seeks a role model (outside the family) I'd rather it be an educator, not a sports star. In this country we've turned that 180 degrees though valuation of people based on dollars, not sense.
So before you complain about teachers getting to much time off, good benefits, and job security; walk in their shoes, carry their responsibility, live their life. Compare what you do as a teacher to that as a ball player, a banker, a Hedge Fund manager and ponder what is important.
Re:Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? There is no shortage of domestic supply. If you disagree, please cite some objective evidence to back your claim.
The only objective evidence I have is that I have never met someone who is involved with hiring developers who has said how easy it is to find quality talent at market rates. You can be naïve and believe that salaries would rise with increased demand if we ended the H1B program, but the reality is that more work would simply go overseas. I work at a consulting company and if we had to pay our entry level developers $80k/year we would never win a bid against a primarily overseas firm. Almost the entire software development industry would move offshore, with the exception of a very small group of very highly paid developers that stay in the US.
This isn't a field like medicine, law, or garbage collection where proximity to the client is incredibly important, and we don't have strong organizations like the AMA or ABA who can create anti-competitive laws and procedures to keep wages artificially high. Any efforts to manipulate the job market like we do for doctors and lawyers are very unlikely to succeed.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who is involved with hiring developers, I agree there is a shortage of qualified developers currently looking for work. H1B (in my experience, in my area of the country) does very little if anything to help the situation. If there are highly qualified H1B carrying individuals, I'd love to meet them (and hire them).
My personal experience has shown that on the whole, H1B's are average to slightly below in terms of the overall talent pool, and that pool is pretty shallow right now. I've interviewed H1B's whose most complicated project they worked on in college amounted to "Hello World" and who can't even code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard. Granted, I've also interviewed American citizens who are equally un-qualified, but if the intent of H1B is to attract only the "best & brightest," I'd say it fails pretty badly.
If there was a way of screening H1B applicants for qualifications before granting the visa, it might make more sense. Perhaps require that they have a job offer waiting from someone who wants to hire them first. As the program stands now, all it seems to do is dilute the talent pool and waste interview time on dead wood.
As far as off-shoring goes, as we've also tried that as an option, we found you get what you pay for. The time differences, language barrier, and out of reach nature of off shore programmers led to barely adequate code quality, and required significant oversight & double-checking by some of our more talented team members to ensure what the off short contracts were delivering was secure, performant, and actually did what it was supposed to do. We found that at any scale, the amount of highly talented supervision required on-shore off set any gains by having programmers off-shore. Hiring better people locally & paying them a bit more is a better ROI.
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
I recently got hired to a very large SV tech firm to do a job for which they had not found *anyone* (let alone an american) to fill for a full year. They're still looking for more people to do the same job, and still after a further 6 months can't find any americans suitable.
It's not about wanting more scientists and engineers, it's about wanting specific scientists and engineers.
I doubt there is any job that is so specialized that they couldn't have used their time, money, and resources to find someone that is in the ball park and then train them to bridge the gap of what they wanted, rather than spend a year and a half looking for a 100% match.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree there is a shortage of qualified developers currently looking for work.
Bullshit, you're seeing a shortage of _cheap_ developers, not qualified developers, which is obvious from your statement "Hiring better people locally & paying them a bit more is a better ROI". As long as the cost of living disparity exists as dramatically as it does now, you'll never see salary parity between overseas labor and local labor. That has nothing to do with shortages of qualified workers.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Student loans are a disaster and, while a separate issue, I have no problem discussing. them.
Personally, I feel that we should extend compulsory education two more years and make it an Associates degree. We could do this by extending the community college programs we already have, and they could be funded at the federal or state level to avoid the problems we have with uneven funding of primary and secondary education. Once everyone is getting an associates degree or technical training for "free", we could dramatically scale back our Stafford Loan programs. Even if we left the Stafford Loan program as-is, debt would be cut in half for most takers. I think that a high-school degree is no longer sufficient to prepare most people for the working world - and not because the high school degree has become "devalued", but because we have become more productive and our jobs more complex.
Colleges have gotten completely out of control. My wife went to one of the best liberal arts schools on the planet, almost 30 years ago. It's still one of the best and it serves just as many students - but it now has twice as many buildings. Has the education value doubled? I think not. What happened is the cost of education grew by approximately the amount of a Stafford Loan, because the money is "free". We tried to do a good thing, and instead inflated the cost of college for everyone.