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."
Major Cities Anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hint: They're always in major cities. National averages don't mean a damn thing when your local supermarket pays more for a meat department employee than your "average H1-B". Why do people see 50-something salary nowadays and think that is par? This is an engineering profession. Even the least skilled should be doing better than a teacher's or a cop's salary.
50k was good...25-30 years ago.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
Lawyers and the like need years of study for a certain field which the laws will almost certainly not translate to another country or even state.
How convenient.
Dean Baker (http://www.cepr.net/) had a good suggestion though. Have foreign schools train for US laws and practice, and let people elsewhere take the exams for the federal or various state bars. Only after passing would they get their visa.
Re:Simple solution? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's actually a much better policy from an economic perspective as well. If you want to let in a fixed number of people (say, 50,000) for the reason that they will fill shortages and benefit the economy, how should you allocate them to different fields? The obvious market-driven answer is: allocate them to the highest bidder, who we can presume must have the greatest need for them. An employer willing to pay $120k for an H1-B obviously feels a greater need for them than an employer only willing to pay $60k.
Basing it on prevailing wages, by contrast, doesn't really make much sense.
Re:Simple solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Simple solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also just let them immigrate. No H1B, no being tied to the employer to stay in the states. Put up X spots, let companies bid and let the people simply immigrate.
Re:It is OBVIOUSLY cost reduction (Score:5, Interesting)
If they have the choice you should be reporting them. What you are describing is simply illegal. It is not uncommon though. It is really your civic duty to report this sort of thing.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
We should have H1B Visas for lawyers and politicians. It would be amazing how quickly the program would be shut down then.
I doubt you could do anything about politicians. The legal profession is heading for trouble. [pjmedia.com] It is getting harder and harder for lawyers for find a good job coming out of law school (with that massive debt), law school enrollments are dropping, law schools are laying off faculty. There are a lot of things feeding into that, including over selling of law degrees, computer and web based legal services, and off-shore legal work. Off shore accounting work is also increasing with the usual implications for accountants.
Law firms send case work overseas to boost efficiency [washingtontimes.com] - September 25, 2005
Guess which jobs are going abroad [cnn.com] - February 25, 2004
If a tax preparer gets you an unexpected refund this year, you may have an accountant in India to thank. That's because accounting firms are joining the outsourcing trend established years ago by cost-conscious American manufacturers. In fact, companies in a number of unexpected industries are now sending work overseas. From scientific lab analysis to medical billing, the service-sector workforce has gone global. CPA firms are just one example. In the 2002 tax year, accounting firms sent some 25,000 tax returns to be completed by accountants in India. This year, that number is expected to quadruple. -- more [cnn.com]
Australia is seeing a similar trend.
Get used to it: sending jobs overseas is the way of the future [smh.com.au]
So that's how H1B visa fraud is done (Score:5, Interesting)
I, Cringley Cringley [cringely.com] had a very interesting post on how H1B fraud is accomplished, except in this case, the he got caught.
How many other scams like this, are being run to prevent American engineers from being hired?
Why do we want more scientists and engineers? (Score:5, Interesting)
This question is becoming increasingly interesting to ask. I see no clear answer. Society is not willing to pay for them, so they are not needed .. or there is sufficient supply. This is not a value judgement; Poets have much to offer, but society does not extract much direct benefit - so the wages are low.
I'd recommend the best and brightest do engineering as last resort, not a primary one. Engineering is a better hobby than a career these days.. in some ways, that is how it's always been.
You're far better off learning how to build a sucessful business, entering law (technical law is very lucurative), or going into medicine - medicine isn't all that difficult if you can get accepted, and protects itself very agressively.
Do what society values for money. Do what you love to be happy. Sometimes those things are the same, frequently they are not. I've been lucky as a EE but I started almost two decades ago, and much of my success has come not from engineering skill, but entreprenurial endeavours.
A profitable, but well managed career can set you up to be financially independent in 8-12 years - then you can go do whatever you like.
Want to increase STEM? Why?
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can take someone fresh out of trade school and get them their certification - I find it a bit hard to believe that there is a true "shortage"
There is a shortage of people with certs or whatever arbitrary skills. The problem is companies wait until an emergency then hire someone. This means they can't develop employees before something becomes an emergency.
H1Bs are a quick fix - there are deeper problems (Score:4, Interesting)
1. There are fewer entry level jobs -- few companies are willing to train people.
The buzz from Jack Welch was to treat team members like pro athlete stars -- pay the alpha performers well and get rid of the beta performers. The problem is that almost all new comers will under perform for a while. Why hire them?
2. There is less loyalty towards an employer.
Again this hurts entry level jobs. The norm used to be that employers used to train people, and the people would stay with the employers for a few years, even if the pay was less. The loss in productivity and the training costs from an employers perspective would more than be made up by the long term savings. From an employees perspective, skipping from job to job made you appear unreliable and would hurt your job prospects. Then with the dot com boom, everything changed. People used to join a company that offered training and then immediately jump ship to get even a slightly higher pay. Jumping from company to company became the most reliable way to get a pay raise. Most companies saw their investment in training wasted and eliminated or severely reduced training.
3. There is no loyalty towards employees and long term planning is no longer considered.
IT is typically a cost center. The norm today is to look for saving by cutting payroll where ever possible. Strategically employers look for a cheaper alternative, even if the long term risk to the business increases. incentives for managers are based on short term performance, so even star employees are at risk of layoffs. Salaries are often cut, irrespective to the damage to the morale of the workforce, because by the time the effects are seen, the people responsible for the cut would have moved on.
4. The geographical mobility has decreased in the past 30 years.
The drag caused by having ever larger mortgages, and complexities of ensuring both the husband and wife have a job, often prevents people from moving to places where there are new jobs.
With constant layoffs a new fact of life, the risks of moving, particularly to smaller markets and single company towns has risen. In a larger metro like NYC, folks can look for new jobs more easily if they feel their job is at risk, and even go to interviews in their lunch breaks. In a small town, this becomes much harder.
5. The move towards orienting IT personal to a project at all times creates a need for an ability to hire and lay off people at all times. As the projects becomes larger, at times there is a glut and times there is such a shortage that the project is moved offshore.
6. The need to restrict liabilities, reduce fixed costs and deflect responsibility is leading to more outsourcing. (Outsourcing != off shoring.) This in turn leads to a need for a more mobile workforce. Just pouring money into these issues will not make it go away, and often the cost could be too high. The solutions for these problems -- rethinking at will employment, tort reform, rethinking home ownership as a primary method to build equity, rewarding long term performance over short term performance are complex, difficult to implement, and will require a ton of time, and right now these problems are not even on the public radar. In the mean time business must go on.
H1Bs offer a quick fix to many of these problems by creating a more mobile, more employer dependent workforce. They are a crutch, and do not solve the long term issues, and they do have a downward pressure on wages. But they also buy time for US society and business to get its act together. Whether this time is used properly, I have no idea.
Re:Of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm curious what you think a fair wage for a developer would be. I currently have 4 open positions that I'm having a bitch of a time filling. 2 are mid to senior Java openings and the other two are client-side UI positions. We're in downtown San Francisco very close to BART and close enough to CalTrain that our policy of a company-provided MiFi and 90 min of flex time (i.e. you work 45 min of your day on the train in both directions to offset the ~1 hr commute from the south bay) makes commuting from almost anywhere in the east bay or south bay a reasonable option.
I believe the package we're offering is very competitive and yet we only see a steady stream of untalented and mediocre developers. So what should we be offering? How should we be sourcing? We have a culture where people really enjoy working here, so if you're correct, there's obviously something systemically wrong with our recruiting process that we're not finding talented, let alone competent engineers.