Let Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders Work In US, Says White House 566
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Carolyn Lochhead reports in the SF Chronicle that the White House has announced a plan allowing spouses of H-1B visa holders to work in the United States, a coup for Silicon Valley companies that have been calling for more lenient rules for immigrants who come to the United States to work in technology. 'The proposals announced today will encourage highly skilled, specially trained individuals to remain in the United States and continue to support U.S. businesses and the growth of the U.S. economy,' says Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. 'A concurrent goal is for the United States to maintain competitiveness with other countries that attract skilled foreign workers and offer employment authorization for spouses of skilled workers. American businesses continue to need skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant workers.'
Currently, spouses of H-1B visa holders are not allowed to work unless they obtain their own visa but tech companies have been calling for more H-1B visas, and supporters of the rule change argue that it will bring in more talented workers. Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs. 'Fifty million working-age Americans aren't working,' Sessions said in a statement, adding that as many as 'half of new technology jobs may be going to guest workers. This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages.'"
Currently, spouses of H-1B visa holders are not allowed to work unless they obtain their own visa but tech companies have been calling for more H-1B visas, and supporters of the rule change argue that it will bring in more talented workers. Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs. 'Fifty million working-age Americans aren't working,' Sessions said in a statement, adding that as many as 'half of new technology jobs may be going to guest workers. This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages.'"
Aaaaaaannd..... (Score:0, Insightful)
3..2..1... oh wow... looks like there are way more gay H-1B people coming on in with STEM degrees. How convenient.
have a high H1B minwage / let them work anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
have a high H1B min-wage / let them work anywhere with them being tied to the job.
make the min wage say 100-150K + COL with payed OT. and or an H1B tax.
So if you want h1b you can use them to get cheap workers tied to the job. that can be payed low with forced OT.
Re:throw them the fuck out (Score:1, Insightful)
along with their spouses.
This. Then aggressively pursue companies hiring illegals and fine the shit out of them.
US corporations will not hire US labor at fair rates unless they're forced to. Force them.
Double down? How about "No." (Score:4, Insightful)
How about no? Wages are already suppressed far enough as it is without doubling the number of foreigners these companies can bring in.
We don't have a workforce problem. We have a wage problem. Companies will do anything they can to pay people less. Just look how they've already latched on to this H1B BS.
I say end it. Revoke them and send folks home. We have plenty of workers available, just not at rates employers want to pay.
Pardon my single tear for them.
work is survival (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm extremely liberal and want the best for everyone in the world. But here in the US, we have horrible social welfare. Work is survival for us. If you don't have a job, you fall fast and hard, and it's hard to get back up. Hell, it's hard to get a place to live without guarantors and evidence of an income, and having a place to sleep and eat safely is fundamental to being a biological being. So I call shenanigans on the government allowing more people in to take jobs. Until we've got a robust safety net in place so everyone has a safe place to sleep and can be confident of their next meal regardless of whether they have a job, our focus should be on getting jobs for all citizens that pay what is needed to have those things.
Re:have a high H1B minwage / let them work anywher (Score:5, Insightful)
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers. And by not tying them to a specific job, you remove the ability of employers to find other ways to abuse the system (such as paying them 120% of the average wage to work 150% of the average hours) since the employee can always go elsewhere.
As for spouses working - if someone is good enough to import for their labour skills, at least have the decency to treat them and their family like you would anyone else. If you think this will have an adverse impact on the local labor market, then you probably shouldn't be letting them in in the first place.
Simple corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans like to talk smugly about how corrupt China and Mexico are. Well guess what, great U S of A is pretty goddamn corrupt.
Facebook and Microsoft want cheaper workers, they lobby the gov't (i.e. grease palms with money) for more H1B. Disney wants to milk more money out of Mickey Mouse, it lobbies the gov't until copyright laws extend for centuries. And please explain how this benefits the public (as opposed to benefitting Microsoft/Disney).
Re:seems like a back door (Score:3, Insightful)
Only a small fraction of H1Bs ever get greencards though.
Re: seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
So h1-b is an immigration program?
That is not what the laws says.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
Then they wouldn't fucking do it.
The whole point of H1-B is to gut one of the few times supply-and-demand favors the worker instead of the employer. And that's in a tight economy, not one that's been depressed for 6 straight years.
Re:have a high H1B minwage / let them work anywher (Score:5, Insightful)
"And by not tying them to a specific job"
This. By tying H1B's to an employer, they effectively become chattel for the employer for the duration of their H1B work - beholden to the company, they have no real negotiating power and this is what really drives wages down (or more accurately, prevents them rising).
Re:seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess unemployment in the U.S. is kind of trivial.
This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Both theory and real world evidence show that immigrants, and especially skilled immigrants, expand the economy rather than "stealing jobs".
Re:throw them the fuck out (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, maybe let's have a civil discussion about it. First of all, return H1Bs to what they were supposed to be: A way to get key personnel with unique skills. And sorry, but when I see how certain corporations carpet bomb the relevant fed offices with applications, I can't really believe that to be the reason for them. You really need dozen and dozen of key personnel with skills you can't find here, every single year? Who do you want to bullshit here?
H1Bs are something that should be the exception. It became the rule, though. And that's what's wrong about it. They should be a way to remove a roadblock, to avoid a shortage of people with unique and hard to find skill sets, or to import very specific people who are for some reason very, very important in a certain field. But for the latter to apply to you, if the field was Linux, you better be Linus Torvalds or else you're just not important enough (just to illustrate what I mean with "important in a specific field").
That's what H1Bs are about and that's what they should be used for.
And I could hardly think of anyone having a problem with this, except for some xenophobic hillbillies who fear the dilution of the true American blood.
Re: seems like a back door (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, "the law" does allow a certain H1B to green card path, so yes, it's "what the law says".
We know what the law says. The reality, which often has little to do with legal details, is that the H-1B is primarily a guest worker program. That's how employer's use it, and if it wasn't primarily for guest workers, why have the H-1B visa at all? Get a green card and move on in. That's how other immigrants do it. Why should this case be any different? Oh, that's right, there is a critical shortage of technical workers. Also, I'm the Queen of England.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:5, Insightful)
immigrants, and especially skilled immigrants, expand the economy
Your grasp of the situation has led you to answer the wrong question. Why should I care what the US GDP is? What matters to me is the US GDP per capita, and the distribution of income from that.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy solution: eliminate the H-1B program.
Re:Aaaaaaannd..... (Score:4, Insightful)
a lot of high quality IT people I know are gay
A lot of them don't know what their sexual orientation is, because they're unfamiliar with sex.
Re:Double down? How about "No." (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Large sized American companies open offices overseas and hire foreigners there, which are cheaper than H1-B workers. They also hide their headcount info very well by many different methods. Travel a bit around the world and see the size of IBM, Oracle, Ford, etc offices there.
2) Medium sized American companies hire small sized foreign companies, which are most of the time incorporated in the US too (In Delaware of course), because they are cheaper than small sized American companies.
So, what you believe is the solution to your problem is actually just fighting for breadcrums while someone else already came and took your cake and ate it. The truth if you have trouble getting a job, you are either underqualified, irrelevant or unaffordable, so pardon my single tear for you.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
that would make America's production collapse
Care to justify that assertion? The US worked fine for many many years without work visas. If you wanted to immigrate, you got a green card and came here as a person, not a worker.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. I know plenty of "qualified Americans" who have a hell of a time finding work in the current economy. And if you think H1-B's are being paid the same as local, you're crazy.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
There needs to be new form of Godwin's Law. Whoever uses the word "racist" automatically de-legitimizes his position.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as an H1B visa holder. I earn approaching $200,000 a year. I get a large amount of restricted stock on top of that. It cost the company I work for at very least $150,000 to move me, my wife and all of my stuff over here. All in all, assuming that I can't get a green card, it's likely that it will have cost the company I work for about $300,000-400,0000 a year before taxes to have me here for each of the 6 years I'm here.
The company I work for is still trying to hire people with the relevant qualifications into similar roles on the same team, and are unable to find anyone either in, or out of the US.
Believe me, if they could find an American to do this job, they would have, and believe me, there's no one passing up $3-400,000 a year engineering positions at top flight companies. There really are jobs that need immigrant workers to fill, because there really are no Americans to do them.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:5, Insightful)
Since these are such high demand positions that can't be filled by citizens, the salary they are paid must surely reflect that and is enough to sustain a single income household right? This move just confirms that the government knows and supports the use of H1B as a tool to suppress salaries of domestic tech workers.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're asking the wrong question too. Why should I care what the US GDP per capita is? What matters to me is the global GDP per capita, and how that is distributed.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:5, Insightful)
Your job may have no workers available, sure
But OS and middleware administrators, coders, there are plenty of in the USA. The salaries are depressed for local workers because of the plethora of H1B imports
Same old slashdot, same old circle jerk (Score:4, Insightful)
Look up the lump of labor fallacy. In fact, allow me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org] Labor isn't a zero sum game. More immigrants creates more jobs in the system.
Does the H1-B system need reform? Yes
Does the immigration system need reform? Yes
Does the L1 system need to be scrapped? Quite probably
Does slashdot circle jerk without getting the idea? Yep
Am I missing nothing? Yep.
Re:seems like a back door (Score:2, Insightful)
Lump of labor doesn't say "GDP raises by a larger amount than the pay of the skilled immigrant", and in fact nothing in the article address what you're claiming.
Re: seems like a back door (Score:4, Insightful)
I also earn a good six-figure salary, so I'm definitely not here to help my employer cut any costs.
Just because you are making $250k or whatever doesn't mean they wouldn't be paying $350k if there was no H-1B visas, so yes, even at that, you are cutting costs.
H1b Is a marriage killer in its current form! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody talks about one really important issue. The H1b is such a strain on a married couple that more than half of the marriages end in divorce during the term of the visa. It is absolute killer. Many of the spouses are university educated and have to abandon their career to sit idly by, get bored. They leave all their friends and family behind back in their country of origin. Sometimes having children solves the problem, but often this takes extreme toll. Same on the visa holder, who gets new job in a new country, doesn't know the conditions, has to support family from a single income in place with no extended family support. And every time you come home, there is your bored spouse ready to jump you and do stuff, while you are tired and want to rest from work. It is a huge strain on couples. Giving EAD to H4 holders while the GC is pending is EXACTLY the change H1b program needs to stop being the marriage killer it is now.
Re:H1b Is a marriage killer in its current form! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is forcing them to pack up their family and move here. What you're describing is the same for anyone who needs to relocate for a job, though I admit it's more difficult when relocating to another country. All of the potential consequences need to be factored in if they're going to move, the same as for anyone else who relocates for a job or any other reason. If they're living a good life, one of the two is well employed, and they don't want to pack up and leave, they're not being forced to. As it is, unemployment and underemployment are still serious issues in the US for everyone, and that's killing marriages for citizens as well! While I can see people making the argument it isn't fair to tell the H1B workers' spouses they can't work, the H1B worker has already been granted a special privilege to be able to work here and it's also unfair to grant that same privilege to the spouse just for being married to them.
There are a lot of problems with our immigration system, and I would never suggest we stop allowing people to come to this country and work toward improving their lives, but the fact is there already isn't enough work to go around and it isn't fair to those of us already here to keep willingly increasing the rate at which we add workers to the pool, not until jobs are added at the same rate. It sounds like you'd have to be a dick to say, "You can't work in the country you live in," but that only looks at half the story. It's still pretty damn generous to say, "If you want, you can take your family and move to this country so you can be employed here, but your spouse won't be able to work while they're here." If that doesn't sound like a sweet deal, simple solution, don't take it. It's up to them to decide what's best for them, it's not up to us to sweeten the deal until it is what's best for them.
Re:Sincerity? Green Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
You are operating under a false assumption. You believe the goal of government is to "make America stronger." It is not. The purpose of the government is to serve the interests of wealthy corporations and individuals. Corporations and stockholders, the owning class, want indentured servants (they'd prefer slaves, but there's that pesky 14th amendment). The H1B visa program is just one method by which they acquire these servants.