Big Tech Enters Fray To Save Jobs for Spouses of Foreign Workers (bloomberg.com) 88
Big Tech is wading into a legal fight over visas in an attempt to preserve jobs of spouses of its foreign employees who are working in the U.S. From a report: Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more than 20 other companies and organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on Friday urged a federal court in Washington to reject a lawsuit seeking to eliminate work authorization for more than 90,000 H-4 visa holders. Eliminating H-4 visas "would not only siphon off U.S. gross domestic product, but gift that productivity -- and the innovation that comes with it -- to other nations, harming America's global economic competitiveness into the future," the companies and organizations said in a so-called friend-of-court brief.
Under the Obama-era "H-4 Rule," the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2015 issued visas to spouses, more than 90% of whom are women, of more than 580,000 highly skilled workers who live in the U.S. on H-1B visas, according to the companies' filing. H-4 visas are critical to couples' decisions to come to the U.S., buy homes and raise children, they argue. The Trump administration attempted to dismantle the rule, but never introduced regulation to do so.
Under the Obama-era "H-4 Rule," the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2015 issued visas to spouses, more than 90% of whom are women, of more than 580,000 highly skilled workers who live in the U.S. on H-1B visas, according to the companies' filing. H-4 visas are critical to couples' decisions to come to the U.S., buy homes and raise children, they argue. The Trump administration attempted to dismantle the rule, but never introduced regulation to do so.
Skilled workers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want really skilled workers to boost your economy then you need to let them bring their families. They aren't interesting in leaving them behind, doing a few years in your country and then going back home. The want to bring their families and settle.
Re:Skilled workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you even want them going back, from a pragmatic perspective no; but also not from nationalist perspective unless that was rooted in pure hatred.
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Exactly. From a pragmatic point of view, you wish more of your population would speak the official language, work and pay taxes and have no criminal record.
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The vast majority of immigrants speak the official language - perhaps not fluently but still adequately.
From a pragmatic point of view, it depends on what you are optimizing for. People from around the world provide points of view from around the world - which ultimately might make things a more interesting and better place. Monocultures usually tend to be stagnant. So you if you prefer (and succeed in imposing) that people are all alike, you will probably wind up with a poorer country.
On average immigrants
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I think some people feel like they should come, work like slaves for a few years to earn money to take home, and then leave so that a freshly trained American citizen can take over the job.
The problem is that they often don't earn that much to take home, living costs in the US being what they are. Also it's not a very attractive proposition compared to what other countries are offering. I know some people do that kind of thing e.g. with Saudi Arabia, living in a compound for a few years and then leaving, bu
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I think some people feel like they should come, work like slaves for a few years to earn money to take home, and then leave so that a freshly trained American citizen can take over the job.
Which was precisely what I had to do to get a work permit in Canada. I had skills that they were unable to hire for at any price (specialized knowledge), and the cost of a work permit included a requirement for a transition plan (to wean themselves off foreign labour). To get their work permit, they had to pay double the prevailing wage, list the job for a year, offer to hire any qualified Canadian over me. The transition plan had a number of requirements, including elimination of all work permit employe
Re:Skilled workers (Score:5, Insightful)
I've personally seen the H1B system abused to get essentially abusable indentured servants. The bottleneck for American citizens is usually hands-on paid experience. You can't get that from yet more schooling. Corporations just want to skip the on-the-job training period, tapping plug-and-play foreign workers instead.
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Perhaps, some kind of incentive to give newbies on-the-job experience rather than just reach-for-the-seas. The thing is, it's not just graduates facing such. For example, transitioning from shrinking Oracle DBA to growing RDBMS.
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Indeed and the H1B system should be fixed to prevent these abuses. That however has nothing to do with whether you expect highly skilled workers to abandon their families.
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If they are here merely for co's to avoid training expenditures or to have indentured-servant like complicity, rather than an actual "shortage", then it is an issue.
Re:Skilled workers (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course we don't want them going back, because if they go back it's a sign the system is screwed up in the first place.
Most should never have been permitted to come at all, especially their families. A slight labor shortage is a good thing, as it forces companies to raise wages and train to attract and maintain talent.
As Harvard and Statistics Canada found, there is an inverse correlation between immigration-induced labour shifts. In other words, when the labor pool gets bigger, wages get smaller (and the GDP gets smaller). Merit-based immigration (like Canada) reduces income inequality by suppressing wages of higher earning (professional) workers, which hurts the tax base (as the poor pay very little, relatively speaking in tax base).
So, if they don't have essential skills, we don't want them (as they decrease wages for the poor), and if they have professional-level skills, we especially don't want them. There is value in truly exceptional and talented people, but we're talking H-1Bs here.
The nationalist approach is not deportation, it's denying them a visa in the first place.
Re:Skilled workers (Score:5, Insightful)
football and basketball players are union!! (Score:2)
football and basketball players are union!!
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Whoever said that unions require a single pay scale? Yes, this is true at some union jobs, but there is no requirement that it is like that (and the example of professional sports unions is a good counter-example). Unions are there to make sure that workers get paid appropriately and that the working conditions are reasonable. Professional sports unionized precisely because management was vastly underpaying for talent. They could have made the argument that they were worth more, but until the union showed u
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Re:Skilled workers (Score:4, Insightful)
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Obviously its not work anyone wants to do if any of what you just wrote were true (it isnt).
What should happen in this instance should be some mix of the following:
1) If the work does not need to be done domestically for some reason it should probably be out sourced to some place it can be done cheaper. The fact that id does not need to be done domestically and there are so few workings willing to do it would tend to indicate its not cutting edge high productivity strategic work that is value to keep in the
Paid less != less skilled (Score:3)
This whole critical need bullshit is the big tech wanting slave wages and not wanting to pay people what they are worth.
Aren't the H1-B workers the ones deciding their work is worth $60k?
Ever wonder why its only these companies whose assets near 1T sound this alarm?
Because big companies are the ones with the resources to deal with all the regulatory hurdles. I worked with a startup who had an ideal candidate for a position and wanted to hire him... but he needed an H1-B. The company was too small to commit resources to sponsor him. The current structure/limits on H1-B visas allow only large companies to benefit from them.
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This whole critical need bullshit is the big tech wanting slave wages and not wanting to pay people what they are worth.
Aren't the H1-B workers the ones deciding their work is worth $60k?
H1-B, on paper anyway, is not supposed to be a tool to get cheaper labour. It is supposed to be a resource to supplement the local labour pool when you cannot find a qualified candidate domestically. You are supposed to be paying the H1-B worker, or more realistically, the consulting agency that employs him, the same wage you would have payed for the full time position they are replacing.
I reality of course, it is used to depress wages or to avoid having to hire a full time position with benefits that you
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"Because big companies are the ones with the resources to deal with all the regulatory hurdles."
Because big companies are the ones with the resources to buy politicians and laws.
There, fixed that for you...
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H-1B workers are paid much less than their citizen counterparts.
You sound like you're talking about IT support staff. H-1B visas go across industries and not all industries treat them like a labour farm. I only know a few people on H-1B visas and holy shit they are paid well. But then some companies actually still use them to source highly skilled workers.
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H-1B workers are paid much less than their citizen counterparts. This whole critical need bullshit is the big tech wanting slave wages and not wanting to pay people what they are worth. There is no fucking shortage. There is just a shortage of people willing to work for $60k in a region where that job normally pays $90 - $120k.
H1b people are not paid less than the US counterparts. And the absolute minimum wage for software developers in the Bay Area is around $90k for this year.
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https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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H-1B workers are paid much less than their citizen counterparts.
As a manager of both citizens and non-citizens with various visas... I don't see this at all. My employer claims to pay everyone the same (based on work performance), regardless of visa, and from my firsthand knowledge of at least one tiny part of the company, it's true. Granted, my information is anecdotal, but it's a counterexample to your broad claim. If you said "Some H-1B workers are paid less", I'd have to grant that's probably true. If you said "most", I'd want to see some data. But you seem to be
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https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
countless examples of us employees required to train their h-1b visa replacements, countless articles of how h-1b are used to deliberately keep wages down to pay tech workers less than their worth. These are but 5. There some 44 articles discussed just on slashdot regarding the h-1b issue. If anything your employer is the outlier, no
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If anything your employer is the outlier, not the norm.
I think my employer is the norm in "Big Tech" (I work for Google). I spent 15 years at IBM, which was the same. When I worked for smaller companies there weren't any H-1Bs, so, dunno there.
Re: Skilled workers (Score:2)
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Your employer formed a sort of cartel with microsoft, apple, and another in an agreement to not poach each others programmers.
Yes that did happen for a few years, but AFAICT H-1Bs were paid the same as citizens then, too.
Maybe they pay you a good salary, but maybe they could pay you a great one? Maybe your real value, when factoring in scarcity, is worth double what youre paid? Its not like google cant afford to pay you $350k or even 1mil if they wanted to.
Indeed [levels.fyi].
That said, none of this is really relevant to the question of whether H-1Bs are paid less than citizens.
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People who use H1s to underpay cheap workers aren't the same companies pushing this policy.
Companies that really want to import the talent are pushing this - they know they're bringing in an H1 for their skills, and they want them to bring their spouses and families over to the US to settle. This is not something you underpay a worker for - you're really trying to get them to settle and be naturalized as a full citizen.
If you did try to underpay them, it would be plainly obvious after they bring their famil
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Re: Skilled workers (Score:2)
As an ex-H1B worker, that certainly wasnâ(TM)t the case for me. Not only was my pay rate higher than typical for my position, but my company had to pay hundreds of thousands to get me over to the US, get me set up etc. It would have been vastly cheeper for them to hire an American. They just couldnâ(TM)t. They continued to hire for my position (they wanted more like me) for another three years before they found enough people who could actually do the job.
Iâ(TM)m not saying that H1b abuses
Re: Skilled workers (Score:2)
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Of course pay should be high, but there is no reason why there couldn't be a skills shortage and the employers exploit them with low pay as well. They won't pay more than they have to.
Giving H-1B workers more rights would help fix this. They could move to another company and by gaining citizenship after a couple of years it would make them much harder to exploit.
Re: Skilled workers (Score:2)
As far as the H-4; if
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I'm all for training etc. but I think it's worth saying that the basic attitude I have is that immigrants are a net benefit and add to our prosperity and culture.
Re: Skilled workers (Score:2)
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On the contrary, pay them enough so that their spouses don't have to work and can take care of the kids if they so choose.
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Well, if you are paying "enough"...then hire US Citizens....I mean, their families are already here!!
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Reverse Mormons?
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Just fast-track those H1-B to permanent (Score:5, Interesting)
The US should just Just fast-track those highly skilled H1-B workers to permanent resident status. See if big tech is really worried about the people or worried about losing a labor pool they have VISA leverage over. I'm betting it's not a humanitarian thing.
Re:Just fast-track those H1-B to permanent (Score:5, Insightful)
Intresting idea. But makes two probably wrong assumptions:
1. "Visa leverage" assumes people moved over to their US job because of US, and not of their job. I know there is the stereotype of India being one big slum, but if you were able to get an IT degree that qualifies you for H1-B, you're probably from a different neighborhood. And with that Indian degree, you most likely would get a well paying job there, too. It's not like a US H1-B dumping salary allows you to live like king in the US
I've only been to the US as a tourist, but somehow it seems to be a common opinion with the CBP guys that going back home after a stay in the US would be some kind of punishment.
And second, that government could turn H1-B into immigration. That whole thing got passed only because it was sold as explicitly NOT permanent residency.
But you're right. The industries reply to such a proposal would be interesting to see.
Re:Just fast-track those H1-B to permanent (Score:4, Insightful)
By visa leverage he means that people working under H1-B visas don't have the same freedom that US citizens do. They are beholden to the company they are coming to work for. This is how big tech companies artificially keep wages down. A really good H1-B visa employee might be worth twice what they are paid but have much less ability to switch to other employers. Have you heard about the big name tech companies having gentlemen's agreements not to poach each other's employees? It's the same kind of thing. On the open market really good employees might be worth significantly more than they are paid, but large tech companies are doing everything in their power to limit the ability for employees to move around. H1-B visas are just one part of that strategy.
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Yes. I agree that H1-B is more job market manipulation than anything else. But "shut up or I'll send you back home" is probably less a threat than some people would expect. My fiance is from the US and it's shocking sometimes how her some of her family think what life outside of the US is like.... and we're talking about a developed western European country here.
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I work with many of H1-Bs, but not the H1-B visa mill kind - the smart kind. These are people who went through the same interview process that everyone else went through, and nobody on the interview panel knew if that they were H1-Bs. We selected them, then only later learned "Oh, this person was an H1-B." One of those H1-Bs was a young guy from India who currently worked in another state about 3 hours drive away. He was recently married to a woman who was also an engineer on an H1-B who worked in that
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I absolutely agree that this is insane.
But if she couldn't leave her job because she was on H1B and had to fear deportation, but leaving his job was exactly what he (also on H1-B) did.
But I also get that it may be impossible for them to do it at the same time and that this whole situation came from some stupid rules that do nothing to protect domestic workforce as intended. (or rather as promised to someone to get them to agree to your idea of that whole thing)
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FYI: He only left his job after he got hired here and had guaranteed H1-B sponsorship. (Which means he had to commute out-of-staet for the interview, while he was still working! I don't think we interviewed him remotely. This was very much pre-covid.)
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Hyperbole?
I think you are 1 hour off because you added time for traffic that I already included, but other than that your math checks out. He traveled in the wee hours of the morning to avoid traffic, so maybe it was 2:30 on some days? But yeah, it really sucked! I don't think I could have done it.
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Exactly. Everyone heard of the Google employee that had to sleep in his car. That's why I said the the popular assumption that H1-B workers are coming to the US to have "a better life than back home" may need some re-thinking. I don't thing many of those homeless people in India are homeless despite having an IT degree and a 40 hour job.
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At one company I worked for recently we had a satellite office in Calcutta. The development manager in that office was paid a salary the equivalent of $30,000 USD and on that salary he was able to afford a live-in maid, cook, and chauffeur.
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There are tech jobs where the housing is more affordable. Go to the Midwest. You might make $60,000 instead of $90,000, and you won't be earning stock options in a sexy startup, but you will be able to afford a decent house.
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There is a skill shorta
Personal Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
While I do think that the H-4 probably should accompany any H-1B visa issued; I have to continue to ask the question: Why aren't employers training for the skills they need, instead of using H-1B visas? Could it be because there's no incentive, or that the H-1B visa is less expensive than investing in US manpower?
Seriously. H-1B's should be expensive and costly and a last resort while you're training your own in-house people.
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versus all the stories of people training their h-1b replacements?
https://www.orlandosentinel.co... [orlandosentinel.com]
There are few good options (Score:2)
versus all the stories of people training their h-1b replacements? https://www.orlandosentinel.co... [orlandosentinel.com]
Which would you prefer? Training your H-1B replacement or training your overseas replacement? This is the problem, if companies are hiring H-1B visas it is probably because they are interested in saving money at all costs and have already decided in-country talent doesn't bring sufficient value-add to justify the increased cost. This is probably a bone-headed decision but it's already been made, banning H-1B visas is unlikely to bring the job back to you, just send it overseas. From a public policy position
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You train the H1-B replacement who then goes and trains the off-shoring replacement.
Though there are really two types of H1-B workers, the one where a highly qualified foreign applicant is being recommended and is a perfect fit for the job (someone worked with recently, or know the person from university) and the company is willing to pay a competitive salary. Then there's the H1-B pool being pushed heavily by offshore contractors to do bog standard routine jobs, like manage your support desk, be scrum mas
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versus all the stories of people training their h-1b replacements?
I was trying to be 'nice' with my post, and not really get into the weeds so much. I cannot, however, disagree with you.
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Re: Personal Bias (Score:2)
The H1Bs they hire themselves, sure ... what about the assembly line H1Bs working for them through infosys&co?
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"While I do think that the H-4 probably should accompany any H-1B visa issued; I have to continue to ask the question: Why aren't employers training for the skills they need, instead of using H-1B visas? Could it be because there's no incentive, or that the H-1B visa is less expensive than investing in US manpower?"
IMO big U.S. employers such as Google and Microsoft should be going to college campuses and talking to students in their first year or two and getting them to study some technical field such as c
False argument. (Score:5, Insightful)
Eliminating H-4 visas "would not only siphon off U.S. gross domestic product, but gift that productivity -- and the innovation that comes with it -- to other nations, harming America's global economic competitiveness into the future,"
H-4 are "issued to dependent family members of H-1B, H-1B1, H-2A, H-2B, and H-3 visa holders" so what they are really arguing is that both the U.S. gross domestic product, productivity, and innovation are dependent on these programs. At the levels were are at, this is objectively false. Their argument is a lie of omission because they are omitting the fact that if they raise worker wages then there will be no loss of GDP, productivity, or innovation.
Lawyers for "Big Tech" are arguing in bad faith and should be put out to pasture.
More production = more GDP (Score:3)
H-4 are "issued to dependent family members of H-1B, H-1B1, H-2A, H-2B, and H-3 visa holders" so what they are really arguing is that both the U.S. gross domestic product, productivity, and innovation are dependent on these programs. At the levels were are at, this is objectively false. Their argument is a lie of omission because they are omitting the fact that if they raise worker wages then there will be no loss of GDP, productivity, or innovation.
You didn't account for the productivity loss of the family members. An H1-B visa worker + a working spouse increases US GDP more than a single domestic worker doing the same job as the H1-B holder. It's the output of two workers instead of one, so of course that impacts GDP.
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I can certainly tell you that here in Silicon Valley, both spouses are working full time to make the rent. Nobody is bringing over a stay-at-home spouse (though there may be an extended visit by the grandparents to care for the babies while parents are holding down the jobs, that's called family values as oppoosed the the cheat-and-repent style promoted heavily by political televangelists).
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Nobody is bringing over a stay-at-home spouse
"Nobody" is clearly too strong. I personally know several counterexamples.
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You didn't account for the productivity loss of the family members.
Sure I did. The American workers have spouses as well and most work. Do you think "Big Tech" is the only employer with depressed wages?
We should just ditch this worker programs (Score:4, Interesting)
We just replace the all these guest worker programs with a residency tax! Say 10k a year indexed to inflation.
If the worker is valuable enough to the employee that they really should be preferred over a domestic hire, they should have no-problem providing the employee with the cash to cover the tax even as an advance.
We could remove a lot of the caps and rules about work authorization etc. These supposedly highly skilled worked should be easily able to negotiate their employer covering their spouse as well, or they were never really that valuable.
How about an H1-B auction - payable to the worker? (Score:2)
We just replace the all these guest worker programs with a residency tax! Say 10k a year indexed to inflation.
How about an H1-B auction, payable to the worker?
* Limit the number of H1-Bs.
* The limited number go to the workers who are offered the highest salaries (with the companies committing to the amount and a term of service).
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(Note that, when the following was include in the previous post, with a couple blocks of words stuck together with hyphens, the lameness filter rejected it as ASCII art.)
If the number of H1-Bs is low enough this would drive the wages up from the "undercut citizens" level to "only really high skilled get hired". The cheap-labor pool would dry up. To actually enforce an "only the really skilled" rule the government wouldn't have to investigate thousands of people on a whack-a-mole basis - just tune the supp
How magnanimous of them... (Score:2)
H-4 visas are also putting them into competition with a lot of working class and lower side of the middle class people. The average worker in the US doesn't benefit from that. "Buy homes" = more competition for already increasingly scarce affordable housing. Raise children here? Does not benefit my kids or the kids or any other US citizen. Heck, depending on how much property taxes they pay and how man
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um, no (Score:4, Insightful)
of more than 580,000 highly skilled workers who live in the U.S. on H-1B visas
H-1B doesn't mean you are highly skilled, it means you are highly cheap. That's what these companies are worried about, pure and simple.
Most people at /. actually know this ... and don't like it ... but they vote against their own interests.
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exactly.
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This sort of statement has always bothered me to some extent:
"but they vote against their own interests"
Why must we assume that everyone must always vote in a way that personally benefits them the most no matter how much it might affect anyone else, let alone this example of H-1B visa holders. This is the sort of thinking that has made us so divided. This is the thinking that causes companies to do whatever they can to make money be damned the consequences.
Why is it so
In 80's US outsourced manifacturing, now education (Score:2)
Eliminate H1B (Score:2)
Fix *legal* immigration (Score:3)
As a person who has gone through the legal immigration system, I can easily say it is much more cumbersome than it needs to be. We have some really good visa categories for skilled workers, artists, writers, and even temporary workers who are just coming to pick up strawberries in season. However all the stringent paperwork, and overall opaqueness could be vastly improved.
If someone can speak fluent English, has no criminal record, paid their taxes, earn more than local / national average, has highly sought after skills, and more importantly, have built their roots here with more than 10 years of residence, we should have a simple path without needing to jump through hoops. A simple "green card" to all legal skilled people and immediate family who wants to pursue it.
Otherwise I had seen those with PhD working at prestigious jobs to a 1 year sting in Europe to come back with an L1 visa. No need to disrupt their lives twice.
I have been on both sides of H1B (Score:2)
Fast forward now, I routinely hire developers for the company. Our company is big, and our policy is to make really serious and sincere effort to recruit Americans and only when are not able to we hire H1Bs. The law is clear, H1Bs should not be paid less than prevailing wage, and we should not tailor the job requirements to the candidate. I follow the law to the letter and to its spirit. The entire HR tea
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Do you think an auction process, in which those who will be paid the highest salaries are given visas, would help end the body shop abuses?
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If we stop being politically correct and maintain the fiction all degrees from all over the world are equal, we will have a solution.