Opinion H1-B Visas. How do we fix this mess?

[Cole train]

Most Americans would be SHOCKED to visit a local park near the Microsoft Campus, it's like your in Mumbai.

I watched some videos of offices google has.

Crazy stuff

 

[Russky]

Most Americans would be SHOCKED to visit a local park near the Microsoft Campus, it's like your in Mumbai.

Many Indian managers would hire Indian engineers only. That's a part of the culture, and it killed one of the companies I worked for.

 

[ElKarlo]

Maybe fund public education so that there isnt a shortage of STEM field graduates?

Well US schools have the funding. My question is where is it going? There's so much nonsense built into the system now

 

[Russky]

Well US schools have the funding. My question is where is it going? There's so much nonsense built into the system now

It is not about money. China and India do not spend nearly as much money and the result is way better. It is school program, teachers, and attitude.

 

[C0NCH3TO]

Dudes from Bangladesh, Pakistan and other shithole countries are much smarter than you americans lol. ( i wont even bring south Korea or Japan.. that would be too savage). Usa pays to bring wonderful minds to their territory so they can keep on thriving. It’s been like that for years. You don’t have people with the brain power to do what these malnourished, poor kids can. You simply cannot perform those jerbs at the speed and accuracy as them.

 

[JSN]

Take a look at H1B occupation statistics:
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC#LCA
90% of the H1B visa holders are computer SW/HW/Network/etc engineers.

Majority of the CS/EE engineers graduating from US universities are foreigners on J1 visa who have to leave the country once they graduate:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment
US education produces only about 20,000 engineers/year who can be employed.

Not the most recent article, but it shows that there are over 500,000 CS positions were open for 50,000 US graduates (they do not take into account that 80% of those graduates have to leave the country).
https://qz.com/929275/you-probably-should-have-majored-in-computer-science/

Basically, anyone who is willing to get a job with six figures salary can do that. Get CS/EE degree and after 3-5 years your salary will be in 100+K range if you are not too stupid. Even 60K of foreign H1B specialists coming each year is not sufficient to cover all these positions.

Why is this not happening? Why people do not want to get this decent salary and benefits? It would be very interesting to hear.

Cost of education does not seem to be an issue. There are low cost options like Community College with transfer to State university that can be as low as $20-30K for bachelor degree that can be paid off in a year. Even if it is $100K it can be paid off quickly.

My theory is that Math education is completely broken in the US. My kids were going to the best US schools and yet I had to spend tons of money and time to raise their understanding of Math to some adequate level. I am not talking about anything advanced. Just basic Math they are teaching at school. Even if they get "A" grades that does not mean they can solve any real math problems.

A few years back US department of Education realized that "Our Best In The World" system produces miserable results. That resulted in Common Core Standard system that did not make things any better. There are too many things that are broken and until attitude changes from "We Are The Greatest" to "We Suck" I do not expect any change.

I think we have a lot of shit going on. I’ll stick to my own field because I don’t know much about tech. A lot of American engineering students are looking for a path to management.

I’ve known a lot of chemical engineers in their thirties and forties who’ve done very little engineering in their careers and a lot of the people graduating now are going straight to an mba. I think engineering bs+mba is a great combo traditionally, but skipping any kind of work experience just doesn’t produce the same kind of asset imo.

I’ve also heard that a lot of STEM programs, evenengineering programs, are softening accordingly. I’ve seen a lot of recent graduates far more concerned with getting their black belt or trying to use Minitab to spit out a DOE than use what I would consider more effective basic level problem solving skills.

 

[Mamba Mentality]

130,000/330,000,000 = 0.00040625

muh INFUSION

muh 0.04% INFUSION

of people who are here specifically to work hard and make a life for their family, and offer skills in demand


GTFO

Yes 130k every year... Lol at you angsty twats defending this.

America is a dumping ground for it's own citizens.

 

[AznTrojan]

H1B is for doctors too numb nuts. Not everything revolves around IT.

lot of rural docs only work there due to h1 visas.. good luck attracting talent to bumfuck nowhere

 

[Russky]

lot of rural docs only work there due to h1 visas.. good luck attracting talent to bumfuck nowhere

There is artificially limited supply of doctors in the US. Getting into the medical school is incredible tough and expensive process.

 

[Cooz]

If you find a quality visa holder, it’s a great value for your company as you can retain them for a long time, keeping qualified Americans is hard as they easily move for better offers and locations

Bingo.

You just made one of my key arguments for how they lower wages. You are able to retain an H1B visa holder for a long time? Why is that? Because they place greater value on stability and are willing to make other sacrifices (quality of life, wages, etc.) in order to get past the 7+ year waiting period to become naturalized.

You are unable to keep qualified Americans because they apparently go to higher paying jobs. That means you are not willing to pay market value, unless your market is saturated with below market rate talent.

Now what do US citizens do that do not have mobility and are not able to just pack up and leave? They have to cave in to the local rates which are artificially low due to and external injection of talent.

This was never the intent of the H1B visa program.

 

[Cooz]

The H1B is a mixed bag. On one hand it's abused by a lot of these foreign tech companies, mostly from India, that are just basically staffing mills for cheap IT employees that undercut American labor, and whom most of them have never even step foot in this country.

On the other hand it's a great tool to retain high quality talent who have studied in the US, and provides a path to green card and citizenship. These people are usually the creme de la creme of their native countries who have come to attend the top American institutes, and many do want to live in this country and contribute. In a time where intellectual property is a valuable resource, and the brain drain is a real thing, the H1B visa helps overcome that.

Unfortunately the H1B visa system is deeply flawed. It's a lottery system where the odds are the same for a PH.D student who have studied and worked as interns in the US for years versus some cheap Indian IT guy who's never been in this country and will be getting paid much less than market value. I've seen cases where very good co-workers did not win the H1B lottery and had to go back to their home countries, despite being in the US for 6+ years, working for an American company under the F1 OPT visa for two years and paying taxes. Due to the uncertainty and cost of the H1B visa a lot of companies don't actually sponsor the candidates, further restricting the employment prospects of quality candidates from the American post graduate education system.

What really needs to happen is a total revamp of the H1B system. There needs to be a faster, more secure and less restrictive visa category for people who have studied in the country, worked here and paid taxes, rather than lumping them with the low wage foreign IT sweatshop workers. In times like this where China is investing billions to attract top quality professors and researchers to work for China, we need to really find a way to attract and retain high quality foreigners who want to live in this country and contribute to its future success.

Triple Like.

I can't stress enough how spot on this post is. There is a clear need to attract and retain foreign talent. Why wouldn't anyone want that??

The current system has been abused and corrupted. It desperately needs to be revamped.

So there's been more stringent requirements implemented by this administration for proof of employment when renewing an H1B Visa.

They include taking photos of your work space and laptop. Not a joke. No badge/logo/dates newspaper required to be in the photo.
Even sherdog has more stringent standards when posters upload photos of themselves (often tim the form of the subject holding a banana).

If anything, this administration has made it more confusing for H1B visa holders to go through the process. It's done nothing address the problem, and quite frankly people with greater talent (and less desperation) are saying "eff it, not worth my time" and are leaving.

 

[Cooz]

Who else would good at it? FBI has lots of specialists, some focus on white collar crime, some on pedophiles , some on 1%ers, some on domestic spies and industrial espionage etc..

Let's first address the problem, then figure out who will police it.

 

[panamaican]

So, the argument from the OP is that we get 130,000 qualified people into the labor pool and this is a bad thing?

The supposedly work-displaced Americans can bootstrap themselves up or so I'm told...

Okay, that last bit might have been too tongue in cheek for some. But if the economic model is working the way it's supposed to be working, and every time I mention the poor I'm told that the system is fine, then these Americans should be able to find work if they want it bad enough. And even if they can't find a job, they can go into business for themselves.

Unless, and this is a big one, what if the system doesn't work the way it's advertised for all Americans?

 

[Cooz]

Even with all the US and foreign talent, you're still facing a major shortages from now forecasted till 2025

https://recruitingdaily.com/why-the-u-s-has-a-stem-shortage-and-how-we-fix-it-part-1/#:~:text=The National Association of Manufacturing,highly skilled candidates in demand.

I agree oversight should be done to ensure the US talent pool gets priority to jobs and pay befitting of educated, qualified and talented domestics but you're currently and on pace to fall way behind the demand.

Time to consider revamped high school to focus less in humanities and arts and more on math, coding and automation

Great point, and I remember you being in the industry (although you made some very dishonest claims about AI drones killing people ).

How to GROW talent at home is an entire other problem and I can't address that yet (although I'm making headway in that industry now).

How do we ensure that we're getting actual talent from overseas and that it's not suppressing the local market?

Strict evaluation periods? Should a company be required to post jobs being held by H1B holders and allow anyone to apply for them periodically?

 

[Cooz]

H1-B workers do have anchor babies. Just read an article about 2 days ago about an Indian H1-B couple who had 2 kids while working here. The mother was visiting her mother in India and is now stranded there, cause of strict US entry requirements for non citizens , owing to Wuhan virus. On a personal level I know of some H1-B couples who have had kids here.

I think I came across that same article, though I'm sure there's more than one. Another person was stranded in Canada with her kids. This process and uncertainty is not fair to them.

Must be fixed!

 

[Cooz]

I do not see H1-B visas as the enemy. Far more benign than anchor babies getting all their peasant relatives in.

It's not the enemy, however it's not being used as intended.

 

[Cooz]

You guys already do this.

You should have seen the pile of paperwork I (someone in my company) had to do to work in the US for a couple of months. Also had to bring my original diploma to the airport with me. Had to explain why I could the job and there were no US citizens that could etc... what a nightmare.

Yes, the paperwork is a nightmare. Having said that, would you say some of that has to do with how confusing it is?

Also, a lot of the vendors that sponsor these visas have staff to churn that paperwork out.

 

[Cooz]

I don't disagree that the H1-B software progammer's kids have a higher odds of being college grads. The kid of the illegal Central American will also be productive, just in a different field.

I look at the person coming across the Southern Border in a different light, as someone who is native to the Americas, living in poor conditons , and in the case of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, someone who lived under death squads / dictatorships that in part was funded by the US. So these folks coming here helps them, their familes and country which I prefer over attracting the educated foreigners just because it advances American economic interests.

Great point. However I don't think H1B visas have any impact on the other type of immigration you bring up. Different buckets and quotas.

 

[Cooz]

Americans are too busy majoring in Business, Psychology, and Sociology.

I was recently making the argument that certain programs and degrees should NOT cost the same as others.

An arts professor is certainly not paid as much as a math professor, so why the hell does an art degree cost a student the same as a math one?

I digress...that's a topic for another day.

 

[Cooz]

H1B visas will be done soon. Right now even conservative companies switching to remote.

I actually don't know what type of impact 100% remote work will have on that. To be honest, I don't think there's any issue with that.