> Those big tech companies already have international offices. Why wouldn't they have just expanded those offices?
Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
From the article above:
"Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper."
I'd personally like to see the US adopt a systematic and generous immigration system like Canada's. But the H1-B system has mostly been a farce, used as a weapon against American workers. There are exceptions, but overall, it's most benefited the big tech company stockholders.
> It is a means of lowering wage rates among engineers and software developers
You might think Mark Zuckerberg is in this to bring in international developers and pay them peanuts, but the reality is that most people Google, Facebook, and the like are bringing in on H-1B visas are extremely well compensated, on a par with their US counterparts. Once you account for relocations packages and visa/legal fees (which alone can top $10k) it's often more expensive.
Yes, some companies take advantage of international workers. I don't dispute that. But many people who want to enter the US are losing out - they have great job offers, and end up being slaves to an arbitrary lottery with a fairly meaningless cap in the grand scale of total US immigration.
There's growing evidence [1] that even when used by american tech companies H1Bs are largely being used to suppress wages of technical laborers (us). From a purely economic perspective, if you could pay someone on an h1b $80k when it would cost you $120k to hire an american, why would you hire the american? Tech CEOs calling for more H1Bs has very little to do with their politics and morality and much more to do with reducing one of their largest costs (labor).
I don't know where you get your information, but at the kind of top-tier tech companies that are being discussed here, H1B employees are not getting inferior benefits.
And as someone that does a lot of hiring I can guarantee you that the interviewing costs, relocation costs, and language barrier trade-offs do not make up for any salary differences that may or may not occur.
We're not talking about some low-tech banks and telcos trying to save a few bux by outsourcing work to india.
These are companies that have a high enough bar for entry that they truly cannot hire by looking only locally and must consider the entire world.
Furthermore, your whole implication that the companies care about this from primarily a financial point of view is deeply cynical. Immigrants are heavily represented amongst the tech sector, and we have a deep faith in the success of western nations being directly tied to absorbing people hungry for a new life in a new world. It's not about screwing over people who are already here, it's about making the whole country better as a result.
CAVEAT: Am Canadian citizen, am first-generation immigrant. As mentioned, work for a multi-national tech company that is on this list, and hire from around the world. But I work with counterparts on the US side dealing with H1B and know they agree with me.
I don't think that's the case. Right now a ton of the H1-B visa's are given to various IT contracting companies, which use them to suppress wages. Those companies know that their people can't easily leave (and wouldn't be qualified for lots of other companies anyways), and so they can pay them less than they would US citizens.
The bigger tech companies aren't using the program to suppress wages though, they're using it to bring in highly skilled employees. For example, there is a ton of hiring in the AI field and grabbing up foreign workers who are skilled in this area is a huge economic advantage for the US. The tech companies want these people, not some dude who took a three month course and is now "qualified" to work on a helpdesk.
It's in the best interest of these tech companies to reform the H1-B program to make it more viable for these highly skilled workers. Unfortunately the big fear right now is that any reform attempts will be used by the current administration to crack down on all H1-B holders instead of simply reforming the system so it fits the original purpose.
I really don't think Big Tech is using H1-B and greencards to buy fake loyalty or cheaper labor. If your current employer applied for a visa for you, your future employer will too. (To some extent, startups get screwed here, since nobody on an H1-B is going to ditch Apple to work at your startup.) H1-B salaries are public information; and they are exactly the same as what everyone else puts on levels.fyi. I worked at Google; I saw the mandatory H1-B job postings and there was no difference in comp or requirements between my role and the ones being advertised. Filling out paperwork so that every qualified candidate in the world can work there is the cost of doing business; if there were more qualified applicants, they'd hire more people. To the visaholders, this is just another perk for working at a big tech company.
When I clicked the link, I thought this article was going to be something like "non-US citizens get an extra $10k in perks because these companies do all their visa work for them, and US citizens don't need a visa". But it's something much more obscure that doesn't matter.
Big tech companies hire only a small percentage of H1Bs. You are generalizing a special case. The vast majority of the visas are used to undercut American wages. Period.
> When companies like Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies agree [..], and threaten to replace tech workers in the US with less-expensive H1B visas [..]
When did these Silicon Valley companies threaten to hire less-expensive H1B visas? Do you have any citation on this? Are the H1Bs working for these companies paid less than non-H1Bs? Looking at the publicly available salary data for these companies - AmaGoogFaceSoft kind - seem to pay their H1Bs very well.
That being said, without the employees who could leave, but choose not to, Google would not survive. Hiring underpaid immigrants can only get you so far.
H1-B visas are for highly skilled workers, either holding higher education diplomas or similar qualifications. They also come with a minimum salary requirement, which for most tech companies would start at $150,000.
Any company paying their visa holders less than the required minimum salary cap, is indeed committing a crime.
Also, this move is obviously directed against tech companies. It does not make any distinction between large IT providers such as TATA, well known for their dumping tactics, and Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
I would even go further to say that, given the lack of interest in banning the entry of seasonal workers, who focus mostly on blue collar jobs, and given that the highest contribution to the rising unemployment numbers come from lower paid service and manual jobs, this is just another move to appeal to the rural, hard right wing Trump base.
As it will not impact them in any significant manner, yet it would create more uncertainty in wealthier, highly educated, urban areas.
> In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
Good to hear your experience, but this response imply that you either think the author is dishonest or that you don't care about their experience because it's not yours (your emphasis "one reason, and one reason only").
I won't be ignoring your response, because I think it's based on truth and it got so many up-votes, but as many have already pointed out, it does indeed goes into unnecessary details to make your point, giving it a xenophobic feel as a whole.
Now to get to the actual subject I believe there are two distincts type of actors (company sponsors) competing for H1-B creating a bit of a dialogue of the deaf every time the subject comes up:
(1) consulting companies, commonly called "body shops" that swift around H1-B workers and scale profits on workers/margins. Such companies as Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro and to a much lesser extend Western IT companies such as Accenture, Microsoft (let's not forget Microsoft make nearly $700k of revenue per employee [1]), etc. [2]
(2) startups and small groups who do product development or research and thus are not looking for cost savings, nor can they scale human costs very well. For these groups (like the authors's), hiring the right candidate has a significant cost and importance and making a mistake can be even more costly. The burden of processing H1-B visas is very high, but the importance of being able to access a global pool of talent is big enough that they still go through the trouble. This is especially evident by the fact that such startups usually do not usually have oversea offices yet but are competing globally.
The problem is that (1) has a very well refined process that has scaled with the bureaucratic obstacles and eats the majority of H1-B visa numbers without much impact for them when some of their petitions get dropped when the lottery gets "drawn". (2) loses however loses greatly at this game.
A very simple solution to this problem is to award the top 65,000 petitions with the highest salaries, and award them monthly instead of yearly, as timing is also a major issues for small companies. If we talks about quotas after making such change, we'll be talking about a very different kind of H1-B and the road will be much more open for a positive debate.
Also, am I the only one bothered by the use of the term labor? High-tech jobs are not usually factory jobs, but more generally creative-type of jobs. This may be how it's viewed in (1), but for (2), people are not necessarily replaceable entities, if a startup want to hire a candidate because they have worked with her in the past or have had a very promising interview, it is their business and their choice, they are not hiring "labor".
Also, just to give a bit of scale context of the H1-B issue in the grand scheme of the immigration debate, the 4 million work permits granted recently through executive orders are roughly equivalent to combining 65 years H1-Bs at current quota levels, not justifying one or the other, just trying to give scale and expose how much legal work visa venues are completely squeezed in the US.
This is why I'm EXTREMELY skeptical of companies calling for more H1-B's. I'm all for making the path to citizenship easier but these companies don't give a shit about that (However that's what they ACT like). They want cheap tech workers who they can use to replace their American workers. There isn't a shortage of tech workers, there are a shortage of tech workers that will work for shit. It's outsourcing 2.0.
Given the high salaries of tech employees and the low unemployment among them, I think that "cheap labor" isn't exactly what I would call the H-1B system.
It is a bit exploitative of the immigrants, by which I meant that the companies use the strict/stupid US immigration system as leverage. But citizens or taxpayers in the US have no reason of complaining. Maybe these H-1Bs are preventing an entirely cut-throat competition for talent, but on overall, those people add to the economy, and in a big way. Anyone who earns like 100K a year creates numerous other jobs and pays a lot of taxes...
> It was also used by American tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, to hire top talent.
Do these^ companies hire foreigners via H1B?
I don't know if this is true, but I've heard — because of the lottery/uncertainty involved — that these companies instead park foreigners who they want to hire in their offices in other countries (such as Canada/Europe) for a while and then bring them in via L1 visa.
Did you read the article? Many tech jobs can't be done effectively in India or overseas with low quality labor for any number of reasons. The 250 American workers for Disney had their jobs replaced in the US, not by overseas workers.
> "These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors"
Well, let them work for Samsung instead of Apple then.
> "One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company."
The point of the H1-B visa is precisely for those cases where there are no Americans that can do the job, so your hire follows the law. But then if it such a hard to find job, then the scarcity implies the person should get a higher salary, especially if he/she created "20 high paid jobs for our company."
H-1Bs depress salaries because the companies don't have to give an H1-B a significant raise, basically, ever (read: 5+ years or more).
If people can get green cards in 24 months, those people can leave indentured servitude for a company that pays better. It also completely obliterates the "body shops" as they would have to pay a bunch of money for people who are going to jump out at the first opportunity. So, companies wouldn't automatically bring in a visa holder as there wouldn't be a real advantage over a domestic worker unless there was a real, technical reason for doing so.
I have no problem competing with tech people who come here and can move between companies. In addition, immigrants in tech are generally from a higher socioeconomic strata in their home country and have a tendency to found companies.
More tech folks normally means a need for even more tech folks as long as they aren't artificially suppressed.
Duh. H-1B has always favored tech companies because it increases the labor supply and indirectly decreases salaries. Perfect example of how companies only want free markets when it benefits them.
Honestly, I was hoping Trump would end the entire program, but who am I kidding? Google and friends spend way too much on lobbying for that to happen.
The whole program was sold under false pretenses and has been abused hundreds of thousands of times by virtually every large company in the US. It was sold as a program to import foreign labor in specialized roles that couldn't be filled by US workers. In reality, it's a cost-cutting measure designed to suppress US wages in order to increase corporate profits.
The program was bought and paid for by US corporations for their direct benefit.
The cover story these tech executives and investors use is that they like the H-1B out of a pure love for immigrants and the melting pot it creates. The reality is that they love the competitive advantage it gives them in hiring. They don't sincerely care if it's in America's best interest or in the interest of the countries being brain-drained. Some of them will admit this in private.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing but respect, understanding, and zero judgement for employees working in the US on H-1B visas. I have a dozen good friends on H-1Bs. They're in no way to blame for these abuses. They're just doing what's in the best interest of themselves and their families.)
Because they still want to hire lots of Americans. They just don't want to pay them market prices. So they bring in H1-Bs to lower wages. If they hired them overseas, there wouldn't be that effect:
From the article above:
"Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper."
I'd personally like to see the US adopt a systematic and generous immigration system like Canada's. But the H1-B system has mostly been a farce, used as a weapon against American workers. There are exceptions, but overall, it's most benefited the big tech company stockholders.
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