I don't understand the allure of FAANG for residents besides the money. The thing is, for us H1B workers, we have very limited options. And these big companies have the best track record in processing GC for us. Unless these regulations got changed, and give smaller companies more chances. Given how powerful big companies are, I probably wouldn't be surprised if they also lobbied regulations against small companies hiring immigrants.
FAANG resources are the highest in the country. They could afford to hire 100% US citizens if they chose to. Even if that made it much harder for non-FAANG companies. No one could afford to compete with them.
The motivation for FAANG committing so much fraud using the H1B isn't really debatable. They do it to to steal money for their shareholders. The same motivation for all their tax cheating. The difference being that the H1B fraud is clearly illegal, even if it has remain unprosecuted by virtue of political bribery, etc.
Been pondering this, but at root I think one disconnect is that H1B is very much “A Tale of Two Cities”. If you work for FAAMNG or FinTech, your H1B colleagues represent the spirit of the program: World-class engineering talent being compensated appropriately.
If you’re outside that world it’s less cut and dry. Employers use H1B to drive down wages. They have a hold over the employees and can sometimes mistreat them. And then there’s the historical practice of body shops outright abusing the visa in exact opposition to the intent.
I lay this at the feet of FAAMNG. Instead of sending the message that it was an unmitigated good, they could have acknowledged the negatives and used their position to lobby for reforms before we got here.
I will make a slight derail into H1B's. Anytime that you allow a company to have significant control over an employee's life, such as putting a significant risk of deportation on the employee, you are putting the employee at severe personal risk. This is the central problem with guest worker programs, as you incentivize the company to threaten employees in order to keep them working for you and their costs down.
I had an intense argument with someone about whether H1B's were good or bad for the economy. The key point he was arguing was that H1B employees do not have significantly less salary, and they are fully capable of switching companies.
In my experience, the primary reason that a company would go through the hassle of hiring an H1B is for cost reasons, because there are enough competent workers locally there to fulfill open positions (at a price), and the quality of H1B workers is generally less than local hires. On rare occasions a foreign worker has extremely unique skills, but this is certainly the exception.
Secondly, it is very difficult for an H1B to switch companies, as it's difficult to convince a company to go through the hassle of paperwork / lawyers / cost, so an H1B employee has little recourse for being treated poorly and paid less.
Therefore, I'm against H1B's. If we had a more reasonable immigration policy, where people could more easily come to America as normalized citizens, I would be for it. But the H1B and similar programs give far too much power to the companies, which is ripe for exploitation.
And it's a question as to whether any of these FAANG companies actually need to hire any H1Bs considering how much money they have. How many well paying jobs are they exporting for no good reason other than they want to keep more money.
Massive companies already have an advantage when it comes to H1Bs. Because of the lottery system most H1B applicants will be rejected. If you have a small company and only need to hire 1-2 people how do you fill those positions with H1Bs? Apply for 2 and hope they both get it? What if they're both rejected? Even if they're accepted you have to have the applications done in the spring and they can't start work until the fall. Can a small company really afford to wait that long?
Your argument about the higher pay in certain areas is just wrong. Why can't a company in a lower cost of living area pay Silicon Valley rates? I'm getting paid more now in North Carolina than I was when I worked in Silicon Valley.
I dont think corporations profit from the H1B in an economic sense. Some can, but only very few: that is, copmanies whose H1B situation allows them to have a higher range of profits than other companies in the same space that wouldnt have access to the same visa.
If immigration where free, or almost free, then these companies would hire even more people, and all others would also do it. The amount of immigration the tech sector would have if people could go to the us, stay 6 months to acclimate, learn and pick jobs, would skyrocket and would increase the talent pool for companies.
The great supporter of such restrictions are the people that think their own wage would be reduced if more competition were brought up. And they would be right to fear that in the short term. In the longer term, lower wages would also mean higher profits, thus higher capital which would eventually rise wages again.
Any immigration policy is more often than not a problem of bias and misunderstanding from the public, and a matter of voters for the politicians.
Where do you see me arguing that smaller companies should be allowed to circumvent any immigration laws?
I simply argued that OP's proposal - which is a not a law - would put companies with scarcer funds in disadvantage against bigger companies with more money to burn. I'm all for a free market, but what the OP is proposing is a market distortion since there are a limited number of visas.
Anyhow, you do realize that H1B filling requires a certified LCA, don't you?
It's also about companies violating the H1B visa rules on a large scale. H1B is supposed to be about high performers (that is in the law) ... and it just isn't. Companies do not ever use it like that.
There should be consequences to violating these rules. Not being allowed to hire workers JUST because they're cheap (99% of H1B visa workers) is something that should always be enforced.
It's to help companies and H1B workers at the same time. It doesn't support the nativist theme that legal immigrants should be tossed out of the country for no other reason than their company had layoffs it a tight market.
Ideally, we'd spend more on education/training and less on sourcing workers from other countries - but being nice to the workers already here and making it work for small companies seems a legit altruistic move (and good PR).
Well H1-b is for temporary foreign workers, so the restrictions would be on the companies hiring foreign workers rather than the immigrants themselves. Personally I think H1-b visas for lower end workers are just an excuse for companies who want to treat their workers poorly by offering lower wages and benefits than they would get with American workers. And of course that contributes to unemployment among low income Americans who would otherwise have these jobs. By all means we can have a mechanism that is more indifferent to money when we look at other categories of immigration.
Look at it from the other direction: large companies have fought giving H1-B workers better protections. They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t profiting from workers with less negotiating ability.
That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.
The whole point of the h1b program was to bring the best over. Additionally I believe that if companies had any sort of interest in growing juniors as an industry wed see apprentice programs or some equivalent pop up. Hiring a junior whose on a restrictive visa seems to be entirely about cost savings
H1-B applications are not only for tech jobs, and not only for the bay area. There are many other professions which are subject to the same cap, and also have to look outside of the US to fill roles. Nurses are one that come to mind. If all H1-Bs are just sorted by comp, you'll end up with FAANG getting 80k H1-Bs per year.
You may want to argue that "well then other companies don't deserve them if they can't compete with FAANG", or "then companies should pay SF wages everywhere" (which I sorta-agree with), or "then other industries should pay more!".
They may be valid points, but it is unreasonable to expect that another industry can compete salary-wise against FAANG at the moment, and it doesn't make their inability to find candidates locally any less true.
Regarding preventing visa farming, an easier solution (in my opinion) is to improve the flexibility for an H1B worker; allow them to work for any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B harvesting wouldn't be worth it.
I absolutely agree. Companies like TCS, that get the highest number of H1B visas already, will easily be able to bid high enough at an "immigration auction". Nothing would change at the high end - only at the low end small companies would be crowded out.
Taking this further, the big corporations could potentially (and probably will) play strategically and outbid most start-ups.
Why? That does not make any sense whatsoever. Most corporations that use H1Bs have billions sitting in cash in their bank accounts. They are more than capable of paying for local workers. There is a glut of local workers looking for jobs that can do the work that are for the most part as smart as the immigrants.
The work is highly profitable. The skills are present in the local population. Why should anyone want H1Bs in the US at all other than the investors looking for the largest returns for exploiting the poorest people in the world.
Ultimately this whole issue is an issue of exploitation at the behest of the owners of America who don't give a shit about its people. Initially they exploited slaves, then they exploited immigrants, now they want to import not even real immigrants to exploit.
H-1B was for non-immigration, wasn't it? How is this not in favor of large corporations seeking cheap workers? What specific benefit do US-Americans get from this?
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