New Senate Bill Would Give US Grads Preference In Receiving H-1B Visas (computerworld.com) 221
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: A new bill in Congress would give foreign students who graduate from U.S. schools priority in getting an H-1B visa. The legislation also "explicitly prohibits" the replacement of American workers by visa holders. This bill, the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, was announced Thursday by its co-sponsors, U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), longtime allies on H-1B reform. Grassley is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gives this bill an immediate big leg up in the legislative process. This legislation would end the annual random distribution, via a lottery, of H-1B visas, and replace it with a system to give priority to certain types of students. Foreign nationals in the best position to get one of the 85,000 H-1B visas issued annually will have earned an advanced degree from a U.S. school, have a well-paying job offer, and have preferred skills. The specific skills weren't identified, but will likely be STEM-related. "Congress created these programs to complement America's high-skilled workforce, not replace it," said Grassley, in a statement. "Unfortunately, some companies are trying to exploit the programs by cutting American workers for cheaper labor."
It's a start! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a small start on a long needed road of reform. At least they're having the discussion.
Re:It's a start! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be better to give job priorities to U.S. citizens who qualify for the jobs?
Re:It's a start! (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the bill supposedly "explicitly prohibits the replacement of American workers by visa holders" this would presumably not be necessary. If Americans are able and willing to do the job, companies shouldn't even be allowed to hire H1B visa holders. Of course, that has never stopped companies from finding a million loopholes and tricks to get around this in the past.
It all comes down to how strictly and consistently the law is actually enforced. Send a few execs to prison for trying to cheat the system and the rest would quickly fall in line. But, campaign promises aside, the odds of THAT happening are slim to none.
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The needful is to be speeking the huerdu. American chappies is jolly fine but not able to be speeking the huerdu.
The needful must be done!
Re:It's a start! (Score:5, Informative)
What I've seen in the past is first identifying the candidate, then writing the job description to uniquely identify that candidate.
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Yeah, that's one of many tricks used. Another is to post jobs with ridiculous requirements that make them basically impossible to fill, then running to Congress begging for more visas and citing these unfilled positions as evidence that there aren't enough qualified American workers available.
Re:It's a start! (Score:4, Interesting)
And then filling those positions with low level inexperienced H1b visa workers.
My proposal- in order to get an H1b you must run an ad for 3 months on the Dept of Immigration site with your requirements. All applicants go to their review official there as well as the company. If the company cannot find a qualified applicant- and immigration agrees, then they may fill the role with an H1b applicant.
However, if they cannot find an H1b applicant that meets the posted requirements, they must reeview the US applicants along with immigration BEFORE they select a less qualified H1b applicant. Any US applicants that have the same qualifications as the H1b applicant must be hired instead.
And, the real kicker- the H1b applicant must be paid the same amount they would have paid the US applicant of the same qualification. Enforced via industry standard/average salaries for the region.
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I'm a US Citizen
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That's ridiculous. People in other countries get college for free or at a much lower cost than they do in the US. That's a pretty freaking huge advantage to have when you can afford to work for much less than what the natives are working for.
Also, this kind of arrogant attitude is why the US is going down the crapper. Are, you really, sure that you're wiling to put up with the crap that the visa holders put up with to get and keep those jobs? Sure, on paper, they're probably being paid well and treated well
Re:It's a start! (Score:5, Insightful)
You are either young, unexperienced or just delusional. When companies decide to switch some or 100% of their IT workforce to H1Bs, it's usually decided by the CEO and other execs/MBAs who:
a. Do not know about your "mad coding skillz"
b. Do not understand how "good" you think you are
c. Do not give a shit about your existence
d. Are only concerned about the $$$ (your_pay - h1b_pay)
You think all the guys who got canned at Disney are dumber than your holiness?
Finally, good luck with your "mad skillz" when applying for a job when your resume is thrown in the Recycle Bin simply because you are NOT an H1B.
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Yeah, no thanks. I'll compete with anything any other programmer can muster. If they provide a better value proposition, then I should reconsider my competitive advantages and lower my requisite salary. I do not need the government dictating my wage to me. I didn't vote communist, ever.
I'm a US Citizen
You are a US idiot.
Indian workers do not work for less because they are kind and generous. They work less because they don't have a nanny-state government that steals a lot of their income and uses it to build electrical grids, water treatment systems, inspect chemical plants in Bhopal or pay police officials salaries that discourage them from being for sale to the highest bidder. They don't have an incorruptible system of inspectors to ensure the safety of the food, water, electrical systems or whatever. T
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Yet you live in a mostly-Communist state. Two of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto were installed in the 30s; specifically, the formation of a central bank (Federal Reserve) and a graduated income tax.
I'll not resort to name-calling, as it does nothing to further true discourse, yet I'll say you're misinformed, as many are, on the subject of socioeconomic control of a population.
I suggest you read "None Dare Call It Conspiracy" by Gary Allen
www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/nonedarecallit_con
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This +1....the late Bill Hicks had a great routine on this for illegals, make it against the law to pay them any less than an american worker, removes 99% of the incentive to hire illegals, the only thing left is work ethic, which most of us have in spades.
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Companies make sure that there are not any qualified US candidates by requiring foreign language skills, so liaise with their customers and teams in India etc. And even if the salary was the same as for a US applicant, that person is still reliant on continued employment to stay in the US.
So in addition to your changes, they should simply ban foreign language requirements (too hard to judge fairly) and change the H1B visa so that holders are not deported as soon as their employment ends, e.g. they get a yea
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Enforced via industry standard/average salaries for the region
Thanks for the loophole. Let the best paid people get brought down a bit thus bringing the industry average down.
My proposal- in order to get an H1b you must run an ad for 3 months on the Dept of Immigration site with your requirements.
Must have exactly 20 months experience with Windows 10. Fortunately in 3 months time we'll get plenty of capable H1B applicants to fill this condition that the US applicants weren't capable of.
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What happens when Americans refuse to move to the jobs? Both here and on Reddit are multiple people "I can't find any ____ jobs near Seattle" and when they are suggested moving they can't because they have a bag of excuses. H1Bs are already moving to a new country and don't care they're taking a job in Iowa.
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Companies can move out of silly valley.
If you force companies to move out of SV, a lot them will move to Mumbai instead of Omaha.
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and after seeing the shithole that is most of india, the extreme corruption (that makes the US look like saints) they'll be back in a flash.
bring it on! the sooner they experience this, the better.
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don't care they're taking a job in Iowa. more like can't find some one in the Bay area for 40K.
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If you can't find any ___ jobs in Seattle then you are basically unhireable, and it has nothing to do with H1Bs. Seattle is the hottest market in the US, if you can't get a job there you are eminently unqualified.
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Good, please stay in Iran.
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Because that is what the issue is in practice with programmers and corporate work -- same as how even without (illegal) migrant workers, we would have no shortage of farm laborers in the US if wages to pick fruit at a reasonable pace were, say, US$30 per hour with OSHA protections, overtime, and
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Re:It's a start! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Raise the salary floor to $100k from the current $60k
2) Force employers to pay a 10% tax on that salary
3) Create a bidding structure based on the minimum guaranteed salary those employees are willing to pay those H1B employees. Currently there is a lottery for employers to get these slots. That should stop. If an employer is willing to guaranteed a $200k salary then they go ahead of the bottom feeders only willing to pay $100k in the order of allocations
3) End jobbing out these employees in body shops.
We are only supposed to be bringing in the most needed skills and those with the highest demand skills would be paid the highest (or at least according to knee jerk capitalist dogma). I would expect this to bring in a lot more cardiac surgeons and a lot fewer share point admins.
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4) create a secret shopper program where well-qualified 'testers' apply for jobs and if they are turned down, an OFFICIAL (and expensive, if the company is found to be fraudulently rejecting locals) investigation would occur. one that has PUBLIC RESULTS POSTED for anyone to see. public shaming, big-time, for violators.
without a secret shopper program, there's no good way to keep the fucking companies honest. they'll continue to pay lawyers to find loopholes. but if they are publicly shamed, they'll stop
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Yeah, but then you'd have one hell of an expensive secret shopper, since that person would also have to actually qualify for the job he's interviewing for in order to pass the interview...
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Do it in one step: start assigning a $200,000 excise tax for each H1-B worker. And do it before any regular compensation or benefits - this way when the company claims there aren't any Americans who can do the job, we'll know they aren't being too lazy to recruit or too greedy to pay for what they want to get.
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I am very pro H1B and I agree with most of these.
1) The key point: Silicon Valley companies are paying 6 figures out of college for top talent. So for someone to be worth importing (and I believe many are), obviously $100k should be a minimum.
2) Paying a 10% tax? Maybe for 1 year, since it costs at least $10k to hire someone (probably also from out of the country, but at least they are putting their money where their mouth is when claiming there are no equivalent candidates (which I believe is often true!
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Create a bidding structure based on the minimum guaranteed salary those employees are willing to pay those H1B employees.
Problem with that is that smaller companies which really need foreign talent won't be able to get it. The lottery was created so that the visas wouldn't be simply bought and everyone would have a fair chance regardless of size.
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You do realize that most developing countires have higher income inequality than the US. What this means is that while beginning and average salaries are lower , salaries at the higher end are higher than in the US. Cardiac surgeons from India will not move to the US as they earn much more in India than in the US. Same for folks earning 150K plus. The kind of folks who would attract those salaries in the US are getting paid much more (PPP adjusted) in India. Only people at the beginning of their careers are
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4) Hope the job doesn't move to another country.
I believe that's a bluff and I'm prepared to call it. If they were going to do that, it'd already have been done.
What are you talking about? Offshoring of IT work already does happen, and will continue to happen. If they haven't done it already, it is because of the cost of doing it (cost in either money, effort, and/or quality). The American workforce may still benefit from limiting H1B visas, but it will almost certainly have an effect of increasing the amount of offshoring. The hope is we offshore less jobs than we save, but it's far from a guarantee.
Considering it's nearly impossible to find good software develope
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It happens, but the results are shitty code and a hard time monitor the work being done. It's something that's done by corporations that don't know what they're doing and are just looking for the boost to stock prices that comes from screwing the workers over.
That's not to say that there aren't any quality coders overseas, there are, but if you're offshoring things on the basis of saving money, you're not going to be hiring any of them. You're going to be hiring the ones that are willing to make ridiculous
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4) Hope the job doesn't move to another country.
I believe that's a bluff and I'm prepared to call it. If they were going to do that, it'd already have been done.
What are you talking about? Offshoring of IT work already does happen, and will continue to happen. If they haven't done it already, it is because of the cost of doing it (cost in either money, effort, and/or quality). The American workforce may still benefit from limiting H1B visas, but it will almost certainly have an effect of increasing the amount of offshoring. The hope is we offshore less jobs than we save, but it's far from a guarantee.
Considering it's nearly impossible to find good software developers these days, I find it hard to believe things would be better with even less software developers in our local economy.
I think though there are other costs some dumb cost accountants do not consider but good MBA managers will. That is the loss or productivity and communication with a team far removed from the business processes and users and needs of the local corporate headquarters and customers.
The kind of offshoring is commodity lower value jobs like help desk.
The problem is when everyone including every other programmer, PM, and now customers are also in India or the Phillipines! It was stupid to outsource to China in 1
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Isn't this the part where all the "free market" believers tell us that "companies never pay taxes, they just pass them on to their customers"?
So far, we've got Trump proposing a 35% tax on US companies that build products overseas and Slashdot fools telling us that raising taxes on companies will lead to greater employment.
Did something change with the Trump inauguration that's suddenly made believers in "economic liberty and small government" love taxes?
Having some people believing in the job protecting power of 35% tariffs and other people believing in the free market just isn't working out since clearly there can only be one opinion for a huge group of people whose only characteristic is that they frequent a website. The solution is obvious. Determine what your opinion is on the subject. That'll nail it down for everyone.
Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America first. (Score:2, Insightful)
Regardless of what you think about him, we should thank President Trump for again making it acceptable to put America and Americans first when it comes to policy decisions.
For too long now political correctness, forced on the nation and its people by leftists, has prevented American interests from coming first and foremost.
Thank you, President Trump, for taking away the stigma that leftists have associated with putting America first.
Although this reform isn't as good as completely eliminating these awful vi
Re:Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America fir (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it was political correctness that led to the H1B issue. I think it was probably corporate/rich person greed.
Re:Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America fir (Score:5, Funny)
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It was political correctness that kept people from speaking out. H1B's are "not white" and thus it is racist to try and talk about it. The real issue though is that liberals play so much identity politics that attacking anyone but a white man for his or her identity became off-limits. Add in the fact that it benefits corporations and bam - who the hell wants to touch the issue? White males can't talk about it, corporations don't care, women are only marginally affects because, on average their jobs aren
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Indeed, it was the opposite - racism towards Americans and right wing corporate greed/minimal regulation.
Unfortunately you just elected the poster child for corporate greed, minimal regulation and racism. Oops.
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H1Bs were introduced as part of WTO negotiations. When India agreed to let US sell Caterpillar backhoes and Pepsico Sugar water in India , US agreed to let India sell software services in the US and as the work permit process in the US is messed up and the L1 is very restrictive, H1s were introduced. The conflation of H1B (a free trade visa) with immigration is unfortunate and happened because of a quota which put an artificial limit on number of people coming to US to provide short term software services.
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The sad thing is that patriotism and nationalism have become dirty words on the left. It's even worse in Europe, though. Members of the "Britain First" movement are being arrested and persecuted [independent.co.uk] pretty heavily. Shit, you can get into serious trouble there just for selling stuff with the British flag on it [telegraph.co.uk]. Such is the insane world we live in.
Re:Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America fir (Score:5, Insightful)
Nationalism, though, has been a dirty word since the '40s when nationalism's big brother "Fascism" became a bit of an issue for people living in the countries immediately adjacent.
And the world's not insane. It's just that people disagree. It has always been that way and it will always be that way. If you want it to feel less "insane" spend some time understanding why people make the decisions they do. Once you understand, they're not so much "crazy" as they are in different circumstances.
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"Disagreeing" is one thing. Imprisoning your opposition, threatening them with violence, getting them fired from their jobs, banning them from speaking engagements, harassing them, calling them racists and sexists, etc.--well that's something else entirely. The left stopped merely "disagreeing" some time ago.
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Describing something or someone as racist or sexist is an entirely legitimate criticism if true. Complaining that people are calling out your racism/sexism is just an attempt to silence critics and an attempt to use social pressure to stifle free speech.
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I was born a white male and no-one has ever accused me of being racist, except for some idiots on the alt-right who said I hated white males (i.e. myself). I just mocked them, rather than getting all upset and demanding a safe space away from the bad words.
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Ah yes, how very typical for neonazi crybabies bemoaning themselves as victims even though they are the ones who get violent.
https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
http://www.zeit.de/politik/deu... [www.zeit.de]
Fuck you and your patron saint Breivik.
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Patriotism has become the first recourse of the scoundrel. It's the kind of anti-politically-correct. Anything politically correct is automatically bad, anything patriotic is automatically good. It's a cheap bit of rhetoric, a bogus argument.
Real patriots, like Edward Snowden, are denounced and punished. Only faux patriotism is allowed.
Re:Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America fir (Score:4, Interesting)
Patriotism has never been a dirty word. Misuse of the words "patriot" and "patriotism", though, has stained the words to the point where they're immediately associated with something being covered up (see: USA PATRIOT Act).
Nationalism, though, has been a dirty word since the '40s when nationalism's big brother "Fascism" became a bit of an issue for people living in the countries immediately adjacent.
This. Having pride in your country because its something to be proud of is patriotism, a patriot strives to improve his country.
Demanding your country is recognised as superior without merit is nationalism. A nationalist seeks to belittle other countries to make his own look better.
A patriot does not mind people criticising their country, a Nationalist or Jingoist does not permit any questions about his beliefs.
I just got back from Holland. contrary to popular American views is actually a nation of people who are very proud to be Dutch, I think the confusion comes in the way the Dutch express their patriotism. Everywhere I went I was asked "You are from England, how are you enjoying Holland". Hell, even the Dutch customs officer asked me how my trip was on the way out of Schipol. The Dutch take great pride in their hospitality and friendliness. Because of this, they are actually quite open to criticism, seeing it as a means of improvement (or at the worst, know when a critisim is not valid and should be ignored).
Even though I'm technically an Australian, I really dont mind being called English (I live there now). It happens all the time in the US, I consistently am asked "What part of England are you from" (which should be "which" part) and respond with "I'm from this small island a bit south of England called Australia". Well I guess I cant use that one any more. Sorry for the Grandpa Simpson story, and yes I did have an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time.
So it's a shame that I have to use my own country as an example of nationalism, particularly as nationalism pretending to be patriotism. Traditionally, for an Australian to be proud of Australia, we were proud of its accomplishments, accomplishments that often outshone larger nations. It was always an easy going pride, the idea was that you didn't have to wave a flag or recite a poem to be a proud Australian. The Australian way used to be giving people a fair go, being kind and generous to your friends. Sure it was always cliquey but nowhere near the level of outright xenophobia you see today. The people in Australia who label themselves "patriots" are nothing but xenophobic ultra-nationalists who have adopted ironically un-Australian sayings like "Fuck off, we're full", make barely coherent arguments about "boat people" who are allegedly "destroying the Australian way of life" and "taking jobs from Hard working Australians" (lets ignore that the speaker has probably been on the dole for the last 4 years).
Sure I know plenty of people who like Australia, who would like to express their pride, but are too scared of being associated with the likes of Reclaim Australia because... because to be frankly Australian about it, they aren't racists fuckwits like One Nation and Reclaim Australia.
I see the same thing here now I've lived in England for a while. There's lots to celebrate about English culture (not the food, but I digress) however nationalists like the EDL (English Defence Leauge) make it hard for ordinary English to do this because they deliberately try to weld being a proud Englishmen to a xenophobic ideology... And I think that's a bloody shame.
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You are aware that "Britain First" are a racist hate group with as good a reputation as the KKK? Many of their members have criminal records for violence towards anyone they consider foreign.
Look at pictures of them in the press, and look for the word WASP tattooed on necks and knuckles. It stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and it's the only kind of person they seem acceptable to live here.
Re:Thank you, Pres. Trump, for putting America fir (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a question of disagreement. It's a question of utter dishonesty on your part.
Members of the "Britain First" movement are being arrested and persecuted
He was arrested for breaching his bail conditions. that's not persecution by any measure.
Shit, you can get into serious trouble there just for selling stuff with the British flag on it
Saying "serious trouble" strongly implies trouble with the authorities. No such thing happened. A few people let him know their dumbass opinions in person and on face book. OH NOES EVERY RIGHTWING NUTJOB PANIC!!
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Yeah, two world wars would tend to give patriotism and nationalism a dirty name. Let's bring them back and see if they are still a threat.
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Patri
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Every country and culture has a nasty history of some kind. That doesn't mean they just give up and commit cultural/national suicide over it. Europeans have long been a cynical lot. But the level of self-hatred and white guilt that we're seeing today has almost become a form of mass mental illness. Europe is rapidly becoming dysfunctional to the point where, when the invaders come (and they always do eventually), most will just throw open the gates and beg to be destroyed.
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And please tell me what these American interest are that the Republicans cater to and Democrats ignore. In my adult life, it's been the left that has more routinely focused on domestic social issues.
Trump puts Trump first. That is why his family and his friends are getting government roles. My biggest worry is that the country sacrifices long term stability for short term growth.
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Well, Trump is a "baby Christian" now according to the Prosperity Evangelicals. This baby Christian has decided that America no longer needs to be accommodating to refugees. Jesus said give up all you have an follow him. So we'll be seeing Trump dump his dough any moment now and offer Trump Tower to refugees...Muslim refugees, we'll be wanting to know he is sincere.
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Thank you Donald! (Score:1)
There's no way in hell Hillary would have done this. She would have only increased the number of H-1Bs.
Re:Thank you Donald! (Score:4, Informative)
She had already assured [thinkprogress.org] business leaders that she would continue the program unchanged. And she would have likely also labeled anyone opposing the visas as "racists" for daring to question them.
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I seriously hope Trump gets rid of H1B visa completely. (full stop)
We have decades of empirical data showing who H1B helps and who it hurts. It helps the business owners, and hurts the non-executive workers. For many decades we've had a government helping owners at the expense of workers. Let's try doing things the other way and see how that goes.
Re:Thank you Donald! (Score:5, Interesting)
I vote for Trump because I believed there was about a 30% chance he would actually deliver on his promises to stand up to the corporations in favor of the working class. The odds were, and still are, in favor of him being full of shit on those promises. But that 30% chance is still better than the 0% chance that Hillary would have ever stood up for the working class.
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yeah right. trump, THE corporate whore is going to fight against his own kind.
and pigs will fly, soon, too.
I'd expect clinton to fight business greed more than a REPUBLICAN who is ONLY a rich fucker and has no skills other than inheriting a lot and failing, constantly.
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Clinton has a history of standing up for working class issues.
And I'm pretty sure you are delusional.
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What a fascinating rejoinder! Do you have a blog I could follow?
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Lol, well not all of us can be as articulate and compassionate as you, obviously.
Double salary for like Linus or Tim Berners-Lee (Score:4, Interesting)
Raising the minimum H1-B salary from $60K to $150K would mean we could still bring in people like like Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee, who truly can't be found in the US. People who are truly special. A $150K minimum would eliminate the issue ofb replacing US workers with cheaper imports.
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Raising the minimum H1-B salary from $60K to $150K would mean we could still bring in people like like Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee, who truly can't be found in the US. People who are truly special. A $150K minimum would eliminate the issue ofb replacing US workers with cheaper imports.
Someone like Linus or Tim would not come on an H1B visa.
They would come with the green card already in their names. There is a separate process for people who are beneficial for national interests that bypasses H1B.
H1B is for skills that cannot be found locally from someone who is looking for employment, the emphasis being locally and with someone looking for employment. It is not for all across the US. It is not about someone locally who has the skill but is already working and not looking for employme
Interesting (Score:2)
Interesting
65,00p H1-B (Score:2)
> H-1b holders at 1 million+
The annual cap on H1-Bs is 65,000 and they are valid for six years max. If everyone with an H1-B stays the full six years, that would be 360,000 total.
390K. Don't type and walk (Score:2)
I was walking while typing. 390K of course.
Students? (Score:3)
Why are students getting H-1B Visas? Isn't this program for professionals who have expertise that can't be found locally?
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Re:Students? (Score:5, Interesting)
Its for skills that cant be found locally. The latest cutting edge research is done in universities and as the majority of grad students are foreigners if companies want people with reseaerch experience at the cutting edge they need foreign students. Students are getting H1Bs because the US immigration system is so screwed that it has no specific visa for Students who have graduated from US universities to stay and work in US (every other country which has a large education industry has a student work visa post graduation) so they use the H1B which was meant for Models.
Also mostly students are now spending 2-3 years in OPT so by the time they are on H1B they have the skills and the experience.
All this would not be needed if the Comprehensive Immigration Reform under Bush had got passed which had basically said every student graduating in STEM would have a Greencard stapled to their Diploma.
GCs are always better than H1Bs as they have the same freedom to work for anyone and do not depress the market like H1s do.
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That's not really true any longer, especially when it comes to computing, IT, and so forth. It's industry that's responsible for pretty much all of the innovation in these fields, and it has been this way since the 1980s.
Just look at programming languages. None of the widely used programming languages today came out of academia. C and C++ came from industry research labs. Java, C#, Go, and Swift came from large corporations. JavaScript came from a smal
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AI stagnated in academia because the average research budget grant simply didn't cover the cost of high performance computing at the time. In the late 1980's, MSDOS PC's were stuck with 4.77MHz/16MHz CPU's, 256 color VGA modes, and 64 kbyte memory segment block allocation sizes (aka tiny, small, medium, large and huge memory models for code generation). Academics were lucky to have a 80x87 floating-point coprocessor. Even the 32-bit or 64-bit workstations weren't that much faster due to the fact that many
Re:Students? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not students. People who graduated from a US University. For instance someone who came to grad school (or undergrad) and just graduated and is looking for a job.
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Medical residents often will get H-1B or J1. There are enough US citizens for all the Medical residency spots that are out there if you include foreign trained but US citizens. This would force all of them to take J1's. They often get J1's which say they are going back home afterwards but because there is a physician shortage (due to lack of residency spots) they can get more permanent visas. There are a lot of US citizens that have medical school loans and can't get residency spots, leaving them unable
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Why are students getting H-1B Visas? Isn't this program for professionals who have expertise that can't be found locally?
Good question. Actually, H1B is something that both foreign grad students from US universities - F1 visa holders - have to get once they've completed their OPT (Optional Practical Training). In other words, the 1-2 year period that they are allowed to remain in the US to work - that's under the extended provision of an F1 visa, but after that, they need to get an H1B
Which is the same visa that any foreign worker who's never studied in the US would have to get, if his employer wants to send him here. A
Does this help? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, there's been a lot of propaganda recently about how we train people in universities, and then kick them out. The logic is that we might as well keep their expertise in the country, since we've given it to them.
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There are probably a lot of them, but honestly enough to make a dent in the allotment?
Maybe not.
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The H-!B program prohibited the replacement of American workers before, but ways were found to get around it. This bill is really saying the same thing with the addition of foreign students getting preference for them? Maybe I'm being a negative nellie here but it seems that this bill doesn't do anything extra than the original bill did except give domestic STEM workers more competition to get into good schools due to an influx of students looking for the H-1B ride.
You're not being a Negative Nellie. You're being a Realistic Ryan.
Only a fool thinks Trump is magically fixing the H1B problem. Like the Parent said, there were always provisions to prevent H-1B's from taking jobs from Americans, but there were loopholes that were easy to exploit so expect a status quo ante trump. You've got to be naive in the extreme not to know that big business butters Trump's bread, he's not going to do anything to jepordise that, in the mean time if a bit of hand waving can appease
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There are only 65,000 H1-Bs (Score:2)
For 2017, there are regular 65,000 H1-Bs, plus 20,000 reserved for graduating students only. If graduating students are given preference for those 65,000, they'll maybe 50,000 of them. That leaves only 15K for imported workers, instead of 65K.
So yeah, it ends up meaning you have to get a degree in the US in order to have a reasonable chance of getting an H1-B.
Further reforms, like doubling the minimum H1-Bb salary, would help ensure those 15K imported workers are people you really can't find in the US, l
Preference? Don't they have that already? (Score:5, Informative)
According to existing H1-B policies, [wikipedia.org] every year up to 20,000 foreign students who receive a degree from a US university can obtain an H1-B, exempt from the main cap.
So what's different here?
I'm with Mittens on this.. (Score:1)
Staple the fucking green card to the diploma and fuck all this H1B nonsense. If these students/academics/workers are good enough to be in the industry, then these are the people we *want* to become citizens.
Why give them H1Bs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not give them a green card? If you give them H1Bs they are still slaves and will still be paid less than American workers. This isn't an improvement, it's window dressing. It won't change anything except increase the competition/corruption to get into US schools.
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It is illegal to pay them less.
What we do need is a 20% tax and have the actual job description match the job title and allow H1B1 visa applicants to file cases against employers who violate this just like we have with the department of labor.
Do not give them green cards as they will just move the money back to India anyway. Put the tax and limit the cap on these visas. This way we get doctors and architects and senior engineers who are very important, but not help desk sweat shops.
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Why not give them a green card? If you give them H1Bs they are still slaves and will still be paid less than American workers. This isn't an improvement, it's window dressing. It won't change anything except increase the competition/corruption to get into US schools.
That was the original intention of H1B. It was meant to be a super-short term work visa that would lead to a green card within a year.
There is processes to get people to come work in the US directly with a green card with EB-2 and EB-3.
However, most of H1Bs are Indian nationals and it has overwhelmed the system that there is a decade long queue to get a green card.
Also the system has been so overwhelmed that everything is broken. H1B was supposed to available all year around but it is only available f
We could always try my suggestion (Score:2)
Wright State would have loved this. (Score:2)
Wright State University [mydaytondailynews.com] was caught using university students to perpetuate H1-b fraud. They effectively were saying that the training that students were doing was worthless.
This bill would only cement that idea.
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Well, you definitely weren't first, but I'll grant you that you're retarded. At least you have that going for you. :)
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First fail. There, FTFY.
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This. Unless they patch the 3rd party provider loophole, this is meaningless.
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Seriously? House and Senate Bills have different prefixes for goodness sake...