Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens
thehill.com494 points by b_mc2 14 hours ago
494 points by b_mc2 14 hours ago
A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
It's the government that controls the immigration law that gives the company the authority to sponsor a visa. Of course the H1-B is mutually beneficial to both the company and the employee, that is why the program is so popular.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.
What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
Option 1: you give a visa to a quant with 2M/y today’s salary
Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.
This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.
This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.
You could make multiple pools, having separate ones carved out for research and advanced technology.
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
What does overindexing on the swe market mean?
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.
Does the US have such a shortage of artistic talent we have to hire abroad for it?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
L1 employees require that the company employ the person for a year at an international branch so this is only available to multi-national companies.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
You have highlighted the problem I was not able to articulate. This kind of requirement “open the job to local candidates and only if no one exists will we allow you to hire from outside” exists in multiple places.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
I am not sure if your comment is directed at me but I immigrated to the US. In my case there were probably no more than 1000 people in the whole world willing and able to do my job. It was advertised in the industry job boards along with required by law newspapers. Very few people applied and none of them had been a US citizen or LPR. This is what EB immigration is for. You are welcome to lobby for another EB category based on data and tests, but you should not be allowed to commit fraud in lieu of such a category in the meantime.
EB system is pretty broad. If you really were in a position that only 1000 people in the world were able to do your job, you should’ve applied through EB1, which is designed for such people and also does not require the PERM process and therefore the job listings. EB2 and EB3 are designed for labor gaps in the industry which isn’t the same as extraordinary talent such as yours, and requires the PERM process. EB3 in fact also allows completely unskilled workers to file for permanent residency. Like I explained in the parent comment, the congress put a system to evaluate labor gaps, which is flawed. Following the rules set up by the system isn’t fraud.
>you should’ve applied through EB1
Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.
My comment was in response to your claim that EB system was created for people with rare skills, which it clearly isn’t. You were in a job that only 1000 people were able to do, you being one of them. And yet you suggested that EB1 would more laborious and not fit for you.
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.
And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?
As I said, EB-1 does not require rare skills. PERM based EB-2 and 3, though, require that there are no US workers with such skills available so it's highly correlated with skill's rarity. So why and where would I say that the entire EB system is created for people with rare skills?
>> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yep, and I am none of this.
>Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
Yep, because EB2 does not require any exceptional ability, just the lack of a US worker available, willing, and able to do the job and a master's degree.
TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team.
~
I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time.
What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.
Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.
I'd rather they cost like 4X the median worker's wage, with at least half of that collected as taxes by the government.
It should be a notable cost, and the worker needs to be making a premium for it to be a rush on immigration.
Further note, this is to also encourage more _entry level_ jobs for local workers and train up citizens to become more highly skilled workers.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.
This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it.
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
>Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
> As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed?
No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game