H1-B Visa program enlargement

[powayseller]

Is the lower wage meant to compensate the employer for the additional cost of helping the visa applicant get their green card?

[Anonymous]

Dr. Chaos,
I am affected, as I am in the semiconductor industry. What I have found is that the market for grads with less than 5 years experience is most affected by foreign competition. And by foreign competition, I don’t just mean India and China. We’re investing big $$$ in Israel. Modern infrastructure, clean water, English speaking, with a huge infusion of very well educated Russian Jews (100K give or take) since Glasnost. Those guys over there are smart, hungry and ruthless. I could tell you some tales in my company that would amaze you (but unfortunately I can’t).

It sounds like you’re in the Life Sciences? PH.D.’s in my world are in very short supply. Chem Eng, Materials Science, CS and EE are what we look for. American PH.D.’s in those fields are VERY few and far between.

Have you looked at the Bay area? The opportunities in technology and biotech up there dwarf anything available in SoCal (LA, OC or SD).

Best of luck in your search.

[Anonymous]

YBC,
Thanks. It has been a good plan. I was lucky to bump into a few mentors along the way who helped guide me, including the head of my computer science dept. I will forever be grateful to those that took the time to get to know me and offered their advice.

[bob007]

problem with H-1b program is that most of the visas are given in india to substandard software engineers working for fourth rate companies.

highly talented foreign students who study in USA are locked out of the process.

[powayseller]

I know some engineers from Nokia, and they bought nice houses, so I thought they are paid a good wage. Otherwise, how could they buy a $700K house on a $50K salary… and pay for all those trips back to India/Korea every other year.

[treylane]

I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years. Many of those years have been spent surrounded by H1B visa holders from all over the world. An experience I wouldn’t trade for anything. I understand that I’m competing with them in the workplace, and some day they may very well edge me out of a job – but that’s my problem, not theirs. If they’re willing to come here and jump through the HUGE pile of hoops necessary to go from an H1B to a green card, they have my respect.

As for being paid as much as US citizens – HA. Maybe there are some companies are decent and pay work visa holders properly and don’t jerk them around, but I haven’t seen it myself. 10-20% less pay than their citizen/greencard holding coworkers sounds about right.

[anxvariety]

Glad to see some evidence of wage manipulation coming in here.. because the symptoms of it are felt in the industry I work in… no one except the employers win, the H1’s dont have much of a choice to accept the wages and it lowers the wages for everyone.

Really, it’s not hard to see.. of course a company has the advantage, why wouldn’t they use it?

For and H1 being 10,000 miles away from home on a condition that they must maintain employment to stay here isn’t exactly a strong negotiating position!!!!!

[barnaby33]

I started this thread, not to bash immigrants, but to raise awareness. Ultimately there have been a variety of views expressed which I think is really cool. I would have to say though that I have fairly profound experience in the matter and I can say with a fair amount of certitude that:

• H1-B visa holders are paid less under most circumstances. SpeedingPullet if your hubby isn’t paid less, thats a sure sign he is the actual intended target of the program
• The program already allows for companies to bring in lots of people every year 65k is NOT a small number
• When people define a “market” for us to compete in what are they defining? The US is a market. Its not the ONLY one but it is the biggest, both in terms of employers and employees. A market is exactly what I am advocating, just a more US centric one.
• By allowing basically an unlimited number of “skilled” and you can use that term as loosely as you like, worker imports. You take away the motive for Americans to work hard, by taking away the opportunities for them to be rewarded by working hard. This is especially true in fields which take lots of education before any measure of success is achieved.
• I wish I had partied and chased skirts in college, I didn’t, I was busy actually studying.

The rest of my rambling is more speculative:
I constantly come back to what davelj said, “it comes down to whose ox is being gored.” In this case its America’s. There is a huge difference between outsourcing low wage, low skilled occupations and exporting the jobs or importing the workers of high value high wage jobs. That is that those high wage high skilled jobs are the engine of the middle class. Without them we are at least in the near term going to quickly revert to a two class society. The US, minus a socialist re-distribution of wealth, will start looking an awful lot like Palm Springs. The monied class that benefits from global wage arbitrage and the rest of us.

Our governments responsibility is not to see that India has a thriving middle class, but that America does. If we can help India to do that, that is truly wonderful. Not by cutting our own competitive throats.

Which is why I come back to my origonal post. Keep the program, keep the doors open, but don’t open the flood gates.

Josh

[ybc]

I think that Japan actually did a good job in protecting their high tech jobs — by making the Japanese market more closed, by giving R&D incentives (and loans via low interest rate), and by virtue of its culture of life-time employment. The result is mixed. It definitely helped to preserve the middle class (good for citizens), and a strong high tech industry such as the precision instrumentation and machinery sector. The cons include heavily inefficient industrial complexes engaged in many subscale “high tech” segments — look at NEC, Toshiba, etc. The Japanese economy also stagnated. In addition, because of the life-long employment promise made to the older workers, more younger workers are only hired as part-timers, so they are a lot more disallusioned.

US is the opposite — more open, survival of the fittest type of competitive environment. The plus is that a US company is very competitive globally, the minus is that it may come at the cost of displaced US workers. I think that the government did a terrible job in building the right incentive systems (education, tax, R&D credit, worker retraining, etc).

It is what it is. As individuals, do what Boston_and_OC did — find a niche where you have more competitive advantage over others; this is how everyone survives in the global market place.

[Anonymous]

delete

[bubble_contagion]

I found the below article about the subject.

http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1305.html

Link Here

[vcguy_10]

CIS.ORG?

They are a bunch of anti-immigrant hate mongers. For a more intellectual, rational approach to the issue, see the Cato Institute’s page on immigration.

[CardiffBaseball]

In any case, I’d like to at at least see H-1B’s not have the indentured servitude as it stands. Allow them more free market flexibility. This might force companies to really have to pay prevailing wages.

[Anonymous]

It sounds like you’re in the Life Sciences? PH.D.’s in my world are in very short supply. Chem Eng, Materials Science, CS and EE are what we look for. American PH.D.’s in those fields are VERY few and far between.

Have you looked at the Bay area? The opportunities in technology and biotech up there dwarf anything available in SoCal (LA, OC or SD).

No, there are quite a number of biotech opportunities in SD (but mostly at the lower level—need BS in biology and chemistry intern experience to do menial labor @$14/hr—very few scientist positions). But I can’t get any of those.

I’m a physicist with expertise in nonlinear dynamics, time-series signal processing, and computational statistics; really a “data analyst”. Theoretical/computational, not experimental, unfortunately. Suggestions?

[ybc]

I once researched nonlinear control theory, very abstract stuff! So glad that I left the field…

If you’re willing to consider different career path, try a) risk management in the insurance field. There is an article on the latest Fortune magazine talking about the hard science behind risk models, and that may interest you and some of your experience may apply. And b)a quant career on the wall street (financial services industry, asset management) could be possible.

These are two that come to mind. I’m not ware of academic/research positions.

[Author]

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