This comes in time with the whole debacle of the H-1B lottery being triggered this year due to too many people applying within 5 days of the quota period, overflowing the 85k yearly quota by almost twice.
I've written about this before, and I like to impress upon you yet again that the majority of H-1Bs are taken by outsourcing / consulting companies that you might not have heard of, like WiPro, InfoSys, Satyam, Tata, Deloitte, Patni, which contribute the least to innovation, in my humble opinion.
Second in line is Microsoft, Google, et al. and the smallest group by far are startups and small businesses, which innovate the most and create the most jobs for the US.
Why not make work visas easier to get for small companies but limit visas per company? That'll make sure companies pick correctly and only people they need. Or maybe make it much more expensive. There is currently an additional (around 2k/appl iirc) cost for having too many H-1Bs, but it's not enough. The visa system heavily favours larger companies, because it was created and lobbied by them.
Besides, if you're worried about foreigners driving salaries down, you should quit targeting the H-1B which has a legitimate prevailing wage requirement (and we can argue for days whether the DOL does a good job of deciding what prevailing is, and I'll say it does, but that's a different issue).
The L-1 visa for employees of multinationals has almost as many people entering the country per year, but has NO prevailing wage requirements. Yup, I can bring in a person from another country and pay them federal minimum wage to be an engineer.
...
My opinion on calls to end the H-1B used to be pretty negative but maybe we do need a startup visa. My problem with the startup visa is that it's pushed by VCs and favours that model heavily. Want to bootstrap? Want to raise angel investment for a year or two? Good luck.
In any case, the US has a labour force of 150 million. We're talking about 85k a year.
Could we agree that letting small / medium businesses hire a reasonable number of H-1Bs easily would not demolish the the US economy or significantly? Let the cap be for the large ones.
They will drive salaries down by simple supply/demand (but that's not a reason to not to do it -- just like increasing the number of engineering graduates is a good idea regardless of wage effects).
Totally agreed on the cap for large companies and not small ones. There is a lot of precedent for small companies having different rules, and this is one where being small is a huge disadvantage.
In my case, it's because I might hire one H-1B in a year and can't take the risk that I will lose them to a lottery. A company hiring 100 can risk losing a % of that.
Comments
This comes in time with the whole debacle of the H-1B lottery being triggered this year due to too many people applying within 5 days of the quota period, overflowing the 85k yearly quota by almost twice.
I've written about this before, and I like to impress upon you yet again that the majority of H-1Bs are taken by outsourcing / consulting companies that you might not have heard of, like WiPro, InfoSys, Satyam, Tata, Deloitte, Patni, which contribute the least to innovation, in my humble opinion.
Second in line is Microsoft, Google, et al. and the smallest group by far are startups and small businesses, which innovate the most and create the most jobs for the US.
Why not make work visas easier to get for small companies but limit visas per company? That'll make sure companies pick correctly and only people they need. Or maybe make it much more expensive. There is currently an additional (around 2k/appl iirc) cost for having too many H-1Bs, but it's not enough. The visa system heavily favours larger companies, because it was created and lobbied by them.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5515519
....
Besides, if you're worried about foreigners driving salaries down, you should quit targeting the H-1B which has a legitimate prevailing wage requirement (and we can argue for days whether the DOL does a good job of deciding what prevailing is, and I'll say it does, but that's a different issue).
The L-1 visa for employees of multinationals has almost as many people entering the country per year, but has NO prevailing wage requirements. Yup, I can bring in a person from another country and pay them federal minimum wage to be an engineer.
...
My opinion on calls to end the H-1B used to be pretty negative but maybe we do need a startup visa. My problem with the startup visa is that it's pushed by VCs and favours that model heavily. Want to bootstrap? Want to raise angel investment for a year or two? Good luck.
In any case, the US has a labour force of 150 million. We're talking about 85k a year.
Could we agree that letting small / medium businesses hire a reasonable number of H-1Bs easily would not demolish the the US economy or significantly? Let the cap be for the large ones.
They will drive salaries down by simple supply/demand (but that's not a reason to not to do it -- just like increasing the number of engineering graduates is a good idea regardless of wage effects).
Totally agreed on the cap for large companies and not small ones. There is a lot of precedent for small companies having different rules, and this is one where being small is a huge disadvantage.
In my case, it's because I might hire one H-1B in a year and can't take the risk that I will lose them to a lottery. A company hiring 100 can risk losing a % of that.