http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-1b-visa-program-leaving-smaller-ones-in-the-cold.html
See also http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx for the list of how many H-1B visas each employer got for 2015. The top 10 are outsourcing companies.
Yup.
This program needs a total re-think, starting with more accurate comparable salary and certification that there are not citizens/permanent residents available to do the jobs.
This is such a travesty. Why isn’t there a cap on how many H1-B visas each company can be awarded?
American companies should be prohibited from firing their American employees to replace them with HiB holders. Disney did this recently as did Southern California Edison. The old employees had to train their replacements. A travesty.
Re: #3
That is small potatoes compared to the use by the outsourcing companies (though US companies often do terminate their own employees and buy services from outsourcing companies instead).
One possible way of getting the outsourcing companies out of H-1B visas is to allow them only for those who earned advanced (master’s or doctoral) degrees from US universities. Such people are the actual top-end foreign talent that the H-1B program was intended for, and are the ones hired directly by companies like GAFAM and such (the outsourcing companies pay too little to attract such people and instead bring in those holding bachelor’s degrees from non-US universities (not IIT-level) instead).
That’s how it more or less used to be in the 1980’s thru 2000. The H1’s who got Green Cards were all with US graduate degrees and undergraduate degrees from some pretty serious schools. Then as wave after wave started coming, the entrance requirements dropped as well, and now you see people from schools nobody ever heard getting H1B’s.
Most of the H-1Bs I’m seeing hired are run-of-the-mill workers with 0-5 years of experience rather than those with exceptional skills. The government needs to make it a lot more expensive to hire an H-1B. It’s hard to get exact figures, but I believe there’s a one-time cost of about $5000 per H-1B. That’s not much. I’d start by raising fees to $20,000 PER YEAR per H-1B. That should make it more difficult for companies to hire an H1 simply because they’re cheaper than American workers.
I’d put a percentage cap on the number of H-1Bs per company - maybe a max of 10% for large companies, and 25% of employees for small companies.
Finally, I’d rather see those with graduate degrees from US universities given preference over those who merely have undergraduate degrees from foreign universities. It drives me up the wall to see people with Masters and PhDs from US universities get turned down for an H-1B, while people who have Bachelors degrees and have never set foot in the US do get them.
10% ??? Good God, that could translate to thousands of workers. Put an absolute number on it, not a relative one.
It’s win-win for the big corporations and the US government: big corporations get a steady stream of workers to do mid and lower level IT jobs, do not have to worry about keeping them on their payroll, and can cycle them out just like an old PC. The US government gets to keep the FICA (social security) tax , around 15% of yearly salary with both employer and employee shares, because the H1B holders will not be in the US when it’s time for the SS payout.
The real losers are the US citizens and permanent residents - loss of more solid middle class jobs for hard working people . I don’t believe a word of this “highly qualified” stuff. Folks from my extended family in India are here on H1B visas - they were on a different academic track than someone from the well known universities in India.
As a US citizen with a kid interested in these types of jobs, it is a source of concern. Not everyone can go to Carnegie Mellon, and land an internship at Google etc. There are many hard working kids in mid level universities throughout the US who are more than capable of doing these jobs. But the big software companies have no interest - they would rather build up their cash hordes, hire a small group of graduates from elite universities, and in-source and outsource cheap labor for all other tasks. If the college kids were protesting about real stuff like this, I would actually have some sympathy.
Most of those outsource firms hire exclusively Inidans. I always wondered how that’s legal.
If you think bachelors degrees are not enough for an H1B, it gets even lower than that. My father got an H1B, his only educational qualification is an associate’s degree from abroad.
It might be a ‘win’ for the corporations except for the really bad publicity they get. I’m thinking in particular of Disney World. As for the government, when the American IT staff gets laid off, they get unemployment benefits, which costs the states.
It really gets my goat when billionaires like Zuckerberg or Gates say that they need more H1B visas because they can’t find qualified workers. I simply don’t believe them.
Actually, what they are saying is true… for them. Facebook and Microsoft hire those who graduated from US universities with master’s and doctoral degrees. This is the case for many other companies that hire H-1B visa holders directly. But they are all squeezed by the fact that low-end outsourcing companies like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, and IBM are hogging the H-1B visas as described in the linked articles. You can see a clear distinction between the pay levels of the low-end outsourcing companies and those who hire directly at http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx .
If H-1B visas were limited to those who earned master’s or doctoral degrees from US universities (or such people were given visas first before all others), that should bring in the people whom the H-1B visas were originally intended for (top-end foreign talent), at the expense of the outsourcing companies who are abusing the system.
@ucbalumnus Microsoft and Google hire many H1B’s through Infosys , wipro etc. for their middle and lower end IT jobs. So they are not exactly getting squeezed. They benefit from WIpor and Infosys hogging up the H1B visas! The employees are paid through infosys or wipro or TCS and are not official Microsoft or Google employees.
The H1B visa went from special skills (my old boss at my prior job was like that, PHd level education in computer science) to being basically a way to get low cost IT people. They changed the rules and now it technically requires only a bachelors degree or ‘equivalent experience’. Most of the H1B visas are going to the outsourcing firms, as the article says, and if I hear one more person defend it telling me these are highly skilled workers I’ll seriously go ballistic. A lot of the times when companies directly hire H1B’s, they often are the talented people, who have high level degrees, or come from top level schools overseas, but they are in the minority. As a hiring manager in IT, I see the people we are talking about, often looking to get out of the outsourcing/consulting companies, and they are not top of the heap. Many of the schools they are getting degrees from are not the equivalent of a US bachelor’s degree, they are the equivalent of an IT trade school. And the quality is pretty low, most of them go from job to job, stay 8 months, move to the next one, and they are often doing drone level work.
The H1B’s are also supposed to be frozen during recessions, when unemployment is high, yet the program was not stopped after 2008. Worse, an immigration bill (that never made it out of congress) that came from the white house and sponsors in both houses, wanted to more than double the number to something like 180,000.
What is worse with the outsourcing firms is they get brought in by a company (as with Disney and others), using the H1B the outsourcer holds, they get the people trained, then the job goes back to India (or to a certain extent, Russia and China), and the H1B visa is then used to bring someone else in.
And yes, it is done to save money, even those who were once H1B with the outsource firms who hook on with other companies are still making significantly less than if they were non visa holders. The way it is now it is basically a high tech indentured servitude, with employees who have little recourse and basically have to take what they are given.
Sadly, I doubt much will be done about this, I agree totally that outsourcing firms should be banned from having them, that all H1B are for direct employment with companies, and that they have to meet criteria, where the emphasis should be on holders with high level skills, masters level and above from good schools, not people flooding out of what basically are trade schools.
Some managers actually “like” such employees because it is more likely that such employees would have no choice but stay with the employer. It is easier for the manager to manage (or they will not try to steal the manager’s job and the manager could “abuse” them with less consequences.) More importantly, it is “cost-effective” especially when the budget is tight. Some manager still prefers to manage these people (with the “invisible chain” on them for many years), even when some of them came from the education background closer to the trade school level here.
Nope, it’s true. We had a number of projects that had to be passed on because we couldn’t get qualified workers in the US.
Lots of companies use workers from “temp” companies. But those workers need not be foreign workers. There’s no reason those temp workers couldn’t be American workers.
JOD, I hope your HR was not looking for the proverbial purple squirrel or tossed the qualified people because of some silly keyword mismatch.
One example. A highly qualified candidate saw an ad and reached out to the HM. HM told the candidate to send the résumé through the official channel to get the ball rolling. A week passed - HM got no messages from the HR. Turns out, those turnipheads looked at the résumé and decided that the skills did not match the job as described! Why? Because they could not figure out that some keywords were synonymous (like “LC/MS” is, in fact, “chromatography and mass spectroscopy” ).
One problem is that “a degree in computer science” may not functionally be enough, if the real need is “a knowledge of computer science and a top 1% intelligence”. By definition, the US has a limit on top 1%s, but there are a heck of a lot more in China and India.