This is morally and ethically wrong. If the H4 visa holder has the right to work in the past then you can't revoke it. Those already working should be grandfathered in.
It's perhaps not quite as straightforward as "H-4 visa holders had the right to work".
Previously, the H-4 visa did not come witih an automatic right to work. This has not changed. Some H-4 visa holders were eligible to apply for work authorization. Work authorization is temporary and not automatic.
Such a moronic idea.I appreciate there's an argument on who should be allowed to enter the country and live there legally, however this isn't part of it. What is the benefit for that person not to work? How does the state or Americans benefit from it?This is second only to the UK,where refugees are not allowed to work,even though the applications take years to be processed.
I find the working visa concept ridiculous. Why would a nationality be a topic in the hiring process? It's ridiculous to have the government involved in the hiring process and the first vetting step towards employment being the immigration office.
Yes, I understand the problems that limitless free movement might create but it's still unpleasant to see that people claiming to be egalitarian or people who say that want meritocracy to discuss only the implementation details of the visa system in the context of exceptions(i.e. you cannot work in this country except if you personally meet the following criteria).
Why not create a system that is fair at the core, something like "your passport countries' democracy score, worker rights, environmental protection standards and human rights need to be in the same range as the country you want to work at". The visa-free travel and visa-free working right essentially boil down to this anyway, why not remove all the exceptions and let people optimize their countries towards these metrics if they want to work in some other country?
In the current form, immigration is painful for the immigrants and doesn't do any good for the countries that send those immigrants.
The populists say all the time that they want meritocracy and complain that those women/minorities/immigrants are hired based on their gender/race/passport instead of their skills.
They are populist probably because these opinions are popular.
I think you'll find that the "America First" crowd and the "Meritocracy" crowd are listening to different parts of the arguments from the same people, and just hearing what they want to hear.
I think there is a strand in their argument that being American is a merit in itself, but this isn't usually stated explicitly except in forms like "Americans for American Jobs".
I'm not arguing this makes any logical sense though - it doesn't.
It would have been much smarter to have spouse visas count towards the H1B quota, while guaranteeing that if one partner is selected in the lottery, the other is picked, too. Right now, if a couple with active careers want to move to the US together, chances are one spouse has to abandon their career for several years and not be allowed to contribute to the economy. Or, the couple will just go elsewhere.
If being married would double your chances of being picked then that would just lead to a bunch of people getting married to get a H-1B. Similar to a green card marriage but neither of the people are citizens already. I agree that this is absolutely a problem but there would have to be a different solution.
H4 work permits are only issued to spouses when the primary H-1B holder has been on the visa for 6+ years or has already been approved for a green card and is stuck in the backlog. Someone who just received a visa or just came to the country can't apply anyways, so this isn't going to help.
Not really. It is usually the case where a lot of young men/women come here for their master's at the age of 22-23. And typically get married around 28-32, so this would be very useful for the spouse who wants to continue their career here.
H4 is notorious for not allowing spouses to leave their abusive H-1B partners (because they are dependent). Working is a way to allow them to have some breathing room when it comes to these relationships.
> America is, at its core, a nasty, venal, selfish and racist culture.
No bias to see here folks. Move along.
Trump voters and conservatives rarely care about pissing off liberals. Remember the internet is a crazy place where those who shout the loudest get the most attention. The vast majority of people are relatively sane and aren't out to hurt anybody. I'd encourage you to have an honest conversation with a few Trump voters before making blanket accusations.
People seem to think that all Trump voters care about is the economy. In reality, most of the ones I've met care deeply about their families and their country. They tend to see left wing policies as a threat to their future and the future of their children.
No, it’s more complicated than that. The BLS does a robust survey. They also track discouraged workers who have left the labor force. https://www.bls.gov/home.htm
I think one easy thing to do to ensure that small cos and rural areas still have access is to require all h1b hires to be level 4, the highest level. As it stands now more than 70% are hired at levels 1 and 2 (2018 data), which are essentially "below average" which is weird for a program aimed at bringing in those with hard to find skills.
I was browsing the H-1B data out there. Some jobs seemed like borderline first level customer service jobs when I went looking at what was at the location listed.....way way not the kind of job that is hard to find people for... provided you pay reasonably well.
H1B doesn't really have a job market test. You just need to justify it's a job that requires a bachelor's degree and pays whatever the DOL wage data says should be the prevailing wage for that classification. It's not that difficult to game the system by playing around with job level, title and location and getting away with the lowest possible pay. This is basically the business model of staffing agencies and contractors.
It's also being used by many genuine employers looking for talent and highly specialized skills. Cost isn't a concern here as their business model relies on making the best product.
Unless it's specified to be 120k hard cash, it would turn into 120k total compensation including company accommodation worth 60k/year, various practically-not-claimable options, or others ways.
The current "prevailing wage determination" includes fringe benefits already. There's definitely a way to play with those to redirect it back to the company.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect, unless you have a citation for this. The base pay has to be more than prevailing wage. You can't count any kind of bonus or stock-based compensation. This is based on personal experience.
The first and second largest public companies in the world by market cap hire a lot of H-1Bs and are not in the Bay Area and pay more than this proposed floor.
This is a silly idea because only a small percentage of professions enjoy such high salaries, so the only thing you would do if you implement something like that is end up with a disproportionate number of people with such jobs. Furthermore, companies in certain geographic areas (e.g. Silicon Valley) would rejoice, because they would be able to hire an even greater number of foreign workers before the quotas get filled.
There are much, much better ways to fix the issues with H-1B visas. The first and most important thing that needs to happen is no longer tying the visa to the employer. Once we make it so that people on H-1B can freely move around in the labor market during the course of their visa, they would automatically gain the ability to command higher wages, which would result in employers rely on foreign labor less (since it would be more expensive), and only hiring foreigners who are actually skilled and exceptional.
The problem is that skill and salary don't correlate as much as it should. As bad as we are at taxing negative externalities, we're terrible at rewarding positive externalities.
As it is we are bringing in folks on H1Bs who appear to be borderline first level customer support (this was something I ran into browsing the online DB a while back).
At least at 120k you know that the company involved really does value this employee to some extent. They're not likely to spend 120k on someone easily hired locally for far less.
I wonder if a viable H-1B reform would be a mix of a much higher cash wage floor (maybe indexed by geography, but $80-100k across the US, and $150-200k in a place like SF or NY), a requirement that they be hired by firms with at least n (=10?) US citizen or PR employees for every H1B (thus solving the Wipro/infosys problem), and then eliminating the quotas, making them H-1B portable across employers with a ~90 day window, etc.
The "n citizen jobs per m foreign jobs" is a common international founder/key employee visa requirement. Maybe make it 10x payroll for citizen/pr vs. h-1b, but there should also be an "n jobs over $x/yr ratio" to prevent the single investor/owner having a $30mm/yr salary, and then 30 x $100k H-1B jobs)
Otherwise, I'm in favor of scrapping H-1B in favor of an explicitly loosened O-1 which largely meets the same purposes as above.
I dont think this will pass and my best guess is this is the administration getting FAANG to play ball.
But... if it does, how will it work? I did read the article but it wasnt clear if current h4 employees would be grandfathered? I work at a place with a few hundred h1b engineers and it seems their spouses fill the product/project management roles. If they arent grandfathered it'd be catastrophic for the company I work for, never mind places the size of FAANG companies.
Don't be alarmed if you don't recognize a good portion of the top companies because they're Indian IT outsourcing/consulting companies that logjam the whole system.
There really isn't that big of a problem with H1Bs. It's a great way for companies to hire additional talent and to keep students that come here for graduate school inside the country where we subsidized their education.
I think we should focus on fixing the abuse first, then lets see where we stabilize, and then do further restrictions. It's too aggressive to curtail legitimate uses of H1B when it's clear that it's being so blatantly abused.
Many if not all FAANG companies supplement their workforce with those consultancies though. It's why I've stopped publishing profit per employee comments -- the denominator is arbitrary.
The truth is more complicated. Because these agencies have gamed the system, they effectively control some fraction of the labor market. To a degree, FAANG has to come to the agencies if they want engineers, no matter where on the experience / skill curve they land. I imagine there's also an element of reputation shielding as well -- people like yourself blame Tata instead of the companies that hire them, but the companies that hire them get cheaper labor that basically can't hop jobs. That has to be valuable, given the policies Steve Jobs shopped around for around no poaching.
FAANG absolutely are abusing the H1-B system, they’re just doing it through the staffing agencies you mentioned. Google and Microsoft in particular are notorious for their huge shadow workforce of vendors, a lot of whom come from the H1B-abusing body shops.
There is no "pass" to it, it's an executive policy change, it doesn't need Congressional approval. Just another example of callous cruelty from the current administration.
There's currently a 32% selection rate on the H-1B lottery, regardless of whether your application's even eligible or not. The best case (with OPT extensions right after college, not applicable for already-working people; and also assuming selection rates don't further decline) is 69% selection rate after 3 attempts. I don't imagine hundreds of thousands of H-4 holders like those odds.
Unless there are plans to expand the H-1B to accept more applications, I don't see how further stressing already overloaded VISA program would help.
Without extra Masters reservation, the odds of getting an H-1B are really low. (25%?), That's about 50% of the population on the H4 that would be unemployed for ~2 years.
What company will tentatively hire an employee until they get an H1B in what could be 3-4 years ?
There will not be any grandfathering. That said, spousal work permits typically have a 3-year duration so they might let existing permits stay valid until they expire.
The administration had been making some cautiously encouraging noises about fixes to this system. I wonder now if those voices were drowned out or the administration is just schizophrenic and this is the work of another part of the administration.
This right-to-work for H4s isn't the problem. Don't get me wrong: it sucks for those affected and it's arbitrarily capricious but it's not the problem.
Oh and BTW the US immigration system as a whole is arbitrarily capricious. This is some combination of "they're stealing our jobs" and an effort to discourage immigration in general, psychologically lumping those that sneak across the border with highly-skilled workers into the same bucket.
Some examples:
- If your green card is lost or stolen it costs $400 to replace it but, worse, it takes 8-12+ months at current queue times to get a replacement. The US government can get a US citizen a passport in a day if it needs to.
- Lose it while overseas and you're in for a world of hurt to re-enter the US (and then go through the above process to get it replaced).
- Your Labor Certification ("LC") can get audited. This sounds fine but it's really not. USCIS has a stated goal of not having applicants figure out their auditing criteria so they RANDOMLY audit a some applications. The total number of audited LCs is estimated to be ~30%.
- If your LC is audited, this just randomly adds 12-18+ months to your process depending on how many times USCIS can send you Requests for Evidence ("RFEs"). Yes this can happen more than once. Personally I know of one case where there were 3 separate RFEs for a FAANG engineer that added >2.5 years to the process.
- Green cards have quotas by country of birth. H1Bs do not. This, primarily, is the cause of the massive logjam particularly for India but, to a lesser extent, also for China, Mexico and the Phillipines (depending on the visa category).
- It is common for applications at various stages to get stuck where nothing happens for months for no real reason. This is so common that there is a procedure for dealing with it: writing to your local Senator or congressman and having their office file an inquiry with USCIS. Not everyone knows this but this tends to unstick things within a week. Why it gets stuck in the first place is a mystery.
- Once your case is assigned to a particular examiner, you're stuck with that examiner. They will process their applications on a FIFO basis and one examiner may be particularly slow compared to another for no readily apparent reason. Worse, different examiners will apply the same rule differently in that in a given situation one will ask for an additional form where another wouldn't. And yes that adds another 3-6 months to the process as your updated submission goes to the back of their queue.
- There are several time windows you need to be aware of. With sufficient delays some of your supporting documentation may be out of date. And bingo, that's another go around.
- Getting married on a green card won't really help your spouse at all. There are years long delays for sponsoring your spouse and they'll enjoy no relevant status before then. The general advice is you'll start this process and finish it probably after naturalization (which is a far quicker process).
So what is the core problem that needs to be fixed? Easy. The abuse of the system by Indian IT outsourcing companies. For these companies, the 10+ year delays in getting a green card for Indian-born people is a feature not a bug because that's longer they can keep them in what is not that far from indentured servitude.
These people aren't highly-skilled and aren't highly-paid. They're taking spots that could otherwise go to highly-skilled and highly-paid people at FAANG type companies.
Other commenters are right in that a simple minimum pay could have a lot of loopholes. Being "total compensation" with inflated values on "benefits" is just one way. Another is, say, overcharging for services that are described as optional but really aren't, like food or accomodation.
Want to see examples of how desperate people are trapped by these sorts of "fees" into essentially perpetual debt? Look no further than India's brick kilns [1].
Initially they weren't. Then there was an obama era executive order that allowed work authorization for dependents of H1B, provided they have an approved green card petition. Mostly only Indians use it because they have the biggest backlog in getting green cards.
The current administration plans to revoke it so its going through its procedures.
Considering that 93 percent of the approximately 100,000 H4 spouses are women from India, its clear at whom it is targeted. And the changes in h1b seems to be working as indented.
>The US is no longer seen as a plum posting by senior IT services employees (of Indian IT companies).
>IT giant Infosys recently blamed the denial of H-1B visas by United States (US) for part of its growing employee attrition and said that it would introduce a "new value proposition" to help retain employees.
I don't think they were blaming the government. Just citing it as one of the issues in their quarterly shareholder report.
One of the main ways these companies retain people was this: give the employee promise of onsite deputation if you work for 1-2 years in this project. Now the companies are forced to give them a decent raise or promotion or better projects.
It sucks for 2 people I know who had been working like that for the last 3-4 years. Their work day usually ends at midnight and sometimes 1 am-2am (instead of 6.45 pm). They stayed in that project because they thought one day they could go to US. Their employer applied for their visas, but got denied.
this only make sense if we also remove 'is he stealing american job' verification step (LCA) for h1b. otherwise its just weird to do you bunch of checks for h1 candidate and not do any checks for the spouse when they are potentially doing the same job. If someone is working on h4 then they should be able to get own h1b otherwise they are "stealing an american job" by definition.
Well that's the way green cards work. Only one spouse needs to pass the Labor Certification (LC) but both spouses get green cards and can work any job.
The H4 work permission was basically a stopgap for Indian citizens who should have gotten green cards years ago but didn't because of processing backlogs.
It is far from being mendacious. I'm doing exactly that, with a family of 13 people (12th kid due soon!) on one income.
Yes, it is expensive, but aren't these H-1B people supposed to have rare and special skills that are worth a lot? All I have is a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. If I can afford 11 kids on one income, surely these people with advanced degrees can afford more. At some point... how fertile can you be? One income should do.
I assume you don't live in the Bay Area? My wife and I both have high paying jobs and we currently live in a 2 bedroom apartment with just one baby. Can't imagine affording anything big enough to fit 11 kids in the Bay Area right now...
Right, I left the Bay Area as a child. I still have a grandmother and 5 of her 7 children there. Things were more affordable back in 1963.
I think it would be possible for a non-beginner Facebook employee willing to live in a 3-bedroom. It's not something I've seriously considered.
I've grown to like Brevard county, FL. It's cheap and peaceful. Walking to work is often possible, and for driving there isn't much traffic. Out here it is a long commute if you drive more than 20 minutes. You'd do that if you wanted 5 acres of land or an affordable beachfront property.
I think a bit of background is in order here. H4 EAD's are only issued for People with pending Greencard applications, that is for someone with an approved Greencard petition.(I-140). So, for some one from the countries you have described, there is no greencard wait times. Which means, a spouse on H4 visa would not have to wait-forever to get work authorization as the primary petition holder can quickly get their Greencard. Not the case for someone "Born" in countries like India, where the wait-times for Greencard is currently at a minimum 10 years and at a maximum 120 years. So, yes this really looks like it is being targeted against people born in a single country.
(I am going to assume you are genuinely curious and will answer sincerely. Also, this topic has enough easy to Google sources for my claims below that I am not bothering to cite them, primarily because I am on my phone. However I am happy to add them later if that becomes the only point of contention)
Actually there aren't (white people being affected). This primarily affects Indians and to a lesser extent, Chinese immigrants.
For every one else, if you are here on a H1, and your spouse wants to work, you apply for a green card and get it in about a year. Now you and your spouse can work (and NOT WORK without consequences) for the next 10 years, after which you have to renew your green card.
If you are from India, your green card queue is currently estimated to be 30-100 years long. This is because green cards have country of birth quotas that ignore the population of countries. During this wait time, your spouse cannot work unless they can find another employer to sponsor an independent H1B for them. Also, you have to renew your H1 every 3 years, and if you lose your job, you have less than a month to find a new one, else you have to leave the US.
The Obama administration started the H4 work permit for the above situation, for people whose spouses are stuck in an insanely long green card queue. The number of people actually on H4 work permits is a miniscule percentage of the US labor force, such that it is not going to change any economic dynamics. But it is a massive blow to the unfortunate spouses who rely on it.
At which point, the most likely logical explanation for this step is that the Trump administration thinks that it will please his primary voter base, and the actual distribution of the affected people suggest (even if it is hard to prove) that racism played a role.
> Visa is not a right, it's a privilege. "Please be aware, entering the United States is a privilege, not a right."
100% correct, and nobody is saying otherwise.
What people here are saying is that it's a two-way street. The alien agrees to leave their lives behind, leave their friends, their families, their jobs back home and come work for an American employer to the benefit of the US and the US economy over that of their home country. In exchange, the government agrees to allow them to enter into and reside in the United States for a period of time and affords them certain rights and privileges. That's the deal.
Reneging on your end of the deal half way through is dealing in bad faith. It makes America look bad. It diminishes America's brand, it's standing in the world, its reputation and the value of its word. Make no mistake it's entitled to do that. What we're arguing is breaking your word is bad and you could argue that's true regardless how you feel about the H-4 program.
It's just like backing out of the climate accord, backing out of the Iran deal and demanding concessions on NAFTA. America's word should be its bond. Every single one of these deals is time-limited, including H-4s. Change it on expiry. Don't renew it. Update the program for the next wave. Don't pull the rug out from under the world, especially those that depend on you. It's not a good look, and doing it enough times may leave America without a seat at the table.
> It diminishes America's brand, it's standing in the world, its reputation and the value of its word.
Spot on. The amount of damage done in the last couple of years is incredible, the long term damage is going to have major effect on America's ability to effectively develop its foreign policies.
I'm trying to be very specific in not arguing about the merits of the program but in how the change was implemented and what that means. You made promises to these people and now you're breaking them (assuming you're an American, as the government acts on your behalf). You can choose not to make the promises again in the future, but that's totally different. I'm not opining on the merits of the decision but in how it was made, and that's equally important if not more so.
Just to address some misinformation -- again without opining -- I don't think the H-1B program has a $60K minimum wage as you assert. The program requires your employer pay you at least the prevailing wage for your job in the geographical area. This information is maintained by the Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration National Prevailing Wage Center (DOLETA NPWC), I kid you not. A prospective employer of an H-1B worker is required to file an LCA (labor conditions application) with the Department of Labor showing that they are paying at least the prevailing wage. The form is here [1].
Frankly if you search [2] you'll see a software developer would need to be paid between $95K and $175K in San Francisco depending on seniority. Sounds about right, tbh.
Everyone is pretty aware that most H1-b visa holders aren’t exactly highly-skilled labor.
"Everyone is pretty aware" seems like a way of avoiding examining the facts. H1-B visas are explicitly designed for skilled labor, and most non-US citizens working in the US at places like Google and Facebook come under a H1-B visa.
So.. maybe "most" aren't high skilled labor, but 90% of applicants are jobs requiring high STEM knowledge[1], so it seems like a bit of evidence to support your view here might be useful.
It’s been heavily abused at this point.
This is possible, but it seems like the solution would be to attack the abuse problem rather than banning the spouses of people who are doing the right thing.
I have no idea why you're citing a government website on an ethical question. You realize that law and policy is just something a bunch of people decided was a good idea? The distinction between rights versus privileges, insofar as it is defined by law and policy, has nothing to do with ethics.
So "law and policy is just something a bunch of people decided was a good idea". What do you think ethics is? If we're going to be really strict, then everything about humans is "just a bunch of people decided was a good idea".
Do you believe, as I do, that the foundation of ethics is supernatural? If not, then ethics is also just something a bunch of people decided was a good idea too in your world view. And a democratically elected representative legislative body is as good a bunch of people as any to do so.
Edit: this really is the cultural differences thread
Driving is a privilege and if the government arbitrary removed it from a certain class of people it would be considered unjust. Here an example. California revoking all drivers license to people who moved to the state in the last 5 years. It’s perfectly legal and could have a good justification with easing congestion but is pretty unjust to people who need a car to get to work.
I will throw a different perspective here on why tightening regulations on H-4 spouse work is important:
- Fact is everyone comes to the US to have a better economic life.
- Even asylum seekers, would want to move to the US over any other progressive European nation , because, American Dream, easy upwards mobility, diversity. This is a personal observation.
Let me shed some light on how it works for Indian people. You can extrapolate it to other entities too.
- Indian girls in general conveniently marry a US living
husband of their parents choice(not all but many), and
compete for the same jobs with kids who finished their
Masters Degrees here.
- H-1B visa system is fucked up. Infosys and Wipro and
TCS ship tons of their employees to the US.These people
work at a price less than the current market price.
- This is bad for three reasons:
- Kids don't want to come to the United States to do their Masters because, job market
is tight. Its bad for schools and kids too. Schools for those foreign dollars, for kids- its important to have
an exposure to outside world - this helps shape world view in a tremendously good way.
- These people are employed mostly to replace existing American workers.
- From my observations, the reason I am biased in favouring kids coming here for
Masters is because, with in the time it takes to finish their education, and the
time it takes to find a job, they imbibe American culture. This may sound silly, but
it is very important. These people at some time will become citizens and will become
part of national discourse.
- Contractors shipped by Infosys and Wipro and TCS could never be part of that. It is
hardly possible. Again , its a personal observation.
- So , how do all these things tie together
- Someone who finishes his Masters in the United States is expected to find a job with in three months of his
OPT(Optional Practical Training) start date.
- Now these people are mostly by themselves and invested heavily for their education. No reason why these people
flock to so called 'consultancies'.
- Compare that to the spouses of existing H-1B visa holders, who never invested anything here. No cultural
investment, nor education. They have a security to live here for as long as their relatively smart husband is
allowed to live. With unlimited amount of time compared to some one with a Masters degree, they are at a
disproportionate advantage.
- People finishing Masters should be given precedence over H4 spouses and H-1B's(for reasons above) hired by
outsourcing companies.
- There is more to it than we know.For all the xenophobia, this administration is displaying there are times,
they are not wrong.
Even if the administration does actually issue a ruling (which they have been sitting on for years now), it will immediately be challenged in courts and remain there indefinitely. Like everything else it's meant to be a talking point for Trump at his rallies, nothing more.
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