I feel like this proposed bill doesn't go far enough.
H-1B visas should ONLY be granted for workers that are in such need that they are above the 90th percentile of pay for that role. They should also be limited to no more commitment to the company than their peer workers.
Once within the country, an H-1B worker should also be able to leave for other employment (without the top market rate requirement) whenever they choose and with a 6-12 month grace period for finding new work if they quit or are laid off.
The entire point should be about bringing valuable future citizens in to the country, and the program should definitely be a strong path to citizenship.
It also makes sense to have a different (easier to get) type of immigration for workers that want to start a company (and have most of those jobs) within the US.
I have Indian friends in Canada who were hired for an American company but are currently in a Canada office since the company plans to L1 them (which is much easier since getting an H1B as an Indian citizen is hard). I have been (unsuccessfully) trying to convince them stay and avoid the tons of issues that US immigration has. Well, one of them wants to stay in Canada, but I think he wanted to from the start since he was aware of these things too.
I myself was considering Canada for my current job, but chose against it due to a number of reasons specific to my case.
Fortunately they all work for a good company, which probably won't abuse its power over them once they're in the U.S.
>they are above the 90th percentile of pay for that role
The problem with that is that companies will do what they are doing now. Give people titles for lower wage jobs (support, QA etc...) pay them the 90% for the lower wage job, and have them perform the duties of the higher wage job.
That is a problem. I do agree that it doesn't go far enough though. It probably ought to be like $150k for a minimum, and tie that to inflation. Even if that creates a short term supply problem, that'll just incentivize investment in job training and raise wages.
Make it so that if this is the case, the manager goes to prison, the employee gets paid the difference and a green card. Anybody would snitch in that case and the manager knows that.
I agree with everything you are saying. Almost everything about the work visa and employment based immigration needs to be reviewed.
I grew up in the USA (undocumented) and had to leave because I wanted to try to come back legally. Unfortunately, it's not easy even if I can easily get a six figure job or start a business.
> The entire point should be about bringing valuable future citizens in to the country, and the program should definitely be a strong path to citizenship.
For what is worth, not everyone who wants to live and work in the long term in the US wishes to become a US citizen. A lot of us would be happy with an easier path to permanent residence (green card), which would solve the problem of being "able to leave for other employment".
Also, from the point of view of US citizens who favor stricter immigration, it can be argued that simply making it easier for people to become US citizens doesn't solve the (real or perceived) problem of depressed salaries or higher unemployment rate due to the increased labour pool.
> Once within the country, an H-1B worker should also be able to leave for other employment (without the top market rate requirement) whenever they choose and with a 6-12 month grace period for finding new work if they quit or are laid off.
Isn't that just going to lead tata/infosys/whatnot to establish front companies that people then immediately leave and join tata/infosys/whatnot?
How would that work? People agree to take a paper job for $150k and then quit and take the $75k? This seems like pretty easy behavior to both prohibit and enforce.
But I'm not sure why those people wouldn't just go to Google and leave Infosys on the hook for all their initial immigration expenses anyway.
" This will definitely help to reduce the use of H1B for hiring underpaid foreign labor."
Surely it will, but it also may damage many companies ability to compete effectively.
A lot of talented R&D folks, outside of the Valley, may be earning 80-95K doing valuable work - and most of the surpluses will go to those companies, to the US in form of taxes, and remember those people spend mostly in the US as well.
So the issue is the degree to which Americans are actually displaced by those foreigners - that's the real underlying issue.
Here's the thing - if a corporation's "competitiveness" is dependent on a deeply coercive ability to control their employee's right to live and work in the US, with severely limited mobility rights for the worker, I'm not sure I care all that much.
If you can't pay high enough wages to compete for talent that has the freedom to choose which job and industry they work in, then you're probably not a high value employer.
"dependent on a deeply coercive ability to control their employee's right to live and work in the US"
This is a little misplaced I think.
Google, FB et. al. are major users of H1 programs and I seriously doubt they are not 'high value employers'.
'The right to live and work' is governed by citizenship, which goes way beyond just economic issues.
In the 'general case' the H1 program is valuable: US companies can bring in top-talent from foreign places for a few years to do great work. That's good. It's when the H1's are used to displace local workers simply to lower wages - this is the problem.
On principle, I'm generally opposed to any arrangement where the employer controls the employee's right to live and work in the US. That includes bestowing the right in the first place, but it's especially pernicious when that power continues throughout the relationship.
Truth is, even "high value" employers like google are up to mischief. Remember that wage suppression no-hire collusion? I don't really trust them with this power, and not just because I generally don't trust corporations with this power. Google and the other participants in this no-hire scheme gave us good reason not to trust them in this regard.
Now, on a practical note, though, I think sometimes principles need fuzzy boundaries. It's bad PR for high tech employers to talk about a critical shortage of workers while firing $100k a year mid-level tech employees and requiring that they train their H1B replacements as a condition of receiving severance and 6 more months of employment as they scramble to find a new job. But in a same vein, it would be bad PR for critics of the H1B program to get too vocal about the "exploitation" of $250k+ a year SSE's at google. That would not play well in peoria.
Honestly, if we set a very high minimum salary for the H1B (say, 200k a year), I think the problems we see with it would largely fade - though I assure you tech employers would be up in arms[1].
100k does seem too low to me - not because tech employees are "entitled" to more than this (nobody is), but because generally, US employers are required to hire from the pool of people who currently have live/work rights in the US - a country with a population of 300 million that takes an additional 1.2 (roughly) legal immigrants into the country every year. We created the H1B visa largely because high tech employers claimed that they couldn't find critically needed highly skilled workers from this massive labor pool, so they needed the power to bestow (and maintain control over!) limited live/work rights in the US on new hires.
So we're talking about a unique and very serious power and privilege accorded to these companies, granted on the agreement that these are rare and unusual workers with high levels of skill who are supplementing, not displacing, the existing workforce. If a corporation wants that power, but then says 100k is too much to pay this worker (in the bay area, no less!), then I pretty much feel we should dismiss that claim with scorn, frankly. Seriously, this is an utterly critical worker to you and the US economy, you need this person to work in the most expensive city in the country, and 100k is too much? Look, sounds like you can compete for the existing labor workforce like everyone else.
Believe it or not, $250k a year isn't an outrageous salary for a highly skilled worker in San Francisco. That's hardly an unusual salary for a lawyer or physician, and many of these critical H1B hires do have advanced degrees in STEM fields, which at the elite level are arguably more difficult to obtain than law or MBA degrees.
But overall, yeah, I certainly wouldn't be arguing as vociferously against this visa if use were limited to people paid SSE level salaries at google. Nor, I suspect, would most of the people who object to it. The only objections you'd see there would be from the heavy users of this visa, especially the body shops.
[1] I do wonder if there's a good strategy in this for google and Facebook, though. Clearly, these companies are frustrated when they can't get enough visas. So far, their approach has been to lobby for expansion of the number of visas, but that is causing a PR problem at this point. If they were to get a much higher minimum salary - even 100k would help, $150 would be better - they would no longer have to contend with body shops snapping up all the visas. I'm honestly very cynical about this at this point, especially hearing Zoe Lofgren starting to criticize the program. But I think what is happening here is that the industry, and their allies in government, are starting to realize that the H1B program, because of the serious abuses, is gaining a very bad reputation, and they're at risk of losing it. It makes strategic sense to get out ahead of this and reform it so that google can still use it but the body shops can't get visas.
In theory that sounds good... In practice does the wage difference go directly to the companies who manage the H-1B employees? It's not like they would pass that on...
