USA doubles visa fees for migrant IT workers The United States is set to pass a bill named the “9/11 Health and Compensation Act” and Indian IT companies are mad as hell about it. The bill delivers funding to compensate those whose lives were impacted by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. To keep those dollars flowing, the Bill has changed the amount …
The problem is with the H1B statute in the first place. It is formulated on the basis of salary. Salary (even if the companies complaining were honest about it) != employee hiring and retention cost. The discussion continuously concentrates on salary which is not the issue.
If you are hiring a local you have a retention cost - you have to provide incentives and retention measures so qualified staff does not move to a competitor. While in theory a H1B employee can move to another company along with the visa, in practice they are salaried slaves. You do not need to figure out a retention program, stock incentives, cash bonuses, perks, etc.
When you compute the difference over the length of an average H1B IT contract for a qualified employee you are looking at 20K-60K.
This bill does not even start to redress this cost differential, a fee of 50K would be more appropriate. It will be the right number for qualified employees and as far as non-qualified labor, sorry, no bonus. That should not be provided on H1B.
This post has been deleted by its author
For the same reasons that selling slaves in the Americas was easier than trying to establish plantations in Africa... note it's the *whole industry* behind this "market" complaining, not just the prospect workers. There are a lot of people in India that takes advantages of them, and probably India is also interested in how many dollars they send back home. Just they have no wish to start a far riskier IT industry - it means to have to develop products (and it usually take well paid people to design develop good products people are willingly to buy) and take risks about their possible failure... there's less risk in "selling" low-paid workers, with so-so skills..
Christoph,
Are you tilting at invisible windmills trying to equate everything this country decides as being against foreigners? Since you so obviously don't understand US policy or politics please stop commenting about it.
All these people are complaining about is scummy business owners who want to bring in someone cheaper to replace them by misusing the visa program which is only supposed to be used when a company cannot find skilled workers. The caveat is that they could have found them in the US but would have to pay them more than slave wages.
I SINCERELY hope someone uses an H1B visa to do that to you personally!
AC because I have a job, and stuff.
I am an H1B worker; I make $150k+ a year. In Texas. I seriously doubt that they're using me to depress wages. It IS, however, salaried slavery - but not in the fact that I make little money, but because I can't easily quit or move jobs. Which DOES depress wages, but for me, not for Americans. And would increase wages for Americans because it is always easier to hire an American than me. I've already had large companies tell me it would be difficult to sponsor an H1B for me - not because of the cost, but because of the process and the fact I have little time on my H1B left. I don't care. The world is a big place and someone with my skillset can be hired anywhere.
The fact is that Americans, en masse (yes, there are always exceptions) are horrible at any tech work, and wouldn't know their ass from a CPU if it bit them. The math skills of most college graduates here are beyond atrocious; I literally had to teach fractions to Project Managers drawing $80k of salary a year. You have a very serious skill shortage and the best way to enable Americans to compete is simply let them hire whoever they want. Right now I'm starting a business and I am seriously considering starting it in Europe where both the cost of living is lower and I would have no visa issues.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of H1B workers have their pick of the litter when it comes to job options; would you really want the US to NOT be a destination for highly skilled workers?
The Texan reference was to ensure that it is understood it is not the Bay Area, where $150k is entry level.
and I've been in the states far and wide; those Americans with "adequate math skills" in the tech industry by and large are foreigners. Americans don't do actual work; they do marketing.
I'll have to disagree.
When interviewing tech workers with college degrees, I find that the norm is that the candidate will lack basic math, reading comprehension and communication skills.
Perhaps some of that is due to full employment in our area, and it is primarily the "unemployable" looking for work.
But you do have to wonder what kind of education our schools are providing students, when people that should not have been awarded high school diplomas are admitted in to college and acquire degrees.
Well done. As a fellow H-1B making $225Kish in the bay are (salary + annual stock refreshers + bonuses), it's tiresome to hear of idiots babbling about the topic. Every H-1B story has a comment section that's nothing more than a circle jerk fest among westerners trying to tell themselves how they are superior and the brownies and yellows are all dumb rocks.
There's really two H1B programs. One is what the visa was intended for -- recruiting highly skilled workers from overseas to provide skills in short supply locally. This appears to be the H1 program you're on, and its the H1 program I was on. (I eventually applied for a change in status -- a Green Card -- and years later took up citizenship).
There is another H1B program, though. This is an abuse of that visa system by Indian contract programming houses. Their sales pitch is that they can replace IT workers for lower cost workers, either insourced to directly replace them our by outsourcing the work. Locally, for example, workers at Southern California Edison (a large electric utility) were replaced by these workers and, to add insult to injury, they were required to stay and train these replacements in order to get severance. This is a typical example, and its an abuse of this program.
Doubling the fees is stupid, though. What needs to happen is that the government needs to take a close look at people working the system, be it K1 visas for prospective spouses, H1 visas to import low cost contract labor or those 'investor' visas. If they're doing what they were designed to do, fine, but the world being what it is there are always people out there who will work the system.
Read it again. I am doing no such thing. I am talking about the deliberate and completely unjustified link between letting in foreigners on this visa and the attack on the World Trade centre.
Oh, and I'd be quite happy not to comment on US policy and politics if the US stopped dictating to every other country what their policy and politics should be, and bombing anyone who doesn't knuckle under.
> Very neat subliminal linking of the 9/11 attacks to letting in those nasty sub-human foreigners. It nowhere actually says it was their fault of course.
Subliminal is hardly the word if I read it correctly.
"We are increasing the H1B fee and syphoning it off to help Twin Tower victims."
It's pretty explicit actually.
Unlikely to be that much for a company that specialises in them. Either they've hired their own lawyer to do it, or they've got other in-house staff who know how to do it. US visas can be done by normal people without needing to consult a lawyer, once you've figured out what sort of answer each question wants.
"Having been to Detroit, you were wise to not go. Robocop is a documentary."
As if. I've heard it's better now, but when I went about 15 years ago to visit a friend... well, the actual city in Robocop looked quite in good shape compared to the reality. It looked like it had been nuked about 20 years in the past and left there. Buildings with all windows broken out, burned out, collapsed, and blocks of just grassland (had the buildings collapsed or did these use to be parking lots? I don't know.). Driving in on the interstate, the road (still supposedly 70MPH speed limit) suddenly became alarmingly potholed to the point that I almost hit my head on the roof, slowed down to about 40... still was shaking about as bad as that Klingon War bird when they slingshot it around the sun... I had to slow down to about 25MPH for the car to not threaten to fall apart. I looked out the window and found to my alarm that some of the concrete had worn down so much that I could see the rebar and see right through the bridge. The onramp nearest my friend's apartment had a "road closed" sign in front of a big pile of rubble, it had collapsed. On the other hand, I wasn't particularly worried about being mugged or anything, the whole area seemed largely depopulated (his apartment building had nothing within blocks of it, for instance.)
"Buildings with all windows broken out, burned out, collapsed, and blocks of just grassland (had the buildings collapsed or did these use to be parking lots? I don't know.). "
IIRC, Detroit has decided to bulldoze many of its vacant buildings and just let those areas return to grassland status. This beats having abandoned, decaying structures everywhere, and the trouble which goes along with that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
