<story><title>H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads</title><url>https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/25/h-1b-oracle-favored-hiring-foreign-graduates-of-u-s-colleges-over-american-grads-feds-allege</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vowelless</author><text>When I was on an h1b, I was making around 60k in the middle of the country, working for an amazing startup where we were ramen profitable. My skill set was highly specialized for the job. However, I couldn’t be a founder due to my visa status and we couldn’t pay each other even basic salaries. But we did some pretty amazing stuff for DARPA, DOD, and eventually some commercial enterprises.&lt;p&gt;You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. But maybe that is by design and I don’t mind that opinion. All countries have nativist subsets of society so it is just a normal, natural stance.&lt;p&gt;Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. But maybe now the populace believes the natives need to be protected from outside competition so that they can improve. Fair enough.</text></item><item><author>yholio</author><text>Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level.&lt;p&gt;If a company can&amp;#x27;t find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy under question. Below that level, it&amp;#x27;s the citizen&amp;#x27;s right to a fair salary without labour dumping from a poor country. Above that level, it&amp;#x27;s everybody&amp;#x27;s right to fairly priced services without professional rents.</text></item><item><author>mykowebhn</author><text>Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor&amp;#x27;s allegations really that surprising?&lt;p&gt;In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it&amp;#x27;s quite common for citizens&amp;#x2F;permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs. Companies can lock these employees for longer, and they can pay them less.&lt;p&gt;Rather than going after the companies, shouldn&amp;#x27;t we be focusing on fixing the H-1B visa process instead? It almost seems like the government has set up a broken process for companies to take advantage of, and instead of fixing things, they blame the companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ericson2314</author><text>Yes there&amp;#x27;s nativism, but that&amp;#x27;s not the only thing here. In purely economic terms h1bn visa holders are potential employess that are extra attractive because they have less power; power they cannot get back and power other classes of residents cannot give up.&lt;p&gt;This is classic artificially divide the market and race to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically.&lt;p&gt;You are making the classic mistake of holding the macroeconomics constant. If we had sane immigration policies as proposed in this thread, the going rate might have been different.&lt;p&gt;Maybe you have been payed more, matching the coasts. Maybe we all would have been paid less, matching you. Maybe the incumbents wouldn&amp;#x27;t have had a competitive advantage such that you all had to be underpaid to be even ramen profitable.&lt;p&gt;The big point is given a skill set (projection of the labor market), residency status shouldn&amp;#x27;t be economically observable. Policy should be constrained to affecting the residency status distribution accross slices.</text></comment>
<story><title>H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads</title><url>https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/25/h-1b-oracle-favored-hiring-foreign-graduates-of-u-s-colleges-over-american-grads-feds-allege</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vowelless</author><text>When I was on an h1b, I was making around 60k in the middle of the country, working for an amazing startup where we were ramen profitable. My skill set was highly specialized for the job. However, I couldn’t be a founder due to my visa status and we couldn’t pay each other even basic salaries. But we did some pretty amazing stuff for DARPA, DOD, and eventually some commercial enterprises.&lt;p&gt;You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. But maybe that is by design and I don’t mind that opinion. All countries have nativist subsets of society so it is just a normal, natural stance.&lt;p&gt;Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. But maybe now the populace believes the natives need to be protected from outside competition so that they can improve. Fair enough.</text></item><item><author>yholio</author><text>Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level.&lt;p&gt;If a company can&amp;#x27;t find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy under question. Below that level, it&amp;#x27;s the citizen&amp;#x27;s right to a fair salary without labour dumping from a poor country. Above that level, it&amp;#x27;s everybody&amp;#x27;s right to fairly priced services without professional rents.</text></item><item><author>mykowebhn</author><text>Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor&amp;#x27;s allegations really that surprising?&lt;p&gt;In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it&amp;#x27;s quite common for citizens&amp;#x2F;permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs. Companies can lock these employees for longer, and they can pay them less.&lt;p&gt;Rather than going after the companies, shouldn&amp;#x27;t we be focusing on fixing the H-1B visa process instead? It almost seems like the government has set up a broken process for companies to take advantage of, and instead of fixing things, they blame the companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinay427</author><text>&amp;gt; ramen profitable&lt;p&gt;Off topic, but I hadn&amp;#x27;t heard this expression before so I looked it up and stumbled upon an interesting Paul Graham blog post derived from it: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;ramenprofitable.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;ramenprofitable.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for introducing me to a new phrase!</text></comment>