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H-1B Visa Use Soared Last Year At Major Tech Firms (phys.org) 93

Posted by EditorDavid from the not-shopping-locally dept.
"Even as the White House began cracking down on U.S. work visas, major Silicon Valley technology firms last year dramatically ramped up hiring of workers under the controversial H-1B visa program," reports the Mercury News. Menlo Park-based Facebook in 2017 received 720 H-1B approvals, a 53 percent increase over 2016, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, which obtained federal government data. Mountain View's Google received 1,213 H-1B approvals, a 31 percent increase. The number of H-1B approvals at Intel in Santa Clara rose 19 percent and Cupertino-based Apple received 673, a 7 percent increase.... [E]xperts say the data doesn't show how many additional H-1B contractors tech companies may get from staffing agencies or outsourcing companies. In response to this news organization's inquiries, Facebook said it does not publicly discuss its use of H-1B workers or contractors. Google, Apple and Intel did not respond to requests for information about their use of H-1B workers or contractors....

Amazon chalked up the largest increase in H-1B approvals, with 2,515 in 2017, a 78 percent leap. Microsoft received 1,479 approvals, an increase of 29 percent. Neither company responded to a request for comment.
A distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley believes that the threat of a U.S. crackdown on H-1B visas may simply have prompted companies to secure as many visas as possible while they could.
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H-1B Visa Use Soared Last Year At Major Tech Firms More

H-1B Visa Use Soared Last Year At Major Tech Firms

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  • STEM, it's a job machine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Right???

  • "threat of a U.S. crackdown on H-1B visas" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well duh.

  • Get 'um while you can! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lionchild ( 581331 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @01:02PM (#57150248) Journal

    Get 'um while they're still "cheap" and while you can!

    This is a loop hole should have been tightened up long, long ago. It should be a tool used to encourage companies to invenst in their own employees, re-tooling them with the skills the company needs; not used as a reason to go looking to effectively off-shore work.

    At best, it should be a stop-gap measure while you train up local talent to fill the position long-term.

    This is a numbers game, currently, to corporations. If these numbers become less and less appealing, then they'll turn to other solutions that include increasing local skills and building local talen.

  • Misleading title? (Score:5, Informative)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @01:15PM (#57150308) Journal

    H1B use isn't up: there is an annual cap on H1B visas.

    What's changed is that "Major tech firms" are getting the visas which must have reduced the number of H1B visas that were assigned to the outsourcing companies such as Tata, HCL, Infosys, etc..

    • I should note that this is a good thing. Those major firms are less likely to be engaged in visa fraud and are more likely to pay real comparable wages.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        LOL, OK

    • Re:Misleading title? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18, 2018 @02:06PM (#57150526)

      You've on the right track, but you've got cause and effect backwards.

      The number of H-1B's is fixed, as you've said.

      With the recent changes, it's much harder for outsourcing companies and others who were abusing the system to get their applications approved. As a result, they get less of the fixed (well, capped) number of visas.

      This leaves more to go to others, which means that Facebook, Google, etc - who's applications will all fit well within the requires - see a higher percentage of their applications approved. What the article fails to mention is the number of applications each of these companies made, which while it might have been higher than past years, almost certainly wasn't as large an increase as their number of accepted applications.

      As for a labor shortage, there is not generally a shortage of tech people in the bay area. However there absolutely IS a shortage of skilled tech people, especially in certain fields. It's easy to ignore that distinction. Getting 100 (or 1000) resumes for a job isn't helpful if none of them are qualified...

      • I doubt those company file for H1B if they're not 99% sure to get it. They have better to do than wasting their time and money on visa applications, so they pour a lot of money to get H1Bs and they need to be sure they'll get it.

        Quite the opposite of consulting firms which business model *is* to flood the application system and get as many lambda person approved as they can. Those don't care who gets the visa, it's a matter of numbers only.

        So finally H1Bs are used for their original purpose : get skilled

      • I always hear about the shortage of skilled technical people, but I've witnessed the opposite being true. A number of people have IT related skills but cannot find a job because companies are often looking for rare skillsets. When I say rare I mean tools that were developed in house and not commercially available. If you don't have 10 years experience with their internal process they want nothing to do with you. They then claim they couldn't find anyone and try to find a H1B or H2B visa holder.

        The s

  • As a former H-1B and current Green Card holder (Score:5, Informative)

    by grahamwest ( 30174 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @02:23PM (#57150588) Homepage

    I was always paid the prevailing rate, and the other H-1Bs I've worked with get the same. Put it this way, they're able to get on the housing ladder in Silicon Valley. They're also really smart! Indian, German, Chinese, Canadian, British (like me), they've all been good colleagues. There may well be plenty of poor quality H-1Bs at outsourcing companies, but I've never worked anywhere that used them.

    I've given enough job interviews in my time and have always recommended people by merit. If there were more qualified Americans applying for these jobs, they'd be getting hired. I recommended plenty of Americans and they usually worked out well. Sponsoring H-1Bs is expensive and a pain in the ass. Companies don't do that unless they have to. They also have to keep dealing with it because the time to get a green card has grown from about 3 years (when I did it 15 years ago) to over a decade in many cases.

    And don't give me that ageism thing. I'm 45 and have no trouble getting hired, and neither did the older candidates I recommended. When you're growing fast you want all kinds of people, and the varied experience and attitudes they bring make everyone more productive.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Australian E3 now on a green card. My experience is the same. I was imported into a good tech company and paid the same wage as a local.

    • We get that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @03:50PM (#57150902)
      but you're still lowering market rates. Supply and demand dictate that. Your presence in the market increases supply, lowering demand. It also discourages training and investment in local talent.

      In more left leaning states like Canada and Germany that's not so bad. Your contributions to the economy are spread around in the form of public infrastructure, education and single payer healthcare.

      The trouble with us here in America is that very, very little of our tax dollars make it back to us. More than half of them is just wars and servicing the debt from those wars. We aren't gaurnteed health care or an education for ourselves or our children. What's more since employers can access well trained people like yourself without paying the taxes to maintain higher education systems we've been cutting public college funding for 2 decades now, resulting in massive debt burdens. But you don't have a choice but to take on that burden because if you don't have an advanced degree the companies can and will hire an H1-B instead so they don't have to train...

      The problem with America is that every single aspect of our lives is predicated on the quality of our jobs. Anything that gets in the way of that is a disaster for us. No, it shouldn't be that way, but it is. So that for the average American bringing in foreign labor hurts us because none of what you bring make it down to us here in the trenches. There's folks who want to change that, but so far they're in the minority.

      It's an irrational system, but if you're forced to live in an irrational system then you do what can only be called rational irrational things.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        but you're still lowering market rates. Supply and demand dictate that. Your presence in the market increases supply, lowering demand. It also discourages training and investment in local talent.

        Labour markets don't work like that, you can't compare skilled employees to commodities.

        I've recently accepted a job overseas. The company couldn't find anyone locally and is paying me above market rate. Because they have filled that key role they can now employ even more people to do related jobs, from unskilled labour right up to electrical engineering and even marketing.

        The alternative to employing me is not training and investing in local talent. That would mean delaying new products and falling behind

        • For the top end you're right (Score:4)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @08:38PM (#57151938)
          but most of what I see are code monkeys. Those are trainable skills. There was a time when a 3-6 month stint in a community college could net you a decent salary writing code. There was a time when a company would give you on the job training to do the same. The guys I know who remember that time are in their 50s and 60s. Now you need a college degree to reboot windows PCs and occasionally troubleshoot a TCP/IP issue.

          As a worker I don't really care if my country falls behind because my country's success doesn't belong to me. The companies use offshore tax havens to hide any of the benefits and monopolize the profits. We gave up on any sort of social contact here in America went all in on "supply side" economics, aka trickle down.

          Again, the issue here is that the interests of the American ruling and working classes are no completely at odds with each other. This is less true in Europe & Canada where the ruling class is still held to some standard of a social contract. Here it's every man for himself. Your presence in my economy benefits the upper class, but it actively hurts the working class. Baring a huge shift in my countries politics that's not going to change. I'm well aware that's a completely messed up situation, but I have no idea how to change it. At least not on a time scale that matters to me and my family.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • those kids aren't starting families (they can't afford to). That means fewer kids and more need for immigrants to keep the economy going. And don't think they haven't noticed. They're angry. Real angry. A few are demanding a new social contract with guarantees for food, shelter, healthcare, etc. But the bulk aren't. There's centuries of puritanical culture that make that a bitter pill for Americans to swallow (e.g. "If you don't work you don't eat").

              If this keeps up they're going to find themselves a di
    • Wouldn't your country be better off with you at home, contributing to their prosperity? Instead, you're contributing to the one country on the planet that doesn't need it. It's super-wealthy already. Your own people badly need talents like yourself and with you deserting them, how are they ever going to get ahead?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      So, why do other old Americans and I cannot get IT jobs then?

  • H1-B is, at its core, a mechanism for re-distributing wealth from richer countries to poorer ones. Which doesn't sound like a bad thing, until I look more closely. Then I see the companies that are importing cheap labour, are simultaneously taking advantage of tax breaks, concessions, and taxation-funded infrastructure. So to a fairly large extent, the companies aren't re-distributing their own wealth - they're exporting money that taxpayers legitimately expect to be spent in their own jurisdictions and for

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      H1-B is, at its core, a mechanism for re-distributing wealth from richer countries to poorer ones. Which doesn't sound like a bad thing, until I look more closely. Then I see the companies that are importing cheap labour, are simultaneously taking advantage of tax breaks, concessions, and taxation-funded infrastructure. So to a fairly large extent, the companies aren't re-distributing their own wealth - they're exporting money that taxpayers legitimately expect to be spent in their own jurisdictions and for their own interests.

      There should be two classes of corporations. Those that oink away at the public tax trough, should be required to hire locally. Those who DON'T get tax breaks and other government subsidies, can hire whomever they want from wherever they want. I can't think of a single major corporation that falls into that second category - and I'm pretty sure that category would remain empty even if my 'two classes' idea was actually implemented and enforced. So why aren't we forcing corporations to hire locally? I guess it's because government isn't "by the people, and for the people". That needs to change.

      If you really think about it, it is actually the opposite.

      A foreign country's tax payers bears all the costs of raising a child, 15+ years of education and then US just swoops in and gets to use the most productive years of the engineer. On top of that, US gets to choose the most best engineers of those who want to come.

      H1Bs also have to pay taxes. Also have to spend money on housing, transportation, health care that goes into the local economy. On top of that, they cannot be displacing an American emp

  • Trump? (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @04:21PM (#57151006)
    I thought Trump was going to fix this. It was his one redeeming quality for me.

  • If you crackdown on the bogus H1B companies, that leaves a lot more for the legitimate (high-paying) companies that really are trying to bring in the best of the rest of the world.

    • Do not crack down on tata, wipro, etc. Simply enforce the rules with denying companies future immigrants if they do not obey them. In addition, we need to add rules such as saying that if a company brings over an H1B and then sends the work back with the person (disney comes to mind), they will also be denied anymore immigrants of any kind.
  • H1Bs should not be allowed to be contracted out, or to work on contracts. Basically, it should be for a company to do the work local, and later, if the work is sent back to said contractors home, then the company should be denied future H1Bs or any form of immigration work. If we are going to keep H1B, It is time for us to enforce the laws on this.

    Note that this means that if a company like tata wants to hire H1Bs here, then it can only be for their own local work, not for work brought in-house. The sam

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