Yves here. Even over this normally quiet holiday period, the Musk-oligarch and now Trump fight with MAGA over H-1B visas continued at a fierce pitch in the social media sphere. Readers may have seen some of the information snippets below (for instance, Lambert featured key parts of the Robert Sterling tweetstorm below). But when you put the major elements of the case versus the H-1B visa from the American workers perspective, as Tom Neuburger does below, it’s overwhelming.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
For those who bought the “Learn to code” lie (source)
“We live among predators, lions and tigers and bears, each determined to eat what they can of us before another takes a bite first.”
—Yours truly, here
This is something everyone who’s worked in high tech has known for decades. As I put it a few days ago: “H-1B is a wage-theft scam, because the rich aren’t rich enough yet.”
Now for some detail. First, from reporter Lee Fang:
Next this, about Amazon and its H-1B visa applications for warehouse jobs:
And this, from right-wing commenter Ashley St. Clair. (She could lose her seat at the table if she keeps on like this.)
Finally, consider reading this data-rich thread regarding the “body shops” involved in H-1B worker trafficking:
Within which we find such goodies as this — ten times the statutory limit of approvals per year. Your (well, actually their) government breaks the law for them voluntarily.
And this — almost all of these wages are well below market:
‘Learn to Code’
It’s very simple. High tech companies like Google and Apple (and, really, all of them) bring in foreign H-1B workers to 1) create indentured employees — people who can only live in the U.S. by staying in the good graces of their employer — and 2) keep Americans from earning too much. Because money.
Americans in high tech have been suffering through layoffs since 2022, massive ones, with no end in sight, and H-1B visas exist to fill the gap. Take that, well-paid American worker. “Learn to code” indeed.
We live among predators…
H1B was always a racket. Friends found it a breeze in New York and nightmare in Texas to get Labour certification from Bureau of Labor when 5 years of H1B required Green Card application.
The whole US Immigration System is a disaster since it was skewed away from Europe towards Asia. Quotas were never filled from Europe but are never enough for Asia and their creativity at faking qualifications is boundless even having surrogates take exams.
Trump is in thrall to PayPal Mafia which has sidelined the Brin-Zuckerberg Faction but ALL can unite on importing slave Labour to park on ships offshore or import on temporary H1B
H1B should be capped by function or country of origin and employers should post a Bond to ensure the employee has funds to return home throughout Visa term
I was reading online posts over 20 years ago where IT professionals were quite bitter over the effect of H1B labor on their job and salary prospects. This was post the Y2K boom but still in the early-mid 2000s labor market (hardly recession territory). Even then the scam was know and called out. Many of the core arguments are identical. But it never had the heat or rage of this recent episode.
Unlikely to work. “Caps” and “reform” are now radical centrist issues. We’ve entered the “extreme-in-ator” phase of this policy. Oligarchs will push for practically unlimited H1B visas, populists for zero immigration (actually remigration at this point). There is no middle ground. Musk’s torrid online spectacle over the holidays did in fact lay out the policy positions for practical purposes.
Personally I think he US is ultimately headed for a re-run of the 1925 immigration act. The only question is how long and large the oligarchs can push the immigration blowout before the whiplash sets in.
Enrollment in IT-related US academic programs collapsed in the early 2000s largely as a result of off-shoring and H1B wage suppression. Resulting shortages of native workers then fuel demands for more H1Bs and further suppressed wages. The process has been going on for decades. Top native US IT/math/programming talent ends up in finance, not engineering or manufacturing or even Silicon Valley. Hedge funds pay much better than their competitors for skilled IT labor.
This seems to be a massive national security issue as well. Indian intelligence services along with other countries haven’t backdoor every corporation in the United States? Perhaps there are corporate secrets between corporations but there are no secrets from RAW.
Memphis has corporate HQ’s of Autozone, International Paper, and Fedex. These companies may have some middle aged white guy project managers but almost all the rest of the IT staff is Indian. My friend was an IT consultant. He quit the business a few years ago. He is convinced corporate IT system are held together by baling wire and bubble gum, in addition to being totally compromised.
Way, way back in 2004, this was the subject of an award-winning novel, Transmission, by Hari Kunzru: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_(novel)
The hero of the novel is an Indian who is trafficked to the US by a company that IIRC is called Data Bodies. They put him I in NoCal and then with very little notice ship him off to Maine where he lives in constant fear of being fired and sent home to his parents whom he has told braves lies about his success in America.
Anyway, anyone who was paying attention has known about this for decades. And I know we are governed by wolves but what kills me is all the ordinary barely comfortable people, mostly the stereotypical OK Boomers, who go along with and pretend like we are still living in 1985 with 1985’s economy and the only things to worry about are Russia! and Ukraine! and Fascism! and Racism! and…you get the idea…
Let’s see if Trump now comes to say that all those H-1B workers are actually refugees from the jungle being given sanctuary in Amerika.
And let’s see how much cognitive dissonance there is among MAGA-philes/fools.
“Anyway, anyone who was paying attention has known about this for decades.”
Well I pay a lot of attention to blogs like this one and seems to me this is barely talked about at all. The pitch has always been that Asian developing countries with their large populations are overcompeting us in the engineering space rather than that the program is mere labor arbitrage to service big tech profits. Or, in other words, it’s a big brain pool world and a small United States relatively speaking.
Of course both arguments could be true. I like the Construction Physics blog and his latest is about how a Chinese immigrant went from Texas Instruments to building what is now one of the world’s most important companies.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc
So in our age of grifters it could be that something that was needed and justified and helped the US to command the tech space for awhile has degenerated into yet another financial boyz scam.
Software dudes have known about it for decades. Here’s a Slashdot story from 2008. That is by no means the earliest, just the earliest on the first page of my search results.
I worked two H-1Bs in the biotech industry. Two observations.
1. I saw zero evidence of visa fraud in that industry. It’s hard to fake doctoral lab experience…
2. There were several Chinese H-1B visa holders I worked with. Zero Indians.
I suspect the H-1B fraud is in jobs where you don’t need the expertise to be able to do the job (warehouse??) or where there is financial collusion between the traffickers and the sponsors.
No, did you miss the stories about Indian body shops giving minimal training to IT hires???? Biotech is far from the main employer. If you have been following this at all, it’s the computer software biz.
Absolutely not. Most of the Indians I worked with were just out of college and were in the process of being trained in the languages and business I worked in – life insurance. Only on the last project I worked on (last year) did the H1-B’s have any experience.
Look at the graphics posted right on this page.
I, too, have known at least one non-Indian, non-tech-industry H1B holder. She was under a great deal of stress when there was a paperwork problem and she had to go back to her home country (of course, her lease, car loan, and all other bills kept ticking) for months while her employer sorted it out. That alone made me hate this program.
But that’s an anecdote and the post here is data.
Maybe depends on the industry? IT seems to have been a pioneer. When I took a corporate IT job in the 90s, this was already a well-established practice. My colleagues were 90% non-USian, all on H-1Bs: from India, China, the UK, Eastern Europe, Russia, etc.
Was it fraud? At the time, my distinct impression was that my colleagues all thought their status was kind of dodgy, but they wanted to make a new life in the putative land of opportunity, so they weren’t asking too many questions. We’d have lunch together every day and they were constantly fretting about their visas. Later, the company was acquired, the new owners treated employees badly, some quit, and one guy started making noises about organized action (i.e., a strike). There were no takers. I saw right then that these visas were a very effective strategy to keep labor docile.
Somewhat ironically, I had originally started in IT during the early 80s, straight out of H.S., and it was an Indian colleague who one day took me aside to say: “you are being exploited here — you should leave, go to college, and then maybe think about coming back.”
He was from Kerala, the Marxist state in South India that you never hear about.
Coding is the perfect storm of non-credentialed and non-regulated (unlike medicine, teaching, law, most civil engineering), not tied to culture (unlike design), doesn’t require a very firm command of English, non-union (unlik manufacturing), and the US is so incredibly dominant that other countries’ coders, especially India’s, all learn to do it the US way, talking about scrum and agile and all that.
this is an excellent point
And yet, the media, the politicians, and the wealthy will say it’s either the bigots or the communists who are the problem, not the corporations, the wealthy, and the corrupt.
Man, if 120k is towards the lower end of developer salary ranges I should be paid way more!
Even 80k is towards the top end of developer salaries here in Tokyo. Admittedly that is more to do with the recent weakness of the yen and 80k certainly goes a lot further here than it would in Silicon Valley, but still, it makes me think how much more could I be earning if I lived in the US rather than Japan.
EarlyGray, you may wish to consider this calculation of PPP.
And that’s for the whole country. Silicon Valley is a special brand of crazy when it comes to cost of living.
Earl Gray, I’m not sure what Santo’s numbers mean. Scroll down here for the current OECD PPP for Japan (69).
There’s income … and then there’s expenses, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/twitter-employee-earning-160000-says-hes-barely-making-ends-meet.html
That’s back in 2017, imagine what you’ll be paying for rent today. Anyway, I had worked as a software engineer in the Bay Area until 2022, and recently I moved to Japan from Taiwan to ply the same trade. Since this is my first time working in Japan, I don’t know yet whether it’s better or worse overall.
A couple of things:
1. Rent is mighty expensive in the Bay Area. Buying a house, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
2. You are going to need a car. There’s BART, Caltrain and Muni, but you are going to tire of those pretty quickly because unlike Japan, the trains rarely depart/arrive on time, they are poorly maintained, and some of your fellow passengers could be dangerous to your health. One of the memories I will never forget is the smell of human feces emanating from the BART carriage I was about to step into one Thanksgiving afternoon. A homeless person had taken a big d**p earlier and BART had seen it fit to keep the carriage in service.
3. Visiting the Tenderloin area in San Francisco would be like visiting a third world country, heck perhaps worse.
4. Service generally sucks, but your servers would expect a 20% tip at least. Imagine ordering a cup of coffee to go and being presented with an option to add a 20% tip on some tablet.
The golden era of working as a software developer in the US is over IMHO.
Being in the DoD space, pretty much all my devs had to get a clearance, so H1B not a player. But GS-11 or 12 on the civil service side is not going to make you rich. Our engineers started at GS-7 just out of school. But there is locality pay too.
SoCalJim, good comment and I agree, especially with BART – your commentary is music to my ears. Bart is my daughter’s only viable option. She tends bar in the Theater District (near Tenderloin) and typically takes the last or next to last train across the bay. She carries pepper spray and dresses to somewhat disguise being a food/beverage service worker (tips).
A friend on an H1B was slated for layoff, and he begged – BEGGED – to stay on at lower salary – and saved his job. The alternative was moving his family back to China. He was one of the lucky ones.
Another anecdote: while working as a consultant at a medium-sized company, saw a job posting for “H1B Only” – which I’m pretty sure was illegal. No Americans need apply.
My question is why do foreign “professionals” only come from poor third world countries and not from rich western countries with better educational opportunities?
Isn’t it obvious? For many, particularly if you’re from a “rich western country”, moving to America is often a *massive* step-back in quality of life: dealing with labyrinthine private healthcare system and health care denials in a system that’s falling apart and massively underdelivering on health outcomes, school & public shootings (including road rage), low quality & underfunded primary-education system (if you have kids), car culture requiring driving and everyone sitting in their 8000-lb bubbles for multiple hours a day and lack of public transit, lack of third spaces, food is much more expensive, rent is much more expensive, higher homelessness, expensive dental, and list goes on.
When you tally up all the lower take home wages by factoring in all the COL and Quality of Living, it’s not a good proposition for many people from “rich western” countries. It’s barely even a good proposition for people from “poor” countries” but at least you will make more “money” that you can send home to buy your family/extended family a better life there.
Also if you think about it in terms of a unipolar petrodollar hegemon, then it’s in America’s best interests to deprive “poor” countries of more education workforce to keep them from being too uppity and too resistant to colonial and exploitative plundering of their country. It doesn’t really help the American hegemony to take a bunch of Danish dentists or whatever because Denmark is already subservient to America and is not at risk at challenging that.
It’s not limited to rich Western countries. IM Doc has described how the current MD shortage is deliberate. The US anticipated a MD surplus in the 1980s based on med school enrollment levels and pressured the unis to cut back on program size. The belief then was that any (likely) shortfall would be covered by recruiting foreign-trained doctors.
The US found out that after an initial successful wave of getting non-US MDs to come here, many returned and enlistment levels fell off. Word got out as to how lousy it was to practice medicine here, between dealing with insurers and on top of that, corporatized practices.
I do remember, back in the 1970’s and early ’80’s, when I worked at two universities with med and dental schools, east coast and west coast, that the talk was of a future surplus of dentists, so no new or enlarged dental schools. Plus, rule of thumb was, for increasing institutional prestige, it was cheaper to add a law school than a med school. The law school needed only a library; the med school, expensive labs and a teaching hospital. Oh, and a med school dean, less of an administrator than a minor god. Well, scratch the ‘minor.’
There is another twist here. Years ago, my colleagues and I wrote a paper on the responsiveness or the lack thereof of the US higher education system to the needs of the economy and the labor market. It turned out that, for example, the number of medical student seats available at med schools, enrollment and degrees granted had barely budged between 1980 to about 2005, while the population had soared by 80 mill or thereabouts.
https://www.aamc.org/media/8661/download
Our calls to college/univ admissions officers revealed the complex impact of occupational cartels (obviously only for powerful occupations and trade bodies – AMA etc), role of alums, University incentive to keep alums happy through restricting supply -> keeping salaries high -> attracting donations.
There is no doubt that H1B acts a boost to the the supply of software engineers, keeps salaries low and helps the tech employer class…..but there is a different story for some other occupations. In any case, it looks like the higher education system in the country seems to march to its own drummer, while immigration policy is hijacked by the oligarchy
There are a lot of H1Bs in the US hired as doctors. Look at any advertisement page in the back of a medical journal. They would be ideal in a corporate owned clinic or hospital. In India getting into a major government med school is about who you pay to get the questions on the entrance exams. And the private schools in India take anyone who pays the tuition. Many of their medical schools exist only to produce graduates to go to the USA. Indians know that is the gateway to get out of India which is the goal of everyone but the oligarchs who do not have to live in India. There are no jobs for them in India. Parents work like animals in the worst work conditions for a lifetime to get one of their sons into med school and then the US. I learned all this because one of my kids wanted to go to med school and I wanted to see what options existed if she did not get into a US school. It was eye opening. Anyone with essentially average IQ can become a doctor nowadays. And the only obstacle is passing the National Board Exams which they have watered down dramatically after being sued by largely Indian medical graduates and US DEI. There are coaching programs for these tests available worldwide. And there are coaching and answer scandals for the US exam out of India and the third world quite often which means it is a good profitable scam and it continues to this day with a little Baksheesh. In the US not so much as far as we know. And my daughter did not decide on going to med school bless her heart but her daddy learned a lot. The US needs a national health care system with all doctors on salary with no production bonus. The model of eat what you kill is criminal in health care.
Moved to the US from Denmark in early 2000’s, as a finance professional. Learned first-hand how the H1B program is manipulated: On paper, employers are required to demonstrate that no US resident meets job requirements, and in order to document this there’s an elaborate ‘search’ for applicants: (1) Post the job for a minimal amount of time on internal notice board; (2) Post the job online on obscure sites that only exist for this purpose, ie nobody actually uses these sites for job search; (3) Run radio ad for position after midnight. In my case, the process was not on an industrial scale but nevertheless achieved the same for my employer (and me).
Many professionals move around richer countries, but in general it is poorer large countries that have a very large surplus of skilled due to lack of opportunity or low salaries. In smaller countries, its very much the norm to move around to gain experience, especially if you are in a specialist profession. In my (Irish) extended family, nearly every one in the professions has done at least a year working in the US, UK, Australia, Europe or Asia. Much the same applies to NZers, Danes, Dutch, etc. But in overall terms its not significant simply because of population scale. The population of India is nearly 3x that of the EU. So if even 1% of the Indian population has the willingness and skills to move, thats still more than the entire population of most European countries.
It should also be pointed out that even by rich country standards, wages are very high in the US in most skilled professions, especially in recent years as the dollar has become very strong. Medical doctors and IT professionals and even nurses can pretty much double their income by moving from Europe to the US.
>>wages are very high in the US in most skilled professions
This is the wage arbitrage problem. We US people also have a ton of very high expenses that H1B immigrants don’t have, from student loans to healthcare to the dream of home ownership to a very expensive retirement with very expensive long term care, and extending to financial support for extended family members who also live in the accursedly expensive country.
And we get to watch as these people blow in and get to be heroes to their families while our own politicians denigrate us.
I thought the Bloomberg article linked here a few weeks back gave a good feel for the abuses:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-discriminates-us-workers/
Well researched and with lots of data to back everything up. It’s nominally about racism in hiring, but the picture that emerges is of a much larger problem.
I think it’s undeniable that there has been a massive abuse of the H-1B Visa program, and I am not going to defend such practices, but I couldn’t help but feel that the picture the article presents about the program is not quite complete.
In my last job in the States back in 2022, I was an H1B Visa holder and my total compensation was around 500K USD, give or take. I was never treated poorly by my employer, and not a single person in management had ever used the Labor Cert Program as some sort of Sword of Damocles they could use anytime to obtain my subservience. I ultimately CHOSE to leave the United States because I thought that when sh** hits the fan sometime down the line, there will be a tide of blood unleashed in the US as you’ve never seen before. It’s a bit dramatic but I’ve always believed that Americans are a violent people.
Now it’s easy to say that there’s always going to be an exception to every case, but I think it’s not hard to believe that 20 to 30 percent of all H1Bs are actually earning a pretty massive amount of money, I mean you just have to do a quick search to get a general idea of the kind of total compensation senior people can make in Google, Apple, etc like up to 1 million dollars a year. If you find the numbers unbelievable, then how about the massive amount of taxes (income, property, etc) people like me have paid to the coffers of both the Federal Government and the state of California? An inconvenient truth?
On the topic of working visas, companies have other visas they can use to bring workers over from another country, like the L-1 Visa, where you first hire a person say in India to work for Amazon/Google/etc for one year and then transfer the person over. I am willing to bet that pretty soon there will be a big increase in the use of such visas in lieu of the H-1B. So in the end, this will become a whack a mole game where companies are not even allowed to hire anyone overseas with the exception of administrative assistants.
So what you say? At least those jobs are coming back. If they are, then be prepared to watch double/triple/quadruple the amount of advertisements on all the services you currently use.
A friend in the US also recently shared the following with me: his company is now increasingly using South American contractors because they are even cheaper than Indians. The company had hired a “Software Architect” from South America on an H1B Visa, giving him a big salary in the process, but he hadn’t been hired due to his software skills, rather it’s because he could put the company in touch with super cheap local “talents” and because there’s a bigger overlap between the timezone of that particular country and the States, the company does not even have to bring those contractors over to the States (what H1B?). It’s a win win for everyone except for people who got laid off from the company :(
Ultimately though, this is all thanks to the Fed. The tech sector could only become such a behemoth thanks to the Fed’s generosity, but the Left just loves all that free money, am I right?? Look, full employment ….. for Indians!!! ROFL.
It would be better to put them on L-1 Visas and force the employer to have them employed abroad first
Yes the L1 visa is very popular in the life insurance industry. The vendor of the software I work with uses L1 visa extensively as they have an operation in India so they can ship people back and forth without any limits as to how many or for how long.
Very few Americans remaining in the industry. In the last ten years I have only worked on 2 projects where there were any Americans beside myself otherwise I was the only American on the project. Working for American companies in America and I’ the only American on the project – really!
What “Left” would that be? Neoliberal Democrats? And, what do your Federal tax payments have to do with any of this?
Ah yes, an extreme outlier weighs in. Clearly relevant to the discussion of wage arbitration.
lmao
In Canada we have a similar thing with the “LMIA” (Labour Market Impact Assessment) that also essentially is focused on importing foreigners to do similar jobs listed in this article. Actually it got so bad I think the UN had a report that actually labelled it as modern day slavery
An excellent post. Kudos for not claiming that ‘racism’ has anything to do with it.
One notes that, even if it was enforced (it isn’t), the ‘prevailing wage’ is nonsense, because increasingly, the ‘prevailing wage’ is set by the number of H1B and other visas.
In the 1940’s, 1950’s, and the first half of the 1960’s, immigration to the United States was near zero. The system picked a limited number of people like Einstein, but you needed more than a PhD in physics – you needed to be the BEST PhD in physics (and eventually if we continue to destroy our labor market the BEST will go elsewhere). The United States exploded into the greatest scientific industrial power the world had ever seen. Sure the CEOs etc. did very well – they lived in mansions, drove the best cars, wore the best clothes – but they did not become the modern equivalent of billionaires, not so much because of tax laws but because a limited supply of labor prevented all the profits from flowing to the top.
We don’t need billionaires to thrive – but billionaires require mass poverty and low wages to achieve and maintain their fortunes. They are like the pre-civil war American plantation owners, who were not rich because of their agricultural skills, but because they had access to cheap labor. Without the cheap labor, their fortunes evaporated.
>>>They are like the pre-civil war American plantation owners, who were not rich because of their agricultural skills, but because they had access to cheap labor. Without the cheap labor, their fortunes evaporated.
This is quite true, but it also was due to the massive physical destruction due to the war. Destroyed railroads, burned plantations, shattered cities, the destruction of what manufacturing there was. Even when they held on to the wealth they had in their very large land holdings, they were surrounded by a destroyed economy.
This is what I think might happen to the United States in the future.
” …bring in foreign H-1B workers to 1) create indentured employees — people who can only live in the U.S. by staying in the good graces of their employer…”
This says it all. It’s better than owning them outright because they are so much easier and cheaper to discard.
It also gives a reason to sabotage education for US citizens.
This!!
One example, math education in elementary school in the US is atrocious. I believe it is designed to hold back the kids in order to minimize the number of those who will emerge with solid math skills and interest in math. Which of course years down the road will minimize the number of candidates for STEM majors… hence then the importation of STEM graduate school and H1Bs — a self-licking ice cream cone indeed!
I think the discussion about H-1b’s is one-sided. Most foreign students who finish a Ph.D. program at a US university and are hired as professors or postdocs here work on an H-1b. Are we prepared to let them go back to their home country, after financing their education through scholarships and teaching assistantships?
Moreover, thousands of highly competent professionals come to the US to do a master’s and get industry jobs (outside of IT or software engineering) on an H-1b visa. An example is actuaries. There are not enough domestic students who are able and willing to put in the work and qualify as actuaries by passing the 10+ exams required. Not to mention that foreign students provide diversity dividends.
If we only permit individuals of extraordinary ability (who qualify for other types of visas) to stay and work in the US, then we will lose access to thousands of still very talented individuals. The H-1b visa program does require an overhaul to eliminate the abuse, but scrapping it completely would be devastating.
That’s not what the stats say. Over 70% hired through body shops.
And I doubt those students were mainly financed. The reason unis are so keen to take foreign students is so many pay the rack rate, particularly from China.
Yves, everyone in my Ph.D. program at a large public university was a TA or had research funding through their advisor. We even finance many of our master’s students. I don’t dispute that there is huge abuse in some sectors like IT and software engineering, but this visa is essential for other jobs (and I dare say, the US economy) where there is demand and no abuse.
The Executive branch of government should comply with the law. If 85,000 are allowed by law, then it should not be giving H1b’s to an order of magnitude more.
Even if one’s company does not bully one for having an H1b, the possibility of being laid off and having to disrupt one’s life takes a mental toll, which is something individual managers know and can exploit, so this is being misused.
The solution is to fix the program to limit it to those who are truly needed and send the officials who did not comply with the law to prison, so that this corruption does not reoccur. Enough with Obama’s “looking forwards” crap.
Non-profits (such as most universities) are not subject to the quota.
But more to your point, many actuaries still on an F-1 have to do the H-1b lottery again and again, and many no longer are able to get it. This creates lots of costs and uncertainty to their employers. That’s a case where the H-1b abusers hurt everyone else with a legitimate reason to apply for this work visa.
Yes. At my California community college out-of-state (foreign) students pay $350/credit unit (15 units is a normal semester load). California residents who graduated from a local high school pay $40/credit unit (with no additional fees). The California college age student population is declining (by 10-15%). The Chinese students are mostly from well to do families and drive to campus in new Tesla’s. The European students (predominately Scandinavian) have their fees paid by their national government. My community college has raised the foreign student quota from 5% to 10% over the last year. It will likely go higher, as the college has a current debt of $7M
An important restriction for a U.S. Student visa is a practical ‘facility’ with the English language. This is not an issue with Euro’s, but a clear restriction for Chinese. Another restriction is they cannot be employed off-campus.
( ‘Dreamers’ are a separate category.)
“At my California community college…”
Thank you; the detail is interesting and helpful.
I don’t know about the USA but in Canada it appears that the high tuitions were at community college and university undergrad levels. Foreign grad students are valued labour so you don’t want to exploit them any more than your locals.
Clleges and universities were raking in the money until the Gov’t put some new limits on both temporary foreign workers and foreign students. A few colleges seem to be in real financial distress in my province. OF course, my province is the lowest in funding tertiary education in the country so a drop in income hits a college really hard.
⁹If they’re post docs, isn’t that still an F1 visa? The H1B isn’t supposed to be for students. Some employers might seek to change a student from F1 to H1B, but the default coming in if you’re a student isn’t supposed to be H1B.
I’d add that the problem here is no one is enforcing the rules for H1B holders in the US. Or the businesses applying for H1B. A lot of good could be gained by actually enforcing the law here.
Also… to your question, should we send these students back? Depends on the student. Should we stop academia from importing slaves from other countries and offering slave wages to grad students such that domestic students can’t afford to be grad students on the paltry sums assistantships offer? Absolutely.
Postdocs are not students. These are temporary positions for young researchers to develop their research agenda and acquire more teaching experience, before they can get a tenure-track that may allow their universities to sponsor their green card.
I know what post docs are, but whether they are classified as employees in need of a H1B or not per the federal government is an entirely different matter. As far as I know, they could still be under F1, but perhaps you have different information. Regardless, we’re getting really far afield here. Post docs are a tiny subset of students who are generally competing for extremely limited opportunities in grant funded programs. Either they’re extraordinary candidates and can use that visa program, or they’re not, in which case, let’s build up home talent and give these former PhD students a chance to work and earn a visa that way.
I literally do not care if universities don’t have access to post docs from abroad. Let us develop native talent. Let the universities pay wages to practicioners in industry who might consider an academic research position. Post docs are the highest rung of the abused grad student ladder. That’s not a good thing to support.
And let’s drop the tenure track canard in this discussion, shall we? Because if we’re letting foreign citizens take tenure track positions in the US then we need to kill the programs that allow it. I have way too many native born and foreign born friends with PhDs who have languished for years waiting for tenure track opportunities. They either don’t exist or are quickly eliminated. This is a trend that has been accelerating for the past 20 years. We don’t need a visa program to permit foreign post docs to be paid as workers while they’re gaining teaching and research experience. We need universities to stop acting Iike hedge funds and support research and teaching.
There are several articles and reports that explain the critical importance of foreign born STEM academics and scientists to the US, so I won’t waste time with this. Some links:
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/us-workforce-foreign-born-stem-research
https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=309769
I agree that some domestic researchers lose out and end up doing work unrelated to their Ph.D., but I don’t think that’s because the system discriminates against them. More importantly, they still contribute, e.g. by working at Google or FB instead of doing research at a university.
So, I’m not sure you read the links you shared, and I’m not going to hold you to an exhaustive literature review on this topic for the sake of discussion here. The NSF study is showing that the percentage of noncitizen STEM workers, those requiring visas, in the US is about 5%. That’s not a large number. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s some amount larger such that it would be a significant percentage of the total. Why can’t we make that up with domestic talent?
For many of the same reasons people argue about farm workers in the US. The job sucks and the bosses are awful. It makes little sense for US citizens to take post doc or research assistant positions in academia under the current conditions. The time value of money is a real thing. Why should a bright engineering graduate volunteer to make 50% or less of what they could be earning while working for an employer to be treated poorly? Why should anyone have to suffer under the arbitrary and capricious standards of comittees and colleges just to do cool research? The reason why we need foreign talent in that area is because these people are coming from places where your typical grad student salary and the possibility of getting a job in the US is a step up from what they can get back home.
And let’s also talk about the awful treatment of foreign grad students in most research school departments. Surely you’ve seen people from foreign countries paired with professors who were originally from the same or a neighboring country? And surely you’ve seen cases of those professors hold their students for years longer than necessary, often under grueling conditions, because of the visa? In my experience it is typically female professors and those from Asia who are the most often the cruel stories we warned other students about, but foreigners did not hold a monopoly on cruelty. I’ve seen friends who came from India suffer under an advisor who refused to accept their proposal until they had published dozens of articles for them. I’ve seen friends from Malaysia work for months without a day off to complete a grant proposal which garnered their advisor a nice bump in pay and gave them nothing.
If we increased the salary of grad students, if we had a national healthcare program, if we had a better educated pipeline, we would not need to import this kind of talent. If making it so foreign born workers can’t get H1B visas would create momentum for those programs in the US, then I’d gladly kill the visa program that these people rely on. Short of that, I’d gladly increase the regulation and protection for these foreign born workers in the US so that they can’t be abused as I’ve seen. But I think we both know what would happen under those circumstances. Those positions would just find other more desperate people to abuse.
As you see above, US citizens are actually the minority.
You are painting a very unfair picture. There are bad advisors and there is an inherent power imbalance in the advisor-student relationship, but grad students choose their own advisor and sometimes even domestic students end up regretting their choice. I didn’t experience an “awful treatment” as a foreign grad student and neither did my friends—quite the opposite. And my stipend as a TA easily covered all of my living expenses. It may have been harder to get by if I was in a big expensive city, but again, it’s not an evil system of exploitation like you describe it.
Devastating for whom, friend?
I guarantee if the actuary job was advertised Americans would take it. As a physics major who had to do a lot of math I am certain the level of math skill required to be an actuary is at a very low level. The test is not all that hard. I hate to differ with you. If it offerred a stable job at a salary of 120000 with options for promotion over time some American would be glad to take it after taking the necessary courses at a local junior college. I see math majors from top universities sending out hundreds of applications with no suitable bites.
There is a YouTube video of Milton Friedman who explains how he failed some of them and they were hard. Actuaries earn good money but the enrollments in such programs and the number of test takers has declined in the last 5-10 years. This is not due to bad employment prospects. Yes, in theory domestic students could do these jobs, but the reality is different.
Here’s another theory… how about, hypothetically, these domestic industries recognize that they need educated employees and ayaty supporting education in math and logical reasoning so that they have more domestic candidates to choose from? Or perhaps they can participate in magnet programs in high schools to teach kids what they want they to know so that they can then develop a college bound workforce that is familiar with actuarial science?
We are still on a steady path to bankrupt our country because too many MBA types decided there is never a reason to build when you can buy. Hitting the easy button on talent with H1Bs is the same thing. It’s not the fault of the visa applicants but there’s no need to support it.
Some actuaries volunteer as math tutors at local high schools through the Math Motivators program. The industry has also recognized the need to build pipelines from high school or community college and support students with scholarships and internships all along. It takes about 7-8 years from first exam to full qualification, so everyone recognizes the need to provide support.
The only real constraint is availability of talent. By that I mean a combination of motivation, mathematical aptitude, and resilience. Unfortunately, these qualities are in very short supply nowadays.
Vivek has entered the chat…
I disagree. We’ve got Kumon and similar schools popping up everywhere for math tutoring, just to give one obvious example. There’s clearly interest in math and improving math skills in the US. There’s also clearly a lack of support for bridging the gap between interest in math and a career in math.
There is awareness of the need to improve math skills in the US because said math skills are deteriorating fast, especially after the pandemic. I work in higher education and I see it with my own eyes every day, but there is also nationwide data I could provide that says exactly that.
Let me also add that we pay multivariate Calc students up to 2k/year to take actuarial courses and we hardly have any takers.
$2k/yr!!! Such generosity and munificence!
“We” — which company is that?
Yes.
We need to make useful Ph.D programs attractive to natives – not make them grovel for years in labs at low pay under the direction of advisors who abuse their reduced-rate skilled labor. Skilled natives won’t put up with the abusive cultures in these programs. PhD programs favor admitting foreign nationals because they’ll do as they are told, accept low pay, and won’t challenge the faculty. Make the needed PhD programs financially attractive and you’ll have plenty of qualified native applicants.
Who benefits from the 10 required actuarial exams (or med school admissions or….) and why do so few natives pass? These exams are made to exclude natives and allow insurance companies to hire cheap foreign labor – many who (barely) fail the exams would make excellent actuaries. Same in health care – universities artificially restrict the size of medical/health care programs to attract cheap compliant foreign labor. There are plenty of Americans applying unsuccessfully to these programs who’d make great health care workers.
Scrapping H1B would cause some short-term turmoil but in the long term it would provide needed financial and other incentives to natives to pursue needed skills. If after providing such incentives we find that natives still aren’t interested in pursuing needed skills, we can restructure a far smaller H1B-type program. The existing program pushes many natives out of useful careers.
I like the conspiratorial thinking! The exams are decided by a professional body, not by employers. We may agree that fewer exams and a shorter travel time may be preferable, but it has been like this for the past 100 years or so.
Your solution would be extremely disruptive. Already top Chinese talent who would normally come to the US for grad school are now choosing to stay in PRC. You imagine that native students would fill the void, but based on my decades-long experience teaching them, I believe this is totally unrealistic.
The real question is why a couple of private organizations (Society of Actuaries and the Casualty Actuarial Society) get to be gatekeepers over the profession. Who controls them (one guess) and what incentives do they have to create desirable pathways to actuarial careers? Exam pass rates vary from below 20% (2011) to over 60% today. These organizations obviously vary the pass rates to reduce supply (actuarial associate/fellow status is based on when you take the exams and industry demand, not totally on exam performance.)
I recall that actuarial risks assessments during the financial crisis were poor and resulted in many business failures and industry bailouts. The gatekeepers failed and we should have looked at restructuring credentialing. Clearly, the exam system failed to elevate those who understood financial risks.
The medical/nursing professions and others relying on “professional bodies” to determine by examination who can legally work operate the same way. Nearly all such professions have permanent labor shortages by design (pass rates are controlled, professional experience requirements can be brutal,…) and this often leads to H1B use in many industries. Program admissions are a bigger hurdle than exams for health care professions but accreditation bodies still play a key gatekeeping role.
My point is that gatekeepers to professional work that require legally-mandated credentials will make these credentials more valuable by overly-restricting access in ways that have little to do with professional excellence (abusive residencies, associateships, doctoral programs, etc.) When H1B is an option, these credentials can be made nearly impossible to obtain. Take away the H1B options and the gates will open to natives. It’s not “conspiratorial thinking” – it’s just the way it has always worked.
So, along with gutting the H1B, overhauling credentialing/accreditation bodies will be necessary and welcome.
Friend was laid off SAP before Xmas and his job and others like it (procurement) were shipped to Brazil and the Philippines apparently. South of the border seems to be a theme lately
“Friend was laid off SAP before Xmas…”
What this tells is that a range of countries are expressly soliciting work from the US, and rather than invest in technology to improve productivity US companies simply send work to a lower wage Brazil or Philippines. This is a reason US productivity gains have been so weak for so long.
Yes. Let’s not kid ourselves that India and other 3rd and 3rd-ish world countries with excess young population are not expressly asking the US to hire their labor force. India foreign remittances are a ridiculously high percentage of their govt’s budget. Think about that.
Some years ago Chile was exempt from the H1B quota (and some Chileans I met were day laborers in construction!!), I believe, for purely geopolitical reasons – NOTHING to do with “finding highly skilled” workers.
“Nearshoring” is the new offshoring. Usually it’s Central/South America for IT these days.
First, in case some folks don’t already know, the reason Indians are the overall majority of H1-B hires is because they speak, read, and write English. Excellent English, Maybe better English than you, bro.
Second, my native-born American wife was a very successful programmer / coder / IT professional. Indeed, she was a true “database queen” who designed, built, loaded, used, and maintained large databases for various clients over a long career. She has a BA in English.
…is because they are cheap and compliant workers
Good luck to someone like her getting a job now, friend.
And you have not met enough Indians in tech. You will get a permanent headache from their written and oral communication and work meeting culture. Sorry to have to say that.
FWIW, all – with few exceptions my Chinese-born and Arab born colleagues speak and write better English than my Indian colleagues.
My experience, working at a multinational software corporation, is that they still need native English speakers to work with customers. Although you say H1-B hires speak excellent English, unfortunately customers are not able to decifer it through the accents. So all the back office work has been transferred to India for the cheap labor over the last few years, while front office experts who work with customers are still native English speakers or bilingual Spanish.
Also most people have to be trained on the job despite their degrees, but it seems large corporations prefer to train low wage H1-B workers over more expensive US citizens, making it difficult for the latter to even get interviews.
Interesting observation about deciphering Indian-accented English speech. My observation is that the phonology of native Indian languages (there are many) have a sound articulation (labial, dental, palatal, etc.) that creates high pitched sound that doesn’t conform to the normal sounds made in English speech. So, for me, Indian-accented English sounds as if I’m getting a high pitched scolding. YMMV.
https://x.com/davidsirota/status/1873439484450320691
17 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOW0cUaGWZU
Hillary Clinton reaffirms support for more H-1B visas
Thanks for this post.
This from Lee Fang’s substack, public excerpt:
Yes, American Corporations Exploit H-1B Visas to Lower Wages
The first major rift in the Trump coalition boiled over with anger at H-1B visas. The program is widely exploited to lower American wages via foreign workers.
https://www.leefang.com/p/yes-american-corporations-exploit
This is a very interesting thread. Thanks NC.
If this generalist can be indulged a historical observation it would be that this country was built by immigrants including those original Europeans, the unwillingly arriving slaves, the Irish and Chinese who built the railroads, the Eastern Europeans who had so much to do with the movie industry, the physicists who enhanced our power with the terrible bomb. The two people I’ve been closest to were both one generation away from Europe. Of course the tycoons have always been trying to turn our labor shortage into a labor surplus that they could exploit, and they got away with it most of the time. Today’s complaints would likely not be heard if this was only about car repair shops or Indians running motels.
Now that the PMC are themselves threatened with foreign competition immigration reform may happen. But none of this is really new and the 19th century was full of conflicts between factions of the working and lower class. We are a mongrel nation. And some might argue we are the better for it.
Thanks for this post.
H-1Bs have been used to suppress wages for decades.
As someone who worked for a large insurance company that made extensive use of either H1-b’s or maybe it was L1’s not sure, what ends up happening is this.
You have the English speaking help desk support people who have to have a firm command of English to communicate with your mainline employees, those tickets get escalated to L3 or specialized support groups for different products who were all manned by Indians ( software devs, database admins, web devs etc, system admins ,etc)
However it kills any upward job movement because back in the day( before say 2000) – you’d get trained to move up into these other groups. Now there’s no upward mobility from the bottom or any chance to learn. Your siloed forever at the bottom of the career path. There’s all these middle IT positions that would have been filled by Americans back in the day that are now off limits because the company doesn’t want to pay American level wages for them.
So you have Americans filling first and second level support. All the visa holders in the middle, and than Americans filling super high level software architect, security and management positions.
The way it was is the way it is, because “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Or more directly,
“As Marx noted, in the nineteenth century, capital in the wealthy centers is able to take advantage of lower-wage labor abroad either through capital migration to low-wage countries, or through the migration of low-wage labor into rich countries. . . . In his speech to the Lausanne Congress of the First International in 1867 (the year of the publication of the first volume of Capital) he declared: “A study of the struggle waged by the English working class reveals that, in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labor force. Given this state of affairs, if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organisations must become international.””
https://monthlyreview.org/2011/11/01/the-global-reserve-army-of-labor-and-the-new-imperialism/
You know, the H1-B progam seems rather similar to the iqama system in Saudi Arabia where foreign workers, at least back in the 1980s when I was there could not change employers without their current employer’s permission. I wonder if the idea for the H1-B came from Saudi?
This post is a job offer letter from a college in Boston to the poster’s dad in 1980. The job is to be a programmer for the college’s IT infrastructure. Starts as a trainee taking course from Digital Equipment Corporation (a major company at the time). Loan of $3k for the courses, with $1k forgiven every year for three years of employment.
The guy was a college grad, majored in German!
https://x.com/ChattyCorner/status/1872373077042188477
Yes, DEC was mainframe computer maker. My university used them and dumb terminals to teach basic programming. They also were used to maintain/perform certain university functions using punch-card input. The salary of $14K to start mentioned in the offer was probably reasonable pay for that time.
The first personal computer (Apple) arrived in 1976. While it didn’t have the computing power of the DEC mainframes, it was the impetus for teaching computer skills (programming/database/ etc.) I took a minor in computer science during that era just to get familiar with the digital future to come.
The first personal computer (Altair 8800) arrived in 1974.
The general problem here is not the H1B program, but the undue influence of the very rich.