I think it’s easier for many American tech workers to claim that H-1B workers are cheaper to hire (they’re not, they cost more due to also having to pay for their immigration process alongside matching the prevailing wages) than to admit foreign workers are highly qualified to do their jobs.
It’s motivated reasoning.
@carnage4life Who defines "prevailing wage"?
@briansullivan @carnage4life dept of labor. Based on cost of living in the area and median wages for the stated work. Anyone who claims a H1B is only preferred cos they are cheap is lying or misled.
If someone submits a very low salary for a foreign worker in an area the visa will simply not be approved. The federal govt also doesn’t want foreigners who have to ever use public benefits.
@skinnylatte Hmm and who will control the department of labor? It seems like a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.
@briansullivan oh god, H1B data is public, look up any company including Trump’s and Elon’s, they are visas for jobs from 120-400K min
Saying you’ll pay that and then not doing that is a whole host of other crimes, people take this seriously. There are other issues of exploitation but this conspiracy that people who don’t know anything about H1Bs keep perpetuating is not true. Actual H1Bs are saying it’s not true.
@briansullivan there’s a whole publicly searchable table and everything
@briansullivan @skinnylatte Yeah they definitely scam this. I worked for Tata for a few years. The trick is, your job is not your job. I was either an application team member, or a level three dev, or a senior analyst depending on who you asked. You'll have two guys trading shifts doing exactly the same work but the guy with a year more experience is here on an H1B and HR says he's a level 2 and the American working the other shift is a level 3 so the guy with the H1B gets paid 15% less.
And they'll justify that with education or annual reviews (which are largely political negotiations between managers) or whatever, but the fact is they're both doing the same work but the H1B worker gets paid less. And usually they work way more hours too. Because if they don't, they might no longer be in the top x% of the team and they'll get sent back to the team in India and one of those folks gets sent over here to replace them.
@admin @briansullivan people are talking about H1Bs from cognizant / wipro / tata like the entire program is like that. That’s 4 in 10 of H1B visas.
That’s not the default in the Bay Area and other tech hubs, where regular people getting visas are the default.
Recent changes to the visa class are aimed at making it so that these onshoring companies can’t exploit people like this. There’s a new rule about them coming into effect on Jan 17.
Wanting to restrict a program to shut down onshoring doesn’t change the fact that these types of companies will simply offshore instead.
@skinnylatte @briansullivan Glad to hear they're not *all* like that...hope you're right that this kind of bullshit might be coming to an end. Although I'm not sure I'd count on any of that staying in place under Trump..
And to be clear I certainly don't think the solution is to halt immigration...I think the solution is to let people cross borders as easily as capital does. Immigration needs to be easier so that depriving someone of it cannot be used as a threat. Maybe that's not *always* what's happening, but it definitely happens more than it should, by companies that absolutely know what they're doing and could absolutely afford to pay fairly.
@admin @briansullivan @skinnylatte this. People think H1B is well paid because of the law, but in practice that's not how it works. The income seems high on paper but it's devalued from what it would otherwise be, & it comes with a host of issues like being heavily dependent on not being fired.
It's indentured servery, just with a salary that masks the issue.
People who think otherwise are thinking of Google, Meta, etc and aren't aware of WITCH companies practices.
(FTR, I'm a visa immigrant)