[titomc]

" Most of the time it is just easier to hire Asian/Indian employees because they are readily available "

- I doubt that. It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them, because their visa status is tied to the employer. The employers have H1B workers on a leash.

The process of hiring an H1B worker in short.

- Hire an immigration lawyer.

- Post an LCA.

- Apply petition to USCIS.

- Pay petition fees (higher for fast track process)

- Respond to USCIS queries.

- Get petition approved.

- Done

- Its a different game if the employer wants retain the H1B worker after 6th year of H1B.

So hiring is not easy. But retaining and paying them is "easy". So why do these corporations take this much pain in hiring H1B workers ? No its not the skills they are after. (after all H1B is lottery based not skill based right ? )

[pslam]

You're missing the part where the employer is required to:

- Post representative salary data, including the last few (5?) hires to this position.

- Publish the job position locally, so it can be filled by local workers preferentially, and then only by H1B if unfilled.

- Ensure the worker is initially paid a salary similar to other existing hires in that position.

I don't understand how people make the leap that H1B is used to lower wages. It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages. You would need to lie about "prevailing wages" in order for this scheme to work, which is illegal and would put you and your company into deep trouble.

[hibikir]

The prevailing wage comes from a chart: you don't just do research or come up with it. Figuring out which prevailing wage to use among the existing job descriptions is already a matter of judgement, and you can just aim for the low one.

Publishing the position locally is easily skirted: It's not published in places that people look at, it's not written in a way that makes it sound appealing, and often has some nonsensical requirements: In practice, you don't get local workers applying to them.

Then, there's how you hire for positions as junior as possible, and you keep the person there for 6+ years (the green card process can take pretty much forever if you are mean enough to your employee).

I was an H1B. My compensation was pretty fair when I started compared to the US employees around me, but as years went by, I kept taking on more responsibilities, but my salary didn't change to match. Once the green card process started, changing jobs became extremely unappealing, not just because risks of having to restart the green card process, but because to apply for a green card, my employer asked me to agree to pay attorney fees and costs if I left before the green card was awarded plus one year. Any job worth applying to would have been higher responsibility than the paper job I had been hired for originally, so would I be able to transfer by PERM filing across employers in the first place? Not guaranteed. So I kept the job: Being European in the early 2000s, there was a signifiant green card backlog for me, but not a decade long, so I could wait. All in all, I was an H1B for 8 years.

In the next 3 years after I got the green card, I changed jobs a couple of times and my salary more than doubled: I went from being called a plain engineer that just happened to report to the CTO to becoming principal engineer at a Fortune 500 corporation. It's 5 years later, and last year I made 5 times what I was making in my last H1B year: That level of catch-up doesn't come from me improving that much in the last few years, but total catch-up from where I started from.

Imagine what the big outsourcers, who handle many thousands of H1B applications a year, can do to suppress wages further.

[illumin8]

Thank you for your insightful comment - I wish people like you would testify in front of congress on the abuses of the H1B process that are clearly widespread.

It's depressing to think about the stress and anxiety this might cause someone who is literally facing deportation if he doesn't "suck it up" and keep working at a sweat shop for the same salary they were hired at 5+ years ago.

[winter_blue]

I'm on an H-1B, and the thing that infuriates me about the dialogue on this is that they are effectively trying to ban skilled immigration, and exclude people like me from coming.

If you don't qualify for the family-based or refugee route, employment-based immigration is the only viable pathway. The amount of hate I see piled on people trying to come here via the employment-based immigration seems insane to me. These people make it seem like employment-based immigration is not as respectable or legitimate, compared to refugee/asylum and family-based immigration.

The problem with requiring higher wagers is that for people like me, who were students in US -- it's very hard to get an ultra-high salary for the first job out of college. I was a student (on an F-1 visa), and my first job out of college offered me $60,000/year. On my first job on my H-1B visa (in NYC), I was offered $85,000 a year (got slightly over $100,000 with bonuses). Then, just about a year and half later, I was paid (mostly through lucky bonuses) slightly over $200,000 in a single year.

If you raised wage requirements, you'd basically be not allowing people like me to continue to stay and work in the US (after graduation from college), and would instead only allow people from outside who have lots of experience (and skill) and can command a much higher salary upfront.

[sheepmullet]

I mean when it comes down to it choosing a neurosurgeon over an entry level software developer makes a lot of sense.

What is wrong with wanting to prioritise people who have lots of experience and skill?

[winter_blue]

Why even prioritize? The need to prioritize assumes the existence of arbitrary numerical limits on immigration.

I think we should just eliminate the limits on employment-based immigration entirely, with the only restriction being that such immigration does not depress US wages (which is already implemented as the LCA today). At the very least, use qualitative limits, not quantitative limits.

But even better, just let peaceful immigrants in. Before 1921, if you were white, there were no restrictions on you moving to the US. So, let's go back to the pre-1921 immigration policy, with the slight modification that non-white people are not banned. The Libertarian Party makes a good argument: https://www.lp.org/issues/immigration

[pm90]

Well, unless they are flagrantly violating labor rules/constitutional rights of the person by monitoring them at all times, there's really nothing (except the green card process I guess) that stops a worker on H1B from scouting for other opportunities that would pay better. Not all H1B's work for sweatshops, but I understand the system has been abused a lot.

[ones_and_zeros]

> The prevailing wage comes from a chart: you don't just do research or come up with it.

Interestingly, companies can provide their own wage surveys in order to justify the salary on an LCA. They aren't required to use the DoL wage data. [0]

"For the H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 programs, employers have the option of using one of three wage sources to obtain the prevailing wage: (1) requesting a prevailing wage from the NPWC; (2) using a survey conducted by an independent authoritative source; or (3) using another legitimate source of information."

Larger companies are using #3. Since it is so vague and there isn't any oversight within the program they are able to manipulate the survey to provide results to their benefit while still claiming "We pay the prevailing wage! (according to our shady wage survey)"

[0] https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm

[titomc]

The companies have these "schemes" in place. If you look at an LCA posting, these scheming companies will post a salary range, eg : 75k-110k. 75k being the prevailing wages from the DOL for that area. This range means the company can pay the employee 75k and its legal. What does it take for the company to pay 110k to the employee as per LCA ? "Depends on relevant skills & relevant experience of the candidate" so that's the blurry line companies use to suppress the salary and its perfectly legal.

[briandear]

Because the H1s that are lowering wages are from Accenture, Tata, etc. Companies hire them at a lower costs that hiring their own workers. You also have companies like Disney firing existing workers to replace them with lower cost H1s. The fired workers even had to train their lower cost replacements. The prevailing wage for an H1 is lower than a US citizen. That's just a fact.

[toyg]

> You would need to lie about "prevailing wages"

Yeah, we all know a huge corporation would never lie, especially not such a shining beacon of progressive virtue as Oracle, where profit always takes a backseat to human decency. I mean, it's not like such a huge company can spare a few hours of paperwork drudge to set up such a scheme; they certainly don't have legions of Romanian dudes ready to file any form they're told to file to keep their job.

TBH, you don't even need to lie. How many government bureaucrats are deeply familiar with wages of a Fusion Enterprise Foobar for Middleware Cloud Baz Devop Ninja, a position that likely exists only in Oracle itself? Just make sure the position is properly "jailed" internally so all hires are consistent ("we don't have any DBAs here, we only have BigData Deployment and Maintenance Specialists for the Cloud Grid, totally different thing") and publish the job "locally" in places nobody will ever pay attention to, or on an intranet job-site where no application will ever be reviewed or actioned.

> It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages.

I agree that there are easier ways, like relocating all your operations in cheaper countries - something Oracle has already done almost 100%. But half the developing world seems to be on fire at the moment, and the other half "suffers" wage inflation at increasingly rapid pace, so watchagonnado...

[bduerst]

>I don't understand how people make the leap that H1B is used to lower wages.

It's because immigration has been politicized in the U.S., and the average citizens' understanding of immigration is what they read in the news.

Which is fair, because immigration is a bureaucracy that the average citizen doesn't need to be an expert at, but this complexity makes it easier for misinformation to spread about it.

[dend]

Correct. The H-1B process is incredibly complex and is not a matter of simply applying and bringing a person in.

[coredog64]

My employer posts these notices in a public place. In taking to my coworkers, nobody looks at them to determine if the posted salaries are in the correct range.

[CapOneThrow1234]

<deleted>

[throwam99]

<deleted>

[logfromblammo]

You forgot the part about rejecting all current U.S. nationals as unable to work the position. This is often by requiring X+Y years of experience with an X year old buzzword, and then telling your recruiter exactly how to lie on the resume. But it may also be by giving people actual interviews and then either offering them a wage lower than what is intended for the H1B import, or rejecting them for unspecified reasons.

Whenever I get dicked around in the interviews by a potential employer, I start to suspect ulterior motives. One time, for my own amusement, I asked to see their H1B public records. The company immediately got very defensive, and got their lawyer involved just long enough to hastily research what I was talking about, assemble the records, and set up all the flaming hoops I would have to jump through in order to see them. It was almost like they were hiding something. I didn't actually want to see the records, I just wanted to see that they were willing to show them (or that they didn't have records because they didn't have any H1B employees).

It was a lot like asking a toddler who ate the last cookie in the jar, and watching them hide their hands from you as they say, "Maybe it was the invisible ghost ninjas." I don't need that level of immaturity in an employer.

[lawnchair_larry]

They responded that way because that's such an absurdly strange thing for the candidate to ask, not because they were hiding anything or had ulterior motives.

I suspect there are other reasons why you're being rejected. This seems like paranoid thinking. Most companies won't provide a rejection reason as a matter of policy.

[logfromblammo]

...which promotes paranoid thinking.

I only asked after it was already clear I was no longer being considered, and I (politely) asked for some feedback on the interview. They wouldn't say one thing about it, good or bad--wall of silence. So, as is common with whiteboard interviews, I threw out something unexpected to see how they would react. The fact that they reacted so poorly made me feel better about their rejection. It's not me; it's them. I didn't just fail to impress. Instead, I unknowingly avoided a future disaster.

I naturally proceed under the assumption that there is nothing actually wrong with me, as a person or as a candidate for employment. From my perspective, I am a normal person, and a competent software professional. I can be pleasant and sociable. I have been on enough interviews to get a sense of what is "normal" and what is strange--even strange for a tech interview. Usually, that determination only happens after the fact, or very late in the process, but I can still eventually tell when something was out of place.

So when I haven't done anything that would make it clear to me that I have blown the interview, and the company won't give me a reason for rejection, or even suggest one thing that I could improve upon, I naturally take that to mean that there is something wrong with the company. At the least, they are simply too rude to give a candidate any kind of (possibly helpful to them) feedback afterward. But they could also be concealing an unethical hiring practice behind a wall of corporate policy and plausible deniability. There's no way for me to know, and I don't really care by the time I get to that point. There are way too many other companies out there willing to go out on a first date to sit and stew over the ones that won't return your phone calls.

I can't even remember the name of the company now. Which is unfortunate, because I'd have to search through old e-mails to avoid accidentally applying to them again.

[linkregister]

Their H1B records would be posted here: http://h1bdata.info

[logfromblammo]

I know that. I even knew it at the time (though it might have been a different site). They might even have known it. I wanted to see how they would react to my reasonable--albeit unexpected--request for records that are supposed to be viewable by any person who walks in off the street.

At the time, I was toying with the idea of using a company's public H1B records as a way to give me an advantage in salary negotiations. After seeing the reaction of this one company, I decided not to do that.

[bduerst]

H1B workers can, and routinely do, switch companies.

Their new employer has only to file the paperwork to transfer their visa, so your assumptions about retaining H1B workers are not very accurate.

[ergothus]

I've mentioned this elsewhere before, but I've had experiences at both ends of the H1B chain.

In one workplace & location in the US: The H1B workers were...not very good. Adequate, and hard working, but not highly skilled and they were brought in mainly because the location didn't want to/couldn't pay wages good enough to hire skilled US-based talent. There the H1B workers were (in general) fearful and unwilling to complain, because they knew their personal odds of getting another US gig were NOT guaranteed. This left me understanding the various H1B complaints, as the workplace was terrible.

In another workplace in a different US location, the H1B workers were equal or better than any US-citizens working there. The workers were highly sought after and were interested in speaking up to make the workplace better. Switching jobs for them WAS a hassle, but a very doable hassle, so the workplace had keep them as happy as non-H1B workers. This left me understanding the OTHER side of the H1B issues, as these workers raised up rather than lowered their workplaces.

I've had multiple friends spend months uncertain if their visas would be renewed (Most companies seem to employ offshore lawyers to handle the visas on the other ends, and I've heard some horror stories about those lawyers sometimes vanishing, or misfiling). Also, I've had friends that had to stay put in a job during a certain phase of getting their green cards - a change in job title would reportedly move them back to the end of the queue of that step. (No idea about the specifics)

All in all, I've found it pretty hard to generalize about H1B workers and the process as an entire whole.

[vaishaksuresh]

This may be my bias, but the experience you had is explainable.

The former H1B workers probably were in the US as an onsite assignment or through a consultancy/contractor. Most Indian consultancies view people as warm bodies on the chair. Which is why you find people with fewer skills.

The latter workers are most likely people who relocated to the US for education or were hired from India from a US employer because of their skills.

[xtreme]

I think creating a separate visa category for students graduating from US institutions would be useful. Currently F-1 students who intend to stay back and work in the US get lumped together with incoming H1B workers. I am not saying that foreign educated workers are worse, just that it is a useful distinction to make.

[gmarx]

or possibly Indians didn't get the diversity memo and are more likely to hire other Indians than the analogous instinct in white managers?

It's odd that the suit alleges that white people are discriminated against relative to Indians yet those that are hired are paid more.

[hemantv]

More often than not you will find opposite to be true.

[gmarx]

Opposite of which?

[hemantv]

Indians treating other Indians favorably. In most cases I found they are more harsh than to other people. In general I have found Indian and Chinese to be much more harsh.

[gmarx]

Harsh in personal interactions perhaps. People generally feel free to be blunter with close people relative to strangers. The issue here is hiring practices

[r00fus]

It's all about the H1Bs. Oracle wants cheap labor and Asians (Indians) are statistically more likely to be H1B than non-Asians. Thus the higher aggregate salaries for whites (likelihood to be H1B is minuscule).

[mavelikara]

The time when an immigrant gets their H1-B the first time is based on a lottery. Subsequent job changes while on H-1B is not via any lottery.

[briandear]

As a point of fact, an H-1B is a non-immigrant visa.

[bdhe]

> Even though the H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa, it is one of the few temporary visa categories recognized as dual intent, meaning an H-1B holder can have legal immigration intent (apply for and obtain the green card) while still a holder of the H-1B visa. Effectively, the requirement to maintain a foreign address for this non-immigrant classification was removed in the Immigration Act of 1990.[22]

Citations from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa

[vthallam]

> It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them

Wow. Why do you think someone on H1B will agree for a lower wage assuming he/she has a good skill set to get into oracle or similar company?

Changing to a diff job on H1B involves some paper work which everyone is used to do now. If we are talking about Indian consulting companies getting low wage employees, it might be partially true.

[dannypgh]

Changing jobs always carries risk - the new company might not be a good fit, and you may not last there very long perhaps for reasons beyond your control. Likewise, there are many jobs - e.g. early startups - where the risk of the company itself going under may be significant.

People in the country on an H1B lose their lawful status immediately after their employment ends, which means being unemployed for any period of time carries risk of deportation. Most people don't want a change in their work situation to translate into being forced to leave their country of residence.

Between these two points, I'd expect people here on an H1B to have a narrower field of jobs that seem attractive - high-risk startups aren't going to be appealing to most, and to generally be less mobile than those who don't fear deportation if a new position doesn't work out. Because of this decreased mobility, employers can get away with paying less.

[1_2__3]

Because some of us live in the real world and see this literally happening every single day?

[vthallam]

Every single day? May be you should come out and meet more people, just saying. Again, you might come across certain incidents where this might be true and there are cases, where they are more educated than an average American and get paid more. But to generalize very broadly is something won't help people properly understand the issue.

[pps43]

Someone on H1B usually is also waiting for employment-based green card or promise to file for one. Going to another employer means that this multi-year process needs to be restarted.

[chrisper]

You forgot that there is a lottery. So there is more than just applying for one applicant.