The implied “problem” is that these companies are loopholing the H1-B process to hire for positions that American workers were laid off from. Of course, lawyers know how to make things work.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
> for positions that American workers were laid off from
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
I dont know, but companies need to keep hiring because of both staff turn over and switch of priorities. Presumably, the people getting hired are for positions that are perceived more valuable by management than the work people being let go are doing.
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.