Look, if you can’t find an american to do the job you will have no issue paying a premium fee to bring in a foreigner.
Sorry, but H1B is an abject scam, at best 5% of those in this country are here out of true need, the rest are just companies effectively getting slave labor and depressing wages.
You can’t look me in the eye and tell me Bayer Corp, or Sony can’t find a Java Developer that’s a citizen... yet they have H1Bs doing those jobs, along with tons of other companies.
H1B is a SCAM, and ABSOLUTE SCAM.. sure I am sure you can find an individual case or two that actually meet the original critieria of the program, but they are the VAST exception.
Sorry 10-20% is not remotely enough of a fee, because the minimum wage portions of H1B are generally 20-25% or even more under the going market rate for the work they are doing. So, no, 100k fee for an H1B worker per year would NOT kill a start up company. What is a start up company doing that requires such skill that no native born american can be found to do the work???????? Be serious. I worked in start ups for more than a decade, even had a few go public, and yes the ones I was with that went public are still around, unlike all the scam ones. If a company needs someone to do that work so badly and absolutely no american can be found to do it, then 100k fee for the H1B worker you must import, period.
Fact is simple, if their need is that specific that no one in america can do the job, they’ll gladly pay the fee.. reality is, this is RARELY the case. H1B mimium wage settings are at least 20% below market rate, in many cases and many markets (because it isn’t adjusted for higher dollar markets) it can be 50% below the market rate, so a 10-20% fee would do NOTHING to stop abuse.
H1B is a scam, and it conintues to be a scam, its nothing more than a wage depressor funded and sanctioned by our own government on the middle class, and upper middle classes. It is to skilled work what illegals are for unskilled, pure and simple.
I have no problem with a small premium. However, a large premium has the same effect as a high tax on the technology industry. It makes it considerably more expensive to be in the technology business in the US. It causes your economy to shrink or at least slow. It drives business elsewhere outside the country.
Businesses can't charge unlimited amounts for their products and therefore don't have unlimited funds to pay employees. If you force up their costs artificially, you will drive some businesses will simply fail, and others will simply go elsewhere.
Even during the technology boom of the late 90s, there were lots of startups that simply ran out of capital before they could bring their product to market.
H1B is a SCAM, and ABSOLUTE SCAM.. sure I am sure you can find an individual case or two that actually meet the original critieria of the program, but they are the VAST exception.
Our unemployment rate is at about 4.5%. Even during the technology boom it didn't really drop below 3%, and at that point employers were in many places scrapping bottom to find even unskilled workers.
You never have 100% employment. A rate of 4.5% is low, but in some local areas, the rate is obviously higher and in other areas it is obviously lower. But on average there is about 1.5% of our 152.6 million person work force that would likely have jobs if jobs were available, or about 2.3 million.
So what percentage of those 2.3 million do you think have the technical skills to replace the H1B VISA workers if we just threw them all out? I haven't found a good source for how many people are currently here on H1B visas, but on a rough average they have approved about 100k a year and they last for 6 years. Maybe about 500k people, assuming that some leave before the 6 years is up.
Unless you really think that more than 1 in 5 of the people on unemployment that are looking for work are being displaced by people with H1B visas, it would seem obvious that there are more jobs that US citizens with the technical skills to fill them.
When there have been big layoffs at large companies, I've seen some technical people struggle to find new jobs right away in that area, but in general, people with technical skills aren't having trouble finding jobs.
They may not get the particular job they want. In some cases they may even lose their jobs to outsourcing outside the US. However, decreasing the number of H1B visas will increase domestic labor costs which will increase the amount of outsourcing. The amount of outsourcing going on is actually an indication that our labor market isn't flooded with cheap immigrant labor.
Your assertion that H1B visas are an unnecessary scam simply aren't backed up by the numbers. Your claim that H1B visas are only used properly in very rare circumstances doesn't seem to be supported by unemployment numbers, or my own personal experience. So tell me why you believe it to be so. I'm simply asking you to back up your assertions.
Sorry 10-20% is not remotely enough of a fee, because the minimum wage portions of H1B are generally 20-25% or even more under the going market rate for the work they are doing.
Going market rate? You mean the average salary for someone doing that job? Do you really think it is unusual for the minimum salary to be 20% less than the average? If you add a 20% fee, then they would end up paying basically the average salary to someone with an H1B visa at a minimum.
So what would be the incentive to deal with the government bureaucracy to hire a H1B visa applicant, knowing that you would lose them in 6 years at the longest. It obviously wouldn't be cost savings?
So, no, 100k fee for an H1B worker per year would NOT kill a start up company.
So you're saying that most startup companies have a few extra hundred thousand dollars just laying around they really don't need. Is that why the majority of startup companies go under in the first couple years, and what forces them under is that they run out of money to pay salaries?
Where do you work that you think that coming up with a couple or few hundred thousand dollars wouldn't break a large percentage of the startups that do make it.
What is a start up company doing that requires such skill that no native born american can be found to do the work????????
The labor market is like any other market. When a particular portion is booming, people with those skills become in short supply.
If you have time to train people, and have the expertise to train people, you can usually make due.
However, if you are looking for someone with experience in a tight labor market, you are going to have to try and hire them away from someone else. Nothing wrong with that as long as the shortage of such skilled people isn't too great, because larger companies with several such people can usually utilize the people they still have to train others.
However, in an expanding market, to be competitive you can't spend six months or a year training someone, especially in a small company that doesn't already have someone with those skills. You need to hire someone that has the skills now.
Startup companies are generally also the least likely to abuse H1B visas. In general people create a startup because they have an ideal on how innovate and do something differently than it is currently being done. They tend to be made up of smaller groups of technical people who work long hours trying to develop a product before the opportunity passes them by or they run out of money or both.
The companies that are more likely to abuse H1B visas are large companies with large workforces, especially those that contract out their services to others. Such companies have a much greater tendency to treat employees, even technical ones, as easily replaceable lines on the budget rather than difficult to replace assets.
Few people are truly irreplaceable, but if your employer really can just lay you off and grab someone else and have them doing your job just as well in a short period of time, you'd better find yourself a new job where your skills add real value. If you can be easily replaced, it isn't unlikely that you will be at some point in time. It may be a layoff after which they slowly replace high paid workers with entry level people that can do the same job. It may be that your job gets outsourced to a smaller, leaner company, or even one in a different country.
If a company needs someone to do that work so badly and absolutely no american can be found to do it, then 100k fee for the H1B worker you must import, period.
So what you are saying is that if the economy is booming, any company trying to enter into a booming market needs to have such a good concept and business plan that they can afford to pay an extra 100k more than existing companies to hire key employees.
That's an artificial barrier that will hamper innovation.
Innovation is what has kept America the most prosperous country on earth. Investing in innovation is also why China and India are starting to make huge improvements in their own economies. However, they are still far behind.
Driving up the costs of innovating in the US will not prevent them from chipping away at our lead, it will do the opposite. It will drive investment capital away from the US. It will take us down the same path the Europe is on that allowed us to surpass them.
What do you think will happen if technology jobs flee the US at a higher rate? What do you think will happen if you drive up the cost of doing business in the US?
Our economy will slow. Inflation will increase. Unemployment will increase. Our standard of living will get chipped away at by inflation, while our wages won't be going up, because unemployment will be driving them down.
You can't just simply force American wages to remain high through heavy handed protectionism, because if you do more and more of the work will be done elsewhere in the world.
There was a time where that wasn't the case because Americans were simply far more productive that people in other countries because of our free market policies and our spirit of innovation.
However, that spirit of innovation and use of free market policies are being used more and more by others, and they are starting to bridge the gap.
At lease when we have skilled people come here on H1B visas we can often attract many of the exceptional ones to seek permanent residency and even citizenship, while letting those that are less skilled return to their own country after having them work for 6 years helping to expand our economy while making money for themselves as well.
Having some H1B workers working here in the US along side us is far better than having companies shift all the jobs to another country, or be put out of business by a company in another country because they can't compete.
Free markets produce great growth and innovation, but they don't allow people to sit back and say we deserve things like a high standard of living. You have to keep proving that you deserve it as much if not more than the others out there that want it as well.
H1B is a scam, and it conintues to be a scam, its nothing more than a wage depressor funded and sanctioned by our own government on the middle class, and upper middle classes. It is to skilled work what illegals are for unskilled, pure and simple.
If so, where are all the unemployed technical workers in the US? Also, if so, why are so many jobs being lost to outsourcing outside the US? H1B visas are hardly the only factor keeping salaries for technical jobs from shooting up like they did in the late 90s.