So the new immigration bill would increase visas for high tech jobs. How will this help us again?

[jeff47]

68. Your perspective is from an environment where people stay close to theory

For people to not face prosecution, they have to stay close to the theory of how H1Bs are supposed to work. But that doesn't mean once they leave your office that they remain close to the theory.

First of all, I've been working in U.S. immigration law for more than 13 years.

I've been a software developer for the past 16 years. I'm well aware of how companies are actually using H1B visa employees. They were my coworkers.

H-1B employees transfer to/from employers all the time.

Because they swing by your office when there is no transfer involved, so you've got a great metric of transfers-vs-not.

H-1B workers are not cheap. It is actually very expensive for any business to hire an H-1B worker. Legal fees alone are at least $2,500. Filing fees owed to the U.S. government are $2,325 for many employers (less for smaller employers - more for H-1B-dependent employers). So, we are talking about nearly $5,800 that an employer must pay to have an H-1B worker.

H1B Network Administrator: $30k.
Citizen Network Administrator: $50k.

Saving $14k for 6 years: $84,000. Yeah, that H1B employee is really expensive.

Since we are heavily unionized

Congrats. Your shop is exactly like ~1% of technology employers. Clearly that's an excellent model for declaring how H1Bs are really used and treated.

The idea that it's simpler for an employer to get a new H-1B visa instead of filing a change of employer petition for a current H-1B visa holder is ridiculous.

You just claimed that getting a new H1B is really, really expensive. So now you're claiming it's cheaper to go through that process MORE OFTEN because the 6 years expires earlier on transferred H1Bs.

One of the biggest misconceptions and errors - also evident in the post above - is that there is a job search for H-1B visas. There is no such thing. Again, I repeat, there is no job ad placed for H-1B visas.

Employers have to show that they can not find citizens to fill the position. They aren't searching for H1Bs at this point, they're "proving" that they need one.

And they do this by offering the position to citizens in such a way that the citizen is almost guaranteed to decline.

I live in NY. I get lots of unsolicited offers from jobs in MI, MD, CT and IL. From job placement companies that also advertise their H1B work. I have never expressed any desire to move to those states, much less indicated I'm looking for a job, yet they're asking me to interview? Makes absolutely no sense if you actually want to find someone to fill the position. But it makes perfect sense if you want to be turned down. And you can even add with "see, we even tried to get citizens from out-of-state!".

I've also been in interviews where it became abundantly clear the goal was not to hire me. For example, at one company, I amazed all but one of the interviewers. That one really didn't seem to care what I said, and blocked hiring me. Instead, the job was filled by an H1B employee placed by a friend of his who happened to run a company managing people with H1B visas. By rejecting me, he was able to justify hiring an H1B employee.

I made some complaints, which resulted in the guy being fired a little later for receiving bribes from his friend. I found that out when the other interviewers contacted me to see if I was still available (I wasn't - I had moved for another job by then).

As for misusing job titles to circumvent the prevailing wage requirements of the H-1B, what you point out was a lot easier to do when DOL didn't issue its prevailing wage determination. In those days, unscrupulous employers could have certainly gotten off by doing just that (though that would have been stupid for a variety of reasons, too long to get into).

However, now the things are much different. The DOL reviews the job description and, based on that, provides a prevailing wage report. H-1B rules require that the employer pay at least the prevailing wage as determined by DOL or above.

Because it's utterly impossible to submit a 'lowball' job description, and then assign more duties to the H1B employee once they are hired. "We only expected him to do that stuff, but he's so great we gave him more to do!"

For all companies I've had the pleasure of working or doing business with, performance standards are uniformly applied, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.

This is utterly impossible. "Are you good at what you do" is measured by your manager. In most IT fields, there are no objective metrics that can be used to measure that.

Lines of code doesn't tell you crap about what's in that code. Number of bugs fixed doesn't say anything abou the complexity of those bugs. Feet of wire run or computers configured are again, useless to determine how "good" an employee is.

Thus an employee's "performance metric" in IT is a subjective measure assigned by the manager.

But I do have to say I was impressed by the large amount of chaff you included in your post.