What if the U.S. government allowed corporations to import global talent without constraints? Quite a few good people would lose their jobs. But somewhere between unrestrained access to global talent and the current annual quota on H-1B visas lies a more beneficial equilibrium.
In just two days last week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department was flooded with 133,000 requests for 65,000 H-1B slots. The USCIS cut off the application process - get this - nearly two months faster than it did last year and four months faster than in 2005. What’s going on here?
For those of you unfamiliar with the visa acronyms H-1B and L-1, H-1Bs are a regulated mechanism to enable companies to import talent with “specialty” skills otherwise unavailable in the U.S. L-1s are typically used for managers. You won’t be surprised to hear that the vast majority of H-1B workers come from India and work in high-tech jobs, typically as programmers. The otherwise unavailable standard (my words, not theirs) is somewhat related to location, too. In some instances, these skills exist domestically, but available workers don’t want to move to the employer’s location. It’s a highly imperfect market.
Assuming the applications are in order, the winners are drawn at random. The H-1B workers can stay for up to three years and if an extension is granted, six years is also possible. Employers must pay market wages - yet another point of controversy about the use (or misuse) of these visas. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report last June that found “more than 3,000 applications that were certified even though the wage rate on the application was lower than the prevailing wage for that occupation.”
H-1B reform is a possibility, according to an article in the current InformationWeek, Senators Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., have proposed to bar companies from outsourcing H-1B or L-1 workers to other companies. Critics of the visa program cite data that show the largest users of the program (measured by applicants) are Indian service providers. But more importantly it would ask these employers to make a “good faith” effort to hire domestically first rather than import global talent. Interestingly, under the Grassley-Durbin bill, the USCIS would go into the business of hosting a job board to match American candidates to these positions. That’s such a wacky idea it might pass - assuming the cap is raised substantially, too.
As InformationWeek’s Marianne Kolbasuk McGee points out, if Congress fails to act on the reforms this year, an election year is a remote possibility at best. How would you propose to fix this process?
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Quite a few hundred thousand good people have lost their jobs due to excessive E-3, F, H-1B, J, and L-1 visas.
I would correct it by eliminating the E-3, cutting F visas to less than 2,000 per year, capping the L-1 at 25K per year, and auctioning off 83 H-1B visas per month to the highest bidders. The bids would be the amounts of total compensation to be paid to the guest-workers, and would be on top of the $25K fee for background investigation and $2K fee for processing the paper-work.
Short of that, employers should have to prove that they’ve made a good-faith effort to recruit US citizens by handing over receipts and ad copy for at least a dozen newspaper ads for a month, a few trade publications, and at least a dozen web site ads (on sites not owned in whole or part by the employer, parent firm, subsidiaries, or affiliates). The government is rotten at setting up job boards, and the odds are they’d have guest-workers do it with even worse results. The ads must contain at least one contact name at the company, that person’s voice telephone number and e-mail address, an offer of reasonable relocation assistance for US citizens within the USA, and an offer of reasonable new-hire training.
In return, employers should be given tax write-offs for costs of interviewing, relocating, education and training US citizens, and they should be adjusted to keep up with rapidly rising tuition and fees.
I have made this comment on several blogs and articles.
There should be a cap on H-1Bs in order to regulate the number of skilled workers coming in from overseas. But there should be a clear delineation between categories such as IT, health care and other professions. It doesn’t make sense if the applicants are from such diverse walks of life as programmers, biologists and fashion models and yet they are bracketed in the same H-1B category. It is unfair not only to applicants who are not software professionals but to non-IT American industries as a whole.
The second gross imbalance in the present system affects foreign students who undergo expensive university education here only to be left to battle with overseas IT applicants. Students who get their degrees in America should be exempt from the cap. If not all students, then definitely graduate students getting their Master’s and Doctoral degrees. Of the 150000 applications that inundated the USCIS on April 2nd, only 13000 had Master’s degrees.
Reform should address the following bullets:
1) Foreign students who get their degrees in America should not be subject to the cap.
2) Applicants with Master’s and Doctoral degrees should not be subject to any cap.
3) The cap itself - I’m unable to comment on whether the 65,000 cap should be increased or not. I’m not in the IT industry and I cannot comment intelligently on the dynamics of recruitment and requiremnts of the industry. Bottomline is, these overseas applicants should be separated from in-country applicants based on the degrees they hold and the industry they will serve eventually.
Since the current rules were enacted in Nov. 2004, there is an exception made for foreign-born graduate students. Up to 20,000 guest workers with a masters or a Ph.D. are exempted from the annual cap of 65,000 new H-1B visas. I understand that you don’t favor any caps Deepak. However, I wonder if you have considered what impact this policy would have on U.S. graduate school programs? Clearly there isn’t equal access to graduate schools around the world and I can’t think of any countries prepared to automatically grant work permits to post-graduates.
I share your desire to see a more equitable distribution of work visas across multiple industries.
[…] Reforming the broken H-1B program is a priority for both parties. According to today’s Washington Post, “Republicans, with the White House’s backing, are proposing a three-year temporary-worker program that would allow 400,000 new workers to enter the country each year, provided they return to their home countries once their visas expire. A much smaller number, perhaps 20,000, would be able to apply for a work visa that could lead to legal permanent residency.” […]