I benefited from H1-B visa but I am very surprised that you write an op-ed that says wives should also get working permit. That is reaching out too far. I can't believe NYT also promotes something like this. This op-ed sounds like a spoiled brat. No wonder Trump wants to get rid of it all together.
13
Why won’t donny heal spurs fix this?
He KNOWS they won’t vote for him or his party.
This problem is very much part of Americans increasingly turning ugly in their utter disregard of any objective data that shows that jobs are on net created not eaten up by the H1b Visas. It's xenophobia mixed in with economic illiteracy -- given such wilful denial of economic facts. One shouldn't be surprised -- this has been part of the American immigrant story. Those that got in early turning to close the doors on those that followed. A more pernicious recent incarnation of this story has been the attempt by "white" anti immigrant groups to portray "blacks"as victims of immigration. This appropriation of racism by the "whites" is especially evident in the call for stopping unskilled immigrants. Influential anti immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA have continued to propagate this canard of Americans that hire immigrants are being de-facto racist! Here is the NYT report on this group: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/us/politics/roy-h-beck-quietly-leads-...
Plus here is NumbersUSA making its case against immigrants by exploiting discontent among Black Americans: https://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckr/march-5-2010/white-ope....
This ugliness is not going to go away anytime soon. Go to Canada or even better try and contribute to India's progress. She clearly deserves you far more than the ugly American does at this point.
6
I sympathize with the author and agree that immigration is good for our country. But faced with the current situation I'd offer one possible option. Volunteering. Rather than sitting at home with only ties to the "homeland" perhaps these spouses could find an organization, a library, or school that needs help. There certainly are plenty to choose from. Although there's no monetary pay, the benefits in socialization, networking and friendship are worth the investment.
8
This issue is not unique to the US - in fact it is much harder to gain any kind of work permit, much less for a spouse, in Western Europe for non- EU residents. Working and living in the US is not an entitlement. The complaint in this piece is disingenuous, coming from a member of one of the most privileged groups of immigrants in the US. Would these spouses have worked in India? Probably not. I am personally tired of pieces like this that show the “victimization “ of individuals who make personal choices and expect others to bend to their will. Enough! You don’t like the rules here? It’s your prerogative to stay or go.
12
Ms. Shikha Dalmia presents a one-sided take: In 1990, when she came into this country with her (now ex) husband, thousands of qualified journalists with U.S. citizenship and American educations they financed with their families were being met at hiring time with "job freezes". Nobody was hiring journalists then -- unless your family owned a newspaper, or was willing to support you while you toiled in a low-pay, non-welcoming industry. Journalists read the signs on the wall, and retrained for other professions. Working-class journalists were lost to the profession: it mattered less your reporting skills and how you could write than who you could knew to "get in". Not exactly fair competition for the best available journalist.
Ms. Dalmia took this time, she tells us, to further her education with her then-husband's support. Others -- including American citizens -- went out and worked in other jobs with their transferrable skills to support themselves. That's the American way.
In 1990, America did not need to admit another journalist wife to pursue a saturated market. We had plenty at home to do those jobs. Coming in as the wife of an allegedly "needed" tech worker allowed Ms. Dalmia entrance to our country, where she remains and has gained citizenship, even though the marriage has ended. (Does her ex-husband get to bring another Indian wife in now? Can Ms. Dalmia petition to pull in a new Indian husband?)
Being a housewife beats being unemployed. Is India hiring?
15
A very good article! Thank you so much for the article, Ms. Shikha Dalmia. The article aptly laments the woes of H-4 spouses. I came here on a F-2 visa and then changed to F-1 to get a master’s degree. Upon graduation I got a job and my H-1B sponsored. The job I got was a very low paying job and not challenging enough. So I changed back to F-1 visa and pursued another master’s degree. After master I found another job and again got my H-1B sponsored. After I lost that job in 2011, I haven’t been able to find employment. I am looking forward to my H-4 work authorization. I know the kind of life I have led for not being employed. I have been volunteering with various organizations for the past seven years and being unemployed is not fun at all. Eliminating the work authorization will deny many women like me the opportunity to be independent and be a contributing member of my family.
It is surprising that all the hatred spewed in the comments section is towards the immigrants and not towards the corporations who are hiring the immigrants. Please don’t make us the target of your prejudice. Just like everybody else, we spouses have the right to earn our livelihood.
6
You have the right to earn your livelihood for sure - just not entitled to do so in the United States.
12
You are not an immigrant. The H1bs are non-immigrants. They are temporary guest workers. Their dependents on H4 are not immigrants as well.
10
Actually, you don’t. At least not in the US. You have the right to be here on a non-working visa. That’s it.
10
H1-B visas were championed by Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, Larry Ellison etc. etc. who didn't want to pay pimply-faced, socially awkward college dropouts $100K a year to program. As the number of H1-B visas increased, salaries leveled off and the number of computer science majors in US universities dropped like a rock. On the other hand, the number of computer science majors in India soared because an IT degree was a ticket to the US. The only winners in the contest are the plutocrats who got Congress to do their bidding.
18
I'm fascinated by the shameless ethnocentrism of so many of the columns on immigration policy: time after time, we hear people from other countries demanding that Americans let in more of their relatives and countrymen.
12
1. I’m not going to wade into discussing the ins and outs of any particular visa, I’m not well versed in them.
2. I’m pro-immigration
3. I’m pro DACA
4. To everyone complaining about immigrants coming here and taking jobs from Americans,
If we mandated funding high quality Public School Education on a national level with taxpayers money we would send highly prepared students to college or trade schools.
We wouldn’t waste resources providing first year college students with remedial education to catch-up on what should have been learnt in grades K-12.
We would be investing in our future. In our ability to compete Nationally and Internationally. We could be more selective about issuing student and work visas. Right now America isn’t producing enough of the best and brightest for these positions.
Our Public School System is in disarray. Our teachers are under appreciated and underpaid. Resources vary greatly depending upon whether a school district is rich or poor. All children should be given equal access to high quality schools and education regardless of socio-economic status.
The next Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Barack Obama, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or John Roberts could be sitting in the poorest school district in America right now and will be left behind. We might never know unless we make education a priority.
Funding Education shouldn’t be a political bargaining chip. It’s a duty to our children and our Country’s future.
10
I run a business in Asia. The rules for bringing in an expat/non-local employee in our markets are very explicit: I must show that I am not able to hire locally by demonstrating that I have advertised etc and that the person has unique skills that my company needs. We currently have 65 local employees and one expat: me as the founder of the companies.
Employers should be allowed to hire anyone they want provided they can follow similar rules whether it is for high tech workers or farm labor.
3
Sadly this is not one bit true.
https://youtu.be/TCbFEgFajGU
1
Having started my career as an immigration lawyer, I saw this up close and personal. Twenty years ago, I may have agreed with the author but the landscape is different now. What was once a tech limited renaissance is now an employment renaissance for US workers. A tight labor market with increasing labor requirements and not enough US skilled and technical workers workers, in the midst of a growing demand for more female workers at the top and middle layers is a boon for US working women, if permitted. A door has finally opened to eligible US working women and the author is arguing to shut it just enough to allow temporary working women to file through instead. Doing so would lower wages (again) and opportunities for permanent US working women, who already struggle at earning just seventy nine cents on the dollar, and less for women over age 45. Meanwhile in India, working conditions for women are improving, becoming more inclusive with the same tech companies in the US investing in India based sites. American women are long accustomed to living in the gilded cage, living in the service of their families, a slave, with no social safety net. Now is not the time to give jobs to foreign workers. Now is the time for employers, universities, and private schools (prep boarding schools) which have traditionally recruited foreigners from Asia and India to lean-in to advancing American women's rights to a living and prosperous wage. Doing so will lift all women.
9
The H-1B program needs to be completely revamped before a comprehensive immigration bill is allowed to pass.
It should be redesigned so that only the best and the brightest college students at elite American universities (Ivy League and a dozen or two others) quality for employment at wages below $150,000 total compensation (salary and bonus only); and only if they are offered the exact same wages as would be a native born or naturalized student entering the labor force; but that corporations have an ability to bring in an unlimited number of elite level employees above $150,000.
We don't want to cut off our nose to spite our face, proverbially speaking, by making it impossible for brilliant young minds with track records of great academic achievement at top universities to stay in America, if they so choose. Nor should we want to deprive corporations of the elite talent that they might require. But the way that corporations must demonstrate that these are elite talents is by paying them elite wages.
While Ms. Dalmia's complaint is noted, the concern of responsive governments in the 21st century must be to accommodate the needs of its naturalized and native born citizens. When government is perceived to not be doing so, electoral chaos / crisis is inevitable.
13
I do support reforming the H1-B system to prevent abuses by outsourcing companies. However, what most commenters here seem to miss is that the H-4 work authorizations in question were only granted to the spouses of H-1B holders whose green card petitions have already been approved. The insanely lengthy green card backlogs for Indians and Chinese is a direct result of a discriminatory quota system. Imagine two graduates with masters degrees from top US universities who have the same qualifications and do the same job, but person from France can get their green card in a year, whereas the person from India often has to wait a decade or more.
Why discriminate against someone just because of their country of birth? Employers care about recruiting skilled people, not about their nationalities. Senseless policies like this can only serve to drive away talented people.
A simple fix for this issue would be getting rid of the senseless country quotas and granting employment-based green cards on a first come, first served basis. There are bills in congress like HR 392, which propose exactly this and have bipartisan support (320+ co-sponsors), but I am not holding my breath for it to be passed anytime soon.
8
Country quota make sense because the US would otherwise be overwhelmed by immigrants from developing countries, people who are willing to do the same job as Americans for lower pay. The US immigration policy dates back to the days Congress was not for sale and the interests of citizens were valued higher than those of campaign financing companies.
12
And getting rid of the “consulting” companies in India like Tata who scoop up these visas and abuse the system.
8
Discrimination? Really? How? Every country is given 7% quota. Is it our fault that India cannot control her population? Despite the 7% India still received the most employment based green cards. If the quota is removed, no other country than India will get the employment based Green Cards. We need diversity. We don't need people from one country hogging all the greencards. No to HR392.
8
As a rule, the spousal visa's that don't include work rights are nonsensical, and counter to the US's culture valuing work. (The H1b isn't the only one)
And while I wouldn't argue for cutting the number of visa's, I'd prefer cutting the number of visas while giving work rights to spouses than the status quo.
A number of commentators have countered that their sympathy is limited because the visa program is being abused by job farms. Overall though, I find this an argument for reform rather than the status quo. If H1B visas are indentured servitude for the benefit of the sponsor, then opening up the work rights for the sponsored worker (allowing them to take better job offers) cuts into the Indian job shops income stream -- which is coming from the gauranteed difference between market rates and what they promise.
Finally, it's worth noting that it's corrosive to legally mandated working conditions to have a pool of people who want to work but legally can't. It's very tempting for them to take jobs off the books, with all the spillover that has for tax evasion, minimum wages, etc. From the perspective of an American worker who might be competing for the same job, I'd much rather have them be 'legal' and ask for the legal market rate, than illegal where the employer can use them to undercut wages and standards.
5
H1B visas are intended to apply to jobs that cannot be filled by U. S. citizens, because none are qualified. But they are now being used extensively to fill routine jobs and undercut the salaries of well qualified U. S. citizen workers, mostly IT professionals, who do routine work. This is happening because Indian job shops overload the H1B visa lottery with great numbers of Indian applicants, and sell the winners' services here. The H1B workers must be sponsored by hiring companies and are not allowed to seek other employment at higher salaries without the permission of their sponsor company. H1B visas are a kind of indentured servitude that works for the benefit only of the sponsor companies and the Indian job shops. I will have sympathy for Indian workers wives when we stop allowing Indian workers to undercut the salaries of U. S. citizen workers, either by enforcing the program as it was intended, or by allowing H1B workers to seek more highly compensated jobs.
22
I'm surprised by the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards legal immigration by the NYT readership.
What a lot of the commenters here seem to miss is that not all H1B spouses are eligible for the work permit. The change introduced by the Obama administration is only giving work permit to those spouses who are in the green card backlog, which as the author has pointed out can now take decades for new Indian applicants.
Some of these spouses had been here for over a decade without a work permit. Yes, they knew the conditions when they came, but I reckon they didn't think it would take that long.
If America wants to continue to attract bright talent from overseas, there is going to be a need for visas that are more family friendly. I know very few women (or men) in this age and day who would want to put up to stay at home for over a decade. And speaking of which, it baffles me that a company transfer visa (L1) does make work provisions for spouses.
Finally, I'm curious why most see immigration as a zero-sum game? Yes, the H1B needs urgent fixing to curb abuse and could be vastly improved. But generally speaking, I'm neither seeing a race to the bottom with tech worker wages nor rising unemployment. In fact, if you head to job sites and careers pages of Bay area company you'll see thousands of unfilled engineering roles, all paying well beyond $100K a year. If you look even further you'll see that a large proportion of the companies here are headed or founded by migrants.
13
People who say they do not see "why" often refuse to look. There are IT jobs outside of Silicon Valley and he Seattle metro for starters. Many of these jobs are being held by H-1B visa holders who were trained by the Americans the H-1B holder replaced.
Most of the IT H-1B visa holders are not the best and brightest but they will work on the cheap, and routinely work 60 hours or more a week for the same pay as 40 hours. Theses people often live under strict rules from their Indian contracting company. I have heard more than 100 accounts of how passports were held hostage by the contracting company and requirements for the Visa holder to repay $10,000 USD or more in "debt" on top of a percent of their salary. These are typically good hard working people who do not deserve this treatment.
The H-1B visa program and others like it must be ended. A new program needs to be put in place with limited numbers of available temporary visas. There are plenty of highly qualified Americans to take these IT jobs. Companies prefer less qualified "wage slave" labor. And I see this every day when I go to work.
15
I, for one, could care less about your plight. The whole reason H1-B visas exist is because American companies falsely cried to the federal government that they could not find qualified engineers and IT workers. It was a ruse used to lower the cost of payroll. As a result, wages in those fields have stagnated and, in some vases, have fallen. I remember working as a contract employee in Chicago in the 1990s and there were foriegn workers on visas in our department working for nearly half of their American counterparts. Safe to say, American contractors were all let go within a few months after this visa pipeline was established. I now run my own service business, eking out a living when, now in my 50s, I should be at my earning peek. I finished college, finished at the top of my class and received many college awards for my academic accomplishments. To this day, I get calls about contract jobs that pay about half of what I earned in the 1990s. So your plight rings on deaf ears.
43
The restrictions on work visas (for H-4 wives and others ) seems counterproductive for the US economy. Unable to bring candidates from other countries here with work visas or find enough qualified candidates locally,companies are likely to set up satellites in more friendly venues. Thus benefiting other countries . Seems very shortsighted.
5
I have worked many years in the US on a H1B (and my wife worked on a H1B at the same time a well). We have since left but a few observations based on my experience:
- The challenge these days is in getting a H1B visa, which has become a lottery with about a 1 in 3 chance. So a trailing spouse who wants to work and is qualified to work is very likely not able to as H1B visas are simply not available.
- Abuse of the H1B system is a concern, but that can easily be fixed. Require a higher wage. Both my wife and I were paid very well - we were not there as cheap labor to replace American workers.
- Since H4 spouses are already in the US, it seems silly to force them to be unproductive. If the concern is about allowing them to depress wages, then specify a high wage limit for them as well.
- If the administration is still unconvinced about allowing them to take up employment, at least permit them to start their own businesses. What could be more American than that! Some may fail, others may succeed and some may do brilliantly. What do you lose!
15
Starting their own business? Outsourcing to contractors to cheat employees out of health benefits and decent wages is a problem, not something we want more of. Nobody's waiting for another batch of working poor destroying decent jobs in "disruptive" businesses like Uber.
11
For this year's H1B quota of 60k for general category and 20k US educated PhD/Master's quota USCIS received 95k applications in each category. I get it people are against poorly skilled foreign labor but does it benefit the US if 75,000 US educated young grads who fail to convert from OPT to H1B go back? The reality is that the Canadian and Australian immigration gives the highest preference to young educated professionals educated at their own cost in their country. The US system on the other hand restricts green cards to 150k and then 850k or more is for extended family sponsorship, refugee etc. Would not the US benefit from retaining these US educated, mainly STEM graduates for helping the US compete against the rest of the world? The alarming news is international student demand has dropped by 30% this year. Many STEM programs at US Universities were able to keep programs open for Americans because the higher fee paying international students would subsidize Americans and US Universities. Expect major cuts in most Universities as the $30 billion contribution from International students to the Universities and their towns start drying up. Canada has promised work visas to businesses within 2 weeks for international hire. Microsoft no more comes to congress with a begging bowl for more visas. They just hire international professionals mainly US educated across the border from Seattle.
4
"does it benefit the US if 75,000 US educated young grads who fail to convert from OPT to H1B go back?"
Possibly. That could open up entry-level jobs to Americans. People make a big fuss about education, but IT is mostly learned on the job. The disappearance of entry-level work means that we aren't growing our own seasoned professionals.
It's also possible that the jobs would just be sent to India. Fine. Let these companies deal with all the problems that offshoring entails. Heck, maybe we can export their sociopathic C-suites too.
2
We'll take their education dollars, but please go home and fix your own country! Nearly 45% of well educated American citizen STEM graduates never land a job in STEM due to the indentured servitude of H1B & H4EAD.
4
If the concern is really about women, then demand H1B visas issued to women who qualify. Imagine the feminist message that policy would send around the world -- sharp rebuke to countries that invest in educating sons instead of daughters!
6
This would be a good argument if only the H1B visa was not a lottery. Just finding someone to sponsor you is not enough.
The situation is slightly complicated when it comes to hiring people already in the United States. If the H4-EAD goes away, none of the H4's can work unless their future H1B comes through (which is a BIG if), the companies are reluctant to even try. Now even if they decide to take a chance, the lottery system makes it hard. In the case of people coming in from outside, they can keep working for the company in their country till they win the lottery or the company gives up. Merit based immigration policies would solve some of these issues IMHO, but the current system is broken.
3
America needs fresh blood. We need achievers. We need new citizens who appreciate America. We get all three in our south Asian immigrants. Their rate of volunteerism is high. They appreciate America, especially our public lands. Their outlook is unflinchingly positive.
Other immigrants show ill-disguised contempt for America. They have the lowest rates of volunteerism. They feel that public lands are a waste. They feel that "el Chapo's" customers deserve their fate. They put their own families first and our families last.
They also have little to show for all their hard work.
Solution anyone?
4
How the 47% of well educated American citizen STEM grads and ban the H1B scam.
There's your answer.
5
Just a correction...H1B is not dedicated for Tech employment (a search on H1B specialty occupations will show the list). However, it was hijacked, exploited and abused by the various Indian offshore companies to send both qualified and unqualified tech resource to the US. This is one of the very few things I agree with the current administration. This is more like the camel nose story - a situation where the permitting of a small, seemingly innocuous act will open the door for larger things. That said, It is a good idea to issue H1B visas to those completed Masters degree in the US - irrespective of their nationality. The great advantage here is that by studying here the students get acclimatized to the western way of doing things. The other recommendation is to decouple H1B visa and employer and move towards the Australian immigration system.
12
The same good be said of DACA students; tens of thousands who have worked hard to succeed, gain degrees, contribute to their communities, and who speak English.
2
The same cannot be said of DACA students. They already have a legal path, they choose not to take it.
This is how the outsourcing companies abuse the H1b system. They get a Level-4 employee from India, fill his H1b paperwork as a Level-2 employee, pay him Level-2 wages, make him do the Level-4 work at clients location, and pocket the difference in the wages. Then they say that the displaced Level-2 American worker was incompetent, since he could not do the Level-4 work. The fix is to increase the minimum H1b wage from current 60K to 120K. If the H1b workers skill is really needed in USA, the American employer can always pay the employee 120K, and directly file his H1b paperwork. Regarding, H4 EAD, this scheme is pushed by lobbyists like ITServe, not to help H4 spouses, but to push the IT wages down, since these H4 spouses need not be paid the minimum H1b wages. ITServe first pushed for OPT, Optional Practical Training, so that students on J1 visas can be put on IT jobs for free (no wages), while they are waiting for their H1b paperwork. H1b, H4 EDA and OPT have just one purpose, push American wages down.
29
So you would like half the population to sit at home, so "your" half can make better wages?. Hmmm....
The readership of NYT is supposedly very progressive. But reading the comments section, the boundaries of that progressiveness become clear. One thing that all conservatives and most progressives seem to agree on is that we have too many immigrants, especially of the wrong color/ethnicity.
But in this, there is also news for the progressives. Progressives will not win elections at the national level, or have their priorities adopted unless they have a wide enough tent. If blacks keep getting shot, hispanics keep getting herded into deportation buses, and the rest keep getting isolated for reasons like "we have too many H1Bs" (the number hasn't increased in years), then they will turn off to mainstream progressive priorities, like abortion rights, the environment, welfare state etc. Good luck with advancing your agenda then.
10
The H1-B visa does indeed take jobs from Americans. Just ask Trump who cannot find any American wait staff in Florida and thus must import them on H1-B.
12
You are mixed up about these programs. h1B is for skilled workers, not wait staff.
4
Some 8 years or so ago, I took my mother to a nearby NYC hospital on Park avenue . She was in her 80's and had broken a wrist . SHe was in terrific pain and wanted one or maybe three codeine pills to get her through the nights till it stopped swelling and throbbing. There were 5 Pakistani or Indian MD's at the hospital seeing patients like my mother,(a white woman from Australia). All five refused her request for any pain medication and practically laughed at her.
A friend of mine-dying of cancer, gave her 2 spare 5 mg oxycodone c Acetaminophen tabs. She never used more than one. However, long before and long after, my experience has been that foreign MD's coming to the US, especially from India and Pakistan import the morality and judgments of their society to the US. My Mother's own doctor- a US educated MD who was born here(he was whitge), gave her 100 tablets of Oxycodone 5 mg c acet. She never used more then 5 of them. It wasn't the pills-it was the vicious and racialist attitudes of these foreigners which shocked me.
If you want to be hired in America, behave like one, and be good to those who have aided you-in the US being a MD is not a social rank denoting superiority.
14
I have had similar experiences with doctors and reluctance to give proper pain medication, I don't believe it's confined to foreign educated doctors. It's a consequence of the government's moralistic judgement about pain pills keeping track of how many pain prescriptions are written. All of this legal morass is made worse by the abuse of these drugs by many people. In other countries most medications can be bought in a pharmacy without prescriptions. In our country, a perfectly mature sane adult needs the permission of some uncaring doctor mostly worried the feds are counting her prescriptions in order to attack her as a drug pusher.
5
You do realize that nobody should be sharing "spare" tabs of Oxycodone any more than a "US born, white, American university educated doctor" should have issued a prescription for 100 tabs to an 80 year old with a broken wrist.
5
The author & her now ex-husband were both already in the USA on international student visas in the 1980s - w/c means that they were world-class, hard-working young geniuses to begin with!
This explains why they both did well in their STEM-path, fluent English only, rigorous US university undergrad & grad degree programs, segueing into fruitful US careers for decades to come. Kudos to the author for her patience in getting well-deserved US citizenship!
In stark contrast, too many 21st century H1s/H4s from India's greedy IT contractor firms are simply just not as English-literate, nor as cutting-edge STEM-minded, as their 1980s counterparts.
These younger Indians grew up in a post-Cold War India that is: 1) Hindu nationalist-run (thus, their English/World History/Current Events knowledge lags), and 2) is still a stubbornly overpopulated, socialist country full of humans who become pawns/tradeable commodities/robots to Indian & global elites (i.e. gullible voters, indentured IT servants, etc.).
Many current H1s & their H4 spouses are caged here w/ their poor English and undeveloped independent critical thinking/creativity skills.
This is proven by how these 21st century, H1 Indians need to be trained by the more competent Americans they are replacing!
The US immigration system ideally should only retain productive, world-class talents like the author.
Instead, H1 abuse just enslaves weak-minded, mediocre, overseas-miseducated staff & their H4 spouses!
12
“Involuntary Housewife VISA?” Give me a break. No one has forced these spouses to come here. They agreed to a non-working spouse visa, but now that they are here, they’d like to change the rules. I think I will write a macro for all these NYT articles about legal and illegal immigrants: If you don’t like the US immigration laws, please feel free to leave.
25
While the "if they don't like it, they can leave" argument has an appealing common sense simplicity to it, it overlooks the complexities of real life. Leaving the US would mean leaving her husband, or having her husband leave too. Any number of factors could make these both unacceptable choices, ranging from her children to their families back in India relying on her husband's income for support.
Add to all this that these women, based on the situation when they first came, had a reasonable expectation that they would be able to get an H1B based on their qualifications, and the move by the current administration looks less like common sense, and a lot more like needless cruelty.
10
Why would they have an expectation of an H1B visa? Clearly, they were allowed into the US on a different, non-working visa. If their hopes were then to get a different visa or change our laws, then that is their issue. People make choices and then must live with the consequences.
Enforcing immigration laws is not unnecessarily cruel, it’s simply necessary. There is much I don’t like about our current administration, but in this instance it’s that they are moving too slow to curtail the various work visas.
7
I wonder if the blogger will survey how much these women gave in dowry for their indian husbands working in america. Also it doesn't speak well of a person who wishes to work as a doctor in America and not in India, which has one of the worst doctors-patients ratio. At some point maybe people should realize that what for many liberals looks like American gain is actually a loss for developing world.
22
As I've written before, there are two H-1B programs today: One aimed at capturing the best and brightest talent from other countries for the benefit of US intellectual capital, and another that is almost exclusively abused by Infosys, Wipro, TCS, and now even IBM (which has more employees in India than in the USA). The second H-1B program is aimed specifically at providing cheap, horribly under-skilled, and incommunicable Indian resources to IT departments ... period.
I've been in IT for almost 4 decades and saw the uptick in H-1B labor starting right after Y2K. Anyone in IT can immediately tell when an H-1B resource has written code, documentation, or communications: It's often impossible to understand and is produced via the DGCP ("Do the Google and the Cut and the Paste") method of coding.
While I freely admit my grandfather arrived here in 1905 with virtually no skills except a strong back and a willingness to work, he was not tasked with building and maintaining critical infrastructure that's vitally important to a company's success.
And with security often a distant afterthought, I cringe when I see how vulnerable the code that H-1Bs have written to SQL injection, excessive resource consumption, and maintainability.
17
I've only been in IT for two decades, but in that time, I have worked with a number of Indians. A few were bad, several were quite good, and some were among the best engineers I've seen. The same can be said for the Us-born developers I've worked with.
Maybe you and I have simply had different experiences, to be expected with sample sizes in under 100. It's also possible that confirmation bias has led each of us to interpret similar data differently. Can you honestly say that you've never seen a strong Indian engineer?
10
Hi there, Indian H1B worker here working in the tech industry. I have worked for American clients for 10 years, and while I have worked with both kinds - good and bad, in my experience most Americans simply do not have the capacity or drive to write good code. These "native" tech leads still believe in outdated concepts, are simply bad designers and some have not written code since the mainframe days. Some get fancy titles like "solution architect" but start hemming and hawing if you ask them for a decent requirement spec. I have literally written all their documentation for them and just got them to sign off on it because they couldn't be bothered to put in the minutes to do a simple writeup. It's not even funny how awful they generally are at the job that they get paid more for than I do.
While I can't pretend that all Indians are good coders or eloquent speakers, I will say that they have a better drive to succeed, and most get quickly better than whatever the regular colleges are churning out here. Again, this is not because Americans inherently are bad at IT (I have worked with some very good folks too), it's just that they don't WANT to put in the effort to become good at it. Your generalization falls flat on it's face for anyone who has actually worked in the IT industry - but I suspect you already know this.
7
If work authorization for H-1B spouses means the United States ends up “importing” two foreign workers for every one, they could reduce the number of H-1B visa's to compensate. That would be fair, perhaps more fair.
13
This Oped mixes up so many things. Legitimate complaints about quotas (racist) and waiting periods (ridiculous - address the backlog or stop adding to it).
But these women are not “involuntary” housewives. They and their spouses chose to be here under H1B.
I’m frustrated this “unfair H4” notion seems to be getting traction in some forums. Traction that could be better spent addressing the above points or the malformation of the H1B program more generally. And I dare say it will fuel anti immigrant sentiment. No one who needs convincing will sympathize with educated foreign women who want to change the rules because they think they’re so awesome. Just political facts.
14
America does not wish to become overpopulated, overcrowded and overwhelmed. Birthrates in the developing world are still egregiously high and need to be dramatically curbed. America should only ingest as many immigrants as it can sustain without radically compromising its environmental and cultural assets.
15
Stop whining! These women aren't even citizens and they are making demands on the government? I am also tired of hearing how bored these women are and how their only option is to Skype with friends and families in India. Why can't they start their own businesses or do volunteer work in their local communities? Better yet, why don't they apply for an H1b visa on their own?
18
As I understand it, while an H4 visa holder can start a business as an investor, they are not allowed to actually work for the business.
1
"These [people] aren't even citizens and they are making demands on the government?"
I think that's quite a nonsensical statement to make; the US is always (hopefully) going to have non-citizens living in our borders, contributing to the economy, paying taxes; why should the government not look out for them, too? I think a better question is why the government isn't looking out for middle-class taxpayers. (H-1B visa holders make a median salary of $80k, higher than most Americans, which means they also pay more taxes than most Americans.)
I wonder, would you say the same thing about DREAMers? They aren't citizens, either. Citizenship is a construct that humans invented (quite recently, too), and it's not some sort of inherent measure of a person.
"Why can't they start their own businesses?"
Whoosh! That was the sound of this op-ed going entirely over your head.
Because starting a business would be illegal. Did you even read the article?
2
With all due respect to the author, this op-ed almost reads as if it was written by someone who was actually trying to stir outrage among American workers. The sense of arrogance and entitlement is just stunning..."These women are qualified because educated people tend to marry other educated people." Really? And the phrase "involuntary housewife" is loaded with judgment about those who actually are housewives by choice. And is "involuntary" really the correct word to use here? Are American workers and the American government responsible for your choices in life? As educated women, were you not aware of the trade-offs you were making? While there may be some American workers who sympathize with "gilded cage" complaint, I doubt there are money. The author states that "a job is not just income" but for those in this country who have been downsized in middle age or older, a job is a necessity. Not just for food and shelter, but healthcare as well. Unlike the Indian constitution, ours does not guarantee free healthcare fo all its citizens.
20
This needs to get fixed . Now .
1
I feel horrible of what T. might do to DACA or his wall project. But HB-1 visa need to be sharply reduced. There is no shortage of qualified American workers! Employers are just not willing to pay fair salaries to US workers. Most of these visa holders do not have large student loans to pay. I am paying insane amounts of tuition to American colleges.
Sorry, I have very little sympathy for the doctor's wife who had to put her career in hold. It's unfortunate but it's not fair to people who went to the educational system here to be replaced.
16
The responses seem to have turned into an anti-immigrant bashing event, because they are "taking away jobs because they are cheaper" (despite some evidence to the contrary for proper uses of the H-1B visas).
1. I can understand why Trump would recommend stopping all "non-working wives" visas.
After all, getting a new wife (or paramour) for him is no more consequential to him than replacing a soiled tissue.
I wonder how many of the unsympathetic replies were written by someone who believes blowing families apart is the right thing to do.
Trump is also a huge abuser of work visas, importing white workers to work at Mar A Lago despite the large number of well qualified brown workers in the area.
2. Replacing well qualified senior workers with someone who can do job with minimal qualifications but much lower pay is as American as the Robber Barron's and legal (whether citizens or legal immigrants). Unless that company is unionized.
1948 - 1973 1973-2016
Productivity increase: 96.7% 73.7%
Hourly Compensation: 91.3% 12.3%
Unionization (private): 35% < 7%
Lack of employee negotiating power is the problem, not immigrants. Unions set expectations for job security for all companies if at critical mass.
Blaming immigrants rather than "Right to Work" laws is lucrative for financiers, but destroys families, and towns. Non-working immigrant wives should not be an issue.
8
Non-working immigrant wives should not be an issue.
----
We don't mind when they are not working.
It is when they are taking the jobs from skilled, American-trained workers -- and then complaining that it took so long to get their job entitlement here, that it becomes a national election issue.
Stories like these certainly influence my vote.
Who elected Obama to single-handedly change our immigration labor policy just because he was lobbied by special-interest groups like the formerly unemployed writer here? Why do American citizens have jobs taken from them because wealthy Indian wives are bored? Don't they lunch? Can't they set up charity balls or volunteer in under-served city neighborhoods? That's the American way, not whining that you can't find a job that needs you. (How about trying law school and investing in yourself as a divorce lawyer once the Indian women can work and shed/be free of the husbands who got them in here because no one else could allegedly do the jobs so cheaply?)
4
I am an Indian and have seen H1b fraud and H4ead fraud from close quarters.I am also deeply disgusted at this victim card being played every week in this newspaper op Ed columns.This is just injustice to all citizens who play by rule.
In one of the biggest logistics company ,I witnessed how Stem graduates from a premier engineering school were bypassed to give jobs to H4Ead.The reasons are many.
Let me unequivocally state that the entire IT recruitment is being run like mafia operations from IT managers, minority owned staffing companies ,recruiters sitting in India.
OPTs and H4EAD are allowed to stage skype interviews with lip synching .Can you believe it? Hurts to core.
25
I love immigrants. I'm married to one. I don't think immigration is a zero sum game. I don't trust anything Republicans say about immigration reform because I believe they are all either racist or willing to bow to the will of racists.
But this is the least sympathetic angle on immigration reform I have seen. Agreeing to be part of a program then complaining about the not surprising and not unusual restrictions. I hope immigration advocates distance themselves from this boondoggle. To the women advocating for this, this is doing nothing to help anti-immigrant sentiment in this country. I guess I congratulate you on looking out for #1. You're becoming "real" Americans.
13
Didn't we have this discussion a few weeks back. Please read those comments. Nothing has changed; thank you.
8
After reading through lot of comments we can make this very simple.
H4 is granted with the condition and a promise from the applicant that this is only for family unification and that they wont work.
If H4 should be given or want the right to work then few things can happen:
A person applying for H1B if they have an educated spouse or when they marry a educated spouse, their H1B approval should be based on the fact that both the spouses will not replace a local worker. By definition then single workers will get preference over married applicants and free market will solve the problem.
Or if a H1B candidate wants to have a spouse work then let the spouse get their own H1B. This is how it is today.
Bottomline is allowing H4 visa holders work bypasses completely the checks and balances of the H1B mechanism (which are already weak and are abused) and in addition is a complete bypass on the H1B annual limits that are part of the immigration law.
13
Bottomline is allowing H4 visa holders work bypasses completely the checks and balances of the H1B mechanism (which are already weak and are abused) and in addition is a complete bypass on the H1B annual limits that are part of the immigration law.
------
From your lips to President Trump's ears...
3
This is unfortunately by design. If the administration can stop immigrant families from coming to the United States and taking high tech positions on the coasts, they think the big beautiful coal jobs will magically reappear for middle America. It's a con game where everybody loses.
3
Do you think Indian workers are genetically superior to Americans? I don't. Invest in American education for Americans: train inner-city, jobless, black youth to code.. When they start making more money in tech jobs for which they are trained and paid more than hanging on street corners selling drugs or making babies for monthly pay checks, we won't need to import Indians techs and their wives will have to complain about something in India, not here.
Plus we will have jobs for Americans who need them.
2
There is a second issue with non-working spousal visas. If you're dependent on your spouse to support you, and you're not legally allowed to work for pay, it leaves very few options for women in abusive marriages. You can leave your spouse, sure, if you're willing to risk outright deportation, as you don't have any right to be in the country on your own. And if you do leave, you're going to be broke and without resources - you can't get a job to support yourself. It can get much worse if there are children involved.
5
No one is holding anyone as slaves in this free country. In a global economy they are free to pursue their dreams outside of USA. They can both find work in their home country or in another land of their dreams. If they are so talented then they can find a job anywhere. Why does everything become USA's problem? They are highly educated ( that's what they keep telling us) and they agreed when they applied for visa that H4 applicant will not work. So they don't wan't to honor their own commitments?
Allowing H4 to work is a complete workaround the minimal H1B scrutiny and doubles the H1B quota that is legally allowed with no checks and balances.
13
When the H1B started getting more attention, I noticed that the offshore firms that supply H1Bs to my workplace started hiring more Americans. I've seen a notable increase in African Americans being brought in too. These policies have an impact.
I can't stand Trump, but I support him on this.
25
As a student on an F1 visa with an F2 dependent spouse, I sympathize with the author — but I also agree with the many American commenters who argue that every couple in our situation has a choice. We are choosing to leave America once I complete my degree because the odds of my spouse getting an h1b are low, and we want to be somewhere we both can work. America is not that place. One consideration, though, would be to allow dependent spouses to engage in entrepreneurial activities if they can prove they are generating jobs in the US. It baffles me that America has no visas for entrepreneurs and no options for spouses who have money to invest and the ability to start a small business.
5
They do have visas for entrepreneurs - but only well capitalized ones.
3
The readers seem to largely agree that H1 Indian males take jobs away from Americans, that their wives - if allowed to work easily - will take away even more jobs. There is not much sympathy for the cause you write so lucidly about, Shikha.
Op-eds are a great first step; alas I doubt a single American who thinks of us as a reason for joblessness - will change his or her mind. Evidence that H1 visas produce a net gain for the US, that it contributes to Silicon Valley, to science and tech industries, and to today's healthcare - don't matter (note, too many people here would rather believe than know).
I too started with an H1; and every Indian knows of this problem. We need a very American response; i.e., organization, political action, and the use of the democratic processes and institutions in ways other ethnic groups have used before.
Interestingly, people of Indian origin in America are likely the most educated, and the richest of ethnic groups. But it means nothing because we possess zero political power. Indians are doing fine in all walks of life, including body politics, but the organization to help fellow Indians is sorely lacking. I suspect you know all the reasons this is so - but it can change. If your contribution, Shikhaji, triggers a positive step, then you would have succeeded.
Kalidan
7
Great points in your post. The reason the Indian diaspora is not politically active despite our success in America is because Indians are rapidly integrating into American society - possibly faster than other immigrant groups at the same point in their historical integration into America. There is very little impetus to put money and resources into advocating for "Indian" causes when we are defined by our region of India, not necessarily the country.
3
Most support the idea of allowing foreigners to fill positions that cannot be filled by citizens.
This is not the case for most H-1B visa holders. The sad case is it is easier and cheaper for a company to bring in an H-1B visa worker than it is for them to spend a short period of time training people.
This isn't about bringing in the best and the brightest- it is about lowering labor costs.
The idea that relatives of a single H-1B visa holder, supposedly allowed to work here because they have special skills, should get work too is offensive.
21
We do not blame Indian males for joblessness in America. We blame our government, especially Congress, for not updating immigration legislation so that American workers are not undercut in the job market. Also, I for one prefer to judge people by Martin Luther King's standard based on the content of a person's character rather than the color of their skin or ethnic origin. There is room in this country for all of us to succeed. Your singling out of the Indian community as superior as an ethnic group was unnecessary and short-sighted.
11
We can argue the appropriate number of H1Bs we should be issuing, especially if the only point is to get the job done cheaper. But the spouse exclusion should be ended, both for workers we allow in and for Americans working abroad. We should offer to do it under reciprocal agreements with and country that will do the same for our expats. I've seen first hand the waste of the trailing spouse (including trailing husbands) while working as an expat for an international firm in France.
8
I am a physician who came as a legal immigrant. I am now a naturalized citizen. This is not pertinent to the current discussion but I offer my heartfelt thanks to my fellow Americans for giving me the opportunity to learn their values, their simplicity and giving me the opportunity to take care of them. May I be able to make a meaningful difference in your and your families life as long as breath lasts. That will be my debt payback to this wonderful country. Wishing everyone well
17
Thank you.
1
The advantages of leaving your country and seeking employment as a work visa holder in another country to advance your earnings and employment opportunities in the globalized economy that the US, in fact, created, is not lost on every single American working abroad at the moment.
6
My wife has been working for a major US tech giant since the late 90s and witnessed the outsourcing and H1B wave first hand. Together with a company partner she is the only non-Indian on her team of 80, with only 4 other women. Over the last 10 years she was forced to lay off >80 US workers, men and women, mostly middle aged, to be replaced with Indian workers, almost all male. I believe Indian hiring is the major cause of the decline in female tech workers. I feel your plight, but many US families have lost their breadwinning jobs and are facing poverty and perilous retirement. Once IT departments are majority Indian, only Indians are hired. Resumes from non-Indian candidates,even naturalized Indians , are immediately discarded.
58
Great points. The H1B was 'good' when it was first implemented to fill 'essential' gaps in US workers. Now the H1B might as well be called an HIndian Visa. The US needs to focus its education system on developing better local 'workers' FIRST. And make the H1B a permanent TEMPORARY visa where not only does it have to be renewed every year, it should also last for a max of 5 years total. People who have an H1B should be barred from green card process 'completely' [ie no bypass loophole by marrying a citizen etc] for 10 years after their H1B ends.
21
Indeed, I watched the IT department at my former company go from about 30% women in a department of 20-30 people in the 90’s, to only 6 women worldwide in a department of 125 by 2016. The women were let go in the US and their jobs went to men, predominantly in India.
17
Years ago I witnessed this problem first hand amongst American women denied a work visa in mulitple countries where they trailed their spouses overseas. The frustration often broke families apart and was disruptive to the success of American employees sent abroad by Wall Street companies.
Obama’s policy to loosen the work visa restrictions for spouses of foreign work visa holders is in keeping with the response of other countries who have recognized this expanded talent pool and freed up work visas for American spouses.
Imagine the lost opportunity to country’s economy with a hugh talent pool that it refuses to access. We tried that already, but women are still being targeted. Does this make sense in a capitalist economy?
Trump’s continued assault on all policies Obama will have unintended consequences on Corporate families sent overseas to represent American companies.
Wall Street needs to stand up and make him back off.
10
Couldn't disagree more -- if corporations want these service hire them in their home countries. NO US visas
11
In migration (both directions), Obama has a mixed legacy at best. Americans abroad, ordinary Joes and Janes married to foreigners, need expensive accountants for their US taxes and FBARs because of his awful FATCA requirements with insane penalties that catch no actual fatcats. Idem on immigration, any relaxation of quota only leads to more immigration from developing countries that results in pressure on wages.
1
I think some readers are actually just not happy with Automation of Jobs. And the way things are going in technology space, the situation is going to get even grimmer for people who are not ready for the seismic shifts about to come in services industry.
I would happily ask the readers to go and attend any top any top 10 tech and business school in US. "Saving American Jobs" is the last thing that is on the mind of young American Entrepreneurs.
Immigrants and families are just the soft targets for people who are going to be replaced sooner or later with Robots that demand no minimum wages.
10
Employers will look for the best candidates - sadly the US lags behind the rest of the world in education. Graduate schools are at least one half non-American, a significant fraction of medical doctors are from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The US continues to cut funding for education, reading skills are rudimentary, and motivation is often substandard. The White House staff and appointees are spectacularly unskilled - mostly TV talking heads - and these people make policy with a shallow or non- existent education.
11
An American with a bachelor degree in an engineering field can earn much more by passing the Professional Engineer exam in his field and moving into management/partnership than by earning a master's in engineering, which is almost de riguer for foreign engineers due to mismatch in bachelors' curriculums. Having an American master's degree puts the foreign engineer on par with the American with a PE stamp.
3
Research seems to suggest that America produces enough STEM graduates to fill the available jobs and that, indeed, H1B workers are on average, paid less than comparable American workers. Nevertheless, let's be clear about who's at fault here - not H1B applicants, Indian or otherwise, who seek to advantage themselves through employment that likely pays far more than they could earn in their home country,and under better living and working conditions. The real culprit is Congress, which is very aware of the problems caused by the current program, but which has failed to take the appropriate remedial action that would solve this problem. TRhe H1B program should not be ended as America needs the best workers it can get, PROVIDED that qualified Americans are given preference without regard to potential salary costs. The current system seems to favor companies looking for cheaper employees, which was not its original intent.
25
The problem is that typical US companies are not willing to train new hires or retrain current employees (in contrast to typical European companies), so the definition of 'qualified American workers' is essentially limited to recent graduates who have the most current skills (this problem is most acute in the IT industry where skills become obsolete very quickly). That is the reason I do not encourage my children to go into Computer Science because their professional lives may not last more than 10 years.
17
H1B is truly an age discrimination arrangement.
5
There are employers and employees who abuse the H1b system - but statistically, H1b computer science workers earn a higher median wage than American workers - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/16/salaries-have-risen-for-... When you consider that close to 40% of the H1bs are issued to people who just earned their masters in the US - this should ideally be pushing down H1b wages.
1
I am an American born female in tech. I have met hundreds of H1b visa holders, and only half a dozen of those were as good as their US counterparts or better. As for H-4’s , I don’t understand why they come here knowing the rules but thinking that FOR THEM, the rules should change.when companies and our nation follow the H1b rules instead of abusing them I will have more empathy. But that day is not yet upon us
54
That is quite a claim! Let's see. American companies dominate the tech industry worldwide. In silicon valley, where I work, most companies have immigrants on their payroll. In many of them, immigrants make up a majority of the tech employees. If your claim is right, only a handful of them are good. But since the industry so dominates, the US counterparts of these immigrants in these industries must be super human, since they must also carry the load for these not-so-good immigrant workers, and make their companies the envy of the world!!
You are right on, female in tech.
3
You notice it is NEVER the husband who has followed his H1-B wife. This is because, in addition to keeping wages down (don’t believe for even one second that an H1-B immigrant won’t work for a depressed wage; I’ve been told directly as a manager to hire them as they cost less), these visas also serve to support and confirm discrimination against women in tech. How many jobs go to male H1-B workers instead of paying an American woman a market rate? Tech will remain a male-dominated industry as long as we keep importing cheap labor from a country that discriminates against women will n virtually every facet of life.
65
But the H1B's do cost less - since they are paid less wages, and the employer [I believe] does not have to make the FICA contributions.
3
I wish I could like your comment 1000 times
6
One of the most irresponsible policy actions by the Obama administration has resulted in the constant complaining by the H-4 spouses.
The number of H-1B visas is controlled by law, 85,000. Visas are only granted if beneficiaries pass strict scrutiny about qualifications, job requirements, compensation and most importantly, whether no qualified Americans are around to do the job.
The H-4B spousal visa has no restrictions on any of these factors. None. How can a "dependent" visa have no restrictions but how can the main H-1B visa be so strictly scrutinized?
Nothing prevents the H-4B spouses to apply for their own H-1B visas, does it? Why won't they take this route instead of complaining? They won't because in most cases, they would never qualify to earn an H-1B visa, fair and square.
The Trump administration is right in taking us back to the pre-May 2016 days - that is before this Obama-era concession was passed during the heat of the political campaign.
27
Interesting point.
I like your sentiment of "why complain." Complaining is unbecoming of Indians. We have survived and thrived everywhere, without resorting to complaint and without general appeals to "will someone please do something about this and help me."
We are not victims. I would loath to be associated with vocabularies of victims.
I would rather spend the energy in engaging in the political process in America. Because it is what citizens do; i.e., get educated, informed, and vibrant with the political process. Indians are not; we are busy collecting degrees and sending our kids to the best possible schools. We need to start acting like citizens. I.e., get politically organized. It is our cultural weakness, and something we should learn, grow, and overcome.
Kalidan
2
You need to have some appreciation of how difficult it would be for a H4 spouse to get her own H1-B, before just airily dismissing them as unqualified. If you read the article, Ms Dalmia explains some of this. There are 85,000 visas per year, which are allocated by lottery once a year as there are about a quarter of a million applications. You cannot apply yourself, your prospective employer does. That means you a) need to find a company in the same area where your husband works b) who is willing to pay an immigration lawyer several thousand dollars to file your visa application and c) then wait for 6 months to find out if you have won one of the visas, (which is unlikely) before they can hire you. Would you go through that process for a prospective employee, no matter how highly qualified they were?
3
Are there really no Americans that can run a project or write SQL reports? We all know the answer, there are many. The problem is you cannot shackle a citizen to a company but you can shackle an H1B.
10
We've seen a few published pieces now about the poor, depressed, sad young mothers from India, in particular, who feel cheated and discriminated against so unfairly because they came to the US with a husband who got a visa and a job, but they, the wife, can't get work. How is it that Americans working in Europe, for instance, deal with the same/similar and yet survive?
It is also of note that Indians - non-citizens - are actively lobbying the government to change the policies. Isn't that activity, truly, the province of current US voters and citizens? Shouldn't it be?
62
The lobbying is mostly done by US citizens though.
Stop whining. Those that want to work can apply for an H1 visa and hope to win the lottery. If you are exceptional in your field, you can get an O visa and a be fast tracked for a green card. H4 is ridiculous to begin with, as it has no restrictions on the work that can be performed, as opposed to the H1.
I can only imagine the furor when birthright citizenship is eventually repealed.
38
The O visas cannot be fast tracked to green cards. EB1A is a separate petition, if that's what you meant.
1
Thank you for this op-ed, but I am not sure who it is for. People that are affected by personal stories already favor more compassionate immigration reform. Quite plainly U.S. politicians are (or should be) beholden to registered U.S. voters. If you want broader support for your position by elected leaders you need to make an extremely clear case why immigration reforms will help those voters. You touch on this only a little. You also ignore the many stories of H-1B visa abuse by disreputable staffing agencies that unavoidably color this issue.
26
Question to everyone here: what makes Americans uniquely entitled to jobs? Why aren't Indian citizens and other immigrants entitled to compete for the same jobs?
Barring non-citizens from high-paying, high-skill jobs the way we currently do is really saying: Americans are incapable of performing the same jobs without some kind of immigration-status "handicap."
I disagree with that notion. There are many smart and talented Americans. But there are also many smart and talented non-Americans.
And before you say anything about immigrants costing less: companies are required by law under the H-1B program to pay foreign workers the same wage as they would a US citizen. They have to prove this to the Department of Labor. So if you believe companies are abusing this, then it's the *enforcement* that you should have a problem with, not the program itself.
And come on, the reason that argument sounds fishy to me (as someone who works alongside talented H-1B visa holders everyday) is that H-1B workers are going to have to live in the same places as US citizens; an Indian person is not going to be convinced to move to the US if they are not being paid enough to support the cost of living in their new city. Especially if they're bringing families.
The onus should be on the government, not private corporations, to look after American workers who have been displaced by a changing economy. It makes no sense to me to expect a company to retain an employee out of empathy.
12
An article in the NY Times a few weeks ago told the tale of such a wife who claimed she had a biotech degree. She was thrilled that she got a job as an insurance analyst and didn’t have to rely on the generous salary her husband was earning on an H1B visa. Perhaps you are unaware of mass layoffs in the financial sector. There are many many insurance professionals trying to re-enter the workforce. Do you think that it serves such people, who are US citizens, to add not just these so-called highly skilled H1B workers, but their family members as well, to the pool of workers.
25
First of all H1bs are non immigrants. So stop saying they are immigrants. What is the purpose of the H1b visa? It is to bring in workers if there are no local talent available. It is not meant to be use daily to displace Americans and it is not supposed to be used for cheap labor.
10
I'm afraid you are wrong on this. H1Bs have dual intent allowing the visa holder with intent to seek permanent resident status to enter the US.
The politics in the US would be far more favorable in accommodating the needs of authorized immigrants and their families, if the country did not have over 10 million unauthorized immigrants (AKA undocumented or illegal). It takes 10 years of authorized immigration to reach 10 million.
Only a very tiny share of voters support open borders or unlimited immigration, so unauthorized immigration will continue to hurt authorized immigrants from having sensible immigration policies.
19
While the abuse of the program is apparent, these people and their spouses followed all the rules, unlike illegal immigrants and are often overqualified for the jobs they find in the US. I do not disagree with limitations on these visas going forward but it is just unfair to strip these hardworking and highly educated people who pay taxes of a dignity of holding a job.
5
I see a conundrum. Do we want highly qualified people for cheap? Yes. Do we want them not to be immigrants? Yes. Will we accept the same pay scale the immigrants do? No. Are Americans always the best qualified candidates for the job? No.
So you can have it cheap and good with immigrants, or more expensive and not quite as good without them. Now decide which is better.
Conundrum.
6
except for the fact that H-1B workers aren't cheap!
Pew says H-1B workers' median salary is $80k a year: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/16/salaries-have-risen-for-...
Glassdoor found that H-1B workers actually make more than their American counterparts on average: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/h1b-workers/
1
The logical thing would be for people to come here as single and marry an American.
When I lived in Reston, VA the large apartment complex I lived in was flooded with people from India. One evening I was talking to one of the new residents and told him about the many advantages of the apartment complex. In the following months it seemed that Indians heard it was good place to live and started moving in. They were mostly young couples and they all seemed to have babies at the same time. They had built a little community and watched after each other's kids, etc. So now I am wondering what visa they were on. There were Indians working at the local 7-11 who could barely speak English, but there were also many more working at a not too distant Walmart who could speak English fluently. One could tell they were well educated and didn't like having to work at Walmart. It turned out that Walmart had plans for expanding operations into India and these employees were the advance echelon. I wonder too how many were working without authorization.
12
Most americans have no idea what it takes to become an immigrant in this country. I, a Canadian married an American. It took 15 yrs to get a green card. I was on a TN so at the mercy of employers. It is in fact very difficult to become a leagal resident in this country with the exception of mthose coming from communist countries and Cuba.
11
Quit whining!!! God....you give them cookies and they want milk too.
19
Imagine an employer with H1-B employees. These employees cannot go anywhere else, they do not have a second income to survive if they lose their jobs. Bingo! Super-low wages that depress the market for Americans, many of them H1-B holders who naturalized.
The problem, the one that needs to be fixed before allowing spouses to work, is a need to return the H1-B to what it should be: for super-talented professionals that are paid what they are worth, not to low-paid subcontractors.
Before we allow spouses to work, we need to fix the H1-B and prohibit any H1-B holder to be a subcontractor --and no company should be able to, across all subsidiaries and entities, employ over 10% of their workforce under the H1-B program.
With that, and with easily transferrable H1-Bs from authorized employer to another other, by all means, all spouses should be allowed to work.
24
"Super-low wages that depress the market for Americans, many of them H1-B holders who naturalized."
You realize this is a nonsensical statement? A former H-1B holder who "naturalized" is an American.
How about we cut the number of H1-B visas in half or more and then allow spouses to work? The reality is most H1-Bs are applied for to lower or prevent increases in wages for US workers. There is no shortage of talent in the US and any "skills gap" could be easily filled by companies if they would train workers or lobby for more training programs in US or subsidies, but instead they lobby for ever more increases in H1-B visas and also H-4s being able to work which is essentially a doubling of H-1B visas.
77
You are absolutely right- in Physical Therapy, my field, there is a saturation of licensed therapists, but agencies are still able to place foreigners- who will accept much less money for the promise of green card sponsorship. Meanwhile, American PT’s who now have to get a clinical doctorate to get a license are replaced by those foreign workers with bachelor’s degrees from abroad. How is this legal?
25
Sorry, I disagree. There is not only a skills deficit in the country of my adoption, there is a lack of motivation. As a recent THR older lady, I could not have managed without my clinical team, all of whom were "white". But there is a large cohort of other "white" young persons out there who could have done the hard work too. Please don't mistake me, for every "dotard" out there. there are 999 persons who make the cogs of our country work.
2
Why not an article of the damage being done to American IT workers by H1-B visas? When will it be time to think about displaced Americans by the corrupt H1-B system? I am tired of hearing how the H1-Bs are having such a hard time by abusive employers, especially the huge multinationals who import them by the thousand, when in fact they have displaced Americans. The fallacy that America does not have educated workers (especially in the IT field) is the biggest lie perpetrated. And it does discourage even more Americans from entering IT. Shame on the bought out Congress who takes lovey money from these Indian Consultancy companies for their election campaigns.
47
Why is President Trump so determined to prevent spouses of H-1B visa holders from living the American dream? Because he's a mean-spirited man with no compassion.
2
No fan of Trump, but when so many Americans are unable to live the American dream, maybe some prioritizing is allowed? I'd like work, a decent salary, the opportunity to buy - not just rent - a home. I was born here. I went to college. I've had a fairly good career and achievements. I'd like a shot at achieving that dream.
31
I work as a database developer & would like to dispel the notion that H1-B worker only fill vacancies
Here in Connecticut, H1-B workers have been used to displace existing workers at ESPN, at Connecticare (part of Emblem Health) and at Northeast Utilities (now Eversource)
Indeed the NY Time had an article about this very thing happening at Disney in Florida
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-t...
H1-B workers are generally paid less than Americans. Thus employers are incentivized to replace their American workers with such workers.
I bear no personal grudge against H1-B workers. They are well educated, ambitious, devoted to their family and their community. But as a group they represent a threat to me and thousands of Americans in my situation .
I am a Democrat, and a proud one at that. I respectfully but firmly ask my party to represent the interest of American workers, who, traditionally have been its backbone. Cause when it chooses not to, soulless & vile demagogues like Donald Trump fill the void
109
I’ve seen that too. The worst is when the American employees have to train their replacements - or lose their severance.
12
You can either have a capitalist society or a caring society. Pick one. Vote accordingly.
4
In the Internet age, why was the author's career on hold merely because she couldn't take a W-2 job in the U.S.? She currently works as a writer for a magazine. What would have stopped her for taking writing assignments from magazines around the world back in her H-4 days? The U.S. is not the only market for English-language writing.
People in India are able to work for U.S. firms via the Internet. Why couldn't Ms. Dalmia have worked for an Indian firm via the Internet?
14
Philip,
Don’t you think if she could have worked legally on H4, she would have. Even Forgetting that her case is pre-internet days, it is Illegal to receive any form of salary on H4.
1
This is a ridiculous position. You knew what you signed up for. You could have stayed home or went back to your home country. Many people globally want to take the visa you now have an issue with. Americans want the job (or the training--different educational funding discussion) your visa entitled you to.
I agree with the other poster above. I did not vote for Trump but I am starting to fear he will get another term because Americans are fed up with the argument that we need more immigrant labor. Or that our laws can be ignored.
72
Hey, plumbers are expensive, why not let in more of them? The whole H1B thing is a scam by tech companies to lower their costs.
41
In summary, all the negative comments boil down to not wanting any more Indian immigrants to the United states. all under the pretext of a flawed H1B system , losing American jobs etc. The comments in this article just highlight how racist the country is getting to be.Its going to be many more years of Trump and ilk. How qualified and educated were your ancestors when they came to this place all you concerned folk?
8
Not the issue and your accusation of racism is abusive. I am an emeritus professor in an engineering school. I have worked with many fine Indian Engineers. However the importation of foreign engineers and information specialists clearly has a negative effect on US wages and working conditions. That is a real problem that has nothing to do with the ethnic background of the applicant.
38
Vince, then you would know better than most that graduate schools offering STEM degrees are full of foreign students. When I went to graduate school in engineering many years ago, my batch was overwhelmingly non-american in composition. You can not both take advantage of the cheap foreign research assistants to advance your research and at the same time, claim that they keep the wages low.
2
I generally support H1B program. I don't support obama era policy of extending the benefit to the H4 holder as well. H4 was strictly a dependent visa. There is nothing stopping a person in H4 to apply for H1 and go to work. What the author wants is ability to work in H4 and somehow expect folks to understand that this reasonable expectations. I have seen similar articles in other papers as well. I hope democrats don't support crazy policies like this and lose 2020 too! :(
6
The story in 2018 is very different from that of 1985.
I know; during the 1980s I hired several foreigners in the software development field because we couldn't find US expertise.
Since then many, if not most large US corporations doing any sort of software development bring in masses of poorly qualified Indian engineers to replace Americans. In many cases, they force the American workforce to train their replacements.
In other cases, large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Computer Associates, etc. have opened large offices in India, Ireland, the Czech Republic and others and transferred jobs to those areas. At the same time, they have liquidated hundreds of thousands of American jobs in order to save money.
As the software developed in the USA is transferred to those locations, we are obviously losing IP (Intellectual Property).
Our valiant politicians are completely oblivious to this and do nothing to stop this practice.
Obama promised to look at this and did nothing. Trump completely ignores the problem.
It would cost nothing to penalize companies engaging in this practice as there are no trade issues involved. The only reason for this practice is the greed of American companies.
71
You mean that you couldn't find expert software developers for the wages you were willing to pay. If you had improved the salary offer enough you would have filled those jobs.
15
...unless I'm missing something, it's up to Congress to provide legislation which will allow for millions of illegal immigrants to establish citizenship. We have 535 politicians who have ignored this issue for decades, and still can't find a path for these individuals. It's a travesty and emblematic of how dysfunctional Congress is. The White House can't make the necessary changes to the law - it takes the House and Senate. They no longer represent the people; they represent themselves.
3
1. US accepts around 1 million immigrants each year based on the limits set by congress
2. US added 2.1 million jobs in 2017
3. It’s not a zero sum game as the author rightly points out
4. If you are coming in on H4 it is with the understanding that you cannot work. So in this case you’re not a victim. If you want to work you’d wanna come and get a degree here or something.
5. Employers are REALLY struggling to find workers, especially in IT. They’re willing to sponsor H1Bs for competitive salaries that US citizens would kill for. Now why would they do that if it’s an additional hassle for them.
6. Jobs and employees are already migrating to Canada and Australian and NZ which are Immigration havens compared to US.
7. There are only 85,000 H1Bs sponsored every year by for-profit companies. You really think you can’t compete against 85,000 people, mostly on the coasts, who NEVER vote conservative??
4
My wife spent her entire career in Medical IT. The salaries offered were very low given the nature of the job and the training required. Your claim of competitive salaries is nonsense,.
13
All these wonderfully talented, bright people leaving a democratic country that is woefully poor, with hundreds of millions of very poor people who would so much benefit from having these bright people working in India to improve the society. So sad that so many feel a need to leave their country to come to a much richer land, where their skills and intelligence will make so little difference overall. And indeed might even prevent the US from investing in the education of poor but highly talented minority youth. Cheaper to import South Asians, even though these folks might be so important in their homeland. As our misguided leader would say "sad"!
23
All those castigating Indians for depressing wages in the tech industry should note that Indians are by far the immigrant group with the highest income according to the US census. Indians are not competing on wages, but rather on talent. The Chinese tech industry wants badly to hire them but they prefer coming here because of cultural and other reasons. Let’s not lose them to other countries.
6
Nativists and racists assume, absolutely incorrectly, that the employment market, especially for skilled jobs, is static, moribund and by its nature, a job given to a "fer-ner" is a job lost to a "true-blue 'mer-can" (ie, White person). In fact, an economy that isn't growing is dying, and growth means more jobs. STEM jobs are going unfilled, and skilled employees always have less trouble finding jobs. No, anti-immigrant nativism has been a problem in our country for most of our history, long before the Civil War, nativists complained about "uncouth immigrants". Yet our greatest expansions of wealth and productivity have ALWAYS come during our greatest periods of immigration. And when the greatest period was shut down in 1924? Within just 5 years the economy collapsed! Correlation may not be causation but the coincidence of the end of the post-civil war growth slammed down just 5 years after open immigration ended.
Racism and nativism have been a bane on America since its founding...and it still is.
4
If you are here legally on an H1, why repress the spouse, a woman in most cases. Vet the H1 holder well and allow the spouse the freedom to do what they want, and thereby assimilate and contribute to society here. Otherwise it more or less just ends up being a discriminatory rule against foreign women.
6
I see many heartless comments here. It is true that H1B system has been abused by greedy American and overseas corporations and it needs fixing. But the plight of H1B spouses is very real and well articulated by the author. For those of you who say that these women should just go back if they find the situation difficult - may I ask how the situation was when their ancestors immigrated to this country. Well, they just came, probably received visa on arrival at Ellis Island and if they wanted to work, they worked. So drop the righteousness and have a heart.
8
"Plight"? You mean just like/similar to American women who go to Europe when their husbands get work but they are barred from finding jobs. However do the American women survive? How unfair! How wrong! How tragic! No, the women don't need to "go back," but they knew the bargain when their hubs accepted the opportunity.
7
Now if you had only immigrated from Norway he would be right on it.
2
Its discerning to see fellow Indians talk about liberty & pursuit for happiness, when these same folks back in India turn into right-wing vigilantes to spur and criticize Bangladeshi immigrants in India. USA only allows the crème-de-le-crème of the educated lot to migrate to USA based on annual lottery and quota of 65,000@year. The 1% Indians in today's America boasts of an average household salary of 10000 dollars@year, the highest among of the ethnic groups in USA. The average household income for overall Americans stands at 50,000 USD@year. So Indians here in USA are earning double the national average, why must they complain over their wives H4 Visa then? Do they forget that back in India they & their so well-qualified wives are not swamped with job offers either! And back in India, they are Republicans (Supporting the right wing Hindu Party) and persecuting the Dalits and Tribes and Muslim minority & the homosexuals and women, with the arrogance of the mighty majority. Why don they start preaching these values of equality, liberty blah blah in USA? Why do they become Democrats overnight here? Why don't they embrace their own countries and open the doors for low-skilled Bangaldeshis, Pakistanis, Nepalis?
These drama of invoking the constitution of USA to plead for equal rights ring hollow if we study the partisans attitudes they adopt once they reach India.
25
The opinions reflected in most of the commentary reflect how out-of-touch the author, and more critically, the NYT is with what's going on today.
31
"Restrictionists assume a zero-sum math for workers: A job gain for a foreigner is a job loss for an American. By that logic every college graduate who enters the job market would be cause for mourning. But that’s backward, given that skilled individuals create, not take away, jobs, and no economy succeeds by shackling qualified people."
Here's another way to look at it: If Americans instead of Indians were getting the hi-tech jobs in the first place, Americans would be the ones creating new jobs for other Americans. What exactly is wrong with that?
9
I work in STEM with lots of international people here on work visa's. People ask me all the time if I would prefer they be "sent home" so that I wouldn't have to compete with them for jobs, and I couldn't disagree with that more. The vast majority of my immigrant coworkers decide to stay here after their education and go on to contribute to the US economy, some starting biotech companies that employ americans. They keep our industries creative and thriving, and make our research universities the envy of the world. These are not jobs that any random american could be swapped in to do. By having the best of the best from the whole world competing and contributing it makes our universities and tech companies the best in the world. If you want more americans to be able to compete for these highly specialized jobs I'd recommend a renewed commitment to science and math in our failing public schools (and throw in universal pre-K for good measure). If the influx of brilliant immigrants stops it would be a devastating blow to all STEM fields, I may have to learn mandarin to land my next job..
6
“Especially since we had a baby to support”.
There are worse things than having to stay home and be a parent. Too much “day care” in the world. Studies have shown this. My mom was home with me and my brother. It worked out fine.
19
it's also a bare-foot-and-pregnant view of women....
4
That’s absurd and paternalistic. Government policies shouldn’t force families to have a stay at home parent (or not). That’s for families to decide. If this woman wanted to work to provide for her family or just because she likes to work or.... whatever reason she had, her motivations to get a job and her subsequent childcare arrangements are no one else’s business.
1
Naz, I think that I have touched a sore nerve. Let’s face it: it is not about what is best for the kids, for some folks. They want to be parents, and be normal, but they also want the big SUV, and the expensive vacations, and everything else. One adult for two or one child, devoting their adult attention to these young minds... it is better than 2 adults for 20 kids.
4
"Sad and senseless". That defines so many Trump administration policies these days.
4
It is time to take back America from Trump before he breaks the Heart and the Soul of our Country.
It’s true, I would agree, that the zero-sum logic often employed with visas, even by ostensibly informed and educated people, is actually wrong.
It’s the same logic, for example, employed by those who wish to take away the diversity lottery.
They say that such visas would instead go to educated or other people who would be more “suitable” for the economy.
The thing is, there’s no body stopping Congress or government from creating new visas for helpers of the economy, if that’s really the problem with the diversity lottery.
So, I agree with the writer about that.
Where I don’t agree with her is about spouses not working being unfair.
I think Indian techies or other techies being able to work in the US are already way luckier than any opportunities they would ever get back in India.
There’s millions of people who would love that opportunity.
It’s a door of opportunity that even many foreign students here can barely get.
Yet, these individuals somehow get it, with these tech firms, some which are Indian firms, and now turn around and complain!?
So, forgive me, but I feel a sense of entitlement and privilege, a sense of arrogance, when these individuals who are lucky to get these opportunities turn around and complain.
I think if these individuals think that opportunity isn’t good enough for them, they should go back home and have those who value it better take it!!
I bet none of them would choose to go back to India!
This, to me, is really not cool!!!
22
I'll never forget the day my brother in law had to tell his wife, my sister ...who had just given birth to their first child that his job had been given away to an H-1B employee. He had to even train him under threat of not receiving his severance pay and extended benefits. I don't like the way this is sounding , I'm not a Trump supporter by any means. This story has been happening all over the U.S. Even DISNEY did it. My sister's family never recovered from the impact of this job loss. It is a lie that there are not enough tech workers to fill these jobs!
60
If the H1B visas would only bring the world's best experts in the rarest and most cutting-edge technologies around the world, I wouldn't mind a work visa for the spouses. But the way the system is set up right now, the United States are on the fast-track to become a second-tier country. These barely functional, cheap, imported-laborers are decresing the overall quality that once made America the envy of the world. 15 years ago I went to a certain ER room in Manhattan and receieved exemplary treatement. Two years ago I went to the same ER, where now everyone was foreign, some were impossible to communicated with, others couldn't be disturbed from what seemed to be a long siesta, and they sent me home unable to find a diagnosis and with a $9,000 bill. After a night of horror, when I wanted to call 911 from the very ER room and ask to be transfered somewhere else. I since moved to Europe where they found the problem right away and treated me for more tha 100 times less money. So here in the US, the profits go "up" here, while "down" every man is for himself in an environment that resembles more and more a third world country. I love America but sadly it has been destroyed!
42
So are you talking about Medical Doctors or the Nurses that couldn't communicate with your? OR the hospital staff?
1
I highly doubt your ‘foreign’ doctor didn’t speak English. Maybe he or she didn’t have the accent that made you feel at home in the ER, but you cannot practice medicine in the USA without re-doing your medical residency (which is perhaps one of the most rigorous training experiences a human can undergo and is essentially impossible to do if you don’t speak fluent English). Let’s cut the hyperbole around immigrant workers and stick to facts.
2
Foreign doctors and nurses have to past the same testing standards American trained doctors and nurses do. Many are required to repeat coursework.
The bigger question is, was that hospital’s MD and RN staffing adequate in the ER. Was there an emergent event taking place that took priority over yours?
Or do you not like foreign medical professionals?
2
The concensus here in replies, and my experience, is that H1 b visas are abused by the big players like disney. ( google NYTimes disney visas) I was CFO of a modest size specialty engineering co, we performed specialty engineering and exported equipment and know how in textiles and biofuels. About every 3 years we tried to bring in a masters degree , or above, specialist from India or china who had worked specifically in our specialty or plants we sold. ( specialists). By the 90 ‘s it was almost impossible due to thegaing of the system by the big players bringing in kids. ( We wanted people with 10 to 15 years plus experience in our specialty, couldnt get them in).
Definately need to look at the whole “specialist” catagories and “market salary” issues for H1Bs. I wanted a masters degree specialist with 10 years experience, disney a two year degree with 18 months experience, and I could NOT get my person in.
15
We don't have a shortage of skilled labor. We do have a shortage of skilled labor who will work for peanuts. Hence the demand for H1bs. H4 folks if life is that miserable here, you are free to leave. Right now our Green Card policy is just fine. Every country gets 7%. If you want to remove country cap quota for these Green Cards then impose a country cap for H1b. Right now 70% H1bs goes to India and its severely abused.
40
Tell tech companies in Silicon Valley that "we don't have a shortage of skilled labor." Even desirable tech companies, from startups to behemoths like Facebook, are struggling to find engineers they can hold onto.
Also, by law, employers must pay H-1B visa holders equal wages to what they would pay a US citizen for the same job. They must prove this to the Department of Labor. Not sure where you're getting your info from, other than the racist notion that brown people are "cheap labor."
It's also mind-boggling to hear a statement like "our Green Card policy is just fine. Every country gets 7%." In what world is that "fine"? A country like Singapore (with fewer than 6 million people) gets the same allocation as India (with more than 1 billion people)?
2
" H-1B workers usually earn less than U.S. workers in jobs like data scientist, financial analyst, programmer analyst, and software engineer. For software engineers, for example, the wage difference between American workers and H-1B workers can be as much as 17% depending on the city."https://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-h-1b-visa-workers-really-paid-less...
2
Even though the quota is 7%, India gets the most number of Greencards. Every country should be fairly represented. Why is it our problem that Indian cannot its population?
1
I've been working in the tech world for over 3 decades and have worked beside many H1-B holders. I even worked for an Indian outsourcing company for a short bit. The H1-B program is widely abused by large companies, especially the outsourcing companies. They bend or break all the rules and in doing so, they absolutely displace qualified American workers.
I have little sympathy for the individuals such as Ms Dalmia who come here knowing the rules and then want to change those rules after the fact.
41
There are tens of millions of US citizens who are capable of performing jobs filled by H-1B visa holders.
Millions.
Where are their stories? Where are the stories about the entire industries that now pay less than a living wage?
Why am I supposed to care about the entire planet- except the people who live in my community?
I am growing so tired, so very tired, of reading the incessant whining of immigrants. No other country on the planet cares one whit about American citizens- yet our entire media is obsessed with immigrants and how unfair everything is for them.
This country used to be rich- now we are on the fast-track to becoming another third-world country.
26
I generally support immigrant rights and absolutely believe the Dreamers should be allowed to stay and pursue citizenship. But I have negative feelings about the H1-B and H-4 visas. Here in the Bay Area, we have many institutions of higher learning. Large IT firms should be supporting (monetarily and otherwise) computer science and engineering programs at those institutions and then hire their graduates. There is no need to import computer programmers and engineers--we should be able to produce our own. (I won't even mention age discrimination--we should provide any necessary re-training for older workers to re-enter the work force.)
24
As someone else who lives in the Bay Area, tech companies ABSOLUTELY ARE supporting our institutions of higher learning, and hiring their graduates LIKE CRAZY. I implore you to visit any US university with a big computer science program and observe how many buildings/lecture halls/programs are named after prominent tech entrepreneurs and companies.
Come on, tech companies would not be paying 20-somethings $200-300k a year if there were enough talented engineers to go around. They would not need to "import" engineers from abroad if there were enough talented engineers to go around.
Believe me, if there's an American out there struggling to land a tech job, it's not because a foreigner is taking it.
3
One of the reasons we Democrats lose credibility is our ability to conflate related but independent issues.Not distinguishing between the legs an illegal when extolling the value of immigrants is a prime example.Not recognizing that H1B visa which assumes a shortage of skilled Americans with the inability of spouses to get any job is similarly not helpful.
9
No, it’s because Democrats don’t pander to racism.
The same president who claims H1bs take American jobs just passed a tax law that taxes graduate assistantships. These high tech jobs often require graduate education, and assistantships help with graduate education.
So people buy into this bigotry because of ignorance, not because Democrats don’t care. Democrats are just not playing the pandering game as much.
Stop me if I'm mistaken here: Supporting a child on the single income of a medical physicist doesn't seem particularly hard to me. Either Detroit cancer hospitals don't pay very well or you have a very high standard of living. We're talking about Detroit here. As far as urban centers go, the cost of living is not exactly outrageous.
Also, there's a rather large contradiction in this argument. Dalmia is lamenting wasted female talent suffering under the burden of H-4 visas. However, she also applauds how the time before obtaining a visa is used to develop competitive skills. Personally, I'd love someone to tell me "No you can't work. Focus on school and family instead." Sounds like a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.
Finally, the narrative focuses very heavily on the role of gender victimization. That's not really America's problem. Woman here are actually increasingly breadwinners. You could have brought your husband here on an H1B instead. You also could have stayed in India and developed a career there. That's not an immigration problem; that's a personal problem.
24
Tech companies should hire within the US, there has got to be a million college graduates in this country to fill the needs of the tech companies. The reason i believe that the
tech companies use the H-!B visa is save labor costs, and
impose greater control of the foreign workers lives.
18
I think the author misses the point about the H1-B visa program. It is largely being used by American companies to bring in low wage IT labor and suppress American IT wages and by Indian outsourcing firms to build a consulting business that caters to these companies. The program was meant to be used for the short term and not as a path to permanent reisdency or citizenship.
These are the rules of the game that these visa holders signed up for. They and their spouses knew this when they applied for the H1-B visa lottery. Time and circumstance do not change these facts. As for the "guilded cage," it is up to every individual to live their life to their full potential in the circumstamces they find themselves in. There are plenty of Americans who would be grateful to get the well-paying, satisfying jobs you speak of and if not, to live in the "gilded cage."
29
The author earned a masters while she waited for her green card, and then she entered the job market. At the same time, let's say an American student also earns a masters (but without the support of a spousal income), and with massive student debt. Assume that both are equally competent: however, wouldn't you want the American student with massive student debt to get the so that he/she can repay the student loan than the H-4 spouse?
15
I think that argument is not well-constructed: you’d want the more qualified out of the two.
There’s this idea that H1Bs are low wage workers. That’s not really true. Most companies will offer H1B employees competitive market salaries. They’ve to go through the regular interview process just like a US citizen would have to. In fact, and equally qualified US citizen has an advantage that he/she doesn’t need to apply for a work permit and can start working the next day.
6
The hypothetical asserted the two candidates were equally qualified.
An item left out of Ms Dalmia's narrative is the fact that she and her husband are from very wealthy families, which is why they graduate debt free. How much is it delaying advancement in India that so many of their children of wealth are exporting capital, both financial and human, to America?
Ms Dalmia over estimates her value to America. She brought her sense of entitlement characteristic of a wealthy person. There was nothing preventing her from performing volunteer work while she was awaiting her green card.
1
@CH: point taken, however, my argument is based on the premise that both are equally qualified. You are stating an ideal case, which is abused, hence the problem. If everyone followed your argument where the US citizen has an advantage, then we won't be having this discussion. The idea behind my comment is that it is hard to empathize with the spouse of a worker who has not found a job versus someone who is new on the job market (say, an American tech worker) and loses an opportunity to an immigrant.
1
Many comments here seem to assume that the job market is a zero-sum game. It is not, and it is especially not the case for the jobs that are being filled through H-1B visas. The skilled immigrants that are employed here via the H-1B system enlarge the job opportunity pie for everyone else.
3
That would be relevant if employers hired based on the pool of applicants rather than the number of hires they need.
If an employer needs 5 people and 50 people apply or 500 people apply, the employer will still hire 5.
However, if only 3 people apply and he needs 5, without the H-1B program to import workers, he will likely raise the wage offered to attract more applicants. This is how it is supposed to work. We do not need the H-1b program at all.
7
H1-B visas are supposed to be limited to foreign workers in "specialty occupations" for which there are no available qualified citizens to work in the US on a temporary basis.
Ms. Dalmia, your occupation does not qualify as "specialty" and the alacrity with which you and your former husband applied for permanent legal status indicates that you never had any intention of honoring the 'temporary' condition of your visa.
A huge reason for the backlog of visas to "Indian techies" is the blatant gaming of the H1B rules by the huge Indian tech outsourcing firms. They overwhelm the system with millions of applications for the 85,000 available visas, thus garnering about 80% of them, and when their contract workers are employed by American companies who use them in place of higher-paid American workers they establish Indian-preferred hiring practices in their workplaces, in direct contravention of American anti-discrimination laws. Go to any large tech workplace and this is on full display.
An H1B visa carries enforceable limits - temporary, no Americans displaced, no additional workers. Accepting those limits should be a family decision before a worker decides to come to the US, not a starting point to get them to leave.
Perhaps spouses of "specialty occupation" workers could be eligible to work in return for prohibiting any employer sponsorship towards citizenship, required repatriation and forgoing of any birthright citizenship to children born during employment here.
18
The other irony with respect to coders and service center IT and customer service jobs filled by H-1B visa holders [like the workers displaced by Disney] are not jobs for the best and the brightest, they could be easily filled by high school graduates with a year of on-the-job training. The precursor to the internet was built by high school graduate draftees and civilian workers, not by college graduates.
College graduates start work with obsolete technical knowledge and have to be retrained anyway.
8
This is false:
H1-B visas are supposed to be limited to foreign workers in "specialty occupations" for which there are no available qualified citizens to work in the US on a temporary basis.
There is absolutely no requirement that there are no available U.S. workers.
It is completely legal to replace a specialty occupation U.S. worker with a foreign worker!
A company can even force the U.S. worker to train the foreign worker. This is completely legal.
5
Sorry, I wrote a book about the H-1B visa and what you're saying is false.
"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."
Replacing a US worker is illegal according to 8 USC 1182(n)(2)(c)(ii):
"A willful failure pertaining to wages/working conditions, strike/lockout, notification, labor condition application specificity, displacement (including placement of an H-1B nonimmigrant at a worksite where the other/secondary employer displaces a US worker), or recruitment;"
https://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm
Every H-1B is a job lost to a citizen. It is a broken promise- the promise that hard work will result in the American Dream.
We have tons of talent in this country. We have millions of citizens who just want a chance. But we do not train them. We give them no opportunity it expand their horizons.
No- we import workers by the millions. We give them the good jobs. And now we have to give all their relatives a job too.
If this country dedicated itself to giving all of its citizens the chance to get quality education and training we would never need another H-1B visa holder again.
Enough with importing the world to the US so the rich can get a little richer and our working class can be decimated and docile.
Enough. Enough. Enough.
79
If that's the case, you should look for ways the companies can find that talent and hire so that they don't have to keep the jobs open.
I guess the import of workers happens in both tech and non-tech sectors.
Very well exposes the understanding of what an H-1B visa is and how it works and the demand and supply gap.
"We have tons of talent in this country. We have millions of citizens who just want a chance. But we do not train them. We give them no opportunity it expand their horizons."
It is funny. In this statement, there is NO onus on the "citizen" to train him or herself to become qualified for the jobs that WillT26 laments the citizens are not getting.
Instead, the blame squarely lies with the evil immigrant, who worked hard, and despite the odds (you would have to be an immigrant in a foreign land to understand), becomes a productive and contributing member of the American society.
My message to the qualified techies is, stay in your home countries. You will do yourself and your country a huge favor and it will all pan out in the long run. Why would you want to be in a place where you are not wanted.
3
I agree to some extent - at one point, employers had to prove there was a shortage of skilled workers to qualify an H1B hire. Somewhere that requirements seems to have vanished.
But I have to drawn the line at "we do not train them." If you happen to be a conservative and believe in self-reliance, "we" should not be dragging people into training - they should be seeking it themselves. Many parts of this country have a disdain for education, and for public support of it. This is a problem, and is what creates states that take more from federal coffers than they contribute. Add to that predatory vocational schools which provide little training for a very high price. When it comes to creating employment for our citizens, the H1B is the very least of our problems.
2
There has been so much immigration abuse by Indian IT workers that has HURT Americans, by keeping down wages. Immigration policy is supposed to benefit American citizens, but it seems that corporations and Indians have gotten most of the benefits when it comes to tech visas.
All these talented people need to stay home and fix their own countries. No, I did not vote for Trump, but I'm convinced that Trump won in large part because Americans made a desperate scream to STOP the out of control immigration...both legal and illegal. Americans were willing to vote for Trump in large part on this basis.
Can our country have an honest discussion about this?
74
1. I agree there is visa abuse by a handful of certain Indian consulting firms. Why not just blacklist or regulate them rather than hurting every single legal H-1B worker?
2. H-1B quota is 85k per year and even if 50% of it go to India, it is about 42.5k. Do you think this has cause majority of americans to lose jobs?
3. What about the lottery based Green Cards given out that have resulted in more strain on the budget than H-1Bs who actually pay taxes?
4. What is being done in illegal immigration side which is a much bigger set compared to H-1Bs?
16
STOP blaming the victims. Yes, like citizens who lost potential jobs, the immigrants, who wait in line for decades for green cards, are victims. The "abuse" is done by your country's greedy companies like Disney, Edison. Go after them. Not after the victims.
4
Breaking news alert: over 85% of green cards given every year are family-based. A portion of the rest are employment based. Every year 85,000 H1B visas are given out, a majority of them used by Indians, but other countries’ citizens also receive them. Do you really think 85,000 people are hurting you when we are adding 200,000 jobs regularly to the economy (if you’re reading NYT or WP you probably know this already). Every H1B is not one American job lost. In fact if these H1Bs are given the chance they’ll start their own companies and create 100s if not 10s of Jobs. America did not elect trump because of H1B, it elected Trump because 80,000 people decided to vote for him in key states (less than the number of people who get H1Bs btw), instead of voting for the more sensible candidate.
4
As the author notes, its not a zero sum game. Many of these visa holders would surely contribute greatly to the U.S. economy, if permitted, and a rising tide (usually) lifts all boats. However, I see the other side of the issue as well. If the U.S. issues a work visa, it is 'a' work visa, not two.
Why not permit spouses to start a business or work independently? This could be the right balancing act between 'protecting' our domestic human capital and limiting companies from hiring people with lower wage costs, while encouraging these visa holders to contribute to the economy by building small businesses.
Also, the one big thing that is overlooked in these discussions is reciprocity. Almost all foreign relations between the U.S. and other nations is conducted with reciprocity in mind and our U.S. citizens abroad are already feeling the backlash and pushback against the United States, both from a migration perspective and an employment perspective. We raise the cost of a visa for citizens from Brazil and you guessed it, U.S. citizens visiting or moving to Brazil will pay more for their visas, too.
These decisions are currently being made in a bubble - we want to protect U.S. workers so we should do 'this'. But 'this' often results in many, many unintended consequences and we need to begin looking at the world as an incredibly interconnected place.
8
Not all of us on H-4 visas came to the country this way. I came here for grad school on an F-1 visa and had a H-1B visa as a postdoc. Along the way, I married my classmate from my home country, and when he got a faculty job, I moved with him and our 6 week old daughter on the restrictive spouse visa, H-4. Though I had a job offer, it was withdrawn when the employer realised they'd have to sponsor me for a H1-B of my own - which even 20 years ago had quotas that ran out quite rapidly. It was only after we got employment authorisation through his permanent residency application that I was able to go back to work - it all worked out in the end, but I feel sorry for the many qualified people who could contribute to the work force (and have unique skills) who are stuck.
11
H-1B visas are owned by the employer, who has attested, rightly or wrongly, that he cannot fill the position with an American. When the university hired you as a postdoc, it was a lie that there was not an American available. When you quit your job and moved away, your visa was void, since you weren't working for the employer who owned your visa.
2
The employer has attested no such thing. It is completely legal to displace a U.S. worker with an H-1B worker.
1
Do you feel any sorrow for U.S. citizens who are displaced because of the H-1B and H-4 visas?
7
I’ve seen a barrage of articles in the opinion section on immigration and the H-1B program. The articles on immigration tend to be written by people who were born in South and Latin America and those on H-1B tend to be authored by immigrants, originally from India. While the positions are invariably spun as being “progressive,” the authors are usually arguing something is that is simply in their best financial and personal interests and those of their tribes. It’s no more complicated than that. Immigration and the H-1B issue are both policy and should be approached from a broader perspective on what’s best for all Americans.
74
One of America's problems is that senior management often comes from sales, marketing, and finance. None of these positions requires the skills or ability to understand math, physics, or how to get to fact-based answers (beyond cost evaluations).
The comforting (to the senior managers) idea that every job and background different from theirs can be filled with "fungible" workers is very common. If IT is a job that "anyone" who can tick the right boxes can fill, they pick the one who costs the least. (Try telling your wife that since every earring does the same job (fills the hole in your ear), buy the one that costs the least.)
H-1B visa's can be abused. But it's the inability of hiring managers to make good choices--and to ensure their existing employees get the mandatory continuous learning needed in their jobs --that destroys tech professions and design capability in the country. H1B visa's are a (valuable) stopgap.
Punishing the wives of H1B visa holders seems a poor way to fix the real problem, especially since the H1 visa holders are actually helping our national competitiveness.
10
And foreigners with the technical know-how aren't nearly as threatening to the executives and supervisors who lack it.
1
Here I thought an H1B visa granted authority for one person to work, not two.
If your spouse's H1B visa is truly for skilled work we can't source in the US, then certainly, she's paid enough to support a family, and therefore you can contribute to society by volunteering. My spouse found great satisfaction and made a significant impact to the communities we lived in through volunteering at schools.
37
It almost seems unconscionable in this day and age that in a Western democracy, a law prevents a spouse from working! I know that's misstating the issue, but still!
When you agree to accompany your spouse knowing fully that you cannot work and then express anguish over the fact, it is little hypocritical.
Perhaps a easy solution to the H1B problem (not the focus of this article) is for the H1B recipient to sign a pledge not to initiate an attempt to gain residency for the duration of his visa.
Then the H1B is a truly non-immigrant visa, and if the employer thinks highly enough, they should initiate the green card process after the completion of the H1B tenure when the employee is back in his/her home country.
13
The democracy's benefits apply to the the US citizens, not to the citizens of the world.
1
Why should/would an H1B commit three/six years of their life to a job, which will never become a career? Would you be willing to do it?
In my view, this problem will go away on its own as the home countries of the immigrants develop and offer the same opportunities at home.
It is already happening.
I think that it will be a loss to American economic vibrancy, innovation and society. Silicon valley would not nearly be the innovation hub of the world that it is, without its immigrant workforce. But, for now, Trump wins!
A person can work on an H1B visa and then leave the US and continue their career somewhere else. I don't know if a lack of a path to permanent residency would deter people from applying for a H1B. Many people have done that, either because their green card was not approved or because they wanted to move back to the home country. Strange as it may sound to some Americans, people do move back for various reasons.
Those immigrants coming here from foreign countries are lucky they have been admitted at all. Would Americans be allowed to work in India or another country as easily as those who are able to find work here? Hardly unlikely.
We have many qualified American employees who would love to be working in the specialized industries where immigrants are working but cannot because the job is occupied by those immigrants. They also have mouths to feed and expenses to pay. They have been overlooked by the immigrants.
Those who are complaining about spouses not being able to work are getting paid very well probably better than the American who could not get a job in their chosen profession. If they are unhappy with their current situation, they can always return home to their country of origin. They probably will not because they have it very good in America. Count your blessings and be thankful that America opened up their doors to you.
37
For your information, many Americans are working in India, for example, I know several who are teaching at the new crop of private universities in Indian metropolises.
2
"We have many qualified American employees who would love to be working in the specialized industries where immigrants are working but cannot because the job is occupied by those immigrants."
By definition of the H1B, this is at best a fantasy, at its basest, a lie.
2
"Hardly unlikely" indeed. Americans outsource to other countries all the time!
I worked in Iran in the 1970's, as did my father, mother, and three brothers. Two of my brothers worked in England and Germany, and one of them also worked in Romania. There is a robust culture of ex-pat Americans the world over, working in the oil industry, service industry, tech, and other industries too. Abu Dhabi is a famous example of a place where ex-pats outnumber natives, and many of them are American. To answer your question: yes. Americans would be allowed to work in other countries. Over nine million do.
My experience has been that employers generally hire the best person they can get for the best price they must pay. Attempts to remove immigrant workforce often result in disaster.
From 'Outside The Beltway,' June, 22, 2011:
"After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
"Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry."
Last... employers who pay MORE to immigrant labor than Americans? Where? What businessman would willingly pay more for the privilege of being vulnerable to an extra set of laws?
2
The H1B Visa program is a scam perpetrated on Americans by corporations too cheap too pay prevailing wages for higher-end educated labor like engineers, programmers, doctors.
The lie is: "There aren't sufficient qualified candidates in America for available jobs." The truth is that the words "who are willing to work for the sub-standard wages we're offering." needs to be added to the end of that sentence.
Here's the part of the program that is always omitted from the discussion: The visas are NOT held by the workers, they are held by the employer. Should the worker refuse to work 80 hour weeks with no overtime pay, or refuse to live in company supplied housing which is deducted from their pay, or look for work with other employers, or do anything to not be the 'perfect employee', the company can rescind the visa and send them back to their country, after which they will bring in someone more compliant. It is the modern day equivalent of indentured servitude.
H1B Visas are not necessary, Neither those foreign workers nor their spouses should be here when there are highly qualified Americans perfectly capable of doing the jobs for a fair wage.
90
There are currently over 3 million americans working overseas. Do you think each one of them had to prove that there weren't qualified local workers before they were admitted and allowed to live/work there ? NO - There are hundreds of thousands of US students studying abroad. When they're program ends or they graduate, if a local employer offers them a job, do you think they're forced to return to the US? they're not - they get to apply for temporary work authorization just like F-1 student visa holders in the US do with H-1 visas.
A lot of the US immigration system is based on reciprocity - so when you advocate for barring foreigners the ability to live, work and study in the US, you are really advocating for a world where americans are no longer free to go abroad, travel the world. every time this administration implements another restrictionist policy i wonder what americans think when they are treated the same way. It kills me when americans whine about having to compete with foreigners for jobs. If your family has lived in the US for 2, 3, 4 generations and you've had all the great privileges this society offers its citizens and you still can't compete with someone straight off the boat, i don't want you working for me. this country was founded on a system of meritocracy, and open competition - let the best man or woman get the job.
32
"when you advocate for barring foreigners the ability to live, work and study in the US, you are really advocating for a world where americans are no longer free to go abroad, travel the world."
This is a straw man argument. I'm perfectly free to go abroad and travel the world... on a tourist visa. But I'm not free to take a job in another country unless that country has made some conscious policy decision to let me do so. And I'd never feel entitled to that - nations should have an interest in protecting their workers' well-being. The world is not just one big labor market.
2
You completely misread what I wrote, and replied on a different subject.
My letter did not concern immigration policies. It concerned the hated H1B Visa program which specifically allows employers to import TEMPORARY foreign workers on 'indentured servitude' visas when American workers won't take the substandard wages they are offering. Once the visa expires, they are booted out back to their home country, and a new visa is requested, a new indentured servant worker imported. You seem to be in favor of that disgraceful concept.
Not only is the H1B visa program nothing resembling 'open competition' or the laughable 'free market' these companies pretend to care about, it is the precise opposite of that.
1
Everything is a zero-sum game for Trump; he cannot be a winner unless someone else is a loser. For every job filled by an immigrant, an American loses a job. For an administration literally banking on economic growth to pay for their own tax cuts, they can't help but constantly contradict themselves.
22
"But an anti-immigration outfit called Save Jobs USA sued the Obama administration, claiming that work authorization for H-1B spouses meant that the United States would end up “importing” two foreign workers for every one."
An "anti-immigration" outfit? That's your take. An more balanced description might be "pro-American IT worker outfit".
39
You raise the obvious question. Why does a country with an aging demographic like the United States spurn the twin solutions: 1) a robust devotion of national resources to the training of its own citizenry, young and old alike, and 2) rolling out the welcome mat for anyone with the gumption to move to a new country and contribute to the enrichment of that culture?
That, after all, has been the recipe for previous national success. Why does the United States in its hour of mounting challenge turn its back on a seemingly unbeatable formula?
When similar ultra-nationalist ravings threatened disaster (the Know-Nothings, the KKK, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholic sentiments, anti-Asian backwardness, etc.) they were beaten back before they succeeded completely in throttling progress.
Has America as a nation not learned that imperishable lesson?
The recent NYT article on 25-year-old textbooks (the decay of American public schools) raises similar and related questions.
As Alfred McCoy addresses in his recent work the American Empire is in decline and in that decline remains mesmerized (and, indeed, paralyzed) by the delusions of American exceptionalism. People believe that America must prosper and prevail as a principle untethered to intelligent planning.
Clear, straightforward thinking is beyond the reach of most. Us versus them insanity is now the route most frequently taken. Win Win has been displaced by Win Lose. The current administration is the proof of that. How sad!
11
"The recent NYT article on 25-year-old textbooks (the decay of American public schools) raises similar and related questions."
I agree that public education is in a dismal state, and needs more investment. How 'bout this idea, Larry: Let's tax the daylights out of Silicon valley zillion dollar companies like Google and Facebook who always claim that the US educational system is a failure and just doesn't provide them with the workforce they need, and which forces them to rely on cheap labor from overseas. They will surely jump at the chance to help pay more (much more) in taxes so they can do the right thing and hire highly skilled Americans at wages that will be commensurate with their abilities, and truly give something back to the nation that has given them so much in freedom and profit. They are willing to do that, right? Didn't think so.
6
My (Larry from Chicago) response to mpound. I believe that the majority should actually rule. And I believe that majority should back legislation that would tax 100% all annual incomes over $500,000 (for starters). That would eliminate the national debt and provide adequate funds for education and healthcare (for starters). After all it was the American taxpayer that funded (through DARPA) the creation of the Internet in the first place. Moreover we should use our technology and resources to raise the living standards of every human being on this planet. That's entirely doable and would eliminate the problem with "terror". What's missing? Intelligence and vision. We don't need the gratuitous charity of Bill Gates. We need a democratic redistribution of wealth combined with a commitment to the advancement of our brothers and sisters throughout the world.
You expect sympathy for your "plight"? You and your husband, professionals both, came here why? Why did you choose to ply your trades in the US as opposed to taking your hard earned knowledge back to India and help those there?
I sincerely doubt the lack of medical physicists "compelling" a H1-B for your husband, (it is a salary thing and a salary thing only) and to add the thought that somehow you also have career creds and should therefore get another layer special treatment is really beyond the pale.
Requiring qualified citizens move to the head of the line is perfectly reasonable. Perhaps if a shortage truly exists then alternative sources can be sought.
And of course I can not but ask the question - Are you studying for the US Citizenship examination? It is by citizenship that you will feel the "full promise of America and participate fully in American life."
41
You think she needs to study for the citizenship exam? She almost certainly can pass it more easily than the majority of US-born citizens.
1
It states right at the top of the article that Ms. Dalmia was naturalized in 2002. I wonder what else your prejudice has blinded you to?
She says in the article that she is a naturalized citizen
1
Wonder how many H1-B visa holders work for Trump Inc.
5
The preface to the article should have read "...a native of India who has the skills that we journalists relate to".
My heart breaks over these narratives. There's a process, too bad if it seems long and tedious to some. At least she didn't have to wait in India.
6
As an observer who divides the year between residences in Western Europe and California, I can see clearly that the era of economic migration has ended for the foreseeable future. Labor shortages in developed countries were addressed in Europe and the US after WWII by encouraging workers to migrate and fill vacant jobs. Today recipients of H1B visas merely make it harder for qualified Americans to find jobs and apply downward pressure on the salaries they do earn when they eventually find work. Unskilled foreign workers are also no longer welcome even though they keep costs down for native consumers because of cultural backlash or growing world-wide nativism. In the long run this trend may have positive consequences for countries like Mexico, the Philippines, and India as it reduces brain-drain but in any event, that's the reality of what's happening both here and in the core of the European Union
26
H1-B program started as a way to attract true, top-tier scientific and other technical talent to the USA. It has been abused such that it is now used to gain work authorization and permanent residence for IT support engineers for any employer - including very non-technical enterprises. I favor a liberal immigration policy but it should be done with candor and not false claims that the USA cannot compete without H1-B's for any technical position. Likewise, H1-B - whatever its benefits - depresses wages in technical fields leading to more US high school graduates selecting non-technical fields for colleges. I sympathize with H1-B spouses but the focus should be on fixing H1-B first - it needs to be more selective.
54
I agree with you, mostly. My disagreement is just a note. The H1b is nearly impossible to get. I have no idea how Indians get it. I am a foreign student doing a PhD here I can tell you I’ve never got one, I looked into getting one and just gave up after surveying the paperwork. It was prohibitory to say the least.
I believe the way these people get them is often through these companies that apply for them en mase. And many of these companies like Tata are actually Indian companies I believe. They have armies of lawyers who can take care of mass applications and they flood the applications into the process so that the application period even closes as a matter of hours or days after it has opened. So individual applicants by small companies etc have little chance. Foreign students usually deride the H1b as the Indian immigration visa because of how these Indians and Indian companies seem to game it, year after year. They virtually own it it seems!
3
There are far too many middle-aged US citizen IT workers eager to work, but displaced by cheaper H-1Bs and H-4s. These Americans are either unemployed or under-employed. There is no real shortage of tech workers, but companies prefer cheap labor.
92
Yeah, I tend to agree with the view that there's nothing preventing you from getting H1Bs, both of you getting H1Bs in a new place, etc. if you really do wish to work. There are other ways to legally switch your status so you can work also if you are skilled (or have a lot of money to spare). Others mention volunteer work but I understand that anything that could be classified as work even if it is without pay is also illegal (this is a bit tricky).
Yes, the bar is higher than it would be if it you were a PR or citizen (assuming there's no abuse here, which is a separate issue IMO) but that's the price you pay for immigrating to a different country. If the goal is to excel, then it shouldn't be a problem beating out of the vast majority of the population of the world.
Because there is abuse, your situation is actually easier in any big city. I think the H1B is fine without the abuse - the employer abuse needs to be curbed.
3
Abuse is there everywhere.
EB1 is abused and USCIS doesnt even care about it.
L1A/B is abused. L1A/B and H1B are no different in terms of highly skilled visas. Yet, spouses of L1A/B can work. Why this discrimination?
B1/B2 is abused from ALL countries. People come herein B1/B3 and overstay (forever).
4
It is ironic that we don't fund our teachers or our schools, yet don't want to import the talent that is highly educated elsewhere to fill jobs that Americans simply cannot fill. While Trump is busy shutting out this talent, how about we start fully funding and upgrading America's education system to give our citizens the training they need to fill these jobs. Problem solved.
60
Where do you get your facts? Working at Union Bank in LA, there were about 80 Indians and myself. They were payed half my salary and lived 10 to a room. There is no shortage of skills in America. But we are not willing to work at half pay.
11
The same president just passed a tax law taxing graduate assistantships. Well, many of these high tech jobs require graduate level education. Assistantships help with graduate education.
"While Trump is busy shutting out this talent, how about we start fully funding and upgrading America's education system to give our citizens the training they need to fill these jobs. Problem solved."
Oh, I see, to you this is a Trump-created problem. American kids aren't bright enough to fill these jobs and it's his fault, is that it? Too bad the facts don't support your, and Big Tech's, and the Koch Brothers', and the US Chamber of Commerce's talking points.
Hal Salzman is a professor of public policy at the E.J. Bloustein School and the J.J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Here is what he said, right here in the NYT.
"Moreover, there is neither a shortage of U.S. students who are world-class in their educational performance nor of college graduates with science and engineering degrees. The U.S. can claim the lion’s share of the world’s highest performing (domestic) science students and continues to graduate more than two times the number of scientists and engineers than are hired each year."
So be sure to let these graduates know that their inability to find a job is somehow related to the failure of "...America's education system to give our citizens the training they need to fill these jobs." That should make them feel better.
6
While this will be good for the H1B holders,mostly Indian, it has zero value added for American citizens, just more jobs taken away, the plus ones of the H1B visas all taking an extra job, doubling in fact the number of total H1B visas. I would only support this measure if the number of H1B visas is slashed in half, to accomodate for the spouses.
30
We have plenty of people here in the states who are techies looking for work. Wait in line like the rest of us.
56
Being a techie is not the same thing as having a college degree and in many cases an advanced degree. Nationally, companies big and small are begging for qualified candidates for open jobs, but are Americans willing to move wherever those jobs present themselves? Doubt it.
PS: Everyone, please remember the H1-B visa is only good for three years and then one renewal for another three years. It's not a snap moving to the next level for a "green card".
The people probably complaining the most are those who are mostly unqualified.
5
The ones complaining might be the ones displaced by cheap H1bs from India. If these H1bs are so bright, why were the displaced Disney workers etc. forced to train these H1b workers. There is no shortage of skilled labor but there is a dire shortage of skilled labor who will work for peanuts.
8
Americans are willing to move or we could work remote. However, we are not willing to work at half price
7
As an immigration lawyer for the past 25 years, I have seen how this has affected intelligent, educated H-4 spouses and their families - untold numbers of incidences of depression and domestic violence that are directly tied to the pressures associated with H-4 spouses’ inability to work.
35
Nobody forced these ladies to move here. They knew about the GC backlog and that H4 dependents cannot work. If life is that unbearable for these H4 folks, why don't they just move back to India? Have you ever thought about the displaced American workers?
12
I wonder how many untold numbers of depressions and violence occur when American citizens are laid off in order for corporations to higher cheaper foreign labor to replace them.
20
They should consider returning home and using their talents in the service of their home countries that are desperate for this talent.
13
Our immigration system is indeed broken and Mr. Trump is only going to continue to use it as a dog whistle for his base. It needs to be repaired not only for immigrants, but it also needs protect Americans. The H1B is abused by companies like Disney, who in 2015 terminated TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY educated, highly skilled citizens and replaced them with low wage H1B workers from India. These workers education and skills does not supersede those of the people who were fired, in fact many are blatantly inferior.
And to those that are reading this, think about it next time you’re planning you next trip to Walt Disney World.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disne...
31
Trump didn't want his wives to work, full-stop. He once said "putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing." So this is unlikely to be near the top of his list of concerns. If anything, a chauvinist like Trump probably assumes he's doing all the visa recipients a favor by keeping their spouse (often a wife) dependent on them. Even if the husband abuses or cheats on her, she's stuck without an income or the ability to get one. You're welcome, fellas.
10
If qualified why not independently go the H1B route? Surely if you feel you are eminently qualified, companies would be eager to hire you. Yes it is frustrating as an educated partner at not being able to work wherever one wants. But this whole article seems more like a tantrum....I want my cake and with frosting please.
As an immigrant, I think companies need to rethink the H1B visa. If one is importing married folk with extended families for a long period of time, should not the burden of how you need to address your future lie with you personally as well as the company who must educate you on your possible frustrations?
We too are immigrants, we too educated ourselves here and waited for the requisite time for our green cards, citizenship etc. This is the country we chose allegiance to, not a cakewalk, but certainly worth every bit of anxiety and stress. It sure teaches you patience and while you wait you can mull exactly why you want to live here....money excluded. Perhaps then you might think differently.
18
She's a citizen as of 2002. Read the top of the article.
1
I really wish you were in one of these woman's shoes for a decade (green card wait times currently is between 20 - 70 years) or so, Perhaps, then you might think (and choose words) differently.
2
What American dream? Maybe if you come from a family in the top 10% of the income scale the dream is alive and well for the rest...not so much.
7
As a silicon valley tech worker for many years, I have seen this effect on several co-workers.
In America, no policy defect goes un-exploited. One of the wives, who had a master's degree in computer science, found "work" at a shop where her manager demanded a minimum of 50 hours of work per week--for no pay or benefits. Why would she take this "opportunity"?--because this was a way to keep her skills sharp, and offer experience on her resume.
Then, the exploitation became worse, with threats that she would be reported for "working" because of ??? (perhaps the treats occasionally supplied to the office could be counted as payment?) Our employee finally had to return to India or lose his wife (or share her).
Americans do not value certain professions like engineering that are highly valued in countries like India, Korea and China. Potential engineers in America today often prefer the far easier coursework in college to find work in finance, or even medicine, or take many of the same courses to get the required PhD needed for a career in physics or math.
Bluntly put, tech today must hire non-citizens (often US educated). If the US will not provide enough citizens for the desired US positions, companies build facilities and hire elsewhere.
The H-4 visa holders will have babies here (US citizens all). They also tend to be the people you want as co-workers, neighbors, and friends. Our policy is beyond stupid--it is immoral, and damages the country for everyone.
44
What damages the US is not training our OWN tech workers. And we won't begin the process of doing that, and reforming our own failing K-12 educational system, if it is this easy to just "hire foreigners". Also, I totally disagree that a degree in MEDICINE is "easy" compared to a degree in engineering.
4
as a physician who is on H-1B visa I have helped recruit nurses and have established a specialty ICU and have qualifications that nobody else has in the state, that I practice in. there is no question that H1B Visa is being abused by tech workers/companies from India. There is a simple solution that can be had. H1B workers need to have the highest qualifications that local Americans do not have. One way to ensure this is to have a starting salary of 150000 per annum. This will ensure that greedy companies will not hire cheap labor and displace the local American labor. This will also ensure that the best talent gets hired in the country.
20
Money isn't everything and certainly isn't the best barometer of who "deserves" an H-1B visa, which, it bears repeating, is for any job that requires at least a bachelor's degree in a particular field, not just tech. They can be for nonprofit employees, university professors, and lots of other jobs that are not highly compensated and for which there is no other logical visa category.
You cant have it both ways. If you decide that H1B is an exceptional expertise visa, then youve got to pay a premium for it as a citizen. Allowing companies to pay minimum salaries lets them flood the market with sub par candidates. which is happening right now.
1
From a Free Market perspective, what India exports is manpower (skilled, cheap and in abundance). Same is with China, it exports any and every product (cheap, workable and in large volume). Business entities will go to Mars for resources if it helps to increase their profitability. Similarly for US exports, China or India cannot complain about expensive Boeing 787 dreamliner from Boeing or Lockheed Martin F16. Consumers all over the world don't get to enjoy free Facebook, Google services or premium Apple products with low wage workers from India or China not playing some part into it.
I am a strong advocate of fixing the employment based visa immigration system so that new immigrants should feel more welcomed and not be seen as someone who displaced deserving candidates.
But the article here is about plight of H-4 Spouses and how miserable the legal immigration system has become. I wonder if any one the fellow American readers have any experience of living abroad while not being allowed to work. An H4 Spouse is a living human being who is uprooting himself/herself for a better life overseas. The readers here can decide to either treat them as collateral damage or put blame squarely on them for the whole situation, but does anyone here care about the words - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
5
Thank you for your words. Your opinion is a welcome departure from what’s I usually expected to read in comments to stories about immigration.
5
I'm really sorry for those couples that are in economic distress because of this but I don't see why the women who can't work sit home bored. Why don't they go out and do serious volunteer work -- there are so many organizations that could use the help of educated, responsible people.
16
I worked for a TV network that outsourced its IT departments to H1B visa holders via an intermediary company. They were not better than Americans, they were much worse and we could never understand a word they uttered. No offense but they were simply the "cheapest and poorest (quality) workforce that the the smallest amount of money could buy." This trend has now expended to the medical fields, hospitals, etc. I would end H1B visas tomorrow.
79
By the way, many big technology firms, following IBM's lead, have already shipped their software development jobs to India, bypassing the H1B visa hurdle entirely.
5
That's ridiculous. Most Indians I know speak far better English than most Americans. Why do you assume your experience is representative? I studied in India all the way from kindergarten to the PhD and I have written several books in English, published by Routledge, Duke, OUP etc. Perhaps you should realize that there are other accents besides the delightful American accent.
1
A personal note: I get the frustration of these women, however, the complaints of someone not being able to work while their spouse is employed elicit half-a-sympathy from me. I am also from India, and I came here as a student- in particular, a student who was not married. And, I attended an expensive private university in New York . I did get scholarships, still, the cost of living for a student in NYC was a seismic shock. I got an on-campus job the second week I came here, and I have not stopped working since. I have seen so many international students in the same boat- again, students who came here without having a spouse who was providing for them. Due to visa restrictions, they cannot work off-campus, and they can only work 20 hours a week. Often times, they buy textbooks and pay bills from what they earn on-campus.
After having this experience, and after seeing so many students like myself in this scenario, I must say that I find it hard to completely empathize with Indian women who came here under the wing of their husbands. I know that it can drive one crazy to simply roost at home and not enrich one's mind and skills- but it is no match for the lessons you learn as a full-time-international student with limited job opportunities. I have no regrets at all for having come here single... I found the love of my life in NYC!
11
Students can work off-campus if there are no on-campus jobs available. They are limited to working 20 hours a week when school is in session, but can work full-time during school holidays and vacations
3
@Ruth Cohen: When I was an international student, you couldn't work off-campus. The one year OPT allowed you to work off-campus. Second, given that the minimum wage has gone up, fewer jobs are made available for students to work 35-40 hours a week.
1
Maybe foreign students should be scrutinized as well. They are expected to demonstrate an ability to pay for their entire course and stay. So if they cannot afford their textbooks or other expenses, they are technically in violation.
Secondly, the job that they are allowed to perform has to fit a "practical training" framework. This is ill-defined and frequently misused.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exchange-visito...
Often financial statements that are produced for the visa are not indicative of what resources the student has to expend in the US. Also, many of the jobs that they do - especially in the retail sector have no bearing on the practical application of their degree.
7
This is the second similar essay that I have read, in the past few weeks. I suspect there is an Indian lobby behind all of this.
Again, as so many other commenters have stated: H1B visas are what they are. They allow one person to come to the US and work, and bring his or her family. Every single person who gets one of these visas KNOWS this. It is not a surprise to anyone.
The fact that certain populations have buyer's remorse or don't like American laws is neither here nor there. The US owes foreigners or their spouses NOTHING more than what the H1B visa delivers.
90
This is basically a back door attempt by Trump to try and limit the H1b program. When the author came to this country H1B visa holders were truly high tech, they were workers with unique skills,many of them PHd level , with skill sets in engineering, medicine/medical research, high level computer science.
These days the H1b is basically as others have said, a low cost foreign labor jobs program. The H1B was diluted to being simply "someone having the required education and skills for the job", not skills not easily found locally, and what you have today is a flood of people, mostly from India, who have basically gone to trade schools to learn things like Java programming, networking. QA and other skill sets that are not unique. These aren't high level computer science graduates, these are tech trade school graduates, and they have been allowed to flood the market. You go into the IT deparments in financial services, big corporations, and you will find as a distinct minority US born workers, or even those who are immigrants now citizens or green cards, most are H1B from places like India. The myth that they are filling openings companies cannot fill is basically a lie, the truth is that the H1B is the only resource companies want to hire from because it is cheap labor and where the worker can't easily move to another job. Canada is smarter, by having them apply for green cards employers can't exploit them for cheap wages, because they can easily move around.
59
H1b visa holders do not have to work 40 hours a week. They can and frequently officially get paid for working 20 hours per week while actually working 40 or more hours. In addition the job description is often dumbed down to a low level at a low rate of pay, while the work performed is actually more complex for which an American worker would have to be paid more
5
I.E.E.E., the world's largest technical professional organization,in addition to many other leading organizations including UC Davis, have definitively shown that there is *no* shortage of STEM talent in America.
In fact, American companies and Indian H1B outsourcers (Infosys, Cognizant, etc.) have conspired to undercut qualified American workers with this lie.
Also, it is well known that with the exception if India's excellent Indian Institure of Technology and just a few other schools, Indian universities are woefully lacking in the quality of their engineering graduates, not to mention the massive corruption that infects most of those "universities".
Many other kinds fo worker and student visas are also abused to replace qualified American workers.
How many more American jobs will be lost by flooding our labor market with spouses with mid-level managerial and tech skills - and, given India's out-sized level of corruption, how many of these "spouses" will be part of a "marriage of convenience" between two tech graduates in order to take advantage of the law.
We need to *stop* the inappropriate flodding of America's labor pool with H1B tech workers who are taking jobs away from qualified Americans. Caveat: *very high level* science and medical professionals are a different thing, altogether from H1B tech workers; Shikha Dalmia, the author, disingenuously conflates the two.
I ardently oppose Trump, but this is one thing his administration gets right.
105
H4EAD doesn’t need to be fixed, it needs to be eliminated. As to those who say foreign spouses should be able to work here, there is a simple solution: give the spouse an H1B visa without increasing the cap. This should sort these situations effectively.
H4 was a backdoor increase of the widely abused (by IT organizations, at least) H1B visa. It should have been eliminated yesterday.
72
How can you give visas without increasing the cap? A "cap" is a limit on some number.
I'm assuming that she means that if you give the spouse a visa too, the spouse counts as one of the 85,000 allowable. Which makes some sense.
1
Life is full of choices. The writer and her husband chose to emigrate to the United States for their own reasons, knowing the rules of the day. There were other mature economies where they might have both enjoyed a more liberal and accommodating welcome including full employment authorization. Immigration policies exist primarily to serve the needs of the receiving country and universal humanitarian values. No doubt, our system is broken, does not serve America well, and current policy posturing is unlikely to address the real issues. But it is not in the place of aspiring immigrants to make these complaints, when their home nations are just as in need of their talent, and there are other nations with more rational policies that would be more accommodating. Our policies must remain focused on the needs of our national economy and values and universal humanitarian values. If these policies create hurdles for aspiring immigrants, prudence suggests they ought to compare the opportunity with those elsewhere. The writer puts forward good reasons for our government to improve policies, but she and her husband had choices.
106
Worry not. A ton, and I mean a TON of H1B recipients and their spouses are eagerly applying to Canadian Permanent Residency (their equivalent of a green card), a lot of them have already gotten it, and will be moving there soon. Canada has a points-based system so educated young people with no criminal record get PR relatively easily (exactly the kind of immigrants an economy wants). So those jobs will be shipped overseas anyway; either to Canada or India or China or wherever techies can go and work for multinationals. Good luck making America great again!
29
Are they not needed in their native countries?
12
No, because India already has huge numbers of highly educated techies, doctors, engineers etc
Read my comment. The jobs are being shipped, so are the people. It's relatively easier to ship a software job overseas and the people with it (some of whom have worked for years for the same company), than to train a US citizen from scratch. Are some of these jobs underpaid, probably. But try telling to that to people who work for MS, Amazon, Google, FB, Uber, and N other companies with well-payed H1B employees. It's easier for them to go to Canada and basically work in US time zone.
So true, H-1B visas have been abused so blatantly by companies. Also true that American workers are "forced" to train their replacements (one can always find a job elsewhere). The main reason for our Pretend King Trump to shut down the spouses is that most are women who bear children eventually. He wants to stop minority growth in this country something he fails to understand cannot be stopped because this is who we are, mutts. We came from every region on this planet. American does not mean one has to be white, it is an idea. We will weather this storm and throw out another King even a pretend one. But we should also "demand" higher wages and those "foreign" workers should demand it as well.
10
While I do sympathize with your plight in that you (like other H-4 wives) are very much frustrated that you were not able to work, I feel much more concerned for American-born people who lose opportunities to immigrants such as H-4s and H1B visa holders. Contrary to what you've been taught to believe, to be blunt - this country does not lack people who can do the work your immigrant husbands or you can do. Corporate America is exploiting visa holders, and depriving Americans of opportunity.
149
You must be a Canary in a Coal Mine in another planet. "This country does not lack people who can do the work..." What?!?!?! Do you think these H1-B visa holders come to sell hotdogs or lay sheet rock?!?!?! Clearly, never in your life you have been in need of hiring an Electronics Engineer with experience writing hardware models in a high-level language, for example. Contrary to people of certain political affiliation (I suspect you are one of them) foreign workers are not the reason why so many West Virginia coal miners are out of work; try to think harder in finding a culprit for that...
20
This country so lacks for people willing to earn the technical skills needed to qualify for an H1-B visa foreigners fill our Universities to gain their skills at US Universities (we still excel at teaching these skills). Once trained, they sometimes stay, but increasingly return to their native country or to somewhere else.
This country does not lack the people who COULD do the work--but because they lack the training and experience, or because they find easier, less demanding, and more lucrative jobs (and their skills wither).
My son hires many tech workers. He would fill every position locally with someone with no visa issues--if he could. H1-B visa's are an inadequate stopgap. In the past few years, he has had to build whole teams around the world to go where the potential employees live, or want to live (and can get to).
Punishing the wives of H1-B visa holders is just wrong.
It is the decision to not take math in high school, not to take calculus in high school and college, not to take hard physics, and math courses, and not to study too hard because it's not cool that creates the problem. With far less effort you can take organic chemistry in college and then become a doctor, or take ??? and become a lawyer and (likely) earn much more, have more fun, and date the pretty girls. Only those who really want to build and design things do the hard work needed to qualify to do so. Other countries value tech skills, and careers. We do not.
14
David - I can assure you that you know very little about me. First of all, I detest Donald Trump and pretty much all he stands for - but he has stumbled into the correct position in this case. I don't doubt that some people receiving H1-B status deserve it - that electronics engineer from Hyderabad or wherever may be a rare bird indeed. But if you've ever been on the Northeast Corridor NJ Transit train from Central Jersey to New York City any weekday morning at 7 AM and notice that at least 75 percent of the passengers are Indian men, you soon figure out that something is wrong in America. If you really think that all of these men have "skills that nobody in this country has," you have truly been hoodwinked and bamboozled. They don't come here to sell hotdogs or lay sheet rock. They come here to be cheap, controllable labor for big corporations.
1
H-1b visas are primarily for Indian tech workers to undercut wages and jobs for Americans and the program should be greatly restricted, if not elimnated entirely.
Perhaps Indian couples should pursue livelihoods in India.
107
The law requires, and studies confirm, that those employed on H-1b Visas make the same wage as an American citizen. The most recent study demonstrated that those holding H-1b Visas, make more than Americans in the same role.
It is also a myth that Americans are as well-educated as those coming from overseas seeking employment here.
The information I've presented here is easy to research, if a person were inclined to find out the truth.
15
"Perhaps Indian couples should pursue livelihoods in India."
You are getting your wish. This is increasingly the case. US tech companies are building teams in India, doing their hiring there, and building their expertise. They know full well that this is more expensive than hiring either citizens here or H1B candidates here, partly because of the lower levels of experience in these new organizations causes very expensive errors--and risks schedules and projects.
Why do it? Lack of candidates here.
1
Not true. You need to do some research. There are many instances where H1bs are paid less than Americans. Looks at the wage data published by USCIS.
1
Multiple studies have show that the H-1B visa holders have resulted in the lowering of pay for American workers in the same field. Replacing older more well paid American workers with cheaper foreign workers.
Times and other articles have supported this research
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-t...
http://fortune.com/2016/01/26/disney-lawsuit-reveals-an-h-1b-visa-system...
H-1B Visas are bad for American citizens, they are a gold mine for big business.
119
Multiple studies have also shown that H-1B workers are paid more, on average, than U.S. workers in similar positions. Are there companies that abuse the program? Sure. Are there companies that fire older Americans and replace them with younger, cheaper Americans? Absolutely, and probably a lot more people lose their jobs that way than via the whopping 65,000 annual H-1B quota. Go after the abusers.
4
Those organizations run by non-tech trained people, like Disney, are highly vulnerable to making abysmal tech personnel decisions.
H-1B visas are designed to avoid abuse--but fraudsters will always look for ways to abuse them. They should be punished.
Tech companies, here in the Silicon Valley, have a different problem: not enough candidates, despite offering well-qualified new college grads over 120,000 to start. These same companies are the ones who make the products you want to buy, and you use every day, with stock valuations that are now among the highest in the country. They offer employee stock purchase plans, and 401K plans that can ensure accumulation of well over 1 million dollars during a working career without additional savings.
These companies can't fill their jobs with US born and trained candidates. My son will hire every qualified candidate he can find--but is forced to build offices off-shore to get enough tech workers.
Cutting a visa program essential to the best and smartest companies in the US because of abuse by the worst or dumbest seems like a very bad idea.
15
I was on F-2 visa, which is a dependent of a F-1 student visa holder. My ex was a PhD student at an American university and I was a stay-at-home wife in my 20s. I was unable to work because of the visa regulation. Finding an employer who could sponsor me a work visa in the small college town we lived in was next to impossible, so I did go through a frustrating depression period which also hurt our marriage big time. I ended up doing volunteer work here and there, and by the grace of God was able to work things around. I know first hand how difficult it is to be on a restricting spouse visa in the US. It felts like you're being treated unfairly and you want to scream of the injustice done to you. BUT, I don't agree with the notion of "involuntary spouse visa." You married the person and you agreed to come with them to the US. You knew the consequences and you chose to abide the US immigration laws. It's not like you were smuggled here and a victim of human trafficking, or that kind of sort. You cannot claim that it is the US government's responsibility to enable you to work. That is simply entitlement. You have the choice to make. You can choose to come here on a H-4 and be restricted, or you could stay in your country. You could choose to marry that person, or not, or you could marry them and move to a different country with regulations that are more favorable to you. It is not involuntary. It is not the US government's responsibility to make your American dream come true.
191
I agree with your description, but I would also like to find an answer to the following: are we, as a country, making the best out of all the resources (human in this case) we have?
I see these spouses as a potential to increase the well being of the country. Some argue that this increase in wealth happen at the expenses of the less educated/protected/... and it may be true: but if that is the case why is that we are not able to identify a redistribution policy of this wealth to increase the well being of all the population?
Many comments complain that foreigners are taking away jobs for the well educated, so why don't we look at why the US is not able to produce the number of engineers, scientists and doctors (the most popular jobs for immigrants) we need?
On the other side we also need to understand that without qualified immigrants we would not have enough engineers for all the Microsoft, Google, Yahoo etc. no matter how high the salaries would be (and ignoring that some of these companies may be foreign companies in the case these talents would work in India/China/wherever these folks are from).
I agree that this is not a zero sum game, but I doubt (and these comments can confirm that) that currently the economic/policy system favors the population as a whole. These immigrants are making a fortune for shareholders (corporations hiring them), some for themselves, and the rest of us?
5
"You knew the consequences" is a fallacy since you can't know what you haven't experienced and articles like this highlight the problems so you can know, eventually.
4
Cry me a river. These people knew the terms of their visa. How about a story on displaced American workers?
125
You will get that story the same day that Nancy Pelosi gives an eight hour speech on the poor downtrodden American. Like the one she gave on the DACA recipients.
13
Trump administration doesn't intend to make American more inviting to immigrants (doesn't matter how skilled you are). Unless,
What's even more sad is that Congress has completely abdicated it's responsibility to solve a problem it created.
3
We've been focused so on being nice (nor not) to undocumented immigrants that we forgot to be nice to the legal immigrants following the rules and waiting patiently in line for years on end.
38
Cannot recommend this comment enough. It's amazing how many NYT commentators are in favor of importing illegal, uneducated immigrants (to do low-paid manual work) and how many are opposed to educated immigrants from India who can actually compete with them.
4
I support legal immigration, but every immigration rule and law to which folks immigrating knowingly agreed to, can't be complained about and demanded to be changed. H4 Visa is granted to spouses of H1B applicants with the known restriction that it is only for family to stay together. So folks who are highly educated or skilled (we keep getting this parroted to us) can't come to USA and now complain that your talents are being wasted etc. What about the life and talents of an American citizen (50+) going underutilized who probably doesn't get hired due to a H4 getting hired stead. How do they pay for their kids' colleges and how do they pay for their mortgage. What about their life potential getting wasted?
Know that when you applied for H4, the USCIS let you in because you promised not to work. Now you want to break that promise, let alone demanding to do that. If H4 was a working visa, then you would have to go through the same scrutiny of a H1B to not displace local workers and pay the fees etc. On the other hand if you are a talented H4, nothing prevents you from getting sponsored to H1B. This is yet another egregious demand from immigrants with complete disregard to American Citizens.
132
Not that I disagree with your position but I would like to point out couple of things related to these visas.
H4 holder cannot get a work authorization until the principal H1B holder successfully files a green card application. Typically there are three stages - Labor certification, approved green card application with USCIS (agency did its math at this point and realized having this immigrant as permanent resident is worth it), permanent resident/green card (actual status change from h1b). And the last stage which is where most people from India/China get stuck due to the country quota limitations. H4 EAD which I can only assume is a stopgap solution just treats the H1B holders who have completed the second stage as if they already are permanent resident and grants work permits for their spouses (do note that this is precisely what happens if the principal H1B holder actually became a permanent resident). So all these spouses asking is that preserve the stopgap until there is a better solution.
Secondly H1B applications are filed in first week of April and the actual work authorization begins in Sep. In addition to that H1B uses a lottery system so there is no guarantee someone will get it. Think about this from a employers perspective - they have to wait at min 5 months for candidate to join with great uncertainity attached to it. So th ground reality is actually little different and gets lost in thes passionate articles which only highlight the struggle from one side.
1
I think the blame should be laid squarely at the feet of the U.S. companies and their enablers who have systematically abused the H-1B visa program to hire lower-level tech workers to displace American workers at reduced wages and benefits and employ foreign workers who are less demanding due to their precarious standing. Trump probably has over reacted to please his base, but his base has been incited by the unscrupulous actions of these companies. Go figure. What goes around comes around.
143
American spouses overseas face the same dilemma! There are many talented, highly capable American men and women whose careers are thwarted when their spouse takes up an overseas assignment, be it with the US government, a corporation, academia or non-profits. It puts a huge strain on families, economically and emotionally, including my own! Some governments recognize the value of the spouses and provide working visas - others have the same zero-sum mentality of the Trump Administration. It would be great if the US could lead the world in promoting equal working and career opportunities for expat spouses - in the US and overseas -but as in so many other ways, this administration is determined to be a damaging influence. Of course Trump and his gang will block working visas for H-1B spouses; a quick win for his America first gang and enshrines his own back to the 1950s mentality about women. And the people he punish can't vote! So even better. But Americans overseas will pay a price as other countries retaliate.
17
Hopefully he gets rid of the h1b program altogether.
5
The H-1B program has been abused, but it would be very easy to fix. Today, an H-1B visa is tied to a particular job, so changing jobs usually means you have to restart the green card process. Because of this, companies can import workers who are tied to a job, train them and send them back home.
If, instead, you could switch jobs on an H-1B without restarting the clock, or losing the visa, then employers wouldn't be able to abuse their workers, since once here, an H-1B immigrant would be freed to work anywhere their skills allowed.
16
And this fixes the wage depression issue. See, if republicans truly believed in free market solutions, this is how you would fix legal immigration. But I guess you get more votes by claiming Indians are stealing jobs
1
What a surprising number of Americans ail to realize that one of the main things saving our medical care system from collapsing completely is that many of the doctors willing to work in small towns as well as many of the top surgeons in this country come from other, often Asian countries, and have for years. Too much of the time, one can only get an appointment with a nurse practitioner and in my experience they do the checkups but don't offer any treatment or refer you to someone who can. Why go to someone who just nods when you express concern about swelling in your ankles of being out of breath when climbing stairs but offers no suggestions? Can we please have more trained immigrants if we aren't going to train our own citizens to be doctors?
19
If the medical schools would expand thier classes and residency programs we'd have more doctors. There are plenty of well-qualified applicants to medical schools and residency programs that never get in.
3
I think ultimately it is a response to the widespread abuse of the H-1B visa program itself. Companies are supposed to use the program to find highly skilled workers that they cannot find domestically, but instead they use it reduce labor costs.
As an independent IT contractor, I find that I am constantly competing with workers from India and elsewhere who are less skilled than I am, but are willing to work for far less money. I also occasionally see American workers (older ones in particular) laid off and forced to train their H-1B replacements as a condition of their severance package.
If we would fix the program by requiring higher wages and education levels for H-1B workers, the abuses would diminish greatly.
187
This article is not about the H1B visa, it’s about the spouses not able to work on dependent visas and the fact that the per country quota limit to green cards hurts Indians and Chinese disproportionately.
10
Nobody forces these couple to take the H1B job of the bread-winner. If the are so skilled, why not stay at home in India and build a good life there? Good computer skills pay everywhere.
2
Are skilled international workers willing to work for less? Possibly, and this may happen with temporary visas. But generally not the H-1b: The H1-b application involves a labor certification process. The labor department will turn down applications where the candidate's proposed salary is less than the competing wage for anyone with similar qualifications in the US. So, no, companies cannot hire an international worker via an H1-b and pay them less. Second, it is mandatory that the position be publicly advertised, and all eligible candidates - international and American - are interviewed. A detailed justification has to be provided for rejecting any of the candidates. As an employer, I find the process so rigorous and time-consuming that I would much rather hire a citizen. It may depend on the specialty in consideration, but my most recent search narrowed down to 1 international candidate who was clearly more qualified than others - including citizens.
12
While I understand the desire for the American dream for everyone on the planet, it cannot be so because there is not enough space here. That said, the H-1B has been abused by business here in the US - I say this as a recently retired tech worker. I was fortunate in that I was never even close to being replaced with a foreign worker who could/would do my job for less than a US worker - but I saw an awful lot of my peers replaced with less competent workers, many from India, whose main benefit to the company was the willingness to work for about half of what the person they were replacing commanded. I cannot feel sorry for the wives of these people who come here knowing the rules and yet expect to displace highly trained (and highly paid) US workers just because "they want to". It is the fault of the hiring companies that H-1Bs have been abused, but that does not provide cover to people asking for more than they were offered. If one person in a couple is offered an H-1B that is what is offered - not the ability to transform that into two jobs.
133
One place to start is to require companies to issue H!B visas to qualified women only. That will show true concern for gender equality from all sides.
My husband was displaced, twice in 15 years, by lower-paid H1B workers. He is an engineer, with a EE degree. In his case, it was at least as much age discrimination as wage discrimination. The companies wanted to get rid of older American workers with pensions, for lower paid foreign workers who could be given 401Ks or nothing. And BTW: neither time was my husband's replacement from INDIA, so I have no particular animus towards that nation.
I have a friend, whose 22 year job at a law publishing firm ended when the ENTIRE COMPANY was sent overseas to Lahore, Pakistan. To get her severance package, she & the rest of the staff had to agree to train their Pakistani replacements, who were paid 80% less salary (in Pakistan). This was not some factory with unskilled labor, but a job requiring a law degree and/or publishing/editing experience.
I find it outrageous that Ms. Dalmia here thinks she is entitled to a high paying career, in a very competitive field -- the opportunities for journalists in the US are not growing, like STEM jobs, but shrinking -- just because of her husband's job. I also wonder about the people of India, who have lost how many thousands of doctors & engineers & mathematicians & scientists to western nations -- and what effect that will have on a very poor country.
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The United States does not educate it’s children to know and to be comfortable with math and science so most teachers aside from math and science teachers are also uncomfortable with math and science. This results in sparse enrollment of Americans majoring in math, the natural sciences, and engineering as undergraduates. It’s the reason that climate denying and reflection of the veracity of evolution are politically powerful assertions that affect everything from energy policy to education. It’s also why most colleges and universities rely upon foreign educated students to fill up classes in math, science, and engineering as well as for high tech firms to need foreign tech employees.
But the problems are not confined to education. In all of our big institutions which are organized hierarchically, rewarding good work is promotion to jobs that require good people managing skills and all higher salary positions are of this kind. A good mathematician or scientist or manager has a definite limit upon rewards that a skilled organizer and communicator does not.
I’m afraid that people who think that immigrants are preventing Americans from getting good jobs just have not honestly examined the real situation.
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Most H-1B holders are NOT highly educated or skilled. They are willing to work for less money. They frequently replace US workers. This has to end.
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As per us gov USCIS website today : the requirements are as follows:
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-workers/h-1b-speci...
this requires "Bachelor’s or higher degree or its equivalent is normally the minimum entry requirement for the position"
Most of the people I know has master degrees that are working around me! and of course with lesser baggage like leave sharp at 4 PM like most of us do!
I am not sure what percentage of USA citizen work force in white colored jobs are "equivalent of a Bachelors degree" and most H1B approvals today have it from a USA university!
Also we missed the main point they are mostly "temporary" as they get way better jobs back in their countries with 6-9 percent GDP growth!
I would not complain if these temporary Social security tax and medicare tax paying persons work and return home allowing me to get "full" social security benefits when I retire.. who would !
The STEM shortage is a myth kept alive by business executives who either want to keep labor costs under control or who don't realize that spot labor shortages are temporary and natural. Much has been written on this subject.
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