This is why H1-B visas should have a minimum salary requirement equal to 20% over whichever is greater, median salary for the role in the industry, or median salary for the role in the company (and whichever is greater, US-wide, or local pay scale).
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program
In general, H1B visas do have such provisions. At least in CA most jobs must provide a salary range. Even if every H1B is the lowest of the range in those postings, that alone means there are many many jobs which fit your criteria.
Sort by salary ascending and you will see what I mean.
These are blatant violations. We know how much software engineers should make. Do the immigrants know they are moving to one of the most expensive cities in the US?
Almost all H1Bs have already been in the US for years on their student visas, so of course they know COL and where they are moving to.
Those you are posting look like they could be violations. But if you just visit your link, you quickly see that most jobs are in line with median salaries in the bay area.
Compared to average workers, software engineers are specialists. H1B holders are often brighter than their citizen counterparts by at least one objective measure: advanced degrees holding. It's very hard to find US citizens with advanced degrees who can code well and understand computer science.
Not all H1B holders have advanced degrees, and the reason some of them do is because that’s one of the immigration pathways —- pay for a 1-2-year Master’s degree so you get a better chance of landing an H1B after you graduate. Most citizens don’t go for advanced degree because there’s no utility in them, and not because they aren’t smart.
I know this. But it is a measurable differentiator in qualification that H1Bs are way more likely to have than citizens. Many young men don't see the utility in college compared to women in the the US, but employers do.
Then it’s all the more difficult to explain why such “advanced” applicants would accept low salaries. Unless, of course, we accept the inevitable conclusion that companies are using foreign labor to suppress domestic wages.
The page you linked is filled with violations. There is no universe where an “AI scientist” shouldn’t be making the median salary at a minimum. The job titles have been manipulated so as to not raise any flags.
It doesn’t matter whether the median in aggregate is inside the range. If one person makes 60k, another makes 150k and another makes 155k you are still not paying someone enough. No American was going to take that job for 60k, that doesn’t mean you can use a visa to fill it.
Someone should put together a package for the new administration with advertisements to target for H1B violations. I’m sure Stephen Miller would want to see it.
“Labour tariffs” in the west are actually a great thing, and I support it. I’m from India. I support this for very different reasons than those expressed in this thread, but I think in the long term this would be good for India and maybe even the US. The global labour market is screwed up and some churn like this is needed to potentially fix things.
Require employers of each H1-B to submit (along with the hire's w-4 that they send to Uncle Sam that already includes the job's wages and benefits), the position description in the job ad, the candidate's resume, and the matching wage band the job purportedly falls into and exceeds by 20% (or whatever the required margin is). It should be trivial to automate the validation process. Then do random checks to confirm those purported facts, especially of employers who hire large numbers of H1-Bs and have past violations.
This way, a company is always incentivized to find local talent, but when they are actually unable to, they have a path to find the expertise they need. The U.S. could relax restrictions on H1-B, lowering red tape, and removing a lot of churn that comes with the H1-B program