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USCIS announces strengthened integrity measures for H-1B program

130 points by angott 3y ago

dheera 3y ago
I find the entire H-1B program somewhat ridiculously designed. 0. There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after? 1. There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy. There is a cap-exempt H1B, but it's for nonprofits. It makes no sense.
- CPLX 3y ago
  > There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. This has the effect of delegating decisions about who enters the country to an unelected and unaccountable group of admissions officers working at private institutions.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Only if the student can graduate. And you can easily fix that by requiring a government review after school admission.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      We already have the OPT program. The idea of a limitless uncapped program for graduates is a different thing entirely.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Private and public; don't forget that there are many, many public colleges and universities in the US. And presumably this would be limited to accredited higher-education institutions; you couldn't just stand up Butts University, start issuing degrees in Flatulence and Cheekiness, and have met the criteria. And maybe it's not just anyone who graduates from a US institution; maybe limit it to certain levels of achievement, and/or certain fields that the US has interest in developing or maintaining competence or dominance in. I get your objection about unelected/unaccountable, but this happens all the time, and is normal, expected, and unavoidable. The government very often reaches outside itself for expert opinions on things that it cannot or should not develop its own expertise in. The current system is stupid. Educating foreigners in the US and then kicking them out (absent something with the intentions of a Fullbright, for example) is just bad policy.
  - ra7 3y ago
    Students only get a visa after getting interviewed by a visa officer at a U.S. embassy/consulate. So they've already been vetted by a government official.
  - bubblethink 3y ago
    That's something that the state and federal govt. can easily regulate through the Dept. of Education. The converse is more absurd. If I want to study X, and university Y wants me, why does a third party dictate anything here ?
    - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
      Y is located in country Z and benefits from Z's public resources. Z can dictate here.
      - dheera 3y ago
        No, Z invested resources in Y and Y is now a talent and economic asset to Z.
  - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    No; they're already in the country, that's really the whole point. They'd still need to meet the requirements for H-1B visa. Say you're a STEM graduate; you first got an F-1 visa to study, then you spend four years at school in the U.S. You find a job with a great firm for your OPT, and that firm immediately starts to enter the H-1B lottery on your behalf. Based on the amount of oversubscription, there's a significant number of people who are just not going to get selected before they time out on their OPT and have no option but to leave the U.S. after seven years living here, amounting to perhaps their entire adult lives. The fact that such people have no preference in a random lottery with others that have no investment in the U.S. at all is utterly perplexing.
- jedberg 3y ago
  > There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. Agree 100%. Student visas should convert to work visas automatically on graduation from an accredited institution and be good for at least five years.
  - the_svd_doctor 3y ago
    With OPT and STEM OPT that’s _sort of_ the case, albeit for 3 years, not 5.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      I think h1b itself is limited to 5 after which you have to leave for a year unless you already filed green card application. At least that was the case back in the day
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    And work visas should have built-in naturalization paths. There's no reason a highly educated, highly contributing member of society for the past 5-10 years should risk deportation if they get laid off, or, god forbid, quit due to working conditions.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      My honest opinion is that you should get citizenship upon graduation or shortly thereafter, but I haven't really thought it through enough to figure out unintended consequences of that.
    - dheera 3y ago
      Yeah I fully agree with this. I know multiple people on H1B visas who stayed at their jobs even in the face of sexual harrassment, deteriorating physical health, and depression, because of bad job markets and the stupid 60-day rule, and some subset of them already had family and kids in the US who were already adapted to US lifestyle and not ready to be uprooted to a foreign language and culture. All they needed was some time off and time to recuperate and then some job searching time. There is no reason someone who is already "effectively American" from a professional perspective should be uprooted and moved. They already thrive here, they already benefit this country, they should be allowed to stay indefinitely and continue to contribute.
- aatharuv 3y ago
  There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration. Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.
  - stackskipton 3y ago
    Sometimes it's not even Diploma Mills but state schools wanting to sweet sweet foreign student money. One of my H-1B coworker got her Masters in Computer Science from University of Houston. She was competent programmer but her work and another developer work was indistinguishable. She said 97% of her class was foreign students because if you look at the program, it makes little sense for any American to go into debt to get this degree.
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      I went to a few HPC/NVidia seminars there - it’s a real program but you are right about the composition.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  Higher education in the usa can be a degree mill in nebraska with no real acceptance criteria
- LegitShady 3y ago
  >There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. I'm ok with that, if it comes along with the death penalty for diploma mill operators including major universities. Otherwise its not a loophole - its an open barn door.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  A disturbingly large number of non-US born people I know with US degrees in STEM fields got their green-cards by marrying a friend who they had not previously been in a romantic relationship with. In many cases this was after dealing with the H-1B system for some time.
- quatrefoil 3y ago
  > There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. Then you're effectively creating a loophole. There would be a proliferation of private schools that accept anyone willing to pay enough $$$ and churn out barely-competent graduates just so that people have a better shot at citizenship. "Attended a school in the US" is not a good proxy for being an asset to the country. > There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy. That's essentially the whole point of H-1B, and right now, they're overwhelmingly allocated to what one could generously describe as STEM professions.
  - beacon294 3y ago
    It's possible to require an accredited degree.
    - quatrefoil 3y ago
      Accreditation doesn't mean that the school is prestigious or selective, or that the degrees are useful. You have no shortage of silly and easy degrees you can pay for at accredited schools, and I don't think they should give you special immigration privileges. Communications, advertising, dance theory, you name it.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    You just described the problem with easy student loans. The solution is same: tighten what qualifies for student loans and what is an asset to the country
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  What? Why would a degree matter. Either an employee is worth sponsoring or they aren't, regardless of degree. Degrees are largely a waste of time.
- dartharva 3y ago
  Do foreign students get the same support from US government bodies for financing and scholarship as domestic students do? Aren't almost all students paying in full for their education? Aren't they just consumers of the product American universities are selling?
- pandaman 3y ago
  > What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after? Making money for the schools where they go? Foreign student, studying in the US, come here on an F visa, and to obtain such a visa one has to prove that he or she has such strong ties to the home country that they cannot possibly stay in the US after graduation and need to quickly come back and use the education at home.
CPLX 3y ago
This is interesting. Does anyone know what tactics they’re trying to stop? Sounds like something specific.
- the_svd_doctor 3y ago
  Before, multiple companies could register the same person for the lottery, therefore increasing the odds for said person. This is now no longer possible. Why it took so long to implement this rule is a mystery though. Seems like such an obvious loophole.
  - Zedseayou 3y ago
    It used to be much more expensive to make an H1B petition so this strategy was not viable. Then they made it way cheaper, leading to the mass applications.
- ycitizen 3y ago
  I think USCIS is trying to fix one common misuse by certain applicants where he /she applies for H1B through more than one employers ( typically body shop companies) and tries to increase his\her odds of getting the visa. Sometimes the applicant gets more than one H1B visa and wasting the limited visas.
  - fooker 3y ago
    No, this is totally allowed. If you can get more than one legit offer, you can apply more than once. What isn't allowed is the same company applying for you through multiple subsidiaries or contracting agencies.
    - kyawzazaw 3y ago
      You can get one chance per applicant now. So if 10 companies apply for you, the chance of being selected is the same as if only 1 company apply for you.
jedberg 3y ago
It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1-B program but no one wants to and I feel like I must be missing something. The purpose of the H1-B is to allow companies to hire foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens. So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most? Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary. If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people. The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.
- tonmoy 3y ago
  Because then the agricultural company in Alabama wanting to hire the brightest chemist will be at a disadvantage compared to the IT firm in California. Forgetting about the cost of living adjustments for each area the industry wide disruption alone may not be worth it
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    A disadvantage in what way? Unless I'm missing something this just sounds like markets being markets. As a worker, why would I accept a job that pays less and requires me to live in Alabama if I can do better?
    - dalyons 3y ago
      Because chemistry and IT/swe are not the same jobs. And America also needs chemists
      - athowawaym 3y ago
        [dead]
vsskanth 3y ago
> the registration fee during the registration period starting in March 2024, will remain $10. Yeah, every single outsourcing provider is going to enter all their employees and market whoever is selected for on-site assignments to their customers. The cost of entry is way too low and this attracts frivolous registrations. Previously, it used to cost thousands of dollars before to prepare a full petition and only those employers with serious job offers applied for H1B.
- lolinder 3y ago
  That fee has been $10 all along—see this from last year [0]. I don't know much about this process, but the thousands of dollars must be coming from something else—probably some combination of other government fees and attorney bills. [0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-1b-specialty-occupations-and-fashion-models/h-1b-electronic-registration-process https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
  - vsskanth 3y ago
    No. You previously had to fill the entire H1B petition and pay full fees (including lawyer fees to prepare the petition) just to enter the H1B lottery. Your fees get refunded if you do not get selected in the lottery. You're still out lawyer fees though. The $10 fee to enter your name and later fill the entire petition is a fairly recent change https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/08/2019-24292/registration-fee-requirement-for-petitioners-seeking-to-file-h-1b-petitions-on-behalf-of-cap-subject https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/08/2019-24...
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Fair, but this isn't a new change this year. If the catastrophe that you say will happen was going to happen, we should already be seeing it since at least 2020.
      - vsskanth 3y ago
riwsky 3y ago
I suspect it’s no coincidence that they announce this the same day Chita Rivera passed away: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5c8qCff2w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5c8qCff2w
deleted 3y ago
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basura_me 3y ago
[flagged]
olliej 3y ago
Oh, so this looks like it's correcting for that thing where companies were essentially using multiple contracting companies to all apply for a visa for the same person? e.g. double (triple? n-ary?) dipping in the lotto? I still think a lot of the more wanton abuses in the H1-B system could be resolved by requiring the employee be a direct employee of the company they're actually working for (e.g. you can't get a contracting company to provide you with engineers), and to require compensation be - say - a minimum of say 20% above the average wage for the job they're doing, relative to other employees at the company, other workers doing manifestly similar jobs in the same geographical area, etc. If nothing else this will apply upwards pressure on wages even in shitty "we're abusing the h1-b process" contracting companies, because every new h1-b employee they have necessarily increases the average wage at that company, which increases the minimum wage for the next h1-b, etc. The reality is that the set up of the h1-b program allows employers to abuse h1-b employees with relative impunity (including notably lowering wages), so a mechanism by which simply increasing the number of h1-b employees you have forces the wages up counters their ability to use h1-b supported abusive practices to undercut local workers.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Yeah I’ve heard of multiple applications, some sketchy applicants swaps (basically purchasing the winning ticket) and more. You won’t see it in large established companies because they mostly play fair but there is good amount of fraud in the fat tail
  - olliej 3y ago
    My recollection was that it was essentially company A would decide they wanted to employ person X, and they would then go to contracting firms 1 through 100 and get all of them to apply for the same person X. And they could use the contracting company model to then deflate the salary for the h1-b recipient by having the wage comparison be to similar (below real market rate) contracting company jobs rather than the employees they would be working with.
gumby 3y ago
> The initial registration period for the FY 2025 H-1B cap will open at noon Eastern on March 6, 2024, and run through noon Eastern on March 22, 2024. I know fraud prevention is whack-a-mole, and I know the system has been broken a long time, but this still works only for a certain segment of hires. I was on the board of a "foreign" school. All instruction (except English) is in the home country's language, and we of course want native speaking teachers familiar with the subject material. For years we used H-1s -- all the teachers qualify, as they all have master's degrees or more and the specialized skills -- but when the big consulting companies started scamming all the H-1s in early October that became impossible for us. Teachers don't tend to think about leaving until late in the school year, certainly not in March, and they need to know relatively quickly so they can move to the US and get settled before the school year starts. What a pain.
duskwuff 3y ago
FTA: > Also under the new rule, USCIS may deny or revoke the approval of an H-1B petition if it determines that the fee associated with the registration is declined, not reconciled, disputed, or otherwise invalid after submission. The fact that they mention this suggests that they couldn't do so previously... which is pretty mind-boggling.
thumbsup-_- 3y ago
sounds like fixing a bug in a software program. It should have always been unique.
livinginfear 3y ago
When I looked into who is actually hiring H1-Bs, I was shocked to see it was mostly bodyshops. See: https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2022/02/07/h1b-visa-statistics-sponsors-companies/ https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2022/02/07/h1b-visa-stat... The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT. Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.
- nimish 3y ago
  Ideally the admin would ban bodyshops from using the H-1B process, but that'd stop their benefactors' sources of cheap labor.
  - slaw 3y ago
    Ideally the admin should close H1B for few years until job market recovers.
    - fooker 3y ago
      Here's what will happen if they do that: A large number of universities will go under without tuition fees from international students. Professors will leave these universities to pursue industry careers, soneven if the job market recovers the universities won't. Without competent specialized people from the universities, US will lose the tech edge very very quickly. Cutting edge tech requires a large number of people willing to slog through several years of training.
      - dartharva 3y ago
        H-1B is a work visa, not a student visa. And I highly doubt the kind of universities that rely on tuition revenues from foreign students are ones leading the US's tech edge. The universities that actually matter in this regard will be well-equipped to survive a small setback of less foreign admissions.
cute_boi 3y ago
Actually they should be more strict. It is sad to see so many Indian agencies are abusing it.
throwpot 3y ago
Food for thought, when Europeans arrived in there were no visa rules.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago
  They had an easy life being drafted into the US army, and then having to work the land and having to build all the infrastructure from scratch without power tools.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Not everything has to stay the way it always was.
tock 3y ago
US immigration is an absolute nightmare especially for Indians. In Europe its simple. Job offer above minimum salary? Apply and get a blue card yourself. Has been in the country for over 5 years and speak the language? You get citizenship. In the US its nearly impossible to get a Green Card. Forget how difficult it is to get an H1B visa in the first place because of the lottery system.
- ex3ndr 3y ago
  Good luck doing so being russian
  - qaq 3y ago
    That would highly depend on the particular EU country.
- eatbitseveryday 3y ago
  Find true love in an American and immigrate as family. That’s easy peasy
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Calling that true love at that point is like calling a mcChicken a healthy bite.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Friends of mine pursuing Swiss citizenship had a much longer road than what you describe above. I know them to be pretty fastidious when it comes to paperwork exercises and they did not have citizenship after 10 years, though they indicated they were on a path towards it.
  - tock 3y ago
    That's because Switzerland needs 10 years in the country for citizenship. Spain too. Switzerland also has a lot of extra steps in their citizenship process. It is vastly easier and simpler in say the Netherlands.
sgjohnson 3y ago
One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago), and it even comes with a loophole that can make you a legal immigrant later, yet legal immigration is a very tedious and often impossible path. I have a relative that 15-ish years ago simply overstayed their tourist visa and never left. Some 5 years later he found a chick and put a ring on it (and because he married a US citizen, all his overstay was instantly forgiven). Then he had a immediate US citizen relative who sponsored him for a green card, which he got a couple of years ago. In a couple of years he can apply for naturalization. Yes, he couldn't leave the US until he had the GC in his hands, but I'd say it was a small price to pay for a massive shortcut. For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable. I would not accept a non-immigrant visa (like H1B), because it doesn't come with any guarantees that I'll be able to stay in the US, and legal immigration paths are basically limited to winning the DV lottery or coughing up $900k for the EB5, as no company in the right mind would sponsor me for an EB2/3. And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card. US immigration system is fundamentally broken.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  >And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card. That's obviously not true, by both analysis and observation.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    How so? There’s a 100+ year wait on EB2 and EB3 Green Cards for people born in India. Only 7% of GCs can go to people of any one country. At the current cap of 49000, it means only 3400 EB2 GCs can actually be issued to Indians per year. An approved application doesn’t equate to a green card actually minted and issued. There’s a 12 year backlog on applications alone. (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2024/visa-bulletin-for-february-2024.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...) H1B is neither a green card nor a path to one. There is one category that has no cap at all however. The “Immediate relative of a US citizen” one.
prakhar897 3y ago
Related: https://software.rajivprab.com/2022/05/10/18-years-a-transient/ https://software.rajivprab.com/2022/05/10/18-years-a-transie...
thehappypm 3y ago
The H1B program makes little sense in this moment. The major issues facing America are cost of living related. Importing high-pay workers just makes it that much harder for the regular Joe Schmo.
- bakchodi 3y ago
  [dead]
gamesbrainiac 3y ago
In the previous H-1B registration system, employers could submit multiple registrations for the same beneficiary (employee). This increased the chances of selection for that beneficiary but potentially reduced the fairness of the process. So, this makes things fairer to an extent.
Detrytus 3y ago
>> Under the beneficiary centric process, registrations will be selected by unique beneficiary rather than by registration. Why do they think that's a good thing? If you have more than one offer then you are more in demand on the job market, presumably being a better specialist, more deserving of getting a visa :D
cyanydeez 3y ago
the real immigrant threat
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I think part of the issue is that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It's ridiculous for a country like the US to expect people to move their whole household for ... 6 years? H-1B is actually slightly better than an L1*. At least with the H-1B you are allowed to change jobs if the new employer wants to do the paperwork. For the L1 you can't do that. The visa is tied to the current employer. You leave? You're out.
- nojvek 3y ago
  With L1/L2 your partner can work. H1B is more complex for spouse to work.

130 points by angott 3y ago

I find the entire H-1B program somewhat ridiculously designed. 0. There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after? 1. There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy. There is a cap-exempt H1B, but it's for nonprofits. It makes no sense.

CPLX 3y ago
> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. This has the effect of delegating decisions about who enters the country to an unelected and unaccountable group of admissions officers working at private institutions.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Only if the student can graduate. And you can easily fix that by requiring a government review after school admission.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    We already have the OPT program. The idea of a limitless uncapped program for graduates is a different thing entirely.
- kelnos 3y ago
  Private and public; don't forget that there are many, many public colleges and universities in the US. And presumably this would be limited to accredited higher-education institutions; you couldn't just stand up Butts University, start issuing degrees in Flatulence and Cheekiness, and have met the criteria. And maybe it's not just anyone who graduates from a US institution; maybe limit it to certain levels of achievement, and/or certain fields that the US has interest in developing or maintaining competence or dominance in. I get your objection about unelected/unaccountable, but this happens all the time, and is normal, expected, and unavoidable. The government very often reaches outside itself for expert opinions on things that it cannot or should not develop its own expertise in. The current system is stupid. Educating foreigners in the US and then kicking them out (absent something with the intentions of a Fullbright, for example) is just bad policy.
- ra7 3y ago
  Students only get a visa after getting interviewed by a visa officer at a U.S. embassy/consulate. So they've already been vetted by a government official.
- bubblethink 3y ago
  That's something that the state and federal govt. can easily regulate through the Dept. of Education. The converse is more absurd. If I want to study X, and university Y wants me, why does a third party dictate anything here ?
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    Y is located in country Z and benefits from Z's public resources. Z can dictate here.
    - dheera 3y ago
      No, Z invested resources in Y and Y is now a talent and economic asset to Z.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  No; they're already in the country, that's really the whole point. They'd still need to meet the requirements for H-1B visa. Say you're a STEM graduate; you first got an F-1 visa to study, then you spend four years at school in the U.S. You find a job with a great firm for your OPT, and that firm immediately starts to enter the H-1B lottery on your behalf. Based on the amount of oversubscription, there's a significant number of people who are just not going to get selected before they time out on their OPT and have no option but to leave the U.S. after seven years living here, amounting to perhaps their entire adult lives. The fact that such people have no preference in a random lottery with others that have no investment in the U.S. at all is utterly perplexing.
jedberg 3y ago
> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. Agree 100%. Student visas should convert to work visas automatically on graduation from an accredited institution and be good for at least five years.
- the_svd_doctor 3y ago
  With OPT and STEM OPT that’s _sort of_ the case, albeit for 3 years, not 5.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    I think h1b itself is limited to 5 after which you have to leave for a year unless you already filed green card application. At least that was the case back in the day
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  And work visas should have built-in naturalization paths. There's no reason a highly educated, highly contributing member of society for the past 5-10 years should risk deportation if they get laid off, or, god forbid, quit due to working conditions.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    My honest opinion is that you should get citizenship upon graduation or shortly thereafter, but I haven't really thought it through enough to figure out unintended consequences of that.
  - dheera 3y ago
    Yeah I fully agree with this. I know multiple people on H1B visas who stayed at their jobs even in the face of sexual harrassment, deteriorating physical health, and depression, because of bad job markets and the stupid 60-day rule, and some subset of them already had family and kids in the US who were already adapted to US lifestyle and not ready to be uprooted to a foreign language and culture. All they needed was some time off and time to recuperate and then some job searching time. There is no reason someone who is already "effectively American" from a professional perspective should be uprooted and moved. They already thrive here, they already benefit this country, they should be allowed to stay indefinitely and continue to contribute.
aatharuv 3y ago
There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration. Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.
- stackskipton 3y ago
  Sometimes it's not even Diploma Mills but state schools wanting to sweet sweet foreign student money. One of my H-1B coworker got her Masters in Computer Science from University of Houston. She was competent programmer but her work and another developer work was indistinguishable. She said 97% of her class was foreign students because if you look at the program, it makes little sense for any American to go into debt to get this degree.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    I went to a few HPC/NVidia seminars there - it’s a real program but you are right about the composition.
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Higher education in the usa can be a degree mill in nebraska with no real acceptance criteria
LegitShady 3y ago
>There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. I'm ok with that, if it comes along with the death penalty for diploma mill operators including major universities. Otherwise its not a loophole - its an open barn door.
aidenn0 3y ago
A disturbingly large number of non-US born people I know with US degrees in STEM fields got their green-cards by marrying a friend who they had not previously been in a romantic relationship with. In many cases this was after dealing with the H-1B system for some time.
quatrefoil 3y ago
> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. Then you're effectively creating a loophole. There would be a proliferation of private schools that accept anyone willing to pay enough $$$ and churn out barely-competent graduates just so that people have a better shot at citizenship. "Attended a school in the US" is not a good proxy for being an asset to the country. > There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy. That's essentially the whole point of H-1B, and right now, they're overwhelmingly allocated to what one could generously describe as STEM professions.
- beacon294 3y ago
  It's possible to require an accredited degree.
  - quatrefoil 3y ago
    Accreditation doesn't mean that the school is prestigious or selective, or that the degrees are useful. You have no shortage of silly and easy degrees you can pay for at accredited schools, and I don't think they should give you special immigration privileges. Communications, advertising, dance theory, you name it.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  You just described the problem with easy student loans. The solution is same: tighten what qualifies for student loans and what is an asset to the country
VirusNewbie 3y ago
What? Why would a degree matter. Either an employee is worth sponsoring or they aren't, regardless of degree. Degrees are largely a waste of time.
dartharva 3y ago
Do foreign students get the same support from US government bodies for financing and scholarship as domestic students do? Aren't almost all students paying in full for their education? Aren't they just consumers of the product American universities are selling?
pandaman 3y ago
> What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after? Making money for the schools where they go? Foreign student, studying in the US, come here on an F visa, and to obtain such a visa one has to prove that he or she has such strong ties to the home country that they cannot possibly stay in the US after graduation and need to quickly come back and use the education at home.

CPLX 3y ago

This is interesting. Does anyone know what tactics they’re trying to stop? Sounds like something specific.

the_svd_doctor 3y ago
Before, multiple companies could register the same person for the lottery, therefore increasing the odds for said person. This is now no longer possible. Why it took so long to implement this rule is a mystery though. Seems like such an obvious loophole.
- Zedseayou 3y ago
  It used to be much more expensive to make an H1B petition so this strategy was not viable. Then they made it way cheaper, leading to the mass applications.
ycitizen 3y ago
I think USCIS is trying to fix one common misuse by certain applicants where he /she applies for H1B through more than one employers ( typically body shop companies) and tries to increase his\her odds of getting the visa. Sometimes the applicant gets more than one H1B visa and wasting the limited visas.
- fooker 3y ago
  No, this is totally allowed. If you can get more than one legit offer, you can apply more than once. What isn't allowed is the same company applying for you through multiple subsidiaries or contracting agencies.
  - kyawzazaw 3y ago
    You can get one chance per applicant now. So if 10 companies apply for you, the chance of being selected is the same as if only 1 company apply for you.

jedberg 3y ago

It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1-B program but no one wants to and I feel like I must be missing something. The purpose of the H1-B is to allow companies to hire foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens. So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most? Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary. If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people. The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.

tonmoy 3y ago
Because then the agricultural company in Alabama wanting to hire the brightest chemist will be at a disadvantage compared to the IT firm in California. Forgetting about the cost of living adjustments for each area the industry wide disruption alone may not be worth it
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  A disadvantage in what way? Unless I'm missing something this just sounds like markets being markets. As a worker, why would I accept a job that pays less and requires me to live in Alabama if I can do better?
  - dalyons 3y ago
    Because chemistry and IT/swe are not the same jobs. And America also needs chemists
    - athowawaym 3y ago
      [dead]

vsskanth 3y ago

> the registration fee during the registration period starting in March 2024, will remain $10. Yeah, every single outsourcing provider is going to enter all their employees and market whoever is selected for on-site assignments to their customers. The cost of entry is way too low and this attracts frivolous registrations. Previously, it used to cost thousands of dollars before to prepare a full petition and only those employers with serious job offers applied for H1B.

lolinder 3y ago
That fee has been $10 all along—see this from last year [0]. I don't know much about this process, but the thousands of dollars must be coming from something else—probably some combination of other government fees and attorney bills. [0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-1b-specialty-occupations-and-fashion-models/h-1b-electronic-registration-process https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
- vsskanth 3y ago
  No. You previously had to fill the entire H1B petition and pay full fees (including lawyer fees to prepare the petition) just to enter the H1B lottery. Your fees get refunded if you do not get selected in the lottery. You're still out lawyer fees though. The $10 fee to enter your name and later fill the entire petition is a fairly recent change https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/08/2019-24292/registration-fee-requirement-for-petitioners-seeking-to-file-h-1b-petitions-on-behalf-of-cap-subject https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/08/2019-24...
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Fair, but this isn't a new change this year. If the catastrophe that you say will happen was going to happen, we should already be seeing it since at least 2020.
    - vsskanth 3y ago

riwsky 3y ago

I suspect it’s no coincidence that they announce this the same day Chita Rivera passed away: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5c8qCff2w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5c8qCff2w

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

basura_me 3y ago

[flagged]

olliej 3y ago

Oh, so this looks like it's correcting for that thing where companies were essentially using multiple contracting companies to all apply for a visa for the same person? e.g. double (triple? n-ary?) dipping in the lotto? I still think a lot of the more wanton abuses in the H1-B system could be resolved by requiring the employee be a direct employee of the company they're actually working for (e.g. you can't get a contracting company to provide you with engineers), and to require compensation be - say - a minimum of say 20% above the average wage for the job they're doing, relative to other employees at the company, other workers doing manifestly similar jobs in the same geographical area, etc. If nothing else this will apply upwards pressure on wages even in shitty "we're abusing the h1-b process" contracting companies, because every new h1-b employee they have necessarily increases the average wage at that company, which increases the minimum wage for the next h1-b, etc. The reality is that the set up of the h1-b program allows employers to abuse h1-b employees with relative impunity (including notably lowering wages), so a mechanism by which simply increasing the number of h1-b employees you have forces the wages up counters their ability to use h1-b supported abusive practices to undercut local workers.

dilyevsky 3y ago
Yeah I’ve heard of multiple applications, some sketchy applicants swaps (basically purchasing the winning ticket) and more. You won’t see it in large established companies because they mostly play fair but there is good amount of fraud in the fat tail
- olliej 3y ago
  My recollection was that it was essentially company A would decide they wanted to employ person X, and they would then go to contracting firms 1 through 100 and get all of them to apply for the same person X. And they could use the contracting company model to then deflate the salary for the h1-b recipient by having the wage comparison be to similar (below real market rate) contracting company jobs rather than the employees they would be working with.

gumby 3y ago

> The initial registration period for the FY 2025 H-1B cap will open at noon Eastern on March 6, 2024, and run through noon Eastern on March 22, 2024. I know fraud prevention is whack-a-mole, and I know the system has been broken a long time, but this still works only for a certain segment of hires. I was on the board of a "foreign" school. All instruction (except English) is in the home country's language, and we of course want native speaking teachers familiar with the subject material. For years we used H-1s -- all the teachers qualify, as they all have master's degrees or more and the specialized skills -- but when the big consulting companies started scamming all the H-1s in early October that became impossible for us. Teachers don't tend to think about leaving until late in the school year, certainly not in March, and they need to know relatively quickly so they can move to the US and get settled before the school year starts. What a pain.

duskwuff 3y ago

FTA: > Also under the new rule, USCIS may deny or revoke the approval of an H-1B petition if it determines that the fee associated with the registration is declined, not reconciled, disputed, or otherwise invalid after submission. The fact that they mention this suggests that they couldn't do so previously... which is pretty mind-boggling.

thumbsup-_- 3y ago

sounds like fixing a bug in a software program. It should have always been unique.

livinginfear 3y ago

When I looked into who is actually hiring H1-Bs, I was shocked to see it was mostly bodyshops. See: https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2022/02/07/h1b-visa-statistics-sponsors-companies/ https://www.mbacrystalball.com/blog/2022/02/07/h1b-visa-stat... The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT. Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.

nimish 3y ago
Ideally the admin would ban bodyshops from using the H-1B process, but that'd stop their benefactors' sources of cheap labor.
- slaw 3y ago
  Ideally the admin should close H1B for few years until job market recovers.
  - fooker 3y ago
    Here's what will happen if they do that: A large number of universities will go under without tuition fees from international students. Professors will leave these universities to pursue industry careers, soneven if the job market recovers the universities won't. Without competent specialized people from the universities, US will lose the tech edge very very quickly. Cutting edge tech requires a large number of people willing to slog through several years of training.
    - dartharva 3y ago
      H-1B is a work visa, not a student visa. And I highly doubt the kind of universities that rely on tuition revenues from foreign students are ones leading the US's tech edge. The universities that actually matter in this regard will be well-equipped to survive a small setback of less foreign admissions.

cute_boi 3y ago

Actually they should be more strict. It is sad to see so many Indian agencies are abusing it.

throwpot 3y ago

Food for thought, when Europeans arrived in there were no visa rules.

29athrowaway 3y ago
They had an easy life being drafted into the US army, and then having to work the land and having to build all the infrastructure from scratch without power tools.
foobiekr 3y ago
Not everything has to stay the way it always was.

tock 3y ago

US immigration is an absolute nightmare especially for Indians. In Europe its simple. Job offer above minimum salary? Apply and get a blue card yourself. Has been in the country for over 5 years and speak the language? You get citizenship. In the US its nearly impossible to get a Green Card. Forget how difficult it is to get an H1B visa in the first place because of the lottery system.

ex3ndr 3y ago
Good luck doing so being russian
- qaq 3y ago
  That would highly depend on the particular EU country.
eatbitseveryday 3y ago
Find true love in an American and immigrate as family. That’s easy peasy
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Calling that true love at that point is like calling a mcChicken a healthy bite.
sokoloff 3y ago
Friends of mine pursuing Swiss citizenship had a much longer road than what you describe above. I know them to be pretty fastidious when it comes to paperwork exercises and they did not have citizenship after 10 years, though they indicated they were on a path towards it.
- tock 3y ago
  That's because Switzerland needs 10 years in the country for citizenship. Spain too. Switzerland also has a lot of extra steps in their citizenship process. It is vastly easier and simpler in say the Netherlands.

sgjohnson 3y ago

One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago), and it even comes with a loophole that can make you a legal immigrant later, yet legal immigration is a very tedious and often impossible path. I have a relative that 15-ish years ago simply overstayed their tourist visa and never left. Some 5 years later he found a chick and put a ring on it (and because he married a US citizen, all his overstay was instantly forgiven). Then he had a immediate US citizen relative who sponsored him for a green card, which he got a couple of years ago. In a couple of years he can apply for naturalization. Yes, he couldn't leave the US until he had the GC in his hands, but I'd say it was a small price to pay for a massive shortcut. For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable. I would not accept a non-immigrant visa (like H1B), because it doesn't come with any guarantees that I'll be able to stay in the US, and legal immigration paths are basically limited to winning the DV lottery or coughing up $900k for the EB5, as no company in the right mind would sponsor me for an EB2/3. And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card. US immigration system is fundamentally broken.

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
>And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card. That's obviously not true, by both analysis and observation.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  How so? There’s a 100+ year wait on EB2 and EB3 Green Cards for people born in India. Only 7% of GCs can go to people of any one country. At the current cap of 49000, it means only 3400 EB2 GCs can actually be issued to Indians per year. An approved application doesn’t equate to a green card actually minted and issued. There’s a 12 year backlog on applications alone. (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2024/visa-bulletin-for-february-2024.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...) H1B is neither a green card nor a path to one. There is one category that has no cap at all however. The “Immediate relative of a US citizen” one.

prakhar897 3y ago

Related: https://software.rajivprab.com/2022/05/10/18-years-a-transient/ https://software.rajivprab.com/2022/05/10/18-years-a-transie...

thehappypm 3y ago

The H1B program makes little sense in this moment. The major issues facing America are cost of living related. Importing high-pay workers just makes it that much harder for the regular Joe Schmo.

bakchodi 3y ago
[dead]

gamesbrainiac 3y ago

In the previous H-1B registration system, employers could submit multiple registrations for the same beneficiary (employee). This increased the chances of selection for that beneficiary but potentially reduced the fairness of the process. So, this makes things fairer to an extent.

Detrytus 3y ago

>> Under the beneficiary centric process, registrations will be selected by unique beneficiary rather than by registration. Why do they think that's a good thing? If you have more than one offer then you are more in demand on the job market, presumably being a better specialist, more deserving of getting a visa :D

cyanydeez 3y ago

the real immigrant threat

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I think part of the issue is that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It's ridiculous for a country like the US to expect people to move their whole household for ... 6 years? H-1B is actually slightly better than an L1*. At least with the H-1B you are allowed to change jobs if the new employer wants to do the paperwork. For the L1 you can't do that. The visa is tied to the current employer. You leave? You're out.

nojvek 3y ago
With L1/L2 your partner can work. H1B is more complex for spouse to work.