What's the B stand for? (Part 1)
The H1-B visa, brain drain, and building a workforce for the 21st century.
Jim Whitehurst: 20th century companies are already hiring 21st century employees" by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
There is probably no visa category more well-known, reviled, and misunderstood than the H1-B visa. A cursory google search will turn up dozens of stories about American workers complainingly bitterly about the program, including detailed accounts of them being forced to train their own replacements brought in from abroad for lower pay before they are cast out on the street to fend for themselves.
I should caveat what I am about to write by saying that these accounts are not disinformation or exaggerations (for the most part). It is a sad reality in our world today that for various reasons (including the need to cut the bottom line) employers are using skilled workers from other countries to fill perceived gaps in their workforce, and the H1-B visa is one way they are doing that.
Constituent outrage at this practice has led to a multi-front political effort to curtail the program over the years which is just as well-funded and persistent as the lobbyist-led campaign to preserve it. It is telling that despite a general tendency among the press and industry watchers to reflexively oppose whatever the Trump administration proposed, in early 2017 when he began issuing new regulations and policies vis a vis the H1-B, it was not met with an entirely negative reception. Of course, this was early in the administration before it became evident that even “reasonable” sounding policies would either serve as cover for draconian crackdowns or alternatively go absolutely nowhere after rollout. In the case of H1-B reform, it managed to be both at once.
More recently, as a sort of “last gasp” for this abortive effort to fix several very important problems with the H1-B process, the Trump administration has issued a new wage rule and rules for filing that the excellent Mr. Cyrus Mehta and a colleague explain on their blog here. We will get a little more into the weeds on these rules and general issues with the H1-B program next week, but this week we’d like to pivot and offer a few different perspectives on why this program is important.
A lot of the controversy surrounding the H1-B revolves around the IT industry, outsourcing, and undercutting American’s job opportunities and wages. However, if you look at the policy and laws that created the H1-B, there is nothing intrinsically tied to IT or even STEM in general in these regulations. An H1-B employee can work in any number of critical industries, all across the United States. In many cases they fill critical work positions in healthcare, research, accounting, and academia at competitive if not superior rates of pay to the industry average.
It is more an accident of the way the U.S. economy has developed and the incentives put in place by the existing regulations that the H1-B has evolved to be heavily weighted toward a specific use case, namely staffing companies providing IT services and “consulting” that in practice provides a flexible workforce for many U.S.-based technology companies. When that subset of the program is removed you find the program mostly working as intended, most notably last year in the case of desperately needed healthcare workers and medical professionals.
There is also the “brain drain” element. This is a concern that is mostly academic in the case of America, with its seemingly limitless queue of foreign, skilled workers seeking entrance. Other countries like India and China, however, are very concerned with the quantity and quality of skilled workers that are drawn to the U.S. Therefore this issue is mostly evoked in U.S. media as a cautionary measure, when limits on foreign worker visas are contemplated. The sending countries are much more proactive in terms of preventing emigration and implementing their own H1-B style programs to attract foreign talent. The controversial Chinese “Thousand Talents Program” is just one example.
海外高层次人才引进计划 - Overseas high-level talent recruitment program
Related to that point, the H1-B program leverages a quintessential American skill: integration. While homogenous societies like China or India may seek to recruit foreign talent to build up and participate in their economy long-term, they face challenges that are recognized and addressed to a much greater extent in American workplace culture. Our indisputable competitive advantage in diversity clip-art is proof of this.
"Networking" by Jairo del Agua is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
While India is again far and away the largest source of H1-B recruitment, let’s not forget the large number of people brought in from all over the world each year under this program. Many, it’s even likely that the vast majority of these people stay in the U.S., receive green cards, and eventually become citizens. The fact that our country can successfully attract and retain this variety and number of foreign citizens to relocate here permanently is a testament to what America is doing right in the competition for the skilled workers of today and tomorrow. There is simply no other country on earth that is bringing in this variety of skilled workers of different nationalities and resettling them successfully long term. The advantages to our economy are widely acknowledged by many researchers and experts, so with that in mind the argument that we will spend the rest of the series examining is not “should we have an H1-B program?” but rather “How can we take this important program and make it better?”.
Next week we will continue in that theme by discussing the H1-B application process (in a nutshell), some issues with the current system, and what the system looks like from the outside. Proposed solutions and changes, as always, will follow in part 3. Please join us next week for part 2 of our H1-B series, clever tag line TBD!
In the news:
Biden’s new immigration plan is in the news this week, with multiple articles giving slightly different summaries and details about the proposed plan: L.A. Times, Politico, Washington Post, and Univision. There are significant differences in how the plan for a “path to citizenship” is discussed in each article which make it very difficult to analyze how each plan will work. Rather than rehash my thoughts and concerns about possible implementations of this plan as described, I’ll link a couple twitter threads which may be useful in gaming out some possible scenarios. Please see below, and throw these folks a follow if you find their analysis interesting (yours truly included, of course):