US committee votes $30,000 increase in minimum salary of H1B visa workers

Regardless of whether or not you think the bill is a good idea, I don&#x27;t think the opponents arguments against it quoted make sense.<p>As long as the new minimum still clears the market and all spaces are still filled (I think they would be), all this bill does is replace the pool of H1-B visas awarded with a higher-paying one.<p>The quote &quot;It also could disrupt the marketplace, threaten thousands of US jobs, and stifle US innovation&quot; would only make sense if one would expect that lower-paid workers on average contribute more to US innovation, and are less likely to displace Americans. I would predict the opposite, or at least no effect. One might hope that the people companies are willing to pay top dollar for are the higher skilled ones that companies have trouble hiring enough of in the US.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that the bill is a half-measure in that it doesn&#x27;t take the idea to its logical conclusion and eliminate the lottery and sort applications by salary and take the top N, but I imagine that would be politically unpopular.<p>I think you could possibly argue against this bill perhaps for some kind of fairness reasons, but I think the arguments quoted don&#x27;t make sense.

The headline and lede don&#x27;t accurately portray proposed changes. You need to go down a few paragraphs to find this:<p>&quot; The bill prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees, there are no longer any exceptions. It also lengthens the no-layoff policy for H-1B dependent employers and their client companies for as long an H-1B employee works at the company, which means they cannot layoff equivalent US workers.<p>For H-1B dependent employers to be exempted from the requirement that US workers be recruited first, the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act dramatically increases the salary requirements for H-1B workers. &quot;They must pay the lower of USD 135,000 which is indexed for inflation or the average wage for the occupation in the area of employment, but with a floor of USD 90,000,&quot; said a media release issued by the House Judiciary Committee.&quot;<p>This proposed changes would only apply to H1B dependent employers, which are employers with 15% or more of their workforce on H1Bs. Furthermore, there isn&#x27;t currently and won&#x27;t be if the proposed language becomes law, any minimum salary for H1B visa workers. Instead the salary mentioned acts as a safe harbor for H1B dependent employers to avoid certain steps they&#x27;d otherwise have to take in order to file additional H1B employee petitions beyond the 15% level.

&gt; move to harm Indian IT professionals<p>Title of the story linked-to is quite sensational.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of the current administration at all, but as a former (Indian) H1-B visa holder myself, I welcome this move. It&#x27;s clearly aimed at the top 10 H1-B visa abusers, almost all Indian Companies - think Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technologies, Wipro, Tech Manhindra etc - who grossly underpay the Indian software engineers and abuse H1-B visa program.<p>Now these crooks won&#x27;t be able to file Labor Certificate applications with very low prevailing wages, and I think this will help real startups and software companies everywhere in the US, who can&#x27;t find top engineers in US for new technologies, hire people from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world who are qualified, and not just from India.<p>Code-monkey Indians and the companies that try to bring them in on low wages will automatically get filtered out.

This is a good thing for just about everyone except for Infosys and Cognizant and the like. I really hate how close the H1B program comes to indentured servitude, feels extremely unfair and imbalanced.

The mistake with this bill is it assumes that tech workers excluded from the US will just disappear. They won&#x27;t. They&#x27;ll set up shop in other countries, and those companies will compete with US companies. It will also encourage larger US companies to set up dev offices in foreign countries.<p>One way or another, those workers will be competing with US workers regardless.

This isn&#x27;t a minimum in the salary of H1B workers. The current &quot;minimum&quot; is $60k. It is perfectly possible to hire employees on an H1B under that limit, you (as an employer) will simply be under more scrutiny.<p>It relates to H1Bs that are contracted out to other employers where those H1Bs are at least 15% (slightly higher thresholds for employers with under 51 employees) of an employer&#x27;s workforce. They are colloquially known as Body Shops. The legislation as it stands allows the DoJ and DoL to investigate&#x2F;prosecute these employers unless the employee makes a certain minimum salary OR has a masters degree. This is a good thing since it specifically targets the abusers of the H1B program while leaving most employers alone. The minimum salary will go up to $90k and the threshold will go up from 15% to 20%.

This raises a pretty interesting idea: Why don&#x27;t we cap the number of H1-B slots at N and let companies bid for how much they would pay the employees with the top N bids being accepted?

This, together with the proposed new tax laws for graduate students (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;house-tax-bill-graduate-students.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;house-tax-bill-gr...</a>), will slowly erode the status of the US in tech and science.<p>Which is fine if you follow history and just accept the rise and fall of empires.<p>There aren&#x27;t enough CS grads in the US to fill the demand as education is so crazy expensive. Foreigners have skewed the system since forever, see all the 1st generation founders.<p>The constant feed of well-educated foreigners to the US is coming to an end. Someone else will collect that talent. Whoever that is will dominate. Tencent passing FB in market value should be a big clue where we&#x27;re heading.

More news on this topic - Administration to wipe out work permits for H-1B spouses <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;article&#x2F;Trump-administration-has-plans-to-wipe-out-work-12366124.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfchronicle.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;article&#x2F;Trump-administra...</a>

Despite the headline, this will benefit smarter Indian workers who are currently undercut by the less skilled $60k ones

This is a good thing, but mostly because it will help those who went to school in the united states, and struggled to win the H1B lottery during their time under F1 yet are able to command salaries well over the new 90k minimum.

Who said Trump doesn&#x27;t deliver?<p>There never was a skill shortage. Only a pay shortage.

I wonder what would be the impact these artificially determined salaries.<p>I would have loved to see some de-regulation in the employment effectively removing the reasons of foreign talent being lock in to a company, thus not having a negotiation power which results in lower salaries.<p>In my opinion nationality based employment opportunity differences are no different to race or gender based ones.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I actually don&#x27;t advocate global free movement of labour, I just highly dislike artificial ways like salary caps or employer lock ins to manage it.

The original headline is written by someone with an axe to grind, because this change does not hurt Indian IT professionals at all. Restrictions on importing low-cost labor will raise wages for workers in India. The restrictions will also raise wages in the United States for obvious reasons as well.

Restricts the use of H1B to target more competent - and sought after - talent. It&#x27;s a good move; import talent when it makes an impact

Regarding the &quot;stifles US innovation&quot; -- I see many people refuting this. Having the salary cutoff be a hard requirement of the H1B visa most certainly stifles innovation.<p>There isn&#x27;t an effective visa that allows a tech innovator to bootstrap a company in the US. I can get my company to ramen profitability with minimal funding, but I cannot sponsor my own visa because my startup coffers can&#x27;t afford to pay a founder-coder $150,000 salary. If you don&#x27;t have multiple advanced degrees or a magical track record of successful companies or something, you can&#x27;t get an O1 visa. You have to waste a bunch of time and money daisy-chaining educational visas and associated work authorization from cheap community colleges until you get your company established. We all know building a sustainable product and company is hard enough without arbitrary obstacle courses to waste your time on.<p>Having experienced this first-hand, as a cofounder who had to leave the country for 2 years and work remote until we had gained enough recognition and a warchest to justify an O1 visa for me.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the solution is to ignore payscale for H1B&#x27;s, but until there&#x27;s a more appropriate visa for an entrepreneur (which by definition has to have simple initial requirements, low cost and reliable success, maybe with down-the-line auditing for extensions), it would be certainly help innovation if the H1-B weren&#x27;t denied to all the international bootstrapped company founders.

I&#x27;ve responded to similar articles in the past. I welcome this motion. Only thing that bothers me is the fact why it was not enforced earlier. I&#x27;m a H1B holder and I support this move.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;115th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;170" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;115th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;170</a><p>So now you can be a high school graduate but if you earn 135k or higher, you are eligible for an H1B? Am I reading that right?<p>Also, would this affect (say) a postdoc virologist in Ohio trying to get an H1B? Or is this just for programmers in Silicon Valley?

As an Indian who had a very high paying job but lost out to the lottery and had to return to India, I welcome this bill. As someone else in this thread mentioned, this bill only gets half the way, they should remove the lottery and pick from the pool sorted by salary. The current combination of limited retraining of unemployed American labor pool and exploited workers by Indian consulting firms is exacerbating the populism and rightly so. I’m not against my fellow countrymen, I’m against the companies and the management that have failed to balance their own activities and abused the system. Indian government doesn’t want this to happen of course, as they’ll have a pool of unemployed population within the country. This would’ve been fine if this pool would’ve been uneducated, but an educated pool that can’t find jobs in the market will focus its sights on the government and demand changes. All in all, much needed change that unfortunately had to be delivered as a shock to the system and at the hands of a mostly incompetent president.

From my reading I can&#x27;t tell if this bill is solely limited to tech applications. The usual qualm with this debate is that the H1-B usage extends far beyond tech and while this increase wouldn&#x27;t really matter for tech workers, it will make a huge impact on other industries&#x2F;people where 90k isn&#x27;t the norm as in tech

If anything, the US was very indulging with companies like Infosys, that were found deliberately cheating in their applications (e.g: submitting the same applicant multiple times).<p>Then, some Infosys employees report that they do not receive the minimum H-1B salary in practice, and that they&#x27;re forced to give their tax return money back to their employer. I do not know if these reports are true, but I think they should be aggressively audited.<p>To that you need to add that the Infosys business culture, as reported by their own employees, is not the kind of business culture you want to assimilate.<p>Then, if there are more applicants than spots, naturally the US could rank them and pick the best.

I see some folks saying &quot;IT workers don&#x27;t have a problem finding jobs anyway,&quot; but it feels like at least once a week I see articles on ageism in tech come through here.<p>If this actually makes it through and becomes law, I&#x27;m curious about the possible impact on those older workers. Since in some cases it seems like those older workers are back in the job hunt because of companies closing up their in-house IT in favor of outsourced contracts, this seems like it might be directly applicable at least there.

As long as H1-B Visa holders cannot change jobs once they get here, they will be underpaid and overworked, and will create distortions in the American labor market. I would say the obvious fix is to untether the H1-B from the Visa holder&#x27;s employer. Just let people bid for the H1-B&#x27;s, and give the Visas out to the highest bidders. Preferably many, many more than we give out currently.

I graduated from Purdue in Indiana and I&#x27;m on an H1B visa. A lot of international students graduating from U.S. universities in the Midwest get jobs in those markets instead of Bay Area&#x2F;NYC. This basically means no jobs for graduating international students in places like Indiana.

It would be better to remove H1b quota, but considering that US voters in aggregate do not want that, replacing lower-paid H1b workers with higher-paid H1b workers is the logical choice. At least it may help to eliminate H1b lottery and make H1b processing more predictable.

This move more or less will increase outsourcing or offshore dev centers. And only real high and good quality work is done in US. Long term this may impact US when offshore dev centers slowly catch up.

The weird part is that even with higher salary, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend people to go on h1b. Job flexibility, healthcare, work&#x2F;life balance all sacrificed in the name of workin in America!

A simple rule change that will appease the nationalistic desires of software engineers while reducing the harm to strong lobby big-shot companies like facebook&#x2F;google&#x2F;amazon.

I was thinking about taking a job in US many many many times, but I was always deterred by the prospective of becoming a US taxpayer for life and fear of overzealous tax enforcement

I am Canadian and I&#x27;ve worked in tech in the USA for the last 5 years.<p>I wish they made getting an H1B even harder to get.

This may boost immigration to Canada which doesn&#x27;t have an equivalent threshold.

Brilliant! If you <i>really</i> need foreign workers because you can&#x27;t find them in USA, they must so good, so special and deserving way more than $60k.

The one thing Silicon Valley loves about Trump ;)

Set the minimum to 100k at least. Help US grads get started in the field.

I have seen companies in DFW hire what seems like 1000&#x27;s of H1B&#x27;s and offer to work on their Green cards. These aren&#x27;t highly skilled jobs, these are jobs that would typically pay more than the 50k that companies are using H1B&#x27;s so they can pay less. The New Toyota HQ in Plano has more Indians and H1B&#x27;s than US employees from what I heard. There are many more like them that I won&#x27;t mention.<p>India is exporting it&#x27;s poverty all over the world and taking advantage of the US.