Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

This is an open secret in tech. Visa holders have less job offers to negotiate with, less job mobility, and consequently get paid less. Companies preferentially hire them over Americans.<p>Further, the recent actions making harder for &quot;body shops&quot; like Infosys are actually helping big tech companies win more visa lotteries. This means the recent action that was supposed to help American workers, is actually causing the best jobs to shift more to immigrants and less to Americans.<p>The whole visa and immigration system needs huge reform. I am not anti immigrant but the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech. You don&#x27;t see many visa holders working in sales and marketing, or teaching, or law, mostly just software engineering (at the high end) and then migrant farming and illegal immigrant factory workers (at the low end).

&gt; Cisco, which reported $43 billion in revenue last year, employs more than 73,000 workers at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and international offices. The company employed nearly 1,600 visa holders last year.<p>If this number seems low, thats because it is. They probably &quot;employ&quot; another 70,000 contract workers, many of which are also on visas, but since they&#x27;re not on the &quot;official&quot; payroll they don&#x27;t show up. That they were cited at all for the 1600 visa workers in the first place is astounding to me.

Sad thing is - if this is going on at Cisco imagine what goes on in the farm fields, the restaurants, the hotels, and the rest of the lowest paying jobs in this country. If it takes YEARS to build a case against giant company how many little guys are getting away with it on a daily basis?

It seems like a good solution to H1B abuse is to get rid of the lottery and move towards a bid system, but the &quot;bid&quot; is the foreign worker&#x27;s salary. This will solve the wage suppression issue, and will grant access to talent to companies that are willing and able to pay for it.

Corporate greed at its finest. The goal was to hire employees at lower wages and who couldn&#x27;t just up and leave for another company next door so easily. This combined gets them workers who aren&#x27;t allowed to negotiate and who are cheaper than normal workers.<p>When driven only by greed, all methods to get more money are always acceptable... unless you are caught.

Cap minimum pay to the equivalent of $150k yearly and watch as the h1b visa program magically starts working as intended.<p>The solution is not complicated. With the anti-immigrant rhetoric pouring from the current administration, I&#x27;m surprised that blatant h1b visa abuse is still rampant.

This is more common than you&#x27;d imagine and it&#x27;s telling that a company the size of Cisco can&#x27;t hide it.<p>Between OPT and H1B the relationship between tech and immigration is grim.

American engineers are getting shafted by the H1B visa program. The H1B work harder because they have a figurative gun pointed at their heads. Work or leave the country. Why would any sane American work that hard?<p>It is a race to the bottom and the big tech companies at playin with fire. The societal damage is currently unquantifiable, but for an astute observers and people with common sense it’s not good.

When I was at Juniper Networks, Indian managers would routinely hire Indian employees on H1, underpay them to make them look competitive compared to US employees, and then pay them an additional salary through the Indian office, hiding this from the other departments, and the &#x27;white&#x27; people.

I&#x27;ve seen it stated several times here on hacker news that the visas should be available for the highest salaries. And that&#x27;s it. No lottery. If you want them, pay them. That makes tons of sense to me on a lot of levels, it is going to naturally destroy abuse, recruit the best and brightest to come to the US, and not cause unfair discrimination against American workers.<p>1,600 visa workers for Cisco seems really low though. Anecdata, but my company hired a VP from Cisco and from that point until they left we made a lot of hires, but not a single American that I am aware of.

Honest question: if immigrants are willing to do the same job for less money, why do US citizens deserve special treatment and higher wages? Why should companies be forced to not hire in an economically optimal way?

If immigrants are depressing salaries, how do you explain $120,000 (base + stock + bonus) for fresh graduates, paid by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;heres-how-much-new-grads-will-make-at-companies-like-facebook-and-google-in-2017.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;heres-how-much-new-grads-wil...</a><p>It&#x27;s a hardened belief that jobs are a zero-sum game — and from this arises the idea that every skilled immigrant takes away a job from a U.S. worker. This isn&#x27;t true. More skilled, educated workers will actually add to the economy — and grow the economy.<p>Some companies abuse the system, and the abuse must be stopped. But immigration of the best and the brightest is what made this country a superpower, and must be encouraged.<p>See also: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;95.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;95.html</a>

I work here!<p>I also participated in this!<p>We needed to hire a few people at a smaller Cisco site for a project in a less than favourite BU. Recruitment reached out to me after my rec didn’t find any fits in a week and the pushed a couple candidates my way. As these candidates required sponsorship, we knew that we could probably retain them for less and for longer. I don’t have anything against Americans, but if I can get someone who is better educated, will not jump ship in 18 months, and will do more for less then I’ll jump all over that.<p>Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Worked at another big Californian semiconductor company for several years. Directors&#x2F;middle managers, mostly Americans, would always joke about how easy it was to get H1Bs hired and all the shady stuff they did to not have to actually advertise the position. They got great bonuses, life was good.<p>Eventually, {specific H1B subgroup} made up a significant portion of the company as they always continue to hire more of {specific H1B subgroup} at the expense of everyone else. During a downturn several years ago, there was a tremendous layoff to try to maintain profitability.<p>Most of the old guard, almost all the older higher paid Americans that didn&#x27;t make it to the VP level, got axed.<p>You reap what you sow.

I think the answer to this problem is to require H1B holders to be paid 25-50% above prevailing wage for that job type or sector, which would preclude just picking up someone on H1B for cost reasons.

I&#x27;ve heard rumors that this is the same at the big O, and for years with the big blue too.

H1B needs to be abolished. It has only been used to suppress US wages and to bring in lower paying bodies to do the same work a properly trained US Citizen could perform in IT. There&#x27;s no shortage of IT skills in the USA.<p>They should be punished to the fullest.

I&#x27;m curious to see what happens if a company like Huawei enters the US networking hardware market after cutting its teeth. Are we supposed to go with Cisco out of patriotism? Is the general public going to petition the government for protectionism?<p>I also wonder how long it takes wage suppression to propagate out into lower demand and shrinking GDP growth.

I&#x27;d love to see H1B completely done away with. Transferrable visas for non-immigrant status freely available in exchange for a fairly massive bond and annual fee ($50-100k&#x2F;yr), and immigrant visas on a much less expensive basis based on merit.

Something needs to happen for positive change. My Indian friend recently fathered a baby and couldn&#x27;t see his son almost a year later. Politics getting in the way of people just trying to make the world a better place as per usual.

So easy to fix. If you believe in free market, you also need the labor pool to be free. Let H1Bs be able to change jobs like anyone else, and wages will rise. Pretty simple. Indentured servitude is anti free market.

If Cisco pay fair share to all its employees, regardless of their status, how much more money will it cost? I would say it won&#x27;t be a big number as compare to their executives bonuses.

Almost ironic that this article is from Bloomberg. Recently interviewed with them for a software engineer role and the only american I talked to out of 6 people, was the recruiter.

Supposing it is true, why would Cisco prefer work visa holders over US citizens? Lower salaries? Less job mobility(meaning longer average tenure)?

Here is a good talk on how to think about three deeply connected topics that are under attack today.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cXiC4wqn7EU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cXiC4wqn7EU</a><p>---<p>Free Trade, Immigration and Robots, Oh My!<p>One of the biggest threats America faces—we are told—is the assault on our workforce: the loss of American jobs to immigrants, to foreign competition fueled by free trade, and even to technology that will make all kinds of jobs obsolete. In this talk the Ayn Rand Institute&#x27;s executive chairman, Yaron Brook, argues that this fear is entirely misplaced—that a proper grasp of the virtue of productiveness shows that far from fearing and opposing free trade, immigration and robots, we should be eagerly embracing all three.<p>---