I will make a slight derail into H1B's. Anytime that you allow a company to have significant control over an employee's life, such as putting a significant risk of deportation on the employee, you are putting the employee at severe personal risk. This is the central problem with guest worker programs, as you incentivize the company to threaten employees in order to keep them working for you and their costs down.
I had an intense argument with someone about whether H1B's were good or bad for the economy. The key point he was arguing was that H1B employees do not have significantly less salary, and they are fully capable of switching companies.
In my experience, the primary reason that a company would go through the hassle of hiring an H1B is for cost reasons, because there are enough competent workers locally there to fulfill open positions (at a price), and the quality of H1B workers is generally less than local hires. On rare occasions a foreign worker has extremely unique skills, but this is certainly the exception.
Secondly, it is very difficult for an H1B to switch companies, as it's difficult to convince a company to go through the hassle of paperwork / lawyers / cost, so an H1B employee has little recourse for being treated poorly and paid less.
Therefore, I'm against H1B's. If we had a more reasonable immigration policy, where people could more easily come to America as normalized citizens, I would be for it. But the H1B and similar programs give far too much power to the companies, which is ripe for exploitation.
I knew a few guys on H-1B who switched. The only downside is that the clock is not restarted, but since the H-1B timer is 6 years and GC takes about 3 years, a worker who's not a complete idiot has plenty of time to shop around.
Hiring H-1B for cost reasons is not possible. It is not allowed to pay less than market price and the government audits it. My first H-1B job paid $75k in '97 dollars (e.g. north of $120k now) and it was more than typical market value. Full bennies, too.
The problem is that "market price" is extremely malleable, and it's easy enough to tweak the job title slightly in order to change what the person is being paid.
As I said, there are exceptions, but in general H1B is a mechanism for importing cheap labor.
Then explain why, in 2001 while working for Lucent, a more qualified for the job H-1B engineer was paid 45K to my 80K?
While I hear from people like you and other sources that there are H-1Bs being paid what they're worth, all the cases I actually know something about are paid significantly less than market or the like (e.g. too many cases of more expensive, experienced US citizens and permanent residents being replaced by cheaper H-1Bs; we've been reading in the general news about some particularly notorious cases of this happening en masse lately at that California utility and Disney).
Yeah, I also do not agree with this. While there is definitely a certain minimum, you are not going to be paid top dollar on an H1B. More importantly, you have way less leverage for salary negotiations, so as an immigrant you keep at the same salary for years.
Green card in 3 years?, not for someone from India. If the current system continues it may take 10 years or more for people of indian orgin to get a employment based green card
I had an intense argument with someone about whether H1B's were good or bad for the economy. The key point he was arguing was that H1B employees do not have significantly less salary, and they are fully capable of switching companies.
In my experience, the primary reason that a company would go through the hassle of hiring an H1B is for cost reasons, because there are enough competent workers locally there to fulfill open positions (at a price), and the quality of H1B workers is generally less than local hires. On rare occasions a foreign worker has extremely unique skills, but this is certainly the exception.
Secondly, it is very difficult for an H1B to switch companies, as it's difficult to convince a company to go through the hassle of paperwork / lawyers / cost, so an H1B employee has little recourse for being treated poorly and paid less.
Therefore, I'm against H1B's. If we had a more reasonable immigration policy, where people could more easily come to America as normalized citizens, I would be for it. But the H1B and similar programs give far too much power to the companies, which is ripe for exploitation.