One might have more than just a gripe with Infosys given they recently admitted to defrauding the visa system over decades and paid a record $34m fine. How many Americans lost out on jobs as a result? We'll never know.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/indian-corporation-pays-re...

It’s worth saying though that this fine is for lying and abusing the B-1 visas (to circumvent H-1b limitations). That being said I still believe there are a lot of issues with these companies regarding their H-1bs in the first place.

I'm willing to wager that a company breaking the law for B-1 visas is also abusing the law for H1B visas, they just haven't been caught yet.

A non-trivial part of the issue with consulting companies is the long wait for many to turn an H-1B into a green card. If you are going to need many years of continuous employment without ever getting hit by a layoff (which risks a gap in employment), the immigrant might be better of with the consulting company, as they might end up the bench, or just count as employed but not getting any hours.

If the road from H-1B to permanent residency was shorter and more reliable, the advantages of the consulting companies would shrink.

The same as if we didn't end up having to rely on lotteries. Hiring a candidate and hoping for an H-1B is quite annoying if you don't have them on staff in another country, or they are working for you in the US from an F-1. Those consulting companies that have large offices in India can happily submit large amounts of applications of people they already have in India, and be OK with 2/3rds of them not winning said lottery. A smaller company just can't play that numbers' game

If you filter out Information only ( which i am being conservative because this does not include healthcare and other sectors ) that is about 20K high paying IT Jobs. This def smells funny that they cannot find "quality" candidates in US that can build APIs and do FE work. Maybe out of that 20K workers, 500 might be actually be doing something special but rest are doing the work that does not need any specialization.

I have also met teams at FAANG where a foreign born boss’s team is 90% or more H1-Bs from their origin country. Kind of suspicious.

Actually, looking at your link, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon are all in the top 10... on the link you shared, am I missing something?

My point was that those companies are indeed in the top 10, and those companies also look at and hire US applicants. This was in response to the commenter’s point that they’d be surprised if 5-10% of H1Bs listing even considered US applicants.

Not sure if this is only fresh visas or includes visa renewals. Because of the country caps in the naturalization process, you have people from some countries have to renew visas again and again while they wait for naturalization. Given that H1b is only 3 years, for companies like Google and Facebook, you could have a situation where they are just trying to retain employees who have been with the company for a while.

You can only renew an H-1b once (as there is a 6 years limit for H-1b). However, if you have an approved I-140 with a priority date in the future (as is often the case with people from India or China) you can keep on extending your H-1b (which doesn't count against the cap).

Yes, which is why I was checking whether the data includes the renewals (including for approved I140s).

Yes, the data does include petitions filed for renewals:

> The H-1B Employer Data Hub has data on the first decisions USCIS makes on petitions for initial *and continuing* employment

H-1B abuse is a real problem but not by Big Tech. The offenders are the bodyshops like Tata and Infosys.

The bodyshops flood USCIS with Indian-born applicants because they don't really care who gets approved and who doesn't. Those that get approved get a US job. The system is designed to stop employers abusing the power this gives them over employees. They fail in a number of ways.

First, part of the process is a Prevailing Wage Determination to make sure the employee isn't underpaid for that job in that geographical area. There is abuse here at the bodyshops where (IIRC) employees are paid less or not at all if they aren't currently farmed out to a third-party. This should be policed but I don't think it is, at least not effectively.

Second, the real abuse comes from the H1B -> Green card pipeline. H1B visas don't have per-country quotas. Green cards do (max 7% per country as determined by the country you were born in, not your actual citizenship). Because so many H1B holders are Indian-born, the backlog for Green cards for Indian-born applicants is decades long.

Now you can stay with an employer beyond your 6 years (the usual limit of 3+3 for H1B visas) if you have a pending PERM application. The employee can't really leave. If they do they have to file their whole PERM case again (but they retain their priority date at least) so this becomes like indentured servitude almost.

Nobody has really addressed this H1B abuse nor dealt with the huge backlog. A few years ago there was a bill that sought to address some of the issues by essentially removing the per-country quota but the net effect would be that for many years, nobody but Indian-born applicants would get green cards (because they have earlier priority dates). And that bill died in Congress.

But back to Big Tech: they abuse this system too but not so egregiously.

If you wander around any Big Tech office you will find likely a cork board in some obscure corner of some floor with little traffic. It will have a bunch of job postings on it. If you look in the physical newspaper for your area, you will also find them.

Why are these here? To "prove" that the employer could not find a US permanent resident or citizen to fill that particular position. You have to advertize that position through a number of channels and those channels are chosen to receive the fewest applicants because who in 2024 applies for a SWE job from a physical newspaper? If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.

All of this theater is so someone else's PERM application with USCIS can go through.

To me this is also abuse.

> If you do apply, there is a whole process to exclude you from the position. You'll be too qualified or under-qualified or your salary expectations won't match the advertisement. Or they'll find some other reason to strike you.

Why would companies want to do that? Big tech has wage scales and pretty rigorous processes to ensure even pay at level, so what is the incentive to be biased against US born employees there?

For one, because an H-1B holder is legally bound to the hiring company and can't seek work elsewhere. It is much higher level of employer leverage, particularly in a hot market.

I've managed a team at one of the big tech companies for a bunch of years. I've managed a couple people on h1b, all with graduate degrees from premier US institutions.

Never once have I heard anything even resembling "work your h1bs harder because they won't leave." They all joined on the same pay scale as legal permanent residents and were all evaluated through a process where nobody else in the room knew who was a legal permanent resident or not (I only knew because I needed to sign off on forms describing their job responsibilities to the government).

At most this is some aggregate effect of "people changing employers less is good for employers generally."

This doesn't really vibe as abuse of the program to me. I'd vastly prefer it if the policies gave people on h1bs significantly more confidence in changing roles and more time to find a new job should they lose their job, but is this really a decision of the tech companies rather than an output of the immigration policies?

So for Big Tech it's never as egregious as "work your H1Bs harder" or "pay them less". That just opens you up to a future lawsuit.

In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.

Additionally, there are additional burdens on the employer to hire visa holders. For a large company, this process is solved. You have lawyers on retainer. You have a pipeline for the paperwork. It's a non-issue. But an early stage startup? That's a lot less likely. So visa holders are, by definition, more limited in their job opportunities.

Even if you can job hop, if your ultimate goal is to get a green card, you have a problem. Will your new employer sponsor your green card? How long will it take? Or are you better off waiting for your current process to go through? Best case, this whole thing takes just under a year. But it can take years completely randomly and there's nothing you can do about it (eg you get randomly audited).

And if you were born in one of the four high-demand countries (India, China, Mexico, the Phillipines) you have an even longer wait.

Also, after you get to 6 years on your H1B you really can't swap jobs anymore. You just have to wait for your green card at that point.

Now that's not strictly true. There are self-sponsor options for both visas and green cards but the bar for these is much higher and you'll need to hire your own lawyer for this.

So there's no directive on treating visa holders differently but bias creeps into the process. Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave? This may not be conscious either. And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.

> Why push someone for higher bonuses, more RSUs or promotions when they can't leave but another one of your "stars" can leave?

This would have to be extremely unconscious for me, I suppose. I've never considered immigration status when doing comp planning. Comp planning is mostly algorithmic based on performance reviews, which again are done through a group of people who don't actually know somebody's immigration status. Discretionary comp pretty much entirely comes from rewarding people who are in the high end of some ratings bucket, which again is derived from the panel discussion. I've also managed to promote all of the h1bs I've had on my team.

> And it may happen on a level above you, as a manager, because your director is ultimately responsible for balancing out ratings and promotions across their org.

I've actually been pretty fortunate here (I guess) and have never had a rating adjusted by a higher up. I suppose this could happen, but I've also been in the rollup meetings where a director is trying to fit ratings to some expected distribution and there'd have to have been a secret meeting ahead of time for immigration status to come up.

> In a hot market, your best chance of career progression and maximizing your compensation is to swap jobs every 2 years or so. Visa holders have a much harder time doing this.

This is true. People on h1bs being less able to change roles can depress their wages over time and this can be a benefit to corporations. I don't know if I'd really call this "abuse" by the companies, more like a shitty outcome of the policy. It could be the case that the big tech companies lobby to make it more difficult for people on h1bs to change jobs, I suppose.

I would expect to see the thumbs on the scale at the director level, not at the direct report level. At those heights, employees are costs to be managed, and they shave a little off here and there to keep their budget low.

I guess you could expect this.

I've never seen anything that smelled of this even a little bit.

> an H-1B holder is legally bound to the hiring company and can't seek work elsewhere

That's not really the case. An H-1B visa holder is not strictly bound to their employer, and is allowed to transfer to a new employer. Unlike visas such as the L-1, which are employer-tied, the H-1B allows for this flexibility. Transferring does require the new employer to file a new H-1B petition, but that process is straightforward and any big tech company will gladly complete that as part of the hiring process.

The main exception arises only when the H-1B holder has just started pursuing a green card. The first step of the green card process, known as PERM, typically takes 1–2 years to complete. During this time, the worker may feel more committed to their current employer because switching jobs would restart the PERM process, potentially delaying their green card timeline.