titomc

ex-H1B here, You have good skills, once you graduate, you will have to depend on your luck to get into the H1B system currently.

Why don't you get MS from good universities in Canada and enter the express entry immigration system which values your skills unlike H1B system which depends on luck ?

Just a drop in the ocean.

ex-H1B Indian here, now permanent resident of Canada. Left US for good, because I was being exploited by tech firms taking advantage of my H1B status.

This is a welcome change in my opinion. H1B workers were exploited by the Indian body shops as well as American employers. Raising the minimum wages will prune the bad apples and make H1B a visa system for the truly skilled candidates.

Quirks:

1. Find & shutdown fake employers running fake payrolls to match the increased wages. A search for *consulting.com will bring up many 'one-room' body shops in the US.

2. Stop the lottery process and award visa to truly skilled candidates who can provide proofs for their skills.

3. H1B LCA process should be changed and made similar to the PERM process, so that it will be a true test of the market.

4. Giving preference to Master degree holders is not a good idea, having a Masters degree from an American University is not an indicator for "highly skilled". Most of the students from India obtain these Masters degree just for the purpose of getting an OPT visa to improve their chances of getting selected in the lottery for H1B.

Many of these 'master' degree holders show fake experiences & do 'proxy' interviews to get into companies. These fake experiences are backed up by experience letters from bogus companies setup for this purpose from India. Many of them also provide 'bonus' services like proxy candidate interview services on Skype.

5. Stop 'future GC'. Many body shops in US do this by taking a huge deposit from the candidates for their 'future GC services'.

Proud to be a permanent resident of Canada now. I left US (H1B visa) some months back.

2008 subprime lending crisis happened only in America.

Lets think outside of America for this one. Lenders outside America are not idiots. Most of them lend on a solid collateral and someone from the family will have to have co-sign the loan, especially if its a huge sum.

Part deux: What Asian students go through once they get their degrees from American Universities.

They go down the rabbit hole of America's broken immigration system, starting with OPT visa, then H1B (read lottery luck, not based on skills) & then the country based quota for green card currently 7 to 9 years for EB2 categories for India & China. Did I forgot to mention the exorbitant out of state tuition fees and the loans they took for it in their home country ?

If something can be done similar to a Klout score based on frequency of posts, ranking, topic distribution, it would be great.

me too and I found this very useful with the 'engineering_blogs.opml'

Looks like you will have to disagree with the majority of HN community on this one.

The companies have these "schemes" in place. If you look at an LCA posting, these scheming companies will post a salary range, eg : 75k-110k. 75k being the prevailing wages from the DOL for that area. This range means the company can pay the employee 75k and its legal. What does it take for the company to pay 110k to the employee as per LCA ? "Depends on relevant skills & relevant experience of the candidate" so that's the blurry line companies use to suppress the salary and its perfectly legal.

" Most of the time it is just easier to hire Asian/Indian employees because they are readily available "

- I doubt that. It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them, because their visa status is tied to the employer. The employers have H1B workers on a leash.

The process of hiring an H1B worker in short.

- Hire an immigration lawyer.

- Post an LCA.

- Apply petition to USCIS.

- Pay petition fees (higher for fast track process)

- Respond to USCIS queries.

- Get petition approved.

- Done

- Its a different game if the employer wants retain the H1B worker after 6th year of H1B.

So hiring is not easy. But retaining and paying them is "easy". So why do these corporations take this much pain in hiring H1B workers ? No its not the skills they are after. (after all H1B is lottery based not skill based right ? )

Why am I not surprised ? Yet another H1B discrimination story to rant about. (though the article do not say anything about the 'Indian' people's visa status, isn't it obvious ?)