They offer one likely non-sinister explanation right in the article:
“The software engineer market, it’s so saturated with H-1Bs that some of the people who are laid off are almost inevitably H-1Bs and some of the people that are being hired are inevitably H-1Bs,” Bier said. “I don’t read into it anything like this is obviously job displacement.”
That whole "it doesn't look like job replacement" is completely ludicrous, because math.
H-1B exists solely because industry says they can't find needed talent. If you've just had a huge number of layoffs of said talent, you should be getting 0 H-1Bs.
I agree that this looks fishy, but they could be replacing different skillsets or firing people who they thought had a skillset but didn't demonstrate it after a year.
There is no legal requirement like that. H1 has a simple rule - that you should have a degree and work on a field that USCIS considers specialized. Comp engineering is one of them
I'm not talking about any legal requirement. Two things:
1. I'm simply refuting the ludicrous-on-its-face idea that if you just laid off hundreds of highly paid technical employees, that then hiring double the amount of H-1B's the following year, claiming you are not "displacing any American workers" is total BS.
2. Regardless of the letter of the law, certainly the political justification of why the US should have the H-1B program at all, which is argued by all the SV lobbying groups, is that the US needs workers in specialized fields because there aren't enough US workers.
Also, FWIW, I believe H-1B is a horrible program because it really only benefits the companies while basically allowing the visa holders to be treated like slaves. I'd be much more in favor of a simple "skilled occupations" global lottery that wasn't tied to any specific employer, with stronger protections to ensure visa holders aren't underpaid.
First of all, we need to get facts correct. They didn't lay off one year and increase H1b the next year. They had a total approval of 299 visas in 2019. Which means, some of them were approved in Jan and others may have been approved in October. The article deliberately obfuscates that to generate clicks.
Second, let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's Uber has a US citizen who is a poor performer, and a H1 employee who is a rock star. Let's say both make $300K. Are you suggesting that Uber should layoff the rockstar first simply based on national origin ?
Actually, there is a legal requirement like that. Businesses that hire h1b visa recipients must file an LCA with the USDOL, that essentially states it has looked and cannot find an equally qualified US Citizen for the position that is seeking the visa. The original 'ruse' the H1B visa was to address was the supposed shortage of qualified engineers in technical professions. The only shortage that ever existed was of low-paid professionals. One simply has to look on one of the online job boards to see how the system is gamed. Many positions require quite a mix of programming languages, frameworks and knowledge up and down the stack.
They also have a simple rule that you can't hire a guest worker without considering domestic applicants. These companies shouldn't be allowed to dispense inconvenient citizens who can be retrained for these jobs while bumping up their visa pool. Lack of any enforcement or penalties makes that a meaningless requirement but the current administration claimed it was going to do something about this kind of abuse. They don't even have to wrestle with Congress to make meaningful improvements on how the program is run.
That's the law as written, but it is commonly sold to the public as the parent post's "filling competitive positions with talent that can't be found domestically."
The thing that doesn't make sense to me here is that layoffs are supposed to be about having too many employees rather than about having low-quality employees. Why are they hiring at all? Shouldn't they have just laid off fewer people if they need more than they have now?
That assumes employees are fungible. Which they are not, especially in tech roles. They may have too many employees in some departments and not enough in others. They may also need to replace people who quit of their own volition.
> Immigration policy analyst David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, [who] didn’t see evidence of H-1B abuse by Uber in its increased visa approvals and efforts to obtain more.
Sorry, but Cato is definitely a libertarian leaning think tank (one of their few redeeming qualities, in my mind):
- Penn and Teller, the original small l libertarians, are in the board at Cato. That pair wouldn't be caught dead associating with some neocon or populist outfit.
- Cato created and maintain libertarianism.org
- first sentence in Wikipedia's description of Cato: "The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C."
We can quibble about the exact political slant of Cato, but it definitely takes policy positions that are more libertarian than mainstream Republican positions. See, for example, the drug war.
“The software engineer market, it’s so saturated with H-1Bs that some of the people who are laid off are almost inevitably H-1Bs and some of the people that are being hired are inevitably H-1Bs,” Bier said. “I don’t read into it anything like this is obviously job displacement.”