Guest article by Jason Finkelman. Jason Finkelman is an Austin immigration attorney focused on serving international individuals and domestic and foreign businesses in a variety of business-based and family-based immigration matters. Finkelman Law works with entrepreneurs, investors, startups, and companies across all employment sectors to obtain work visas and lawful permanent residence.
Amidst the tweets revealing the Apple Watch to simply be a glorified Power Ranger bracelet or the Facebook posts already discussing the secret SXSW parties that will feature bands you’ve never heard of but will pretend to like, you may have started seeing the cryptic phrase “H-1B” popping up more and more in your social feeds. So, what’s an H-1B?
The H-1B is a U.S. work visa, designated for highly-skilled foreign workers. The H-1B visa was created to allow U.S. businesses to hire foreign individuals with at least a bachelor’s degree on a temporary basis to work for U.S. companies in a “specialty occupation” (a job that normally requires a bachelor’s degree as a minimum qualification for the position). Because tech companies typically need employees with at least a bachelor’s degree to work in “specialty occupations”, many H-1B visas are issued to foreign individuals who work in the U.S. tech industry.
None of that fully explains why your social networks are talking about the H-1B visa right now though. Simply put, the visas are more in demand than the iPhone 7! The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) only makes 85,000 H-1B visas available each year on April 1 . The demand is so high for these visas, that on April 1, the USCIS receives more applications than there are available visas and winds up selecting which applications to process by random lottery. To many, that’s a bit of a cruel April Fool’s Day joke. By way of example, on April 1, 2014, USCIS received approximately 172,000 petitions seeking one of the 85,000 available H-1B visas. Meaning, last year, those that timely applied had less than a 50 percent chance of getting an H-1B visa.
To make matters more interesting, there are limited options available to U.S. businesses to obtain work visas for highly-skilled foreign workers at any other point during the calendar year. Therefore, companies throughout the U.S. (especially in the tech sector) are gearing up at this moment to prepare their H-1B visa applications for filing on April 1, 2015 in the hopes that they are lucky enough to secure qualified employees for the coming year.
The volume of H-1B filings is expected to increase this year, and there are several lengthy prerequisite steps that must be completed before the application can be filed. Waiting until mid-March to begin preparing an H-1B application usually means you’re too late. Those companies looking to hire highly-qualified foreign labor in 2015 and continue to grow in the year ahead should begin preparing their H-1B applications now.
While this doesn’t impact me as much as it does other desk jockey jobs, like programmers and system designers, it still has an effect on service. In the move to outsource work, on-site work is not needed as much. I often see advertisements for jobs online, requesting desk work, remote work, visas accepted.
When people realize that remote work can only go so far, and you still need hands and eyes on site, maybe things will improve for me. Initially, wedding people from other countries come and work for the week is that Americans won’t except, maybe things will improve.
The whole labor pool issue really is one big lie. There are enough people that are willing to work in this country, especially in the tech industry(and in my trade, service work), it’s just that businesses are not willing to pay what we are worth. When someone who had an hourly based job, and was making $20 an hour, if they are offered the chance to take work for $25 an hour they are happy, because it’s more than they made before. What they don’t realize, is that they are now considered self-employed according to the IRS, and taxes will kill them for a price that low. They need to charge at least double that just to break even. I know, because I am a one-man shop, small business. I charge $85 an hour for most work. Unfortunately, there had not been enough training in this country in the area of small business. People need to think of themselves when they are self-employed, as a small business. Nobody does. And, as people take the low-paying work, they drop the pricing for the rest of us, who run businesses and know what we’re doing. It’s not necessarily their fault, but someone needs to teach them.
In fifteen years, I have run across 2,000+ different H1B workers. Only 3 were anywhere near the talent pool that American citizens provide. And for the one that I was interested in, he was locked into a servant contract with an Indian outsourcing company at $33,000/yr when I was offering $118,000/yr.
I filed a complaint, nothing ever happened. The H1B program is nothing more than a “gut the middle class” play from overpaid CEOs. And note that I am CEO/Owner of my own company. MUCH different than the scum who run publicly owned companies.