At least one company I worked at purposefully crafted these job descriptions so that no one would be qualified. They'd find the most obscure parts of our tech stack, require hands on experience with each library, knowledge of our niche, and so on.
You basically had to be already working for us to have the required experience.
The companies are just trying to work with the flawed system that is place. Even if a role is in shortage, it’s impossible for a company by itself to prove that there is a shortage. If in the total market, there are 10000 jobs for “position X” and there are 8000 total US citizens that qualify for that role, if you are a company that has an H1B for the other 2000 positions, there is no way you can prove there is a shortage. The system requires you to put out an advertisement and prove there are no US citizens. The minute you put out a generic requirement, at least the few people from the pool of 8000 will apply even if they are employed in the same role because… drum role…people switch jobs. So even if overall there is a shortage for a specific position, there is no way an individual company can prove it when they are required to actively recruit for the position.
The system is flawed and it forces immigrants and companies to work with the rules that are set. And people who don’t fully understand the system are angry about it.
You have a good point that it's very hard to define a shortage by lack of applications, when there is always a certain amount of churn.
It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test:
1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?
2) Is unemployment in the position both low and remaining flat?
Seems hard to claim a shortage if either of those is false, and there is little gaming to be done for simple government reported labor statistics, recent news notwithstanding.
The funny thing is that prevailing wage determination is also done as part of the process and if your wages are lower than median, your application has a higher risk or audit and/or rejection. No reason why you can’t update the process to be more data driven, they already have all the information they need.
If this was to be implemented, you would see a large lobbying effort by the tech companies around how unemployment is calculated and these numbers would end up being under-reported to keep the supply of cheap labor coming in.
You will also start to see people with ties to big tech being hired to actually compile the data.
It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people say they've never heard of it or don't think it happens, I wonder if they're incredibly naive or being evasive.
In many places it's talked about only by immigration lawyers and people who must be involved.
If you're not very active in recruiting (especially at a sizeable company), it's not hard to be outside of the circles where those conversations are happening.
This happens at a much smaller level too. We knew an au pair that the host family particularly liked, and wanted her long term. A typical au pair contract is for 1 year, maximum is 2. They worked with an immigration attorney to craft a "job" that she was uniquely qualified for, went through the whole dance, and got her into the system. She stayed with them for the next 10 years. They covered room and board, but she worked for free otherwise; getting her in the door and on the way to citizenship was her "pay".
I do feel a bit bad for H-1Bs. When you think about it, we’re pulling so much top talent out of India. If the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Germany weren’t giving out these visas so easily, maybe India would be in a better position to develop its own economy, infrastructure, and institutions, instead of exporting its workforce. Their best engineers, consultants, analysts, all leaving to work in Western corporations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Deloitte, PNC Bank, Chevron, Shell, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, EY, KPMG, PwC, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Qualcomm, Uber, Cisco, Salesforce, Tesla, Adobe, Intel, Nvidia, Bloomberg, Dell, Visa, British Petroleum, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn, VMware, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Intuit, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, American Express, Stripe, Cigna, meanwhile, their home country loses the people who might be solving real domestic challenges. It’s not ideal. Maybe India could’ve used a few of them.
I witnessed employers doing that to get people greencards too. Claim the exact combination of their stack plus experience in the domain is a requirement. Only way to meet that is to have been working the job.
This is referred to as tayloring and it is not allowed. Furthermore you have to have the experience for the job from before you started working for the sponsoring employer, so tayloring can only target your prior experience, not what you learn on the job.
At least when I went through the process the reqs had to be crafted such that applying h-1b employee needed to possess them before the current gig so unless that has changed in the last 15y I call bullshit on your claim.
The companies do that because they already had an applicant from abroad for this role they accepted. And now they must wait out the period for job posting to be live before inviting the applicant.
The law itself is pretty idiotic. Why would an employer give up a well accustomed well proven candidate for the sake of some random guy, waste money to recruitment and cross fingers that the employee would actually join and perform ?
It is like giving up a lottery ticket you have won for another lottery ticket.
Also, the law mandates certain compliance steps which the employers do. There is no expectation that they should actually hire someone else unless the compliance steps are violated. So everything is working exactly as intended.
This PERM process and law has harmed countless american citizens and employers both. Citizens end up applying for jobs they are not going to get and HR wastes time on resources over candidates they are not going to hire.
A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.
This whole circus can be gotten rid off if you ask me.
Better for everyone because the talented H1B employee is no longer shackled to their employer and can leave demanding a higher wage and raising wages for everyone.
I guess you’re proposing eliminating the h1b program to raise wages. That would maybe work but our companies would theoretically be less competitive globally. If we’re going to allow immigration based on professional skills then these people should be fast tracked to having the same employment rights as natives otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages because those that belong to that group will be too risk adverse to ask for more money knowing that they’ll likely have to leave the country if they get let go.
Well you just answered why they don't/won't do this.
The H1B employees being shackled and thus having little to no leverage to demand higher compensation or better working conditions is (from the point of view of the companies abusing the system) a feature of the system, not a bug.
As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.
Trump is at least taking a step in the right direction by changing the H1-B lottery system to favor more highly paid and skilled candidates, but as you say to remove the current rampant abuse it should be made mandatory to pay more than the market rate for the position.
Personally I'd just scrap the H1-B program altogether, and let the free market sort it out. H1-B is almost as bad as simply exporting jobs via outsourcing. Laws should be made to benefit US citizens, not US companies and shareholders.
H1B is worse than exporting jobs via outsourcing. With outsourcing we are only competing with other countries for jobs, but with H1B we get to compete with other countries for housing (in our own towns) too.
With outsourcing it's basically impossible to compete since the country being outsourced to has lower salaries for a reason - because they have a lower cost of living and people can afford to accept lower salaries. If you are a US citizen facing US cost of living (housing, real estate taxes, college costs, healthcare, etc, etc), then how can you compete with someone who can afford to do the job for way less ?!
At least with the H1-B they are paying US taxes and spending at least something in the US economy, but outsourcing is also taking US corporate profits, mostly coming from US consumers, and sending it overseas to benefit a different country!
Trump has said that US companies should be more patriotic in their hiring, but nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code.
The "best" part about H1-B (from a company's viewpoint) is that it's very difficult to switch jobs if you're on an H1-B. So you basically become an indentured servant, always afraid Da Bossman will fire you and you'll have 30 days to get out of the country. There's no way they can pull such shit on American workers.
that’s not true - it’s pretty easy to switch. Your application does not count against new quota - employer just needs to pay a lawyer to file paperwork and done. Been there, done that.
It’s not easy to switch. I’ve been on this more than a decade ago and if you’re laid off or leave you have 60 days to find something new.
Any job you take you need your new employer to be able to undertake the effort for H1B renewals and the inevitable green card application. There’s big companies that do it and smaller ones that will absolutely refuse to.
Either way an H1B prefers to stick around until the green card is done. They will not willingly prior to that unless they see a much better offer.
It may not be hard, but there are no guarantees and a clock is ticking.
Say you lose your job. Boom, the clock starts ticking and now you're in a rush to find an acceptable job that meets the criteria of H1B.
Say your manager mistreats you; denies you promotion, raises, etc. and you want to leave. You can't just quit and start looking. You have to line up something that will come through in 60 days and only then you can be free to quit.
None of these situations apply to citizen or PRs. It tilts the balance definitely to the employer's advantage.
The point is not that the transfer is difficult, the point is that finding a suitable new job in the designated time period has a difficulty you can't predict.
are we talking about just switching or getting fired and trying to find new h-1b job? because these are two completely different procedures from uscis standpoint. the claim about h-1b being "indentured servitude" that people are trying to make usually hinges on it being hard to transfer (which is not the case), not the short grace period after getting fired.
I find it rather strange that you talk about them as if they are two separate things when they are intrinsically linked. You have ~60 days from the date of employment termination to have your work permit transferred or you are out of status, period. Leaving your job (whether via resigning or getting fired or laid off) without something already lined up is thus quite obviously much more risky than it is for someone who doesn't have that sword hanging over their head. I'd sincerely hope it doesn't need explaining how this tilts the balance of power even more in the employer's favour.
> You have ~60 days from the date of employment termination to have your work permit transferred or you are out of status, period.
What the hell else supposed to happen to your temp worker visa when you’re no longer a worker? Are you supposed to just get an immigration hall pass indefinitely?
Same point as in sibling thread - if you cant get a new job lined up while still employed or within 60 days of being laid off, you clearly dont possess "distinguished merit and ability" which is the entire purpose of this visa
I have run across multiple job postings stating that they would not accept applicants needing company support on visas so at a bare minimum they are cut off from that portion of the economy and have a harder time than Americans would
The H1B system is just so terrible for everyone involved. No job posting requirement for H1B but you have to post the job when someone applies for a green card a decade later?
Agreed that H1B should have better job posting requirements, but this pre-green card check seems like a great mechanism to ensure we're not long-term giving jobs to non-US Nationals
The problem is that temporary worker programs are a bait and switch. It’s impossible to send people back after they’ve been here for a decade. Any notion that the PERM adjustment is another opportunity to double check will be hard to water down the process for the initial H1B visa grant. And then the PERM check will be gamed.
That is, in fact, how the State Department turned the H visa category (created in the 1960s) became a de facto permanent immigration visa long before the 1990 immigration act. It just kept adding administrative exceptions to make it easier for people to stay.
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/153205684-senior-director-enrollme...
Must have masters in Project Management, IT, Business Administration (pretty broad). Also have 4 years experience in enrollment management systems & operations in higher education setting.
Probably a decent number Americans who could qualify for this.
For the job requiring Russian, that requirement is likely because the owner or hiring manager speaks Russian (the name where to send resumes to is Russian). Should that be a legitimate requirement to allow a visa for someone to work in the US? I cannot speak to that.
Should it not be? If the criteria is there solely to make sure only his countrymen can get jobs and get to the US then I agree it’s wrong. However if they were willing to hire anyone who spoke Russian regardless of origin then I think the question becomes
“Are people/companies allowed to hire for niche skill sets that fit their specific needs, when it de facto bars 99% of citizens from getting the job?”
I came into the thread to talk about the Russian one, is there any proof that Russian is actually required for the job, or is this a filtering mechanism that they can put in place in order to target the job listing to a specific person?
> is there any proof that Russian is actually required for the job
I suppose I could imagine a construction foreman job that requires Spanish, for the reason that you will be interacting with Mexican labor that doesn't speak English.
But I doubt that Russian-speaking interior fitters in Lynwood don't speak any English.
I think the true selection comes with the requirements. I my country, employers are circumventing the same local-first rule by coming up with the craziest Rube Goldberg requirement contraptions so they hire whoever they want anyway...
I can't figure out how they know the job is related to the PERM program. I looked at a job posting and didn't see an indication, does Jobs.now read from filings with USCIS or DOL?
The only effect of applying to jobs on jobs.now is that someone who is already working in the US on H1-B, and was gonna get green card if you hadn't applied, would instead stay on H1-B.
Another thing is that the company must respond to your application within 30 days. Unlike Indeed or Linkedin applications which simply disappear into a void.
H1-B visas eventually expire. I think it’s technically a guest worker visa, so the expectation is that the visa holder will go back to their home country after working in the US a few years.
H1-B is an immigrant intent (actually dual intent) visa. I know a lot of Canadians that started working in the US on a TN visa, which doesn't let you ever become a permanent resident. They had to do all the paperwork (and win the lottery) to convert to H1-B status so they could begin the process of getting permanent residency.
To be clear, H1B is not an immigrant intent visa. It’s a non-immigrant visa. “Dual intent” is like Schrödinger's intent. It allows someone who is on a non-immigrant visa to avoid the presumption of immigrant intent that would otherwise apply—rendering them deportable—when they apply for a green card.
The statutory protection for H1Bs is thin. In 1990, Congress excluded H1B from the requirement applicable to other non-immigrants that they retain a foreign residence, and from the rebuttal presumption that someone who applies for a green card has immigrant intent. That’s it. The common operation of H1B as being an immigrant-intent visa is mostly a matter of administrative grace.
It's six years in total, excluding time spent outside the US. The status is valid for at most three calendar years, but it can be shorter for fixed-term positions. And you can renew it as long as your total time in the US is less than 6 years.
I was on H-1B at a university where researcher appointments were nominally from July of year N to June of year N+2. But if you didn't start in July, your second appointment might be only 1 year, for some bureaucratic reasons. And you had to renew the H-1B for each appointment. I had five H-1Bs in total over ~7 years.
Yeah, well, won't matter. Those H-1B jobs are full on Java with the most vile old school stacks you can imagine.
Edit:
I'm mostly saying it because everyone now days thinks every tech job is some html and javascript and anyone can pick it up. Doesn't matter how smart you are, one does not simply walk into a h1b Java role. You have to be born in the darkness, molded by it.
Ah yes, the kind of job you can do 9x5 for decades without pressure to use your own time to make sure you are really staying up to date with the fads for your job next year while trying to deliver something stable enough to make it to your last day..
No, the ELI5 is that the companies are posting jobs in a way that makes it very inconvenient to find online or apply for them, to ensure it goes to the H1B visa holder and not to an American national. (actually it's less about filling the job itself and more about the PERM greencard process, but that's not super relevant to the explanation.)
By law, these companies must prove the job cannot be filled by an American in order to hire the visa worker. One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements, or in unlinked and unindexed webpages. That way, the American never knows the job exists, and the company can prove on paper to the Department of Labor that they tried to hire an American but couldn't find one. The InstaCart job posting for example requires resumes to mailed in through the postal service to their immigration department.
The goal of the project is to aggregate these jobs in a place that Americans can find and apply for them. An additional thing to note is that the company MUST respond to the US applicant within 30 days, or the applicant can file an official complaint with the government.
It is entirely relevant to the explanation. PERM and H1B are entirely different processes handled by different departments of the government.
>One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements
That's not some nefarious plot. The government (Dept. of Labor) requires them to post these ads in newspapers. If the government didn't, they wouldn't post these asinine ads.
>That way, the American never knows the job exists
The job does not exist for all practical purposes because there is already someone working in that job. Perhaps your goal is to effect some change so that more Americans get these jobs. This is not the vector of attack though. You want to focus on the root of the problem, namely that corporations are able to hire people at will in the first place. Once they've hired someone, applying to same job is not going to make them fire that person and hire you instead. You want to take the agency away from corporations at inception, so that you can be hired.
I actually saw one of these newspaper advertisements in New Orleans for a New Orleans based company (that had been recently acquired by a big multinational), and attempted to apply. I’m sure they must’ve been incredibly shocked to have a local applicant to reject.
Cool, a job board site where you're guaranteed to be rejected because they are only posting the job to hire an H1B. Is there any legal mechanism in place by which this jams up the company posting these? I don't think so. They'll just say you aren't qualified and move on
Now they have to interview you to determine that you are not.
Ultimately, this is something that the government should be monitoring. It's a legal farce that the system depends on U.S. citizens diligently applying for jobs that both sides know will never result in a job placement.
At least one company I worked at purposefully crafted these job descriptions so that no one would be qualified. They'd find the most obscure parts of our tech stack, require hands on experience with each library, knowledge of our niche, and so on.
You basically had to be already working for us to have the required experience.
The companies are just trying to work with the flawed system that is place. Even if a role is in shortage, it’s impossible for a company by itself to prove that there is a shortage. If in the total market, there are 10000 jobs for “position X” and there are 8000 total US citizens that qualify for that role, if you are a company that has an H1B for the other 2000 positions, there is no way you can prove there is a shortage. The system requires you to put out an advertisement and prove there are no US citizens. The minute you put out a generic requirement, at least the few people from the pool of 8000 will apply even if they are employed in the same role because… drum role…people switch jobs. So even if overall there is a shortage for a specific position, there is no way an individual company can prove it when they are required to actively recruit for the position.
The system is flawed and it forces immigrants and companies to work with the rules that are set. And people who don’t fully understand the system are angry about it.
You have a good point that it's very hard to define a shortage by lack of applications, when there is always a certain amount of churn.
It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test:
1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?
2) Is unemployment in the position both low and remaining flat?
Seems hard to claim a shortage if either of those is false, and there is little gaming to be done for simple government reported labor statistics, recent news notwithstanding.
For tech jobs, the answer to 2 is a resounding no.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream...
> It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test: 1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?
We don’t even know what inflation is anymore
The funny thing is that prevailing wage determination is also done as part of the process and if your wages are lower than median, your application has a higher risk or audit and/or rejection. No reason why you can’t update the process to be more data driven, they already have all the information they need.
If this was to be implemented, you would see a large lobbying effort by the tech companies around how unemployment is calculated and these numbers would end up being under-reported to keep the supply of cheap labor coming in.
You will also start to see people with ties to big tech being hired to actually compile the data.
And that is worse than what you have right now?
The idea of determining skill shortages using data isn’t new, nor is it ineffective. Other countries have been doing it for a while. E.g. New Zealand
It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people say they've never heard of it or don't think it happens, I wonder if they're incredibly naive or being evasive.
In many places it's talked about only by immigration lawyers and people who must be involved.
If you're not very active in recruiting (especially at a sizeable company), it's not hard to be outside of the circles where those conversations are happening.
This happens at a much smaller level too. We knew an au pair that the host family particularly liked, and wanted her long term. A typical au pair contract is for 1 year, maximum is 2. They worked with an immigration attorney to craft a "job" that she was uniquely qualified for, went through the whole dance, and got her into the system. She stayed with them for the next 10 years. They covered room and board, but she worked for free otherwise; getting her in the door and on the way to citizenship was her "pay".
I can’t even tell how this would be different from what is commonly termed as human trafficking.
I do feel a bit bad for H-1Bs. When you think about it, we’re pulling so much top talent out of India. If the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Germany weren’t giving out these visas so easily, maybe India would be in a better position to develop its own economy, infrastructure, and institutions, instead of exporting its workforce. Their best engineers, consultants, analysts, all leaving to work in Western corporations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Deloitte, PNC Bank, Chevron, Shell, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, EY, KPMG, PwC, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Qualcomm, Uber, Cisco, Salesforce, Tesla, Adobe, Intel, Nvidia, Bloomberg, Dell, Visa, British Petroleum, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn, VMware, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Intuit, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, American Express, Stripe, Cigna, meanwhile, their home country loses the people who might be solving real domestic challenges. It’s not ideal. Maybe India could’ve used a few of them.
[dead]
I witnessed employers doing that to get people greencards too. Claim the exact combination of their stack plus experience in the domain is a requirement. Only way to meet that is to have been working the job.
This is referred to as tayloring and it is not allowed. Furthermore you have to have the experience for the job from before you started working for the sponsoring employer, so tayloring can only target your prior experience, not what you learn on the job.
> This is referred to as tayloring and it is not allowed.
Frankly, I'm going to assume that it's not allowed in the same way that speeding is 'not allowed'.
If you get caught you get audits on every single application which means $$$ to lawyers then if you fail audits you get debarred from the program
At least when I went through the process the reqs had to be crafted such that applying h-1b employee needed to possess them before the current gig so unless that has changed in the last 15y I call bullshit on your claim.
The companies do that because they already had an applicant from abroad for this role they accepted. And now they must wait out the period for job posting to be live before inviting the applicant.
The law itself is pretty idiotic. Why would an employer give up a well accustomed well proven candidate for the sake of some random guy, waste money to recruitment and cross fingers that the employee would actually join and perform ?
It is like giving up a lottery ticket you have won for another lottery ticket.
Also, the law mandates certain compliance steps which the employers do. There is no expectation that they should actually hire someone else unless the compliance steps are violated. So everything is working exactly as intended.
This PERM process and law has harmed countless american citizens and employers both. Citizens end up applying for jobs they are not going to get and HR wastes time on resources over candidates they are not going to hire.
A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.
This whole circus can be gotten rid off if you ask me.
>A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.
Huge non-sequitur. Why is this better? Better for whom?
Better for everyone because the talented H1B employee is no longer shackled to their employer and can leave demanding a higher wage and raising wages for everyone.
> can leave demanding a higher wage and raising wages for everyone.
This is simply not believable. More competition for a limited resource (jobs) means lower wages, not higher wages.
I guess you’re proposing eliminating the h1b program to raise wages. That would maybe work but our companies would theoretically be less competitive globally. If we’re going to allow immigration based on professional skills then these people should be fast tracked to having the same employment rights as natives otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages because those that belong to that group will be too risk adverse to ask for more money knowing that they’ll likely have to leave the country if they get let go.
Yes, eliminate H1B.
>otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages
Again, we can just skip the middle-man here and fix wages by ending H1B.
Well you just answered why they don't/won't do this.
The H1B employees being shackled and thus having little to no leverage to demand higher compensation or better working conditions is (from the point of view of the companies abusing the system) a feature of the system, not a bug.
It's the same with most job adverts in the UK, written to satisfy the 3 week listing requirement before the job can be offered to a foreign national.
As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.
Trump is at least taking a step in the right direction by changing the H1-B lottery system to favor more highly paid and skilled candidates, but as you say to remove the current rampant abuse it should be made mandatory to pay more than the market rate for the position.
Personally I'd just scrap the H1-B program altogether, and let the free market sort it out. H1-B is almost as bad as simply exporting jobs via outsourcing. Laws should be made to benefit US citizens, not US companies and shareholders.
H1B is worse than exporting jobs via outsourcing. With outsourcing we are only competing with other countries for jobs, but with H1B we get to compete with other countries for housing (in our own towns) too.
With outsourcing it's basically impossible to compete since the country being outsourced to has lower salaries for a reason - because they have a lower cost of living and people can afford to accept lower salaries. If you are a US citizen facing US cost of living (housing, real estate taxes, college costs, healthcare, etc, etc), then how can you compete with someone who can afford to do the job for way less ?!
At least with the H1-B they are paying US taxes and spending at least something in the US economy, but outsourcing is also taking US corporate profits, mostly coming from US consumers, and sending it overseas to benefit a different country!
Trump has said that US companies should be more patriotic in their hiring, but nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code.
>nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code
Agreed. We need to incentivize the corporate behavior we want and disincentivize or ban the corporate behavior we don't want.
The "best" part about H1-B (from a company's viewpoint) is that it's very difficult to switch jobs if you're on an H1-B. So you basically become an indentured servant, always afraid Da Bossman will fire you and you'll have 30 days to get out of the country. There's no way they can pull such shit on American workers.
That is absolutely not the case today. Also in the spirit of hn pedantism it's H-1B not "H1-B"
that’s not true - it’s pretty easy to switch. Your application does not count against new quota - employer just needs to pay a lawyer to file paperwork and done. Been there, done that.
It’s not easy to switch. I’ve been on this more than a decade ago and if you’re laid off or leave you have 60 days to find something new.
Any job you take you need your new employer to be able to undertake the effort for H1B renewals and the inevitable green card application. There’s big companies that do it and smaller ones that will absolutely refuse to.
Either way an H1B prefers to stick around until the green card is done. They will not willingly prior to that unless they see a much better offer.
It was probably closer to truth 20 years ago just for lack of experience among lawyers and hr but today h-1b transfer is not hard at all.
It may not be hard, but there are no guarantees and a clock is ticking.
Say you lose your job. Boom, the clock starts ticking and now you're in a rush to find an acceptable job that meets the criteria of H1B.
Say your manager mistreats you; denies you promotion, raises, etc. and you want to leave. You can't just quit and start looking. You have to line up something that will come through in 60 days and only then you can be free to quit.
None of these situations apply to citizen or PRs. It tilts the balance definitely to the employer's advantage.
> You can't just quit and start looking.
So? You’re not entitled to always get your favorite thing. Shocking, i know. Get a transfer, then turn in the notice. How hard can that be?
Id argue if you cant just get another job you’re probably not entitled to this visa designed for workers in high demand.
The point is not that the transfer is difficult, the point is that finding a suitable new job in the designated time period has a difficulty you can't predict.
are we talking about just switching or getting fired and trying to find new h-1b job? because these are two completely different procedures from uscis standpoint. the claim about h-1b being "indentured servitude" that people are trying to make usually hinges on it being hard to transfer (which is not the case), not the short grace period after getting fired.
I find it rather strange that you talk about them as if they are two separate things when they are intrinsically linked. You have ~60 days from the date of employment termination to have your work permit transferred or you are out of status, period. Leaving your job (whether via resigning or getting fired or laid off) without something already lined up is thus quite obviously much more risky than it is for someone who doesn't have that sword hanging over their head. I'd sincerely hope it doesn't need explaining how this tilts the balance of power even more in the employer's favour.
> You have ~60 days from the date of employment termination to have your work permit transferred or you are out of status, period.
What the hell else supposed to happen to your temp worker visa when you’re no longer a worker? Are you supposed to just get an immigration hall pass indefinitely?
Same point as in sibling thread - if you cant get a new job lined up while still employed or within 60 days of being laid off, you clearly dont possess "distinguished merit and ability" which is the entire purpose of this visa
You're so close to figuring this out. I believe in you.
I have run across multiple job postings stating that they would not accept applicants needing company support on visas so at a bare minimum they are cut off from that portion of the economy and have a harder time than Americans would
https://www.jobs.now/
Relevant comment by lgleason at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44880832
The H1B system is just so terrible for everyone involved. No job posting requirement for H1B but you have to post the job when someone applies for a green card a decade later?
Agreed that H1B should have better job posting requirements, but this pre-green card check seems like a great mechanism to ensure we're not long-term giving jobs to non-US Nationals
The problem is that temporary worker programs are a bait and switch. It’s impossible to send people back after they’ve been here for a decade. Any notion that the PERM adjustment is another opportunity to double check will be hard to water down the process for the initial H1B visa grant. And then the PERM check will be gamed.
That is, in fact, how the State Department turned the H visa category (created in the 1960s) became a de facto permanent immigration visa long before the 1990 immigration act. It just kept adding administrative exceptions to make it easier for people to stay.
Selecting Other, some interesting jobs description including:
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/151415137-hotel-renovation-special... Must be fluent in Russian. Do you really need to have this to do the job?
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/153205684-senior-director-enrollme... Must have masters in Project Management, IT, Business Administration (pretty broad). Also have 4 years experience in enrollment management systems & operations in higher education setting.
Probably a decent number Americans who could qualify for this.
For the job requiring Russian, that requirement is likely because the owner or hiring manager speaks Russian (the name where to send resumes to is Russian). Should that be a legitimate requirement to allow a visa for someone to work in the US? I cannot speak to that.
It should not. But there is no one vetting the validity of the requirements.
Should it not be? If the criteria is there solely to make sure only his countrymen can get jobs and get to the US then I agree it’s wrong. However if they were willing to hire anyone who spoke Russian regardless of origin then I think the question becomes
“Are people/companies allowed to hire for niche skill sets that fit their specific needs, when it de facto bars 99% of citizens from getting the job?”
I came into the thread to talk about the Russian one, is there any proof that Russian is actually required for the job, or is this a filtering mechanism that they can put in place in order to target the job listing to a specific person?
> is there any proof that Russian is actually required for the job
I suppose I could imagine a construction foreman job that requires Spanish, for the reason that you will be interacting with Mexican labor that doesn't speak English.
But I doubt that Russian-speaking interior fitters in Lynwood don't speak any English.
I think the true selection comes with the requirements. I my country, employers are circumventing the same local-first rule by coming up with the craziest Rube Goldberg requirement contraptions so they hire whoever they want anyway...
I can't figure out how they know the job is related to the PERM program. I looked at a job posting and didn't see an indication, does Jobs.now read from filings with USCIS or DOL?
These jobs are being posted in places that no normal job applicant would look.
I searched for 'go' (expecting there to be too many results -- I usually have to specify 'golang').
I got a single result. For an auto technician.
For Ferraris.
(not kidding: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/150823097-ferrari-classic-master-t...)
Oh, the irony.
As a simple comparison, doing a quick job search for 'golang' on dice.com yields 5k+ jobs. Tell me why I'm going to use jobs.now again?
The only effect of applying to jobs on jobs.now is that someone who is already working in the US on H1-B, and was gonna get green card if you hadn't applied, would instead stay on H1-B.
Another thing is that the company must respond to your application within 30 days. Unlike Indeed or Linkedin applications which simply disappear into a void.
Okay but the 2nd order effect of doing this is that we're not permanently bringing in competitors for US jobs
H1-B visas eventually expire. I think it’s technically a guest worker visa, so the expectation is that the visa holder will go back to their home country after working in the US a few years.
H1-B is an immigrant intent (actually dual intent) visa. I know a lot of Canadians that started working in the US on a TN visa, which doesn't let you ever become a permanent resident. They had to do all the paperwork (and win the lottery) to convert to H1-B status so they could begin the process of getting permanent residency.
To be clear, H1B is not an immigrant intent visa. It’s a non-immigrant visa. “Dual intent” is like Schrödinger's intent. It allows someone who is on a non-immigrant visa to avoid the presumption of immigrant intent that would otherwise apply—rendering them deportable—when they apply for a green card.
The statutory protection for H1Bs is thin. In 1990, Congress excluded H1B from the requirement applicable to other non-immigrants that they retain a foreign residence, and from the rebuttal presumption that someone who applies for a green card has immigrant intent. That’s it. The common operation of H1B as being an immigrant-intent visa is mostly a matter of administrative grace.
H1-Bs are indefinitely renewable as long as you keep your job.
No. They are indefinitely renewable only if a GC application is pending. Otherwise, they expire after two terms i.e. six years.
It's six years in total, excluding time spent outside the US. The status is valid for at most three calendar years, but it can be shorter for fixed-term positions. And you can renew it as long as your total time in the US is less than 6 years.
I was on H-1B at a university where researcher appointments were nominally from July of year N to June of year N+2. But if you didn't start in July, your second appointment might be only 1 year, for some bureaucratic reasons. And you had to renew the H-1B for each appointment. I had five H-1Bs in total over ~7 years.
Yeah, well, won't matter. Those H-1B jobs are full on Java with the most vile old school stacks you can imagine.
Edit:
I'm mostly saying it because everyone now days thinks every tech job is some html and javascript and anyone can pick it up. Doesn't matter how smart you are, one does not simply walk into a h1b Java role. You have to be born in the darkness, molded by it.
There is a single job posting on jobs.now for Java. Posted 3 weeks ago.
I don't think this is succeeding even as a jobs site.
Ah yes, the kind of job you can do 9x5 for decades without pressure to use your own time to make sure you are really staying up to date with the fads for your job next year while trying to deliver something stable enough to make it to your last day..
So the narrative of this site is that they think recruiters are doing a poor job of spamming me with positions that nobody wants?
I mean, hiring is down -- but I still get those spam messages.
(And spoiler alert: I still don't want those positions)
No, the ELI5 is that the companies are posting jobs in a way that makes it very inconvenient to find online or apply for them, to ensure it goes to the H1B visa holder and not to an American national. (actually it's less about filling the job itself and more about the PERM greencard process, but that's not super relevant to the explanation.)
By law, these companies must prove the job cannot be filled by an American in order to hire the visa worker. One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements, or in unlinked and unindexed webpages. That way, the American never knows the job exists, and the company can prove on paper to the Department of Labor that they tried to hire an American but couldn't find one. The InstaCart job posting for example requires resumes to mailed in through the postal service to their immigration department.
The goal of the project is to aggregate these jobs in a place that Americans can find and apply for them. An additional thing to note is that the company MUST respond to the US applicant within 30 days, or the applicant can file an official complaint with the government.
>but that's not super relevant to the explanation
It is entirely relevant to the explanation. PERM and H1B are entirely different processes handled by different departments of the government.
>One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements
That's not some nefarious plot. The government (Dept. of Labor) requires them to post these ads in newspapers. If the government didn't, they wouldn't post these asinine ads.
>That way, the American never knows the job exists
The job does not exist for all practical purposes because there is already someone working in that job. Perhaps your goal is to effect some change so that more Americans get these jobs. This is not the vector of attack though. You want to focus on the root of the problem, namely that corporations are able to hire people at will in the first place. Once they've hired someone, applying to same job is not going to make them fire that person and hire you instead. You want to take the agency away from corporations at inception, so that you can be hired.
I actually saw one of these newspaper advertisements in New Orleans for a New Orleans based company (that had been recently acquired by a big multinational), and attempted to apply. I’m sure they must’ve been incredibly shocked to have a local applicant to reject.
Cool, a job board site where you're guaranteed to be rejected because they are only posting the job to hire an H1B. Is there any legal mechanism in place by which this jams up the company posting these? I don't think so. They'll just say you aren't qualified and move on
Just tell them you are qualified.
Now they have to interview you to determine that you are not.
Ultimately, this is something that the government should be monitoring. It's a legal farce that the system depends on U.S. citizens diligently applying for jobs that both sides know will never result in a job placement.