August 14, 2005

• Actually, if these people who are nominally getting turned away are the best in their fields, they'll be using the O visa category, not the H, which is designed for "professional" workers who have jobs requiring a bachelor's degree for entry into the field. If they're being transferred by their company, they'll probably look at one of the L-1 visas (intracompany transfer). Or they'll wait until the new fiscal year begins on October 1 to join the payroll. If they don't get hired because of the visa cap, they probably weren't the geniuses or bests in their field, because someone will figure out how to get them in under another visa category if they're really that good. "We've hit the H-1B visa cap! The sky is falling!" articles so rarely have anything to do with the reality of how companies get visas. why yes, I did used to work as a paralegal in the field; why do you ask?
• OK, so CIS is now saying it's the FY 2006 visas that they're out of (PDF). That's bizarre. They didn't allow people to petition that far in advance for the numbers when they ran dry early before the cap temporarily increased in the late 90s. It also explains why I thought we'd run out of H-1B numbers for FY 2005 a few months back. There's definitely going to be a lot of scrambling to classify workers under alternative categories. Apparently the breakup of the INS didn't get rid of asshat INS management. Odds are pretty good someone will introduce a bill to increase the cap again, even if it goes nowhere.
• Paralegal person, can you be my friend?
• You don't happen to have experience in British immigration, do you imm[igration]lass? Because I could certainly use some advice before I go insane... I don't know the O-visa category, but I know that visa problems for professors and actual experts in their field are few and far between. Academia, at least, is an international job market, particularly for the better known universities.
• My only significant experience with British immigration is the visitor end. When I was a teenager, living over there with my parents, the lawyers got their stay extended and didn't notice that mine had been inadvertently overlooked (at least I assume so; why the Home Office would want to deny me when extending my parents' stay isn't clear) and I had hell getting out of the country the next time because I was an overstayer at 14 or 15. O is for extraOrdinary workers and a real expert in any field should be able to get one. jb, if you need a recommendation for an attorney, email me (in my profile) and I'll talk to my former boss to see if he can find you a British immigration lawyer. I'm pretty sure he knows somebody who does that kind of work.
• I don't know if I really need, or can afford, a lawyer. I'm applying for a settlement via as a spouse. My biggest problem is timing - can't send in the paperwork until I have my marriage certificate, which is stuck in Canada, but I need to leave the US by September 15, and the process takes 3 weeks. Plus, my plan to visit home (Canada) and go straight there might not be possible - I may have to enter from the US. I'm phoning on Monday. I do have the ability to enter the UK without a visa for 6 months, since I have my own money (research grant) and don't plan to work, but it would be sucky to loose the $500 I've paid the consulate already, and to have to leave the country and apply again. I was (mostly) joking about advice, but I would like to ask - what do you know about visa expeditors? Are they above board? Can they really get your visa in a matter of days? It all seems so shady.
• Also - did anyone notice Scary Corn Imp posts but never comments? We don't bite, you know.
• We never really dealt with expeditors, jb, so I can't tell you anything about them. Normally we did petitions and prepped all the paperwork for the visa application based on the approved petition so that the applicant could go in with a complete package. My boss went across the border (from Houston) a couple of times to help applicants who had to go out of the country, but in most cases we only handled visa renewals and that was through the State Department. IIRC, State doesn't allow in-country renewals any more. I'll keep my monkey fingers crossed for you and Dreadnought.
• ...visa problems for professors and actual experts in their field are few and far between... If we are only talking about world-famous leading researchers, I'm sure people can always find ways to get them in. But I think US visas, in academia at least, can still be a serious issue. I've heard many stories of (for example) would-be visiting professors having to cancel their trips to the US at the last minute due to visa problems. A friend of mine was offered a job at a (major) US university only to have the offer withdrawn the moment some visa question was raised.
• H1Bs aren't about getting the best people into the US. H1Bs are about driving down the cost of labour in the US by bloating the employment pool with bonded workers. flongj: Yeah, but what sort of concerns were they? It seems to me (from stories I've heard) that there are plenty of chances to lose a visa for all sorts of political reasons.
• flongj - that is true. The concerns can be just as simple as not having the right paperwork in time (I have that problem myself). When I wrote that comment, I was thinking of the many Americans at Canadian universities and vice versa, but I realise now that they would be eligible for a unique visa status under NAFTA.
• H1Bs are about driving down the cost of labour in the US I was wondering how the union/protectionist apologists would spin this one. Thanks.
• Actually, most unionists I have talked to are concerned about the fact that the H1B visa puts the employee in a very vulerable position. Their visa is dependent on their working for a specific employer - they cannot leave that employer, or they lose their visa, even if the employer is abusive or at fault. Unions exist to negotiate out conditions for employees, who otherwise are in too unequal a position with their employer to negotiate. Their agenda is that of the employees they represent, which is exactly as it should be. I don't know when it was that people started acting like unions should be looking out for anyone else, or that it was wrong for employees to seek to have some negotiating power with employers, who are naturally always more powerful on an individual basis.
• Then your union members are out of sync with their bosses, because organized labor is one of the strongest anti-immigration lobbies in the USA. I wish it were otherwise.
• The only industry I know is the IT industry (and that as a spouse :) and I know when we were there, the H1B didn't limit the employee to one employer, not even in the sense of complicating the process of shifting employers. Rather, employers were jumping over themselves to poach good developers from one company to another, covering all visa transfer costs (which I think was around $2000 and a matter of weeks to do all the paperwork). Mike (aka #2, who was an H1B-er) says it was pretty standard for the employer to cover the cost. The biggest issue I see with the H1B is that it does have the potential to pull down standard salary in a given industry. The minimum a company is required to pay an H1B-status employee is either $50k or $60k/year (I can't recall which right now) and to a recently qualified graduate that seems a fortune, but in the IT industry it's a pittance. A company stands to save money in the long run by hiring as many H1Bs as possible and avoiding US citizens who would expect a salary more in line with the industry. In other words, my knowledge of the H1B is in line with the linked article and hence adds nothing to this discussion. Ignore me, I should have read the link sooner. /eyeroll Of course, most H1B possibles might have the sense to research the median starting salary in their respective industry; we didn't.
• Taking a somewhat broader perspective, might it not be rather a good thing if the US stopped using its money to grab skilled and talented people from the less fortunate countries which actually produced them?
• tracicle: I don't know when your spouse worked in the US, but I'm guessing it was the salad days of the late 90s. It was standard at the time when money was easy to cover the costs, but I think you're less likely to see that now unless the company is pretty big or wants the worker pretty badly. Some companies solve the problem by simply not hiring workers without the right to work in the US. (And yeah, that $50-60K prevailing wage was low for good developers in CA in the late 90s. I did some of that prevailing wage research and you can get those numbers, but I also know what kinds of money my friends out there were making.) One of the reasons for that is that fees have gone up a lot. Check out the CIS fee page for the H-1B petition and look at the H-1B-specific fees and you'll see that you're at a minimum of $685 in fees alone now, plus expedited processing costs. What bugs me about the H-1B program is not that it undermines wages (although it does, often by undermining labor mobility) but that some of the political backers of the program lie about what it's supposed to do. The H-1B exists independently of the F-1 (student visa) and permanent residence (green card) but if you look at guys like the Club for Growth, they're pretty blunt about F-1 leading to H-1B leading to green card and the whole thing being a pipeline for permanent employment-based immigration. That's legal under dual intent but I don't think most people outside the industry or the political circles where this is discussed a lot think about the program that way. Monkey #2's case is not terribly unusual, but it's not terribly usual either. The labor immobility question is partially about the green card. Since it takes years to process the petition and the followup paperwork, and it's employment-based, the worker is stuck in the job for all that time. If salary and benefit increases mostly come from job-hopping--and my experience as a tech writer and from watching spouse & close friends in the field is that they do--being stuck in a job for 4 or 5 years is a sure way to lose out on them.
• Since it takes years to process the petition and the followup paperwork, and it's employment-based, the worker is stuck in the job for all that time. This was definitely true for us and the sole reason we didn't apply for green card status aside from the Lottery, which gives you a tiny chance without as much hassle.
• Here's an article on how to change the H visa from one of the immigration law portals I read. Worth reading if you're interested in the topic.
• Here's an article on a case of cumbersome US visa procedures preventing positive international academic activity, if anyone's interested. Whoa.. excessive alliteration accidental. (It's NYTimes, sorry if the registration is a problem for anyone.)
• Oh - yes, I'd forgotten. I have no idea why (it isn't exactly a Muslim majority country), but Chinese students and scholars have been getting screwed by INS over visas. People here fear returning home because they might not get approval to come back.
• but Chinese students and scholars have been getting screwed by INS over visas. UK is probably pretty happy about that, since it means there's been a pretty massive influx of Chinese students coming in here since 2001.