While visiting a Maker Faire in my area last week I happened upon a Cognizant booth staffed entirely by 30-something Indians. While they showed my daughter how to make a windsock out of duct-tape, one of their number told me about his background and their difficulty being separated from their family back home and why it is still a better choice than living in India.
As I listened the term "Digital Sharecroppers" came unbidden to mind. But this is worse than sharecropping because an H-1B worker can't switch employers.
What Cognizant and the rest of the H-1B abusers are doing is exploiting the promise/hope of US Citizenship while suppressing near-term wages (and the value of the citizenship they use as a lure), with indentured servants.
Cringely is right. The E2-B program is an appropriate alternative. Another good option would be the Entrepreneur Visa. I say trade an Entrepreneur Visa program which creates new jobs in exchange for killing the H-1B visa which only suppresses wages and supports corporate dinosaurs trying to cut their bottom line rather than actually innovating.
H1-B visa holders (like myself) can and do switch employers. Granted, you need to find an employer willing to take sponsorship of your visa, but this poses significantly less paperwork and expense for the new employer than the original sponsorship does. The entire process can be arranged between the visa holder and the new employer, which means the existing employer doesn't need to be notified in advance [1] and can't interfere.
I can't speak to other locales, but in the Bay Area I've found no shortage of employers willing to take sponsorship of an H1-B visa holder. Not all such companies are willing or able to then sponsor a green card if the employee wishes to stay in the US permanently, but many of the larger companies will also do this.
It can get a little ropey towards the end of the H1-B period - some companies will not hire people who are down to only one or two years on their visa. So, if you want to stay then after the first few years in the country, you'll need to start thinking about finding a place that will sponsor your green card.
[1] This does, unfortunately, mean that it's not always possible to give as much notice as one would like. Nonetheless, the standard courteous notice period in the US seems to be about 2 weeks - much less than the 4-6 weeks common overseas - and most new employers are okay with that.
I personally knew an H-1B holder that was ratted out to their current employer by an unscrupulous HR department as punishment for not taking a poor offer and refusing to switch! His "punishment" lasted years and definitely affected his income. I say the term "indentured servant" definitely applies.
Cringely doesn't understand the difference between immigrant and non-immigrant visas if he recommends the EB-2 as an alternative to the H-1B. The EB-2 is a green card application for a foreign worker who wants to live in the US permanently; the H-1B is for people who just want to work in the US for some period of time. All countries have similar distinctions between workers and long-term residents, and confusing them is a strong indicator that the writer doesn't know what he is talking about.
Cringely is also wrong in at least one important respect about the EB-2 visa: its numbers do indeed fill up every year, just like for the H-1B, for Indian and Chinese applicants. So if you file an EB-2 based visa application this year, it will take you about 10 years to receive your EB-2 based green card if you are Indian, and 5 years if you are Chinese. The US Government was, as of February 2015, processing EB-2 applications received in September 2005 for Indian applicants, for example [1].
Is Cringely then suggesting that companies wait 5-10 years for new foreign employees to join them?
I've posted about this before on Hacker News, but it's a common misconception here that H-1B workers are somehow "indentured", or that they cannot switch employers. Under the AC-21 act of 2000 [2], H-1B employees can switch employers with a single H-1B transfer filing, and even start working at their new employer while their H-1B transfer application to their new employer is in process. Further, the H-1B transfer application is not subject to the yearly cap (which has been regularly reached in recent years), so there is almost no chance of it being denied. In practice, this means that H-1B workers have as much job mobility as native American workers.
The bad actors in the H-1B program are indeed the Indian outsourcing companies, which need to be investigated and punished for violations of the program, including paying below market wages. But there are many more good actors who use the H-1B program extensively -- Google, Facebook, and similar reputable American tech companies -- and they don't use it because they underpay their employees, but because they can't find enough qualified employees even given their high wages. There was a recent post on HN about the very high salaries paid by these companies to their H-1B employees, as disclosed in their H-1B visa applications.
Summary: For someone who claims to have written a long running series on the H-1B program, Cringely is disappointingly misinformed. The H-1B program has violations, which need to be properly investigated, but the EB-2 is not even close to a viable replacement for it. H-1B employees are not indentured labor and have high job mobility, except in the case of a few large outsourcing companies which do indeed deserve to be punished.
Cringely singles out the H-1B abusers to whom I and you refer, and that pay substandard wages, not Google, et al..
Also, switching employers is encumbered if there is any risk of deportation without continuous employment which "vosper" (see peer comment to yours) notes IS a growing risk as the H-1B ages. This is the "indenture" effect in question.
Lastly, H-1B workers working for the aforementioned abusing employers accept their lower wages and often poor conditions because of the hope that once in the USA they will find a Green Card sponsor. This makes the H-1B equivalent to the EB-2 when speaking of the abusing employers to which Cringely refers.
Indeed - this is a pretty basic mistake. Also, note that the government recently lifted the blanket ban on spouses of H1-B's holding employment in the USA (which was for me and many others a factor in choosing an L1 intracompany transfer visa rather than a more portable H1-B when I moved here). The H1-B can also lead to a green card too (given time), so workers on it are by no means locked in.
As I listened the term "Digital Sharecroppers" came unbidden to mind. But this is worse than sharecropping because an H-1B worker can't switch employers.
What Cognizant and the rest of the H-1B abusers are doing is exploiting the promise/hope of US Citizenship while suppressing near-term wages (and the value of the citizenship they use as a lure), with indentured servants.
Cringely is right. The E2-B program is an appropriate alternative. Another good option would be the Entrepreneur Visa. I say trade an Entrepreneur Visa program which creates new jobs in exchange for killing the H-1B visa which only suppresses wages and supports corporate dinosaurs trying to cut their bottom line rather than actually innovating.