Month: June 2007

The washington post is running an article on the impact of immigration on the DC area. America has always been called the mixing pot of the world, for the metro DC area this is especially true. I came to the US as part of the IT Boom in the in the late nineties. The first company I worked for was a micro united nations. You would walk down the corridor and would see people from china, mexico, india, uk, germany, and the us. We some times joked that the us team members were our token americans. We were all young, and starting a new life in a different place.

I don’t think I will ever work in an other company that is so culturally diverse ever again. If for no other reason than it is harder for non us citizens to come to the us on a temporary work visa.

cnet reported that a Cambridge, Mass company is having to pay back 2.4 million to 607 workers who were paid below the prevailing wage. In order for a US company to hire an H1b person they must pay them a similar wage to a US employee. This is supposed to mean that H1b workers aren’t brought into the country as cheap labor. If you take the 2.4 million and divide it between the 600 workers you come up with about $4000 per person. The Department of labor website doesn’t mention how they were able to detect this underpayment but my guess is it was related to employees not being paid when they are on the bench i.e. didn’t have work to do since calculating the prevailing wage is hard.

US companies don’t like employees to talk about how much employees earn which makes it very hard for an H1b employee to know if they are being paid at a lower wage or not. The opposite is not true for US employees, if a company applies for a new H1b visa they must post in a public location copies of the application for other employees to review. This can be very interesting reading if you company hires a lot of foreign nationals. It also means you can view what the current new hire wage is.

It has been interesting hearing the media coverage of the debate on the immigration laws being worked on at the moment. I saw this on cnet and started reading thinking I would hear the same argument that the new points system for green cards are bad for business since they won’t be able to bring in the right people. This is way it started but did at least go on to explain H1b visas.

The media coverage I have been hearing is very misleading they make it sound like an employer is going to have to use the new points system for bringing the right people into the county. The first thing to remember it is very very rare that a company will sponsor a green card for an employee not working in the US since it can end up taking three or more years to get. Instead they bring them into the country on an H1B specialst worker visa or an L1 inter company transfer visa. An H1b is good for up to 6 years. For companies it is going to be, if anything easier to bring a new employee to the US since the proposal is going to increase the number of H1b visas available per year.

What I think business is complaining about, is that if it is harder to get perminant residancy then people won’t want to come to the US.

I am not a huge fan of a visa or greencard appliction being tied to single company, since it opens up the employee to abuse by the employer. I think the point system potentially could be a fairer approach. However being able to covert from an H1b to a greencard is a key part of attracting talented people to work and stay in US.

Fortunately I am out of the immigration waiting game. I was able to get a greencard after getting married. Giving me the chance to abandon my work based application and change jobs.