Personally, given the state of unemployment in the tech sector right now, I think it should be virtually impossible to fill a PERM right now because pretty much any position could be filled with a US LPR or citizen and the only reason it isn't is because the whole process is deliberately obfuscated or artificial barriers are put up purposefully to disqualify candidates.
I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.
> I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years.
This is a very SW mindset, and makes no sense in other circumstances.
If my company canceled a large SW project, and laid off a lot of SW folks, why should that prevent them from sponsoring someone to work on nanoelectronics?
Because companies should be held accountable when they make mistakes in hiring. The employees shouldn’t have to bear the burden of their employers mistakes.
If you need to hide your job postings on an internal physical caulk board in a basement and post them in only physical copies of The Columbus Dispatch then it should be pretty clear you're not following the spirit of the program. If, even after doing that, you then disqualify candidates for pretty fake reasons and you somehow still have qualified candidates so you pull the position and try again in 6-12 months then you should absolutely fail a USCIS audit and you should lose your privileges for hiring foreign workers and sponsoring people for residency, at least for a time.
Legitimate employers and jobs can't get a visa in the H1B lottery because of widespread visa abuse. People from certain countries (particularly India) have to wait 10-15+ years because of abuse of the system. Fake employers with H1B schemes, bodyshops that really pay below prevailing wage and can keep Indian-born people as effectively indentured servants, spamming the system with H1B applications because they don't really care how many they get.
We're in permanent layoff culture now where pretty much every sufficiently-sized employer will probably fire 5-10% of their staff every year while still hiring people. This is to suppress wages and make people do more work for free. There should be a cost to this.
If you're an immigrant, a completely arbitrary layoff can be devastating. You have a short period to find a new job and if you don't, you have to leave the country. Employers who will do that to immigrants shouldn't be alloweed to hire immigrants.
You can be both pro-immigration and anti-immigration abuse.
Well, the abuse is mostly happening for the benefit of people from India.
But yes, it sucks that the "good" people from India have to wait a long time because of the system being abused to get the "not-so-good" Indians.
Keep in mind, though, that you're conflating H1-B with PERM. There isn't a 10-15 year wait for H1-B.
certain employers can use h1bs to fill specific employment needs really well, and have a ton of experience with both sourcing foreign labour and matching it to work that needs doing in the US.
its doing exactly what the program is looking for, filling a labour quantity at the price employers are looking for.
The US government is optimizing for being able to do some volume of technical work, and the the h1 is intended to make sure that the industry isnt limited by labour availability. its not particularly abusive to do that in an efficient way where the same h1b can serve many businesses
the alternative thats coming is going to be moving a lot of the work to india and instead having the local engineers be liasons for where the real work is happening
people in india havw to wait long periods because the green card system of country limits has no per capita normalization, not because of h1 visa abuse. its sheer volume of good people working for american companies in america, wanting to stay in america. Your anti-abuse metrics will bring it down from 15 years to 13 or 14. not a meaningful difference
If the customers for these bodyshops could save money by outsourcing directly to India, they would've already.
And beyond those big bodyshops you have any number of smaller H1B fraud schemes eg [1][2][3][4].
If you're Indian-born and are waiting 10-15+ years for your green card then you should be mad about these companies because they're making your life more difficult.
> The US government is optimizing for being able to do some volume of technical work, and the the h1 is intended to make sure that the industry isnt limited by labour availability
First, I disagree with this claim. The US government is optimizing to suppress wages.
Second, when there's significant unemployment in the sector then there is by definition availability. It further goes to my argument that the main purpose is to suppress wages.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/east-bay-men-plead-guil...
[2]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/h-1b-visa-fraud...
[3]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/executives-staffing-compa...
[4]: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/sunnyvale-man-to-serve-1...
Humans aren't fungible.
> given the state of unemployment in the tech sector right now, I think it should be virtually impossible to fill a PERM right now because pretty much any position could be filled with a US LPR or citizen
are crazy deluded about the quality of the average US citizen software engineering job applicant vs the quality of the person doing that job. Or you haven't ever actually done hiring for a big tech company (who use most of the H1B and perm processes).
I'm not saying Americans are dumb. But the average CS graduate from an average or low tier college in the US (of which there are many many many) is not as good of a hire as the average int'l MSCS degree holder. There's obvious statistical reasons for this: namely the int'l is likely richer in his/her country than the average US citizen is here bc that person can afford to pay for a degree here and move here and get in here.
But this perspective treats these jobs as if they are factory jobs that as long as the position is filled, money can be made and that's not true in software engineering. The quality matters and it's one of many things the PERM process wasn't built to handle and which also many people don't understand who haven't done this hiring process