Silicon Valley and Foreign Talent — Setting the Record Straight

Whenever H-1B visas or visa holders are in the news, it’s usually in a bad light. Just a few days ago, an article got published in the Los Angeles Times outlining several common criticisms. Namely that there is no actual necessity for skilled immigrant workers in STEM, that H-1B visas are mainly used to take jobs from Americans because companies don’t want to pay the high wages, and that the visa holders cannot and do not want to speak English.

Being an immigrant myself, I feel the need to set the record straight. Therefore, I ask you to let me shed some light on the other side’s perspective. The way the story is usually told, there is an army of mindless automatons, mostly from a certain populous developing economy, lining up to take planes to the US and start replacing honest, hard-working Americans. The truth is, however, a bit more complicated than that.

First of all, getting an H-1B visa is not all that easy. It is only possible to apply for it if you have a job offer, and a job offer can only be obtained if the company is willing to sponsor the visa. There is a legal obligation for the company to pay for both the legal and the procedural fees. This is the first hurdle. Another factor standing in the way of a foreign worker and a US company is that H-1B applications can only be filed annually, typically on April 1st. Then comes the lottery. In 2015, there have been 230,000 applications, whereas the cap is at 85,000. That’s a 37% chance of passing the lottery, never mind that you have to be approved by USCIS afterward, which is not guaranteed, either. This means that for the employer, the chances of having wasted a good chunk of money are 63%.

This cap does not apply to all H-1Bs. Academic institutions such as colleges are exempt from it, which means that they can hire as many foreign nationals as they like. Typically, they will be people from other countries who came to study to the US and then accept a job in the faculty. However, considering any university’s preferential treatment for its own graduates, let’s take into account the following: Unless you’re a US citizen or permanent resident, you’re ineligible for FAFSA or student loans, and scholarships hardly cover tuition. You could work on the side to pay for college, but you can’t, because the student visa only allows a certain maximum amount of work. If you have too many internships, you void your right to work in the US for one year after you graduate. Which is why in order to attend college as a foreign national, you have to prove sufficient funds before the university issues you a student visa, thus effectively filtering international students by income. Usually, the people who seek to work in America in the hopes of a better life are not the ones with sufficient funds to be international students. Hence, back to the cap scenario.

Assuming the company has filed the application and even against the 63%-odds, the visa application of the future employee does go through — they cannot starting working until October 1st. So the employer is spending money which they are more likely to lose than not on an employee that’s not gonna be able to start until six months later, if at all.

Most companies are unfamiliar with the process, so they don’t want to even bother with foreign employees in the first place. (Granted, there are a few big companies that have learned to abuse the system, but the vast majority of foreign hopefuls are people like you and me, people who simply want to work for a regular company in Silicon Valley.) The few companies that find an employee they really want to hire, upon finding out about the procedure, decide to forgo that employee after all. So even so much as getting a job offer as a foreign worker is extremely hard, because not only do you have to convince an employer to sponsor you against the odds, you also have to get that job offer in time to file the visa application. If that isn’t a deterrent from hiring foreign workers, I don’t know what is. To even get an employer to go that far for you, you have to be amazing in your field, which is not usually the type to go for low wages. In fact, H-1B is one of the few visas where immigrants are not bound to a specific company. So if you feel like you’re getting abused or not getting paid enough, just interview at a different company, and once you have a better offer, switch.

One may ask: if it’s so hard for foreigners to go through the H-1B process, why even bother in the first place? These people leave their home country, their friends, their family and their relationships behind, all in pursuit of one thing: the dream that is all Americans’ congenital right, which foreigners dream since childhood to achieve. They are willing to abandon everything to venture into the unknown, to embrace the American Dream. And I think I speak for most people that upon arriving in the US, hardly anybody looks back.

Once you’re here, you start building up a new routine. New friends, new activities, new relationships. You don’t have to adapt to American culture because you’ve been following it for as long as you have had conscious memory. Suddenly, you are where all the movies and shows are filmed, you are where books are written about. One criticism of H-1B workers is that their English skills are tenuous at best — which is why I am penning this op-ed article, thank you very much.

Every day you fall more in love with the country, and yet every day you are also reminded how fragile your situation is. As an H-1B visa holder, should you lose your job, you have two days to get a new one. If you don’t, you have to pack your stuff and leave the country. Leave your friends, your significant other — everything. So you have to make damn sure that you never get fired. Ever.

Even so, your visa can only be extended a limited number of times. The maximum total duration of an H-1B visa is six years, which means five extensions. After that, you have to leave and apply for a new one, where you are faced with even worse odds, because while the number of applications keeps growing year by year, the cap remains stable. Usually, if your company was willing to sponsor your work visa, they tend to also file for a green card as soon as you get your visa, which puts you on a very long waiting list. All you can do is hope that your spot arrives before your visa expires.

Then, once you have your green card, it’s only five more years until you are eligible for naturalization. You’re not worried about the test because you’ve been acing all the questions since before you even applied for the visa. Ask any naturalized immigrant, and they will tell you that the day they received their American passport was the happiest of their lives. In fact, naturalized Americans are the most patriotic citizens this country has. They demonstrate this patriotism not by exclaiming that this country is for Americans and Americans only, and that foreigners shouldn’t be coming here, stealing everybody’s jobs. They demonstrate their patriotism by being the most appreciative of the amazing, unparalleled opportunities this unique country offers them. They demonstrate it by being the demographic with the lowest crime rate. That’s right: first-generation immigrants commit less crime than even the elderly (source).

It also so happens that legal immigrants are some of the most vocal people to speak out against illegal immigrants. Personally, I am not sure that’s the right thing to do. The reason I don’t think that legal immigrants should antagonize illegal ones is possibly my background. I’m a software engineer. Whenever you hit a brick wall in programming, the first thing you do is consult Google. One of the first links is typically StackOverflow, a website where programmers ask questions and others respond with possible solutions. Most of the problems you face as a software engineer, others have already faced, too, and the solutions are posted online. However, every once in a while you encounter a problem that, even though others may have encountered it, too, appears to be yet unsolved. If you really need to find a solution, eventually, you invariably will. And then, what do you do? Do you say, “I’ve had to work so hard to find this solution, others should work at least just as hard as me, or it won’t be fair otherwise,” or do you say, “I’m so glad I have found this solution! I will contribute to the community and help everybody else by posting it online for the whole world to see.” (Hint: it’s the latter.)

The same should hold true with immigration. Just because what you had to do was hard, doesn’t mean it should be hard for everybody. America is a country of immigrants, and antagonizing people whose biggest crime is having been born in the wrong country goes against her very founding spirit. By the end of the day, in our hearts, we’re all Americans.