Nah. The “friction” is overstated. H1Bs face the same labor conditions as rest of the folks. When the market is great, you can shop around and make a lot of money. When the market is bad and you stay put, most of the other employees are doing the same. The caveat: I’m not talking about the consultancies that abuse the system, which we can all agree are bad and their employees usually will have a hard time finding other roles.
If you get fired or laid off, you only have 60 days to find a new job or be deported. Also depending on where you are in the green card process, you can lose your place.
This creates an incentive for H-1B workers to tolerate working conditions that American workers wouldn't.
Maybe we should fix that instead.
Even the playing field for all, so there's no real incentive to hire H1B over a citizen. They can still hire H1Bs where the is a real shortage of talent. By providing H1Bs a bigger timeline like maybe up to a year to find employment in cases of layoffs, they won't be forced into crappier working conditions.
Again, if you have terrible work conditions, you as an H1B have the same options as US citizens. You look for a different job and maybe suck it up for a couple of months, just like a US citizen would.
And while yes, if have an ongoing green card process which takes 12-18 months, you may have an incentive to stick around to see it to completion, anyone who has their I-140, does not actually “lose their place” in the green card process. They can file for a new I140 and retain their place in the queue by retaining the priority date from the previous application.
If you think US citizens don’t stick around for a bit in a shitty job for a variety of reasons, then you’d be lying. People (including US citizens) don’t just quit jobs whenever they want without a plan like you’re making it sound. At least not ones that carry a reasonable wage, health insurance and other benefits. Again, all with the caveat of me not talking about consulting firms, which obviously don’t exactly have the best workplace environments.
That’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, which is what I meant by depending on where they are in the process.
You have 2 employees at the same company in a bad job market.
If employee A gets laid off or fired, he has enough savings for a 2 year job search and can pay for COBRA for 18 months.
If employee B gets fired or laid off, he has 60 days to find a job and make it through the hiring process.
There’s been 1 round of layoffs and there are rumors there might be another. The boss asks both of them to put in extra hours, which one is more likely to say no?
In a bad job market, a person with a mortgage and 4 people on their health insurance will work the same amount as someone who has 60 days to look for a different job. Paying COBRA for 18 months is wildly expensive and 2 years of job search is not an easy option as you’re making it out to be. It’s a hypothetical and most people won’t willingly put themselves in that situation.
And FYI, you have 60 days to search for jobs but you can convert to B visas and continue your job search for another year. USCIS has clarified that, so H1Bs are also not that constrained as you’re making it out to be.
If you are on a visitor visa you can't work. An American worker has many many more options. They can take contract work while they job hunt. They can work anywhere they want not just the limited subset of companies will to sponsor them. They can get unemployment. If all else fails they can temporarily work in the service industry.
A large percentage of American workers have a spouse who also works full time whose health insurance they can switch too. If a company fires an H-1B employee they can also withdraw their I-40, which means their spouse will lose their work authorization.
>Paying COBRA for 18 months is wildly expensive
It's $400-$700 a month on average for an individual. More expensive for people with families, but as I discussed above in the majority of families, both parents work.
Someone here on a visitor visa also doesn't qualify for any ACA subsidies that an American scraping by on contract work while job searching would qualify for.
At a population level, if you divide people into 2 groups. And you add significant extra consequences to being fired to group B, group B will work harder to avoid being fired all else being equal.
As someone who's gone from being on H-1Bs for 3 different companies to being a citizen, I can definitely say things were notably worse on the H-1Bs (in terms of feelings of safety and flexibility).
The stress level related to immigration status, whether or not it was worth risking a change, etc, was way higher.
