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-   -   H1B visa -Your Experience (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/21519-h1b-visa-your-experience-18.html)

Good point on the USD 25000 rule.
I believe custom duty for one time imports in India and 'income tax' for persons working in US may be equated.

Again - I am not try to justify anything or oppose anything, just pondering whether my thoughts are correct , and if not what are schools of thought are there.

How so? Both citizens and non-citizens pay income tax. But only imports pay custom duty.

What do you mean? Obviously H1B person can buy property. And vote is not a benefit, but a duty. When you work in any country, all taxes must be paid. But you don't have to do jury duty, drafted into the army, etc.

Countries/Businesses always want access to free market, but don't want to provide free market. :)

Businesses will call any restrictions on globalization as stupid because it affects profit. Forbes is a business magazine.

True - what i meant to say is that if there is 1 position for a job, and a foreigner gets it, he too is paying tax. So the country is not losing any revenue from income tax.
In case of something being bought from abroad for personal consumption, govt loses the revenue (sales tax/vat etc) it would have otherwise charged on domestically made product, and hence compensates for the same by charging a customs duty.

I should have worded my post carefully - not 'cannot buy' but 'generally do not buy', as I have seen. Most buy property after GC.


True.

I, and I am sure thousands of other Indians here, have been longing for this part:
Hopefully this will put an end to years and years of waiting for those who have applied for employment based immigrant visas.

Couldn't agree more.

I have bought a house even though I am on L1. I know many of my colleagues and friends who are on H1B and have purchased houses.

So this means GC processing time reduced right?


My bad - I do not know anyone.

I am also struck by the timing of this bill. Since this is introduced in the congress at the same time as the Trump's muslim ban, all the traditional US supporters of H1-B (read as US IT giants) are busy protesting muslim ban. By sheer contrast with the muslim ban, the H1-B restriction bill will hardly have any opponents.

The 'Travel Ban' has amassed larger vocal crowd support coz of the politics + liberal discontent with the present administration.

On the other hand, the H1-B bill, will have silent(behind the scene) and influential opponents in the IT and allied Industry lobbies. Having said that, the Trump administration banning the political lobbies in the hill might have some impact on this bill.

Actually, this bill is lot tamer than what was expected. The AG nominee Jeff Sessions wants to entirely eliminate H1B program. This bill looks like a compromise between the two extreme groups.

H1B has always been highly beneficial to companies and very unfair to employees, both US and foreign. H1B allowed labour arbitrage, which Indian IT companies exploited to the hilt. TCS was the largest Indian software company 25 years ago, itself has grown 100 times in size thanks to H1B. This phenomena kept the IT wages stagnant in US for a long time. People are still making roughly the same amount I used to make 15-20 years ago in USA.

Meanwhile, it pushed the IT salaries in India into the orbit. This killed the domestic IT industry to a large extent. Major IT projects in India are often executed by large IT companies like TCS/Infosys at below cost as showcase projects. Since they make obscene profit from H1B bodyshopping, they don't mind giving away domestic projects at below cost, for training their staff. So Indians got used to paying very little for software.

As a result, Indian IT service companies can't survive on domestic business at all. Nobody wants to pay fair price for Software development in India. I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked to develop and supply software at 25-50% cost.

Example:
Domestic customer: I want a custom software that does XYZ.
Domestic vendor: Sure, it will take 5 engineers 6 months to develop this.
Domestic customer: Great, I have a budget of ₹10L for this.
Domestic vendor: :eek: Sir, just the salaries for 5 engineers for 6 months will be ₹15L. Now add the overhead costs and fixed costs, which will be at least ₹10L more. My cost alone will be ₹25L. I have to charge at least ₹30L.
Domestic customer: I don't know all that, if I am paying ₹30L, I can go with bigger companies like TCS/Infosys (who will do it below cost).

Therefore, this H1B restriction may finally revive domestic IT services industry. Yes, it also means IT salaries which is artificially kept high, will tank and software services price, which is artificial kept low, will finally raise.

Sir, what's your take on the impact of the US IT companies that have been operating out of India? In your opinion, what might impact them good or bad? Thanks.

In respect to H1B? The effect will be pretty much similar, they will start hiring US locals since the labour arbitrage opportunity is no more available. US IT wages will finally start raising.

Very well articulated. My company recently participated in a bid of a project for a government organisation (my first time in a domestic project) and I was amazed when I saw the RFP state values like 250/- per hour for a software engineer and 1500/- for a project manager. And the RFP also mentioned that the company should be in profit for the last 3 years with a huge amount as turnover!! :Frustrati

As stated there is very little room for defending the proposed changes given the way in which Indian companies have misused the provisions and made the program the cornerstone of their business model.

Another impact that it has had is practically stagnate the careers of people at a early stage in their careers. In my opinion very few of these H1B positions add value to you as a software engineer and companies expect you to play the role of an onsite coordinator or a go between for offshore and onsite team. When I worked for a retail client a few years ago, my company tried to push for onsite development and design positions and the response (rightly so) was "Why can't developers work offshore? What the added value to us in bringing them onsite?"

Something had to give eventually.

Drive on,
Shibu

Can anyone clarify what this Master Degree exemption revoking means? Does it mean Masters from US university only is considered or Masters from any other country is considered as well??

AFAIK, there is a 20k visa quota set aside for applicants who have a masters from US. If they dont get selected here, they again have a chance of applying in the remaining 65k quota. This is what they seem to be talking of and removing it but am not sure if these 20k visas will be merged with the remaining 65k or will it be axed totally

I think he meant companies like Accenture and IBM that have huge operations in India. If the IT salaries in India are indeed going to tank, these companies only stand to profit more from that. No?