People:
It’s bad, and it may get worse after the holidays.
It’s especially bad for those laid-off employees who are on H-1B visas - in many cases they now have 60 days to leave the country.
More than 20% of Meta’s employees are on such visas. At Twitter, when
Elon gave his ultimatum last week and 1,200 people quit the next day, many of those who reluctantly stayed were the ones on H-1B visas. Because for them, quitting could result in their families being deported.
Silicon Valley companies have long used the H-1B program to hire talented people, and the careers of many people have benefitted from it. But it’s also sometimes seen as modern-day indentured servitude - your visa is tied to your employer, which means that if you lose your job you can be deported.
The H-1B visa policy dates back to the Cold War. The program began in the 1950’s, as a way for American companies to hire "foreigners possessing skills that are urgently needed by the country”. To obtain such a visa for a prospective employee, companies need to prove that the worker is of "distinguished merit and ability and who is coming to the United States to perform services of an exceptional nature”.
In the late 1990’s there was great anxiety over the “
Y2K bug”. There was worry that systems were going to crash and airplanes were going to fall out of the sky unless American companies could find enough computer programmers to fix everything. So the US government lifted H-1B quotas to enable tech companies hiring highly-skilled engineers from around the world in the race to beat the bug to the millennium. Two decades later, the CEO’s of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, (and until recently Twitter) are today all India-born engineers who came on visas during that period. That's how transformative the H-1B program has been to Silicon Valley and the larger tech ecosystem.
During my own career I often used the H-1B process to hire talented software engineers. It typically cost me around $10K in legal fees to get the someone onto an H1-B visa, and every person I hired this way turned out to be a great addition to our team.
Contrary to what some believe, the H-1B visa program isn't about saving employers any money on salaries. By law, visa holders have to be paid market rate for highly-skilled positions. At Apple today, for example,
their 1,700 employees on H-1B visas earn a median salary of $170K/year, so it's hardly cheap labor. As with any immigration policy there is some controversy around the program, but the driver for employers isn’t saving money; it’s access to global talent.
In the years since the H1 visa program's debut, Silicon Valley has grown and prospered pretty dramatically, in no small part because of the incredibly talented immigrants from around the world who have come here. Companies have benefitted, employees have benefitted, the economy has benefitted.
But now we’re on an economic ebb tide, and some of those H1-B visa holders are being tossed overboard. Many of them will find new jobs with US companies who are willing to pay immigration attorneys to get the visa paperwork transferred.
But some won’t find new jobs, and will have to spend this holiday season packing-up their belongings and preparing to move their families out of the country.
I hate to see any family disrupted, and I hate for the US to lose extraordinary talent.
That’s it for now. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay focused, my friends.
-Bret
P.S. If you know any H-1B visa holders with awesome startup ideas, VC funds like Unshackled Ventures, Day One Ventures, AI2 Incubator, Born Global Ventures and One Way Ventures have announced special programs to fund seed stage startups with immigrants.
