Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.
The higher pay seems like an overall positive change to reduce the prevalence of "body shops" and so that H1-Bs aren't an easy way for companies to lower overall pay rate. I'm not sure that narrowing degree qualifications is a win; high-skill immigration is a significant boon to America's economy, and I think ability to do the work, and American company willingness to pay above-rate salaries (legally mandated now to 95th percentile for the highest-skill work) ought to be enough signal, and having a particular degree is not as useful a measure at that point. I know plenty of people who are incredibly qualified in terms of industry experience who don't have advanced degrees.
I've been pretty impressed with Taiwan's Gold Card work visa program, where you either need certain educational achievement qualifications, or need to be a highly-paid employee in specific fields — but not both. And it's not tied to a specific employer, which I think helps negotiation (and thus also helps domestic workers, by raising labor prices). I wish America's immigration program worked more like that — specific quibbles about what exactly the rate should be aside; Taiwan's is certainly too low to use for the US — since I think encouraging high-skill immigration would help much more than it would hurt: high-skill immigrants tend to generate more jobs, and also tend to pay more in taxes than the services they receive, meaning it's a win-win where immigrants can get the jobs they want in the country they want to be in and Americans end up with more jobs available and more government services per (American) tax dollar spent.
"…to lower overall pay rate."
What's with this nationalism and view human value?
Just because a person was or wasn't born in a certain place, something they had no ability to affect, they have more or less right to a certain job with a certain salary in a certain place?
Looking at it from the other perspective of the individual who can get a job, they are probably not lowering their salaries, but rather significantly increasing it.
And looking at this from an historical context for the USA makes it even more absurd. Most people with these high paying jobs in the US are direct descendants of people who immigrated to the US with the sole purpose of getting a higher salary – because of poverty and lack of economic opportunities in their home countries.
The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that - they have their own government to represent their interests, which can and should enact policies that benefit them, and negotiate in international agreements policies that will help their citizens. If it's a win-win situation (which is the expected situation for skilled immigration visas) then sure, we should look at how the incentives are aligned; but when it's a tradeoff between the interests of your citizens and foreigners, then the government is elected to ensure that the interests of their citizens are facilitated - if need be, at the expense of others, to whom the government has no inherent duty whatsoever except the voluntarily undertaken commitments to certain international treaties. And if the government is implementing some policies that hurt their citizens to benefit others (which it may well do for all kinds of reasons - e.g. governments do humanitarian aid, which costs your citizens and benefits others, but presumably with support from the voters/taxpayers), then that has to happen due to the choice and consent of these citizens, otherwise they have all right to replace the government with something that will act as the citizens desire.
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
According to who? I understand that this is a kind of framing used here often, but the federal government has been concerned primarily with itself for a long time now at least to my eyes.
According to ground realities. In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
So if you want to be the one politician that values non-citizens’ rights over citizens’ rights, good luck getting re-elected.
Or you could set up an autocracy and try to manage this anyway. For further reading, I recommend the book The Dictator’s Handbook or CGP Greg’s 20 minute summary of it.
Obviously the Flint water crisis is a tragedy and an embarrassment, and I can understand how the issue might cause you to question the competence of the local leadership, but in what way is it an indictment of the functionality of America's representative democracy?
>in what way is it an indictment of the functionality of America's representative democracy?
To a certain extent, I can see it as a case study against the functionality of representative democracy.
One one hand, elected leaders were fiscally irresponsible enough to enact policies that bankrupted the administration leading to a change to the water supply to save money. If I were playing devil's advocate, this could be seen as representative democracy incentivizing short-term political thinking leading to this outcome. E.g., it's easier to get elected on promises that benefit voters while ignoring harsh realities of how those promises will be paid for.
On the other hand, the decisions that led directly to the water crises were made by emergency managers appointed by the governor. This means non-elected officials overruled elected officials. Playing devil's advocate here can lead one to believe the displacement of elected officials is an indictment of the functionality of the system to truly be able to select those who govern the constituency.
it's just one example of many of huge swaths of people in this country not being treated in the way they they would be treated if they were in a well functioning representative democracy.
see if:
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
and "half of this country is a very small bill from crisis for their entire lives, people do things like describing the insurance agent as the most traumatizing part of the bear attack they survived" are both true, in what way can it be considered well functioning?
Can you put a finer point on what you mean by "their interests"? Is this relegated to just economic interests?
If it extends beyond economics, I see no reason why those two statements can't coexist. For example, I can vote against my own economic interest if I vote for higher taxes that I don't directly benefit from on the grounds that I want to support a more equitable society. Or I can vote against government run healthcare that I may also benefit from if I don't think that is the role of government. Both can be examples of voting against my economic interests to reflect my moral interests.
food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests. it's fine for you to believe the government shouldn't have a hand in them, but then in my view you are simply not in favor of what has been defined in this thread as a "healthy representative democracy"
you could argue that it's not your fault if lots of people don't vote so they get what they get, but you would be oversimplifying things for a HUGE section of the populace who don't vote because they have no one to represent their interests, where their interests are not starving or getting thrown on the street or being in debt for years and years because they slipped on the ice. these people not only do not have a meaningful way to vote, they also often do not have the time or energy to engage in local politics or trying to massage the system. they are currently risking their lives at metaphorical gunpoint every day to deliver "essential" services. minus the pandemic, it's been this way for a long time.
This:
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
and this
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
do not describe this country, even if you assert that only those who vote are represented. There's zero accountability to the people, the gaps are too large for people who do represent our interests to get through the door (and when they come close the rules tend to change suddenly) Something being against the rules has never stopped someone from doing it if they really wanted to when they are the enforcers or writers of the rules.
if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you. i have no intention on acting in your interests. politics is a crooked game, and ours is a particularly easy one to fix.
and what of the rest of the citizens who didn't vote because they risk losing their job or because of a million other reasons? are they not still citizens? most of them didn't choose to be, and regardless of whether that gives them some sort of moral obligation to participate to their best in the politics of their situation it does not remove their need for food, water, shelter, and healthcare which has been an increasingly difficult need to meet with essentially zero assistance from the system that is supposed to represent them.
to me it seems a lot like the conclusion is either that they are simply lesser for whatever reason and too bad for them or that the institution is just insisting on itself the way that institutions tend to do when they've been around long enough, and maybe a lot of people are actually very out of touch with what it is like to live in america for about half of our populace.
There's a lot here, so I'll try to summarize your point and you can tell me if I'm off.
>food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests.
I'm assuming you mean this is in the governments purview as part of promoting the general welfare clause. While I would agree, I can also understand those who do not because they take a more Jeffersonian view that the point of the government is to protect individual rights. At times, I can see where promoting general welfare and protecting individual rights can be at odds. I didn't see that specific definition of "healthy representative democracy" so it's may be too broad a reach (or I may have just missed it within the thread).
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that "voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.". Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility. I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons. In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true. If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
part of what i'm saying is that if these statements are true, then we are not in a functioning representative democracy.
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
>This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that
correct. it is an argument against it.
> Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility.
regardless of whether or not i agree that in "the way its supposed to work" this is the case, it's been a lot more than once and for a lot longer than a little bit of time. longer than i've been alive.
with what time, resources, or authority are you suggesting the populace hold them accountable with? don't answer that just yet.
> I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons.
We don't disagree in the sense you are talking about, technically. Zero accountability that the accountable will accept as valid though.
If i am born into a life with zero political agency and a constant threat of not having food or shelter in a populace that is largely entirely alienated not only from their peers but from also what they produce and consume how is that me getting what i deserve? In what way do you expect the hypothetical me to be organized or able to organize? How successful do you think someone like that could be at doing what you are suggesting when they don't have more than a $400 buffer and no supply chain?
> In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true.
I don't think the adage you're referring to is true at all; on the contrary I think that the responses you are speaking of simply take a long time to bubble up into enough of the populace to make them inevitable. Once that threshold is crossed you may as well swap the adage around. The structures and superstructures of societal organization are things that exist prior to you, it's natural for them to be baked into assumptions of "just how things are".
> If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
I don't think that inaction in face of miserable conditions that have been part of your experience of reality since day one makes someone "deserve" those conditions. It just makes them someone living in the reality they've been presented with. Engagement however, of all sorts, has been rising
>If i am born into a life with zero political agency
Genuinely curious, what would you cite as evidence of "zero political agency"? If it's the de facto sense of it being prohibitively hard for one person/group than another as you allude to in your previous posts, this is a very different thing than zero agency. Again, I think it's dangerous to conflate hard with impossible.
The $400 buffer hurdle is a loaded topic that would be difficult to get into without being drawn into more walls of text, but I think this is often an artifact of poorly aligned priorities and choices. I actually tend think the counter is true; lower economic strata tend to have more free time than higher strata, etc. But I'm afraid this would turn into a long digression to get into.
I can agree that a government deserves it's constituency. However, I think can be true without negating the previous statement about a populace deserving it's government as well. It's hard to be both an advocate for empowerment while also absolving oneself of responsibility.
I do appreciate you taking the time to elaborate, but a common thread seems to be an almost infantilizing of a constituency. While I can empathize with the marginalized, I don't think it does any pragmatic good if it just stops at hand-wringing. If we resign ourselves to a lack of agency, ironically it's a good way to guarantee not to get it. It's a personal viewpoint, but I think those who will take ownership of these problems are in a much better position to affect change than those who constantly say it's out of their control.
I spent a decade homeless in appalachia and the general midwest for a decade, and another largely below the poverty line. I'm fine with citing my life and the lives of everyone I knew for the amount of political agency that was present in our lives.
I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.
I agree with you in spirit in some ways here and I do not believe in absolution of responsibility. Material conditions, however, often skew the will in ways rather extreme, possibility is not probability and it's a fool that eats shit after watching 20 people take a bite of a cake and realize it's shit.
>I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.
It’s more than just perception. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but The Meritocracy Trap gives the actual stats. Obviously, the higher strata have an abundance of other resources (chiefly money, by definition) but not free time because of the competitive nature of maintaining within that economic level.
I do think that the middle class is attainable for most as long as they do a few essentially things, like graduating high school, avoiding massive debt, avoiding addictions, and avoiding becoming a parent before financially secure. I also believe we should, as a society, help those who are disadvantaged by things outside their control. However, there will always be consequences for life choices and some of those can’t be completed mitigated.
I didn’t grow up with money but I also eventually learned comparison is the thief of joy
Sanctioned government violence against its citizens by the police comes to mind. Weak environmental policies that are leading to things like wildfires on the west coast. The president* making his Dex fueled escape from Walter Reed and immediately taking off his mask telling people to not worry about COVID. The same president* profiteering off the presidency and 40% of the country unquestioningly supporting it. The same 40% refusing to wear masks in public because somehow being a spoiled brat is patriotic.
This is what I imagine the Roman Empire felt like right before it collapsed on itself. The US has grown too big and too spoiled and is ripping at the seams.
Can you give me an example of the kind of “weak environmental policy” you are talking about? One which would lead to more wildfires on the west coast? Because the only policy I know of that leads to more wildfires, is the 20th century mistake of putting them out, which led to runaway undergrowth leading to hotter fires, such that trees were destroyed that would normally survive. The policy that best protects the environment long term is to let the fires burn. So again, what is the strong environmental policy you are envisioning that would prevent wildfires?
Several. Pulling out of the Paris climate accords is one such policy. Prohibition on further nuclear power plant building. Policy of subsidies for coal power plants. Current policies regarding vehicle efficiency requirements that amongst other things let you classify your 8 mpg SUV or pickup that you drive all by yourself as a light truck instead of a commuter vehicle that it actually is which lets it legally be on the road with its dismal emissions rating. Keystone pipeline. Rolling back environmental regulations. Removing the words “climate change” and “science” from the EPA website because this administration finds science inconvenient. Prohibition on studying climate change by NASA as well as putting gag orders on any other agency from NASA to EPA to CDC on talking about it. Public policy of denying climate change (see last night’s debate as a prime example). Want me to keep going?
Fires are burning not because we have too much forest (though of course finding better forest management instead of Wall Street would be a much better investment). They are burning because global warming (climate change was a conservative TV talking about because they used the fact that global warming could include local cooling to confuse the matter) means longer dry seasons, draughts, lots of dry underbrush. Wildfires have always been a thing. Wildfires that span such areas and can’t be put out like this have not existed on this scale in recorded human history. Those who pretend that this isn’t happening should put a plastic bag with a large zip tie over their heads and tell us how they can breathe just fine in there. It will be just as effective at not suffocating as continuing down this path for another 10-20 years.
40% is a high estimate. Because voter turnout in 2016 was about 60%, only 27% of eligible voters voted for Trump. And probably a significant portion of those are not unquestioning supporters.
Imagine that you are a politician in that area and you have a crisis with the water supply, you aren't going to win votes by promising to first fix the water supply problems somewhere else that's not in your electorate. Even if things are broken there's always pressure to campaign on addressing local needs first in order to get (re)elected, hence the phrase "all politics is local".
The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens even if a particular government fails at this duty. When a government does not properly fulfil their role, that is the direction towards which we push them, to better represent the interest, desires and choices of their citizens - not to act for the benefit of everyone else in the world.
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
Truism. The point of contention is around what constitutes "best interest."
> The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that
If this is so simple, why did it require an additional 500ish words to qualify it?
Your point seems to boil down to this:
In cases where there is a conflict between the perceived "best interest" of citizens and those of non-citizens, if the citizens haven't specifically directed the government to do otherwise, the government should act in the perceived "best interest" of its own citizens.
But it's reductive and short-sighted to say that humanitarian aid "hurts" one side and "helps" the other. For instance, the marginal impact of a U.S. dollar on a U.S. citizen's productivity is effectively nil. But that same dollar spent in a third-world country would have much higher marginal impact. The productivity of that other citizen allows them to specialize and trade, and then everyone benefits in the long term.
The hyper-nationalism perspective that your country should take whatever it can at the expense of other countries is exactly what led to both of the world wars.
The duty and role of government is to act in the interests of those with power and influence. If a vote has more power and influence than money or connections due to how the government is structured or elected then the government can represent the interests of the people.
However, even voters are not equal in the US with those in Wyoming holding almost 3x the voting power for president compared to California due to the electoral college. Senate votes are an entirely different ballgame where small population states are equal to large states in theory but the vote count behind the senator may be millions vs tens of thousands. Also, the less populated but more numerous red states have led to a tyranny of the minority in the US Senate since 2010. If you are curious about that look at the number of justices Trump has appointed vs Obama, and Obama had 2 full terms: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-c...
There's been an admin change in that time plus the Citizens United decision. Remember there are many questions around where PPP loans went, including millions to the newly appointed USPS leadership plus Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Majority leader, and his wife, Elaine Chao, Secretary of transportation: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lawmakers-and-transportati...
Trump himself won with a 2.8 million popular vote deficit, similar to Bush in 2000. There are 3 other examples in the mid 1800's. In 2016 the GOP won a minority of votes in the US house yet held a 10% seat majority alongside a lopsided Senate. These are not symbols of a functional republic or election process, or at lest one that reflects the will of the people. From the 2016 election results alone your first statement on the duty and role of government is failed by the US. We are at risk of becoming a failed democracy for similar reasons.
Lobbying and campaign finance operations are destroying the value of voter preference and need to be reigned in through massive overhaul of the campaign and election processes. I'm all for setting a window for campaigning like the UK, assigning a budget from public money that ALL donations go into to remove lobbying issues, as well as an overhaul of the actual voting mechanisms reverting to paper ballots handled entirely by mail and air gapped technology using a ranked choice or first alternative process to determine the popular vote like Maine implemented this year. Connect that to the bill going around for states to pass their electors to the popular vote winner directly and you have the start of a government serving at the will of the people, not lobbyists, a minority, the powerful.
What a ridiculous statement. If anything, reforming the h1-b program is a good thing for the incoming workers. There were tons of H1-B workers who did not get visas because some 'IT sweatshop' flooded the program with cheap, relatively low skill applicants. Now? Better applicants have a higher chance to be approved!
The only reason why H1B is a problem is that there's a limit and requirement for being employed.
That disrupts the free market approach with sunk cost fallacies and fear of being "sent home".
I saw a study somewhere that if USA opened its borders, roughly 1 billion people would move in there in a short order. Obviously, no country can handle that, hence the need to have limits.
GP is suggesting removing the 85k H-1Bs annual cap but keeping all other requirements in place (with or without new wage standards).
EDIT: GP is also suggesting removal of the immediate deportation proceedings should someone lose their job in H-1B status. The status should follow the employee, not the employee/employer pair.
This wouldn't necessarily lead to a lot more immigration. It would lead to fewer people leaving who are already working for US companies on F-1 student visas in OPT status (they attended US institutions)
Which xenophobe put up a wall, and why is it that the US is the only country not allowed to have borders all of a sudden?
Many Mexicans worked seasonally in the US and then returned to Mexico "back in the day". I'm not sure at what point that became a problem though. Although still to this day many people are here in the US undocumented. The extent of that being a problem I'm sure we could debate. It's certainly not fair for those who attempt to play by the rules though.
Is Canada xenophobic? They won't allow just anybody in. I'm not allowed to move to New Zealand without some legal work visa thing they made up. What about France? Can I move to Japan? Why do I have to sign papers to move to any of these countries?
I'm fine if you want to advocate for open boarders (and I think it actually would be great, but we need far fewer people on the planet to make it work) but I think you really should be consistent about it.
Romania is a first world country with a PPP per capita GDP of $33K, compared to $48K in the UK. Their murder rate is 1.28/million, effectively the same rate as in the UK is 1.2/m.
Romanians didn't move en mass because the difference isn't all that great. They would gain 1.45X more income and no change in personal safety.
The average South American country has a PPP GDP of 16K and a regional murder rate of 16/m.
South Americans who migrate to the USA gain 4X more income (8X the economic gains of an emigrating Romanian) and enjoy a murder rate 1/4 of the South American average.
The incentives to flee Romania for the UK are trivial compared to the incentives for South Americans to move to the US.
It's not. Broad studies and broad claims don't work like that.
There is a lot of correlation between immigrant populations across the board, though.
As for income difference... 1.45 times? How about 4-6 times? Unless you seem to think that they would be going to the mythical average UK income area. And let's not forget that there's plenty of EU countries with high income levels. You can get an apartment in Berlin for roughly 2x the rent of an apartment in Bucharest... and get 4x the income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Here are some things that can be straight up disproven:
* Violent criminals don't migrate en masse with completely open borders
* Economic migration doesn't happen, without severe hardships(drought, famine, etc)
* Asylum seekers aren't invading armies, that seek to expand war to other countries
> economic migration doesn't happen, without severe hardships(drought, famine, etc)
I'm suspecting that that billion in large part included people at severe hardships. Although to be fair a lot of them would have super hard time affording a one way plane ticket to the US, as they live on roughly dollar a day.
Go read your own comment again. Saying that a nation acting in the best interests of its citizens is ethically wrong is laughable. Saying it's as ethically wrong as slavery is absurd. On net, this is a good thing for highly skilled H1B applicants (which is whom we were attempting to bring over in the first place, right?)
Slaves (from a different country) are in the best interest of the people of that country. Thus acting in the best interests of your people can in fact be ethically wrong.
Are they? They're useful to individual slaveowners with enough capital they can have the slaves work. But what about for the working class? People in the U.S. today remark that immigrants willing to work for lower wages than locals drives down wages. A population forced to work at zero wage (or rather, at the cost to the slaveowner of keeping them alive and captive) would surely do the same.
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that, if I were the spirit of democracy/the hypothetical purely benevolent
(to specifically the people I consider of my country/nation/tribe, to the possible detriment of all others)
emperor of wherever, that on balance introducing slavery and slaves into my country would be a net boon on average.
Even ignoring the material aspects, it seems like americans had to contort their worldviews quite a bit to justify slavery to themselves, given their otherwise stated moral beliefs (that were useful to maintaining society). Something would have to give a pretty decisive advantage to justify that required cognitive dissonance, and I don't think 'enriching some already-rich landowners a bit more' is useful enough.
I mean, look at america. Are the descendants of the ethnic groups in the us at the time of slavery on average better off for slavery having existed? Now?
Plus it's wrong to inflict such horror on your fellow man etc etc, and there's a pretty huge difference between not letting people in and abducting them into your country and whipping them.
> What's with this nationalism and view human value?
Honestly it is probably just run-of-the-mill xenophobia, but looking at US Federal Tax revenue [0] I would like to point out that prior to ~1930 everyone was basically on their own and after that the government started really becoming a big chunk of the economic pie. In 1920, I expect it was a lot more practical to target an open-border policy. Economically, the failure of a migrant means nothing to a local. In 2020, if a migrant does not succeed then there is a risk that the locals will be paying for it. I argue that that would reasonably change someone's opinions.
The idea that a person's location should have no impact is great, but sits in conflict with the US welfare system.
'Welfare' on a federal level now means a combination of Social Security disability and redeemable income tax credits- basically they have no income, but Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Credit, means they get money back on their taxes anyway. And of course if they have children there are a number of federal and local programs that ostensibly help feed the child, but are easily worked around to turn into money- in the old days you'd spend all day buying individual kool aid packets (pay with a dollar voucher, get 75 cents real money in exchange), now you're more like to buy high end food items and sell them on, or else some sort of item return fraud.
Oddly the same could be said for Argentina, Mexico or Venezuela, but people aren’t knocking to get into their economies. Why does the US owe the world any more than other countries?
At some point people have to be responsible for their own self determination —as leftists used to clamor for a couple of decades ago. Now they want a shortcut instead of doing the hard work to build viable economies. It took us a few hundred years to get where we are. It didn’t happen overnight. People still have no problem vilifying pioneers, but they’re the first to want the fruits of that hard labor centuries ago. Get to fixing your economies it takes time, but fortunately with the technology today and with the foundations today, we know it’s possible to turn things around in a few decades (China, S Korea, Panama, etc). Even Japan was extremely feudal up until the end of WWII.
This is a very odd argument in the USA context. People showed self determination by emigrating from poverty and lack of economic opportunity in Europe – they didn't stay "…doing the hard work to build viable economies."
Now the US people are denying other people the same opportunities their not-to-distant grandparents had. I guess it's an insiders market.
I find your concept of US "owing" anyone anything strange. Depending on your political opinions you might think that humans "owe" each other equal opportunity.
The leftist motto was “Self determination of Nations”. The US was supposedly corrupt and capitalistic and the people’s of the world should avoid our model.
We’ve let more people in than any other country (including other countries that started out as colonies, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) We have a right to regulate who we think will contribute and be a good citizen.
We now want to exercise our self determination as a nation like everyone else does.
You managed to toss out more strawmen while not addressing the content of what you're replying to.
Can you answer why it's OK for earlier generations of (now) Americans to leave their origins in search of a better life, but modern immigrants should stay and fix these issues instead?
It seems you’re arguing for “consistency”. That doesn’t make sense. In that view if only colonialists had been allowed the US policy would be consistent because it never let immigrants in (noting that as a colonizer you’d be a subject of the crown which in name ruled whatever lands they had dominion over).
They said, a nation with self determination can decide what it wants according to its laws. It’s that simple.
Open borders isn't a leftist idea. It's literally the opposite of control over private interactions.
US gets huge financial benefits from being the world hegemon. Then there's the Northern Triangle that US messed up and Americans pretend that they have nothing to do with it.
I really don’t care who is for it. Migration has to be regulated, else we will return to the mean. Every other state exercises that right but when the US does it then it’s «bad» and «selfish», etc.
We could do it the Canadian or Australian way. Remember all those Americans who thought they could simply slip across the Canadian border and be good? Even they don’t just let anyone in.
I’ll believe the rhetoric when countries where it makes sense to federate federate (Caribbean, South America, Caucasus, etc).
What's with that simplistic view of nationalism and reality?
(caveat: I am an immigrant that came to Canada)
Nationalism is more about culture than birth, albeit there is an expectation of both. Pride in your culture and love for your community which you call nation. As things are, you get more exposed to a culture by physical proximity to the source. Therefore being born within a culture makes you knowledgeable of that culture. More likely to be proud of it. (Note, as an immigrant, I do not partake in nationalism in either my current country or origin country. Albeit, I like their cultures.)
Your idealism albeit commendable is far from reality. The world is unfair get over it.
Everyone wants better for themselves. And like the latest hacktoberfest showed, not everyone has the same culture (1). Therefore not everyone should live in close proximity. It would lead to a disruption of social harmony. Take for example those from a honor/shame culture. They will literally beat you up for joking about their mother. Violence in the name of honor. In the West, that kind of violence is seen as outrageous. "Be stoic about it". People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
I define human value as infinite. Also I am not responsible for the right treatment of those outside my sphere of control/influence. I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
I agree. It is unfair that descendants of immigrants refuse to receive immigrants. As an immigrant that came to Canada, I am grateful for this opportunity. Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
This kind of line of thought is the issue. Why should it be unfair? Or at least, why can't we make it fairer?
>People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
Those willing to adapt are usually those that are immigrating. Your argument does not make sense in this context, as we are talking about people that are, by definition, willing to move and be part of another country. Will there be a clash of cultures in some instances? Of course, but that will last at most for one generation.
> I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
No one is asking you to take responsibility for anyone. But why should you support policies that exclude those that are willing to come on their own volition and contribute to society? What makes you think that they are 'ungrateful'? Again, why should we not strive to make things fairer for everyone?
>Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
Culture is such a meaningless thing. Immigrants assimilate to the culture, willing or not, after a generation. Sure, some of the people that actually immigrate might not be want to change their ways, but their children will. Studies have shown that this is a moot point, used by those that are just scared of different things, when in reality those that immigrate do assimilate the culture of the place they are living.
This mentality makes absolute no sense, specially coming from a child of immigrants. And I see you come from Canada. As someone who is about to immigrate there, it saddens me to see such display of hatred for those who are different. I spent a year studying in Canada a few years ago, and from my experience people there are very welcoming to immigrants. I had the pleasure to meet Chinese, Muslims, Indians and people from lots of different places and cultures while in Toronto, and guess what? Everyone got along very well. I don't understand where this fear and hatred comes from, but most people are good people, willing to work hard to earn their own if given the chance.
And if this is naive idealism, well, then I am a naive idealist.
First please into take consideration that my comment was a response to the previous comment. My points were to defend nationalism as a valid stance to hold and to justify the different treatments of humans.
Now...
> ... I am naive idealist.
The problem with naive idealism is that it is ineffective.
First, what is justice, fairness? Okay, let's say you arrive to a satisfying (to us) definition. Is it true to everyone all the time? Or simply true to everyone? I think you agree that it is not.
Why? Why does that guy over there think differently? Nurture and nature. Let us say that his inherited traits set him as neutral on the issue, why does he think differently still? Because, of nurture. What is nurture? Culture in its diverse forms. Family culture. Community culture. Etc. Do you still think culture is meaningless?
I am not against immigration. I believe in voting with your feet (going to where you think is best). I am a first generation immigrant by the way. Not a child of immigrants.
I have no hate for people of different backgrounds. You misunderstood me. I am currently taking online classes on the Chinese language and on Chinese culture. One of my best friends is Muslim. Another close friend of mine is Indian.
As citizen of a DEMOcratic country (demo comes from the greek for "the people"), I play a part in the government. Albeit in a minor way, I am part of the government. I am partly responsible for what it does. In counterpart, the government exists for me, the citizen. I take the personality and privilege to be citizen of a democratic country more and more seriously.
I did not aim to say that all immigrants are ungrateful, only that with a porous border, I end up allowing ungrateful immigrants.
> Why should it be unfair?
I did not make the world. I came to this conclusion regretfully. You do need not to sell to me the beauty of a fair world. Everyone is born to different circumstances, therefore everyone is unequal. Not only birth but culture. Last century, China once tried to eliminate the advantage of the upper class. They took their possession and gave them a status "to receive lesser treatment". It was an inherited status. After roughly 40 years, they removed that status. Then later there was a study on the descendants of the persecuted class. They were in average in a better position than the descendants of those who had receive a "to receive a better treatment" status. I leave it up to you to make your own conclusion.
There is a nation's culture, a family's culture, a religion's culture, etc. As many as there are groups you can identify with.
>Or at least, why can't we make it fairer?
You can. I intend to do it, to the extent that it is not deleterious to me.
I emigrated to Hong Kong from France and I love the system here. It mandated a "high" salary of 2000USD that is low enough to allow noobs like me to join and try while high enough not to bring people who would just try to survive no better than at home.
They also mandate a master degree and low effort from the company, which can be negociated if really strong guy (bachelor with some effory, expert reputation with high effort).
Then they give a permanent residency after 7 years of taxes but no path to nationality so the only way to persist is to make children locally, another interesting point: you ll never be Chinese but your kids can, which makes also the immigration problem drama free.
I quite wish France tried that because we feel (might not be rational) we have so many issues with our immigration.
I don't know why you're being downvoted for wanting a more sane immigration system for France.
Whenever limits to US H1Bs a are mentioned that gets full support on HN because it waters down local salaries but when similar systems are proposed for Europe it gets downvoted.
India has become seemingly fascist overnight under Mr Modi. Just like Trump, he favours immigration and citizenship policies designed to demonise minority groups
Are you referring to CAA? Then you mistaking my friend. CAA is targeted to prevent illeagle immigration. It also, eases citizenship for people of minority religion.
Moreover that law is targeted only towards neighboring countries, specifically towards Pak., Ban., and Afgh.
And 'No' We do not expect red carpets anywhere on the world. Its totally a individual's choice to move abroad or stay. Due to huge population, the figures look high too.
Thousands of people have made it down the path to nationality in Honk Kong. Acquiring Chinese nationality -- whether mainland or not -- is possible. It's just that the standards are very, very, very exclusive.
In mainland China, the only examples I've heard of were leading academics. The standard is "outstanding contributions" to China. That's what I mean by "very high bar." Next to impossible is not a bad way to describe it, but next to impossible isn't the same as impossible. Thousands have done it. That's not a lot. I don't think it's even tens of thousands.
On paper, there is also path by which you can marry into Chinese citizenship, but it's exceptionally rare in practice.
"Renounce other citizenships" is complex. Many nations don't provide a citizens with a means to stop being citizen. Which is to say, if you take a Chinese (or any other) citizenship, and renounce your old citizenship, you may still end up with both citizenships.
I don't know specifics about Honk Kong, but I do know the standards are laxer than mainland China.
What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is the extraordinary time it takes to approve or reject a greencard petition. In many cases it takes years - or even over a decade or more. That's insane. People bring their spouses here, they have kids who are born and go to school here, and all along the way their immigration status is uncertain. And meanwhile they are tied to whatever job they're in. It's insane.
Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.
It’s insane because it’s a kludge. The US doesn’t really have a general purpose skilled immigration visa. The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” It was never designed to be a payday to permanent residency, because the grand bargain of the law in the 1960s was that it wouldn’t increase immigration.
They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
There should be both. I am German, work for an American company. It shouldn't be difficult for me to move to an US office for some time and return back home. Of course, there is some likelyhood, that if I stayed at a place for more than a coumple of months, that I want to stay at that place long term, and this should be possible without too high bareers.
Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. H1-B can last for 6 years (can be extended beyond that too but let's not get into that) and I think 6 years should be enough for one to get the GC.
There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic:
For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence.
Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
>For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
I don't think this is right. Section 214(b) indeed says that there is a presumption of immigrant intent, but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
> but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
In practice, no, but that's not what "dual intent" legally means.
> It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
I did not say anything about "could not ever". I guess you could maybe interpret it this way, but if you actually followed the citation I gave, it would have been clear to you. What I meant was that the section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis of "dual intent" policy, explicitly amends section 214b of INA, to remove permanent residency application as acceptable evidence for the purpose of establishing immigration intent in context of section 214b.
I'm surprised how different this is from all the secondary information out there, but ok, you're right. Thanks for the info. (I said "could ever not", not "could not ever", but that's a moot point now.)
> The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.”
This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa.
The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
For Engineers and Doctors from India, its takes more than 20 years to get Green card now. Its because of the arcane country quota system which assigns the same numerical quota for each country regardless of population, so India and Monaco get the same number of Green cards.
This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
If there were more people from New Zealand than India trying to apply, it would be harder for New Zealanders.
I've lived aboard and had residency in two other nations. The overall amount of people applying is outrageous. That's the real problem. 22,000,000 apply for 50,000 green cards.
Btw this thing is based on country of birth and not country of citizenship. So basically even a person who is a European citizen and born in India cant get a green card before 20 years. Does that change your view?
IIRC it's based on the number of immigrants from each country, not their race? As an example, a black person from Jamaica will have a much easier time than someone from India or China simply because there are fewer applicants from their small country.
Applicants from Oceania have 5% to 10% chance of winning the green card lottery in a given year. India is like 0.01 percent or something silly like that.
What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is that it is racist. When the law was passed, the grand compromise was that it would not change the racial makeup of the country. So there are country specific (which is really just race specific with a wink and a nod) quotas for different countries. This means if you are from Sweden or Ireland, it's actually pretty easy to get a green card. There is even a green card lottery where you can apply in Ireland and get a green card and get one just because you entered because there aren't enough immigrants from there to balance things out. But if you are from India, it's going to take a decade or more.
Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
But in practice, is the US supposed to track down census numbers for the countries around the globe? So many countries, dont even have much of a process
and the main point is : the govt exists for the well-bein of its current citizens, not potential ones.
The intent of the law wasn't racist, it was to prevent e.g. Indian (or some other large demographic) candidates from taking all of the available quota.
it is not only due to quotas. there is BS request for evidence as well as random changes.
for example, they added some disease to the process (I believe gonorrhea or syphilis) and then the exam I took entering the process wasn't sufficient at the time they actually looked at the exam. then it took them a long time to send that notice, then I got the new exam and the clock started again adding around 6 months from the "we need you to test for a disease that can be easily treated if you had it" to the approval.
this is with highly paid lawyer support.
EB immigrant visas take ages and then there's the archaic process of some poor schmuck sitting in an USCIS office asking the questions and checking boxes on a form that you submitted a second time...
From the p.o.v. of the person actually doing this, it takes years from the moment you apply to the moment you get the decision. This is what needs to change.
why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long?
what you say is correct.
as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life.
look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check.
but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.
You mean... Like Singapore(7days), Lithuania(15days), Ireland(4 weeks), Netherlands and most other European countries - 90 day mandate.
My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document.
My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
Are you talking visa or permanent residency? Those are very different.
7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.)
Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.
The pay level still isn’t high enough. Minimum pay of about 170k in San Jose for a software engineer? That’s not a specialist, that’s average for a small startup.
Product managers are making 80-100% of what a software engineer makes. So 150-200k even at startups, and upwards from there at FANG.
Graphic designers are making 70-100%.
Even roles like "Human Resources Manager" are making 150k, because they're automatically "management", even though it's just a Bachelor's degree in Business and not a highly competitive role.
"Business analysts" (Excel and specialty tool power users) are making 100k+. No hard STEM degree or brutal interviews required.
However, it really is just in a handful of major US tech hubs that the pay is this high in tech. Outside the major tech hubs the high paying professions are the traditional ones... doctor, dentist, lawyer, etc.
The 'hard STEM degrees' and 'brutal interviews' are irrelevant if the industry is functioning: are the people in these roles are able to perform them and are the companies profitable whilst able to pay high salaries.
If they are, there's nothing wrong with this situation.
Most businesses like lawyers, finance etc that are largely human based not capital based pay out almost everything to the workers. Often they were structured as partnerships. Even Goldman Sachs was a partnership for a long time until capital requirements increased.
It's not the US as a whole, it's specifically Silicon Valley and San Francisco where you have this ridiculous concentration of huge software companies (all of FAANG except Amazon have their headquarter there) and venture capital firms (and thus startups), generating an extreme demand for developers.
But of course, that demand drives up salaries across the entire USA to some degree.
Agreed. I'm far south and therefore nowhere near London and this is what I'm seeing. If you are in specific fields, some companies are paying £70-80k+, but you need to have proven skills in the fields they are looking for.
The other thing to take in to account with the US figures - taxation. I believe the US tax system taxes the individual directly, where as in the UK we are generally PAYE and taxed at the point we are paid our salary. Maybe someone in the US can confirm that?
>I believe the US tax system taxes the individual directly, where as in the UK we are generally PAYE and taxed at the point we are paid our salary. Maybe someone in the US can confirm that?
I've lived in the US. Your taxes are withheld from your pay. Unlike in the UK, everyone has to fill in a tax return - even if all of their income comes from a regular job. You might be due a small refund or owe a small amount at the end of each tax year, but fundamentally you're taxed as you go throughout the year.
Almost always gross. When you hear "I make $150,000" in 99.9% of cases that will be the number that are hired at. For that exact number I would expect the actual annual cash in hand to be close to $80,000.
Note that is VERY individual circumstances specific. The largest chunk of that missing $70,000 went to taxes at the local, state, and federal level. Easily $45,000 of it is gone in taxes. There is also a common game of moving pre tax dollars around that benefit you, but not exactly the same way a dollar in hand would.
The two most common are 401ks (typically 4-8% of gross depending on employee matching) which is money that goes into a retirement account for you and you can't touch it until you are old (55 or 65 or something, not up to date on the numbers there) without incurring both a significant penalty of 10% but also having to pay tax on it the year you withdrawal it. There are a few hardship exclusions like medical, first time home buying etc, where you can dip into this untaxed pool of money but for the most part can't touch it until retirement.
The other common pre tax exclusion is an HSA where you get to put pre taxed dollars into an account that can only be used to pay for medical expenses. Essentially every high dollar professional in America takes full advantage of this offering as we all expect to have out of pocket medical expenses and it makes no sense to pay them with taxed dollars instead of pre taxed dollars.
> Essentially every high dollar professional in America takes full advantage of this offering as we all expect to have out of pocket medical expenses and it makes no sense to pay them with taxed dollars instead of pre taxed dollars.
Not really. HSAs are common for sure, but people with high incomes often can afford lower deductible policies. You can't open an HSA unless you have a high-deductible health insurance policy.
I've done it both ways, and I personally prefer paying more for a better insurance policy and not having to bother with HSA paperwork.
Gross. In general you couldn't really quote net salaries in the US as your taxes partly depend on which state you live in. So for example, if you work in DC, you could plausibly be living in either DC, Maryland or Virginia, and your taxes would differ accordingly. You'll also most likely have a choice of different health and pension plans at different costs.
It's not "US", it's particular regions. San Francisco Bay Area pays a lot, while Cleaveland(OH) pays a third of that.
Globally it's the hotspots that pay a lot - London, Dublin, Moscow, Amsterdam, etc.
But then the reason why the salaries have skyrocketed - is just lack of supply.
I'm planning on leaving the field at 36 already. Moving to doing gardening work and running an olive grove... and there's no one that can replace me in NYC at a snap of their fingers. I bet there are people globally, but getting to work in US is a PITA.
Basically. Check levels.fyi and see for yourself. It's only silicon valley "FAANG" companies that pay $400k total compensation for senior engineers, but principal / staff engineers at the big firms make up to a million.
AWS is spinning up a dev team in Auckland though teaming up with Vector on some IOT stuff in the energy space apparently though. I would hope the comp for those positions would be at least $140k NZD, but still that's nowhere near what the fellas over at Google HQ are making for writing protobufs all day.
this is partially offset by the cost of living. for example you would pay roughly double for things such as rent and childcare in San Jose compared to Auckland (which is already much more expensive than the rest of NZ)
I did the math though and I would likely be clearing 100k in the bank even with the high cost of living there.
Auckland is pretty expensive, and senior engineers here make a lot more than regular 9-5 jobs but I'm not remotely close to clearing that much money in a given year.
Relatively speaking you'd be having the same free cash flow proportionally. It's just that 10% of NZ$100k and US$400 is 4x the difference in absolute terms.
You could go to Uber's Pittsburgh office and have a lot of money.... but you'd be in Pittsburgh...
If you don't care about quality of life - there are great options world wide to make a lot of money. I would suggest getting into corruption, as an easy way of making millions fast.
>Relatively speaking you'd be having the same free cash flow proportionally. It's just that 10% of NZ$100k and US$400 is 4x the difference in absolute terms
I just don't think that's true. For two reasons:
1) I earn the equivalent of just under the median household income on my own, and 100% of my income is eaten by our expenses. It's really my wife's income that's left over after all that has been paid for, so none of mine is spare.
2) There must be hundreds of thousands of people who live in the bay area that don't work at FAANG and don't make anywhere near that, but still manage to live on the city somehow. It's not like if you make $360k you're barely scaping by, right!? Else basically everyone else would be homeless there.
I ran the numbers and I'd be able to save a lot more.
If you think that "crunching the numbers" is an appropriate way of comparing the cost of living in two completely different environments - you must be insane.
If you have the fiscal responsibility and live a completely ascetic lifestyle - you can easily save most of your free cash flow. But that is an extraordinary person.
If you are a reasonable person and are going to actually live in SF - you have to adjust your expenses accordingly. Your rent/mortgage, your shopping trips, your recreational activities, etc... and you realise that your social outing costs you $200, instead of $30... and you don't have the ability to host it at home, because all of your friends live 2-4 hours away or you have a $5000 p/m home in a convenient location.
The reason why I say this - I lived in Helsinki, Dublin, London, NYC, San Francisco, Palo Alto and back to NYC. Me and my husband are both SWE, well paid. I literally went through the change of attitudes towards "living a life".
>If you think that "crunching the numbers" is an appropriate way of comparing the cost of living in two completely different environments - you must be insane
I'm under no impression the lifestyle would be the same. Just that it ought to be possible from what I can tell. Where I live in my home country I'm optimizing for a reasonable level of comfort / quality of life. If I'm dragging myself halfway across the world for the top salaries in the industry, I'm not optimizing for comfort or quality of life, I'm optimizing for as much savings as possible over a short duration.
Unfortunately the value of going to Bay Area is long term, not "short duration". It's not just - I'm going to SF for a project and a payout. If you're moving there - it's going to be for a few years.
Also - if you're "dragging myself halfway across the world", it limits your ability to optimise efficiently. You don't have an easy fallback. (I'm from Lithuania and live in NYC. Optimising my living arrangements was not a possibility for a long time, because there's no family or LPR status)
Right, while I don't live in that area, I do live in an area with a similar cost of living (Key West), rent on a decent home running near or above 3K and an apartment / townhome in the Key West Oldtown area can run up to 4K. Average dine out meal runs around $30 a plate and fine dining in the area of $50 a plate and up. Don't get me wrong at SV salaries they are not living hand to mouth but when you see those rates from a different cost of living area it can seem like ridiculous numbers but the reality is $150-$170K in that high of a COL area gives you enough to get a decent apartment in a reasonable commute distance, some pocket money for entertainment, healthcare, the ability to put away for a rainy day and it you live modest enough to pack away some retirement. The reality is that should be the base standard for a job. People should earn enough to provide for themselves, and secure their future. To me the fact that, that is no longer the norm in the US is what is shocking. An honest days labor, should command and honest wage, and to me those are the minimum things that should be secured in an honest wage. I see people down here in the FL keys working 2 jobs as the norm to make rent and to pay for the here and now, they cannot even fathom healthcare, rainy-day fund and retirement is not even on their radar. These are not people working restaurant or construction jobs, I see many "professional" jobs moonlight as bartenders, etc.
Cost of living is radically different in some places. That and software engineers are significantly underpaid in NZ (and Australia) relative to their economic output.
According to this[1], with 140k you're in the top 5% Americans, so you're not far off... but regulating immigrant's salaries on a regional basis seems unfeasible, as they're free to move anywhere in the country AFAIK, just like any other US resident.
Why is it unfeasible? Companies give cost of living raises - and pay cuts - depending on where someone lives in the US. If companies can figure this stuff out, why can't the government? Don't companies get their cost of living data from government agencies anyway?
As someone who lives in a different state I object to someone who is otherwise equal in ability to me earning more for the same work (I have personal reasons to not want to move to CA). I understand why companies do it (only those who have a reason they need to stay in CA - why google doesn't move doesn't make sense), but I will object to my government encouraging the situation even more. My representative needs to be sensitive to that.
This isn't something special to the US, though, and i'm pretty certain if it was changed so that folks in Indiana made the same money as California, folks in California would make worse wages.
The truth is, though, that folks getting paid well in Indiana can generally live better on the lower wage simply because things are that much cheaper. Perhaps you wish to subsidize living in the more expensive areas and increase the safety net?
Maybe you should place some pressure on companies to move headquarters into more affordable places. Lots of places have international airports, after all, so that shouldn't hinder folks much.
Do you think your representatives gives two farts about what folks in a different part of the country are paid so long as folks in his or her district are living well enough? Or should folks in the area living well be enough of a concern?
Do you have solutions for these things that are fair to the folks needing to live in the expensive areas (poor folks have little to no choice in the matter)?
It's crazy how average pay differs from even expensive, technology and knowledge heavy parts of Europe. Where I live, Stockholm Sweden, this would be a very well paid person. Even more so for families, considering it's one income and not two for the household.
In 99% of the US by area, $170k would be a very good salary for a software engineer too.
Silicon Valley is a statistical outlier compared to the US as a whole for salaries and for cost-of-living.
Most of the software engineers in the US don’t work in a place with $170k salaries and $1m+ homes. For most of the US, salaries are 1/2 of that and homes are 1/4 of that.
That's a large reason of why I've stayed in the Phoenix area, though I think about leaving every single summer. The engineering pay is about 2/3 of SF area, give or take, but cost of houses are around 1/4 or so. It's rough thinking of a lateral move in salary, or not enough of a boost to overcome cost of living differences.
Of course housing costs have gone up significantly relative to pay in the past decade, so who knows.
I remember slightly earlier on in my career as an intermediate level engineer earning $70k living in an area (not in US) where the median house price is $1m+
I know a guy who outsourced some stuff to a dev in Nepal. The guy was making 3x the average for his area.
SWE is highly paid throughout the world, but I have noticed there are some geographic areas where it actually doesn't seem to command a higher salary than average.
Salaries are driven by a lot of supply side dynamics, it's less about the overall economic output of the employee and more about the cost of replacing them.
I believe a startup of 50K coders also can create something of value for humanity and be commercially successful. It will just happen in another part of the world. It's up to the US where they want to draw a line.
This is why I don’t work for a startup. However, I suspect the average candidate doesn’t understand the equity well enough to properly value it. Therefore it would be a waste to give away a bigger chunk of the cap table to those employees if it doesn’t save the company much cash on salaries or attract a lot more talent. Only for the subset of roles where you’re trying to hire people who understand how a company runs do you have to give a serious equity stake, because those are the people who know how to value it.
It's more like, employees have lost their negotiating power, so they don't bother to negotiate it anymore, so there's no reason for them to understand how it works.
If the labor pool shrinks a bit, their negotiating power will rise and this will solve itself.
I don’t think this fully explains the dynamics of the situation. Even if you can perform well enough in the interview process to get paid extremely well by big tech, you probably can’t get a comparable amount of equity from a startup. It’s not that the labor market doesn’t value your skills - startups just don’t pay market price.
I would like to challenge the notion of "market price."
I feel that it is safe to say that in different companies, a developer produces different value for the company. For someone working at a Big Tech company, a single developer - even a low level one - can produce substantial value for the company. On the other hand, working at a small company, the entire company may not have as much revenue as the low level developer produced at the Big Tech company.
Should a developer at a small company that is... say... optimizing routes for auto parts delivery for a handful of clients be compensated at the same "market price" as someone who is working on optimizing AWS?
My point is that not every company - even in the Bay Area - can afford to pay "market rate" for everyone.
Its not that the labor market doesn't value the skills, it's that the labor produced isn't worth the same. I believe that it is foolish for a software developer who to expect the wages of someone who is working in Big Tech at all other companies (and it would be foolish for the company to pay an employee more than the value that they're creating for the company).
If you're incredibly good, you might be able to negotiate 20-40% higher offer than the initial offer, but beyond that they'll just reject you and go with another candidate who might literally be worth millions of dollars less and be a ridiculously worse deal.
Engineering management is simply not operating according to standard economics textbook definitions of rationality. It feels more like cartel economics.
I remember the first time I walked into the "residence" for a major contractor's H1B visas. They were packing a dozen people in a 3 bedroom apartment in a bad area of town. You then see how they are treated by their companies at work, and it disgusts me.
This is why you can't have second-class citizens like this. They are terrified to go for help if they even know how. It's even worse for undocumented workers. At least they can quit though. H1B workers are tied to their sponsors, which has to stop.
As a person who used to live like that in the US when I worked there. Its just how it is. US work opportunity is very expensive/valuable for us third world people(in my case India). Its like 70 rupees for a single dollar!!!. Time and opportunities are 70 times more expensive. Every minute, and every purchase matters. You have to make a dent every time you hit.
Its like the most important period of your life. There is little time for non-serious stuff.
You likely won't get a chance again. Even if you do office politics and get visas, you still need to beat the lottery and visa interview. Given how precious the opportunity and what you get out of it. You have to do all that.
Yeah, but take it from American point of view: you're purposely accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly. So you're lowering their living standards and probably their average pay, because your negotiating power is really weak.
More than that, if you consider that the third world probably has 4-5 billion people, many of which would want to live in the US (~350 million people), this creates a scaling issue.
I'm not even American, but I can understand why they consider this a problem.
Immigrants don't take jobs for less, when no government is breathing down their necks. If you have a competitive market - there's no need for government to create artificial monopolies.
It's complete bullshit that billions want to live in US. Billions want a safe and prosperous life... and would stay home, if that's possible to achieve. US isn't some land of honey rivers or gold mountains.
If you want a case study on how unrestricted migration occurs - look at EU.
On one side we have Ireland and on the other side we have Romania. There's complete freedom of migration for Romanians to Ireland. Just buy a one way ticket for 50Eur, basically.
EU is proof that you don't need quotas or restrictions to control migration at all. And immigrants have only a small impact on incomes.
This is a nice use case to study how human behavior works when there's no quotas/limits.
I often say that unlimited calls means people talk less, not more. On the similar lines offering unlimited learning and self improvement budgets to your employees means people will likely spend them less, but more relevant training and development would happen.
A very similar argument can be made about unlimited sick leaves too.
When something is free people don't feel the need to rush and fill the quotas/limits. They use/spend per relevant needs and scenarios now that they know they always have an option to use the thing when they need it.
They say that you have unlimited - then you don't rush to use up. (But unlimited, needs to be actually unlimited)
And for example of migration - if your cost of moving to a new place and working there is reasonable, you're less likely to stay there if it becomes a bad place. Many cases demonstrate this, last being, massive wave of repatriation of people from Eastern Europe during the financial crisis.(And numerous internal migration waves in large countries)
- by reasonable cost I mean that you don't need to spend X thousands of dollars and wait 6-36 months for a permit
I'm Romanian. There are 20 million Romanians and ~300 million people in the rich Western countries. And I don't know if you noticed, but the EU is very restrictive about adding new members. It took Romania 10 years to become a EU member.
Plus Romania is average by world standards (GDP per capita per country), which means that half the world's countries (and probably 80% of the world's population) are poorer or much poorer.
Well, if you ask many people in Western Europe, they shouldn't have even been accepted. The average salary, even in PPP terms, was about 30% of the Western European ones back in 2007. In absolute terms, salaries were even worse (probably 10% in 2007, something like 25% now), and absolute terms matter because many things are imported.
After huge growth, the average salary in PPP terms is now about 50% of the Western ones. Romanian workers in the West have definitely depressed the average salaries in several fields.
And that's with somewhat controlled migration.
My point is: controlled migration is there for a reason. Building a working state is extremely difficult and takes a lot of time. It's a very fragile and delicate thing. Once you've managed to build it... you really don't want to upset the balance.
"Should not have been accepted" - is typical xenophobia. It's not an argument at all.
What sectors have seen a depression of salaries as a direct result of Romanians entering the market? And you have the huge hurdle of proving that those salaries are depressed specifically because of the Romanian labor, and not because Asian products or other global trends.
Also - restricted migration fails to attract the right labor, driving up the cost of labor unnecessarily. Sometimes it gets ridiculously stupid... to the point that local consumers(also local labor) cannot afford to consume products, because local labor(also local consumers) refuses to work for less. It gets to a point where local businesses cannot pay their local labor and invest into productivity gains(required to keep the pay high enough).
It's a complex clusterfuck... and blaming Romanians or Mexicans is just an easy "solution".
I understand. Apart from sharing a apartment with 9 - 12 other people.
But you have to understand, this doesn't necessarily mean we don't have fun. When I was in Bay Area, I knew a dozen ways to save up money while having fun. I didn't own a car, because the company gave me a VTA pass. I knew how to cheaply explore places around Sunnyvale, CA. I knew how to reach SFO, and explore places there for cheap. Where you could eat cheap. This also means, investing in quality and frugal stuff. A good $14 for jeans pants at costco(bought from a friend's costco card of course), buy a pair, and buy a pair of t-shirts. Then may be timberland shoes. Invest in a good jacket. Now your clothing is covered for years. A bag of basmati rice costs $15, and lasts at least 2 - 3 months, invest in a good rice cooker and making curry with veggies easy by buying produce at local farmers market. Meat is kind of cheap in US too. Sometimes you just skip meals(think of intermittent fasting as a side effect). Also you can buy a room heater for around the same price at Target. There are lots Chinese/Mexican barber shops around Sunnyvale/Santa Clara that give $8-$10 haircuts. I knew to scavenge through mail boxes, to pick up coupons. Then of course one kid gave me a whole coupon bunch for lyft, and uber eats and eat for free for long. etc etc.
I took good care of my health, so only once did I have to go to the doctor, and I didn't even pay a single dollar, they just asked me to continue taking TUMS.
Is it hard, yes. I mean I was once caught in a thunderstorm and it was too cold to tolerate, and I once missed the last bus back home. Could have taken Uber but decided to save $3 and walked 4 miles in dark and cold, missed because I had to pick up free food at office so the my back pack was heavy. I even at a point could hear my own footsteps which freaked me out real bad, it felt numb walking in the cold. Then of course you have to wake up at 5 in the morning, because you want to take the 7:15 bus as the breakfast is free at office. Its cold that early in the morning, I had tons of janitorial staff as friends because I would travel with them in the VTA and again meet them at office. I remember it almost feels like the cold seeping into your very bones. One day I relocated to a new place and I was sleeping in the hall, the room heater broke down- It felt like my toes would fall off. It was really really cold.
Then there's tons of time and self reflection you get in that much minimalism, loneliness and it kind of touches your soul to its core.
Then you also save a lot of money you can send back home, that in the hopes when you run out of visa time and eventually return, you will have some money to invest and make something out of it. Did it take a toll yes. I'd be barking mad to try all this again. But I don't regret it for a minute. I got a chance which only one in millions get, and I made most out of it. I learned tons from smart people, worked and pushed my self to the extremes I gave everything I had in me. I would always make it a point to visit universities and companies to get a idea of the scale and ambition of the US civilization. I have immense admiration and respect for the American people, and I am always thankful for the opportunity.
I'm a European, white male but a lot of what you write resonates with me because of my background:
I specifically remember walking well over 10kms in biting cold on a particular new years day early morning to get back to the farm to take care of my responsibilities, having pasta and corn (with grated cheese sometimes) for as a typical dinner etc, stretching pizzas out to last 2-3 days etc. To the annoyance of my family some of these habits stick hard even today :-)
Oh, and pretend it didn't matter when someone lost my my "new" (at that time) 3310 cell phone that I had got second hand from a another friend (who again had assembled it from broken ones that he had gitten hold of :-)
>>To the annoyance of my family some of these habits stick hard even today :-)
At the risk of sounding like a Meninist. I have to say one of the big reasons why Indian men leave behind families at home back in India, is because some of these struggles just can't be expected to be shared by their families. It just gets too much after a while, and after that you just have to keep up with it on sheer will power.
It takes a toll both on your body and mind.
I realize that in order to undergo some struggle analogous to this the American citizens have to undergo Navy Seals training or something. Or they run Ultramarathons just to create the human yearning for struggle and story :) And the attrition rate there is quite high.
Thanks for sharing your story. It reminds me of my father who experienced similar things in the 1960's: arriving to America with basically nothing, a network of friends, some skills and the ability and willpower to do demanding work. He immigrated, but there's a lot of similarity to what you experienced.
If I may ask, what has been your career path since your H1B days?
I was on L1-B. I had to return to India due to a combination of several problems including the Visa issues. Some people just get filtered out of the race. As an Indian it takes more than just a Visa to settle in the US. You have to be in the good books of your bosses if you want to move up in the GC category chain, which involves making it into inner power circles of office politics where the plum budgets get allocated. Its a complex equation of age+politics+luck+health+family situations etc. The equation becomes less favorable to you as you enter the 30s.
People like me, just do our time and return to India. The company was happy to let me continue working from Bangalore office.
Working in the Bay Area was a net positive for me. You learn so much from working with the smartest in the world. Everything changes, your motivation, drive, ambition, your imagination gets re-modelled as to what's possible and how far you can go. I have learned tons due to access to a awesome peer group. I used to visit Stanford and just walk there so many times just to be in the company and see the specialness of the place. My imagination itself has evolved. I learn to take failure less fatally, and take more chances these days.
For this reason alone, I advice young people at work and friends circle to try and work in Bay Area, even if its a short stint. Its a net positive to one's career.
In terms of concrete steps, I've been promoted at work. I learned to swim(Thanks to the hiking I did around Bay Area, all those people who were so focussed on fitness had a good effect on me).I had good savings for a head start in my peer/age group. I also made decent real estate investments in India. I had a start up in Bangalore before moving to Bay Area, now I want to start up sometime again. I have read dozens of books, and have developed appetite for taking on hard projects at work. My eventual plan is to be financially independent, so that I can have mental space to take time off and do things and projects I like. So I'm working on it.
Who knows what's next for all for us due to COVID and what else is to follow. But my experience in the past failing and getting up so many times tells me, as long as one is interested in doing work, learning and have immunity to handle tough times, general direction is always a upwards trajectory.
But I'd like to come back and again work in the Bay Area. This time around not that much for money but just for working with smart people.
Sometimes I really wonder. What stops people in US in other states to buy a ticket and relocate to Bay Area.
Well part of the reasons for all this is my salary was low, and I set myself fairly ambitious savings goals. But in Bay Area, rents are brutal and eat into most of your savings. In some cases even with sharing accommodation with people you end up paying like 15% - 25% of your paycheck(added utilities, general toiletries, home utilities, starting furniture, utensils and other expenses). Then of course internet expenses, phone bills, and coins for the washing machine. Add food and transit. I lived fairly minimal, like I didn't even have a mattress/comforter(sleeping on home carpet, with a pillow), given I was changing residence every 8 months. Only real things I owned was phone, laptop, clothes and a harmonica.
Its not constant, because during yearly bonus time you make a little extra. And when you visit home, you carry some gifts for people back there. I also made sure family back home was taken care off really really well.
But I was able to save a lot. Like able to go close and sometimes above 60% of the net paycheck most months. Keep in my I arrived to us with $200, a job and a suitcase with clothes.
I understand that this was an amazing opportunity for you, but your every response in this sub-thread has just cemented the argument that someone like yourself going to the States reinforced the idea that "accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly. So you're lowering their living standards and probably their average pay".
This not meant as a personal dig at you, I'm glad that it worked out well for you.
>>reinforced the idea that "accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly.
You are either incredible naive or just blind to the plight of your own country men. Do you know how many homeless people there are in the Bay Area? Have you ever seen black people working at Target or Walmart? Have you bothered talking to janitors at your office. Try talking to these people and see how life is going on for them. Sure its not comparable to what I did, but they have their own struggles and life is quite hard for them. Try talking to them and see what they think about those 'rich guys'(programmers).
The living standards you talk about are really for white people hailing from upper middle to rich class white families. Not every one has a $1.5 million home in San Ramon, Cupertino or Morgan Hill. Not everyone has a Tesla and a minivan for kids.
I'm not lowering the standards for anybody, If Im living that way, then there are already people for whom the VTA pass, coupons and timberland shoes were made. I'm just fitting in. You also can't fault me for not spending money like the way others do. If things in your society came at minimal standard of living acceptable to everyone, then everyone would be already living at those standards.
So tomorrow if people waiting tables at Starbucks or janitors took up programming jobs and lived like me, what would you do? Ban programming jobs for them, and reserve only for people who live the way you like?
Also what will you do about things like 'ramen profitability', or people like Elon Musk who at many times have stared at personal bankruptcy and have slept on their office floor.
The existence of a system that allows for companies to pay foreign labor well below market puts a downward pressure on compensation for everyone in industries that take advantage of it.
You mention that there are Americans who also struggle but I fail to see how that’s an argument in favor of systematic underpaying of foreign workers who are bound to a single employer (modern day indentured servitude). It’s the job of the government to improve the lives of its citizens and to protect their jobs, not to help foreign nationals improve their lives or to help businesses boost their profits at the expense of American salaries.
I’m all for immigration and fair pay. I’ve done it myself. But I don’t want to have to live as you described if at all possible. And I prefer that if you are talented enough to make it to the USA then you should be able to profit equally like Americans.
If forcing companies to pay equal salaries for foreign nationals stops the inflow of H1Bs, then this means that there are Americans capable of filling the job market. It there’s still unmet need for talent, then foreign nationals will be brought in at fair salaries
Well of course. As American citizens, its up to you to decide whom you wish have in your country. Its entirely acceptable even if you say one no should be allowed. I definitely won't make point on the lines of 'immigrants built America', its your decision. Nor am I saying that its the job of the US government to improve the lives of people over the globe. Though I believe even without others asking for it, or their consent, Americans are more than happy 'spreading democracy all over the world'.
But you can't stop any one living the way they want. There will always be people who will run/swim the extra miles, lift the extra weights, study the extra hours, eat ramen, do more than one job, walk/sleep in the cold, do the side gigs, moonlight their companies in garages. This is not slavery or anything. Slavery is stripping away people's rights without their consent, under the threat of violence. This just people wanting an edge over other humans. And regardless how you wish to live your life, there will always be people looking for that edge.
Lastly, I don't thing anyone living their life any way effects your standard of living. Your wages and compensation are decided based on how much effort your willing to put to get into a FANG. People who are willing to do that already make lots of money in a place like Bay Area.
The best thing about America, is the society goes lots of distance and makes it easy for people to do anything they want. So that at the end of the you are left with your own choice to make whatever life you want to. No immigrant is coming in your way of 'pursuit of happiness'
If you want to earn more money and want to know what's preventing you from getting it, you only have to look at the mirror.
The point the others are making isn’t about your standard of living, but your compensation.
If you hadn’t been tied to a single employer, maybe you would have gotten a job with an employer who paid more. You would have been able to reach your savings goal without living so frugally. Your employer at the time was comfortable paying you a relatively small amount because you couldn’t go anywhere else.
They’re not asking immigrants to live more lavishly. They’re asking for immigrants to be paid more so there’s less downward pressure on wages.
I am an H1B at a FAANG with top paying TC but I just fail to understand why Americans have to live this lifestyle. I get surprised when my fellow colleagues tell me than even with their high TC they don't get to save and live paycheck to paycheck. It's not a better lifestyle but just lack of financial education. American Capitalism and peer pressure is what it is.
I agree that h1b abusing employers have to be stopped and we need to raise the bar for h1b's but lets not make this a discussion about forcing a unhealthy lifestyle on immigrants.
>they don't get to save and live paycheck to paycheck. It's not a better lifestyle but just lack of financial education.
Expense will expand to cover whatever income you have. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you are not careful you can spend your entire income and have nothing left. There are some very poor people in the world saving surprising amounts of money (for their income - when you make a dollar a week saving a few pennies is amazing)
> It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you are not careful you can spend your entire income and have nothing left.
Really? I mean, I hear people (especially SV people) say this all the time but I make a fraction of what they claim to and I rarely even have to think about money.
You are a minority from what I can tell. Most people spend whatever cash they get. Which is why automatic savings plans are commonly recommended - if the money is never seen you don't spend it.
I'm not sure the above is entirely bad - when you die the money is gone. (this is a religious question - not all agree) You need some savings for unexpected, retirement, planted larger expenses, and other situations. Beyond that, if you have money left over that you didn't spend you wasted your time at work: get a life.
Born here in the US. Grew up in California. I would have loved to have it as good as our visa friend above (while in the US). Growing up poor can be rough. I can spin a sob story that literally has had folks from across the world reach out and say that they teared up.
When I finally broke into programming as a career at nearly 30, my life changed. A couple years into it, I found out I was making 80% of a new hire QA dev on visa where their salary had to be posted in the break room or something. As a back end engineer who was part of a team of 4 writing code that was earning our company over $50M a year, I was surprised that she was making substantially more than me. Turned out minimum salary visa stuff protected her from my salary.
I’m now doing better than most, but I’d expect that there are many like me who would just were/are unaware they could make it comfortably as a software developer.
Not sure where I was going. Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them. Those conditions are just “life” for many of us.
>>Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them.
I feel you.
Inertia can be hard to overcome, and if you are coming from a context and are used to your current social conditioning, breaking out of a self defeating loop can be hard. And you deserve credit for making it despite all the problems.
But poverty is subject to social conditions where you live, and poverty in the US != poverty in India. In fact the definitions of poverty are not even remotely same.
I would wager that an employer would just shift their office overseas, rather than be forced to increase wages. See what happened to manufacturing around the world.
By and large, I think its a quid-pro-quo between the US wanting foreign markets to sell into, and other countries wanting to sell their products, as well as human-resource-services into the US market. But, the US is a saturated market, and so the only growth is in emerging markets. Which also translates indirectly to 401(k) growth...
Almost all of those people you saw there are now living in pretty enviable situations for most Americans.
Calling these 'guest houses' as people living in second class of the society is as incorrect as calling the residents of Pied Piper house in 'Silicon Valley' as 'living like second class citizens'.
It would be simpler to award the limited pool of H1-Bs in order of descending wages, and cross-check with the IRS afterwards to verify those salaries are actually paid. That would kill all the bottom-feeding body shops.
If skilled foreigners accept lower wages because the right to come to the US is worth something to them, then the price of the visa would settle at around the difference in wages. So overseas workers wouldn't undercut US residents. And the perceived monetary value of living in the US would accrue to the government, not to body shops.
If you are in a low wage area and feel that your workers are as productive as workers in high wage areas then you can pay them a high enough wage that they get a visa.
If you don't feel that way then obviously the visa should go to a more productive worker and it doesn't matter that they happen to be in a high wage area.
If you believe immigrants are good for the economy and make everyone richer, strengthening existing companies with their unique talent and expertise and founding many successful new companies, why let rich costal cities get all the benefit when poor cities have a much greater need for an economic boost?
That's just like your belief, the actual economics do not support this. The only thing that might change is the distribution of economic surplus (as in capital gets a larger share of the economic surplus versus labor). You might argue there will be more surplus, but that's likely not the case, and not for the body shops being discussed.
Most people don't believe this statement is true (or, at least as true as you do) because if they did, we probably wouldn't be talking about any of this on HN.
That has the added benefit of removing the unpredictability of the current system. Companies would very quickly figure out roughly where the line is and could pay a premium to guarantee their employee gets one of the spots.
And you need to make sure the salary is not just paid back to the company / its owners. This is a common form of abuse in other countries with a minimum wage requirement for foreigners.
If we had a functional immigration system, green cards would be granted in a reasonable time frame (6 to 12 months). H1-Bs are an imperfect substitute, that can be and are abused. Any of the proposed measures would help curb "body shops" that are indeed stealing jobs from Americans, and keep those legit H1-Bs that are plugging holes in the native labor supply.
H1-Bs are transferrable, so calling it "indentured servitude" is incorrect, the real reason why H1-Bs usually stick with an employer is the green card sponsorship by the employer, which is not transferrable.
Will an executive order (which I assume this is) actually make any difference?
Doesn't it take an act of congress to make any serious headway here?
Personally, I was an H1B a 4.5 years before Trump convinced it was time to leave. I was in the bay area and handsomely overpaid.
I have no personal experience of it being abused, but I'm obviously privileged, having worked at reputable tech companies and coming from reasonable wealthy european country.
(I was never as scared of loosing job or healthcare as my American co-workers, because I would just move home, and have access to healthcare if I lost my job)
But I will say, that the lottery aspect of the H1B adds a lot of uncertainty that might discourage me from living in SF again. So lifting the caps and/or stemming abuse might be a good idea.
This is a rule in the Federal Register. So it's basically like law. It's essentially how the executive is interpreting the laws that congress has passed.
There is a rule that says a new President can automatically overturn all rules made in the last 90 days of the previous administration, but we're before that deadline, so this is pretty much a done deal.
If the next admin wanted to change this, they have to go through the long and arduous rule making process again.
While such action can make a difference, such as whether to put kids in cages or not, it can't really do much. You can't use it to change quotas, set a minimum wage, or allow H1B holders to change job.
So calling it an "overhaul" is perhaps a bit much. It's more like a tweak that mitigates some of the abuse and issues with the system.
>If the next admin wanted to change this, they have to go through the long and arduous rule making process again.
Does that also apply to rules that didn't go through that process but were rushed through with the interim final rules process? Doesn't sound logical to me.
Why is this on the top of the hacker news? The article talks about nothing that will stop the abuse. There are indeed a lot of RFEs that are being given out if you don't have a CS degree and apply for a Software Developer position already.
The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid.
How is hiring folks with a CS degree for an SWE position a solution to H1b abuse?
The rule published here specifically talks about three things(Yes, I read it line by line just so that I can do my due diligence before I comment here)[2]:
1/ Change the meaning of "Speciality Occupation" and tie this to the College degree that the person has.
2/ If you are part of these "body shops" and you are working as a contractor, your visa will only be extended for 1 year.
3/ Some general statements about Site Visits.
4/ No comment on increasing the wage.
The first child comment that we see below is an anecdotal evidence about seeing a house with dozen(?) folks in a 3 BHK flat? What does it do with H1B visa abuse? How is sending money home AFTER taxes H1B abuse?
Still debating how we went from thoroughly researched and thought provoking comments to these.
I don't debate that there is H1B abuse.
- Programmers are paid very less when compared to prevailing wage.
- Programmers cannot leave their employers so employers hold them by their balls and get work done overtime.
- Programmers stay away from their family, contribute to taxes AND to social security. KNOWING that they may never see a day to collect Social security.
All of this is H1B Abuse. There is no evidence that folks on H1B visa compete with a US Citizen's job. (I'm taking about H1B, not offshoring).
Literally NONE of the changes that this administration is doing is addressing ANY of these concerns for both the US Economy and the H1B individual. Comments like these are dangerous since they give an illusion that the administration is doing something to improve the economy, but they are just party tricks.
You’re talking about H1B abuse that primarily affects non-US citizens. I can sympathize (and I’m not a US citizen), but you can hardly expect the US press or hacker news to have that perspective or use that terminology... right?
I would expect people working alongside these visa recipients, and even the public at large, to have some idea of the system and the problems they face. (Although, for the general public, farm labor should probably figure larger).
And, yes, I do usually expect people to have the capacity to sympathise with others. I would even assert that everyone will instinctively want to help when they see others suffering. It's called empathy and is among the basic human emotions.
There is an ideological stream in the US that has seen the success of the market mechanisms based on competition and selfishness and is now misinterpreting it to mean than any form of altruism is bad.
Closely related is the glorification of competition to a degree where people are entire oblivious to the fact that a market economy is first and foremost a mechanism of cooperation. This has gone so far as to make even the notionally educated and self-styled rational tech community grasp around for speculative theories trying to frame this issue in terms of zero-sum competition. They somehow prefer to believe this against all evidence, i. e. the number of high-profile startups founded by first- or second-gen immigrants. And thereby give themselves license to do what it is they either actually want all by itself, or what they consider a proxy for good things happening to them: hurting others.
Additional competition on the job market might be great for companies and maybe even a country in general, but it's bad for job seekers by definition - they have to compete with more people for jobs.
This has nothing to do with the US, it applies just as well to e.g. Europe.
It's kinda fascinating and scary how easy it sometimes is in this country to grab a certain liberal group by the...whatever and even make them preachers of your political agenda.
Ability to control other people's lives - is a drug.
And as usual the decades of "Americans jobs" crap. There are no American Jobs, as much as there are no NYC jobs or LA jobs. The employer doesn't own the job, only the power to be an intermediary.
Jobs are a function of market demand for products and services.
If tomorrow all of US territory became miraculously healthy and had no need for drugs - pharmacists' jobs would just disappear. No market - no jobs.
Correct. It should prevent abuse both ways (for both US citizens and non US citizens). By making the system fairer, both US citizens and the world ends up benefiting, in addition to likely further helping the US economy.
Well... It still could, if “fair and honest dealings” is a political ideal you want to promote in the world. But sure, it’s not an administrations top priority, for understandable reasons.
Goal of my comment wasn't sympathy; but to get the facts out there that the current changes do nothing but to worsen the situation.(...not solving the H1B crisis)
There were companies hiring people under H1B then finding them contract work. Something they are specifically limiting now because they were abusing the system by under paying them as well as hiring them after they get the visa instead of before.
No. It just means that the contractor should establish themselves with employer-employee relationship before finding work, from the rule PDF:
> First, striking “contractor” will avoid potential confusion as the term “contractor” in the
definition is misleading. The inclusion of “contractors” in the regulatory language could be read
to suggest that contractors should generally qualify under the definition of a “United States
employer.” While a contractor is certainly not excluded from qualifying as a “United States
employer” for purposes of an H-1B petition, the contractor, like any petitioner, must establish the
requisite “employer-employee relationship” with the H-1B beneficiary.
> There is no evidence that folks on H1B visa compete with a US Citizen's job.
If an IT department puts out a req and fills it with an H1-B worker, a US worker is out of a job. It's really that simple. People like to respond to this and cite sources funded by H1-B consultancies about how H1-B create more economic opportunities which translates into more jobs for all but this doesn't make sense because companies will A) pocket the savings and B) continue to hire H1-Bs to keep on saving per headcount. The reality is that jobs are a zero-sum game. I welcome your response if you have a counter-point.
However the best solution would be the replace h1b with just citizenship - if you have rare skills why shouldn't we offer immediate citizenship to the talented?
Not really; If you have an in-demand skill set you get extra 'points' on the PR scoring chart, but you need to demonstrate many other things to reach the threshold required to get status. I went through that process and was denied because my work experience was through contracting (which for whatever reason didn't count). This was 10 years ago though, so things may have changed (also after three applications I finally got PR and then citizenship as of last year).
It used to be if you are a graduate or have experience working in a Canadian company you would score points. Which was much less prone to abuse.
Now they still have point based system, but the above don't get any extra point, and if you have those said qualifications anywhere, as long as you can prove (through documentations) you get the same points.
Result is rampant abuse with overseas companies that "vet" candidates' degrees and experience providing certificates and such things. And it takes longer for graduates from Canadian universities or someone with experience working at a company here since they compete in the same lottery pool.
It is still far better than US, but it could take you a while before your points start closer to the draw.
I went through the thing in Australia just 3 years ago. We have the same problem with people from certain country having a lot of experience and inflate the point system. The exp points in Australia acummulate twice as fast as exp overseas so those who worked in Australia like myself still have the advantage. However I am now not a fan of the point system as it's just another standard test to be hijacked by multiple attack vectors. I'd much prefer the european way where work visa is given out easily with fair wage and better mobility, (in Australia you have 4 - 6 weeks to find a new employer, not impossible for software but a bit tight). From what I've heard there is no real incentive to acquire citizenship/PR in many european countries b/c temporary residents enjoy the same stability.
It's not totally true that you don't need PR in European countries. For example you would get very different treatments and interest rates for loans when you want to buy real estate or apply for credit cards (many banks flatout turn down your application). You're probably not that much of a "second class citizen" compared to somebody working in the US, but some subtle restrictions still do exist. Though of course I can easily imagine the situation being much worse in the US.
Canada discriminates against those with disabilities that they deem would impose an 'excess burden', regardless of whether you have a good paying job or not. They are not perfect.
No, it really isn't. If you have your masters you can immediately be granted PR. This is the case for all Indian nationals - however it is still lottery based. The point system you're talking about is for unskilled labour, and that still has the 5 year in the country+ language requirements.
That's what folks pretend it means. IF you give citizenship to folks born there - or even born there to citizens, etc - then it isn't at all about loyalty.
Same with granting asylum seekers citizenship and so on. Same with allowing dual citizenship - are you loyal to two countries? Citizenship is never about loyalty.
Citizenship has a lot more to do with the ways you contribute to the country. Folks born in a country are likely to live there for life and contribute by speaking the local language, participating in local customs, being educated in and working in the country, and most importantly, paying taxes. This is why some categories are seen as "less important": Because folks think that some categories won't integrate enough (and it is impossible for an immigrant to ever do this, regardless of background), some won't learn enough language, or won't contribute as much. The truth of this is thrown out the window, of course, and there is no real objective test to test these sorts of things. Time in country might be one of the better tests, though it isn't perfect.
Citizenship has been diluted in recent decades, but it's not just pretense. And while the US has a rather puzzling loophole around birth and citizenship, that doesn't apply AFAIK in the EU: a child born to foreign parents will have to apply for citizenship just like anyone else. Asylum seekers likewise.
Dual citizenship's typically only allowed in the EU when the other country is also an EU country. Some countries do not even allow that. There's even a citizenship test which is administrated.
It is in the US: "Throughout our nation's history, foreign-born men and women have come to the United States, taken the Oath of Allegiance to become naturalized citizens, and contributed greatly to their new communities and country. The Oath of Allegiance has led to American citizenship for more than 220 years."
Now I haven't looked into many other countries, but at least in the EU I know that there's many proxies for loyalty when applying for citizenship. And many countries do not accept dual citizenship, which should make things clear for you hopefully.
I have heard stories (that don't seem too uncommon) of unscrupulous companies doing a variety of things - including charging the hopeful visa recipient payments to secure a job, paying the required salary only for the months leading up to the H1B interview and then lowering the salary immediately after, etc.
Not sure what fraud these new rules will prevent, if they are implemented.
"Body shops" like Infosys and Tata Consulting that import thousands of H1Bs under borderline fraudulent applications, and then underpay these employees.
Just a random link, but the contours of the problem:
Sure, there are low paid H1B workers, but why is that necessarily a problem? Your link shows no evidence that they depress the wages or employment of native-born workers.
In fact, there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration:
As a data point, a consultancy I used to work for competed directly with Infosys, Tata, and other H1B shops for tech contracts (mostly BA and PM work). I can personally guarantee you that hourly rates were artificially reduced as a result at multiple companies, which negatively impacted salaries and bonuses of American workers.
Keep in mind that most economic analyses of this topic ignore the direct competition aspect of the contract labor market impacted by H1Bs and instead focus on salaried FTEs at the businesses that contractors provide services to.
H1B here myself but someone who moved here during one of the years that had surprisingly lax demand for H1B visas. I moved here for a startup as the first engineer with a pay much lower than what I could have gotten in the market. It was purely because there was no demand for H1B that year that I got in. Every year since then has been the top 3 Indian companies stuffing the applications. However, the current rule change would shift the balance from consultancies to big tech companies. Startups do need talent too and there are people like me who are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for a reasonable equity. The winners of this rule change would be big tech companies - not necessarily the US in general.
What the US needs is a point based system with automatic green card in x number of years. This would allow the government to prioritize "desirable qualities" (education, age, salary and whatever you want to optimize for) and balance them out (e.g, I could get points for my education instead of my salary and still qualify). The automatic green card option would then open up the employees to work anywhere they want instead of the company that sponsored them thereby preventing wage suppression.
I'm fully supportive of massively more immigration - I believe it's a net economic positive and a moral imperative.
At the same time, if a program is designed to bring in 'exceptional talent' but is really just importing mediocre drones from a single country, that's not really serving the purpose of the program.
Let's fix H1Bs and then work on more equitable ways to allow other forms of beneficial immigration.
Aside from all of the evidence that both countries benefit in these arrangements as people skill up and often move home later on, letting free citizens choose where to maximize their livelihoods is a moral imperative, yes.
>Aside from all of the evidence that both countries benefit in these arrangements as people skill up and often move home later on
Can you please provide this evidence? I want to be educated on that. I thought that returning home is really rare for these people, and it does not compensate negative effects of the "brain drain" at all.
>letting free citizens choose where to maximize their livelihoods is a moral imperative, yes
People should be free to pursue whatever they want, no questioning that. However, elites of the US create such conditions that the best career path for the people from less fortunate countries is to move out, break cultural bonds and, probably, make the countries that they moved from, even less fortunate in the end - is it really moral?
I think that the most moral option would be increasing investment and creating child companies in countries where these people move from, creating nice jobs outside of the US, so nobody would have to move anywhere.
H1B and immigration shouldn't be used interchangeably. I think immigration should be easier, but I highly doubt that when the company I work for uses hires junior web developers with H1B visas for low pay based on the area, that they couldn't find a single native to fill the position, especially since it's always been a fully remote position.
One issue is that the scattershot visa applications from body shops crowd out applications from employers who want one specific, highly skilled person.
> there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration
I actually read through two of the "proper economic analyses" in that reddit link since I am interested in this.
One of them wasn't an economic analysis but a summary article: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/contributions-high-.... Almost all of this article is talking about all of the problems with trying to identify the net effects of immigration and how difficult it is.
It has quotes that directly refute what you are saying such as:
"Immigration has complex, sometimes ambiguous impacts on natives. The benefits to the US economy from high-skilled immigration can be accompanied by negative effects for certain groups of natives and positive effects for other groups." Which is the opening summary of the section on effect on natives. Also,
"Borjas found that a 10 percent increase of immigrants with PhDs in a certain field lowered the wages of native born graduating with doctorates in those same fields around the same time by 3 percent"
"Researchers have also examined the degree to which high inflows of foreign-born students affect the educational opportunities of native students. Borjas finds some evidence that an inflow of foreign-born students displaces native, white male students in elite institutions"
Clearly, the biggest effect of immigration is on previous immigrants (currently 30% of California): "Foreign-born workers already here sustain the largest losses in real wages, losing between 17 and 20 percent of their real wage over 14 years."
It just so happens that natives (specifically who are college educated) tend to have complimentary skill sets in the years mentioned.
"Except for workers with some college education, whose real wage gain is around 6 to 7 percent, no other group experiences real wage gains or losses larger than 4 percent. This implies that even with the moderate costs of moving, in the range of 5 to 10 percent of their yearly income, native workers would not move (out of or into California) in response to immigration."
That is the support you have that "native-born workers benefit from immigration". It helped college educated natives and the rest of the population wasn't negatively affected enough to leave California. And that's based on migration data ending in 2004 and Californians have been leaving in record droves since then.
Of course, it doesn't mention any thing about the rest of the effect on natives such as cost of living increases due to crowding, strain on institutions (do you want to send your kids to an average California school?), unwanted changes in culture and politics, decrease in social cohesion, decreases (or lack of improvement) in working conditions, increases in inequality or any of the other consequences.
The average US male wage has barely moved since the 1970s during a time of unprecedented levels of immigration. If immigration is such a net benefit to native-born worker, where did those improvements go?
H1B visas are in theory intended to be awarded only when there is a shortage of some specialized labor and it is not possible to find enough qualified candidates within the country. If a person hired under that premise ends up making a “pretty normal” wage it’s a pretty clear sign that the process is being abused.
I work for a company that's about 30th in terms of H1B's. All around me, I see degreed engineers -- many with their Masters -- doing clerical work that a sharp high-school graduate could do. I'm not talking about a few. I'm talking about dozens. There's nothing about what they're doing that requires specific engineering knowledge. They only have to be conversant about what the actual engineers are doing. So the effect is 2-fold: the fact that his arrangement exists puts downward pressure on wages for the skilled jobs, but it also takes great opportunities away from people who would have gotten those jobs a few decades ago.
A majority of H1B visas are currently issued to relatively low paying consulting firms, who are then hired by big enterprises in place of their more expensive technical employees. This isn't supposed to be legal - you're not allowed to hire H1B employees if an equally qualified American could have filled their role - but due to the specifics of how the program is administered you can often pull it off with that kind of arms-length deal.
"Bottom" performing FTE's are let go as part of annual stack ranking, only to be hired by staffing agencies, and contracted back to large tech companies.
It's a way for tech companies to retain people who are necessary to perform the work, but at reduced wages.
You're bound to the employer that sponsors your visa. Lose your job? You're effectively deported.
Your employer has... well, a power imbalance over you, to put it nicely.
I'm not sure how the proposed changes will play out for American workers. Theoretically, treating H1B workers better could benefit American workers: there is less incentive to callously replace them with underpaid H1B workers. On the other hand, American workers will face increased competition, it seems to me.
> Your employer has... well, a power imbalance over you, to put it nicely.
I can't help but think of this any time I see an HN comment about some questionable surveillance-ad-tech, usually saying that engineers should just refuse to build that stuff.
Do you think the possibility of finding a new job makes H1B workers feel any more capable of standing up for their beliefs at work and maybe saying "No" when asked to build something evil?
It may not eliminate it, but I'm sure it improves the situation compared to not being able to change jobs at all. I originally came to the US on an H-1B, and had no trouble transferring the visa to a new employer.
If you have to go back to UK or Canada that is no big loss
If, on the other hand you have to go back to China or India
or AFrica then your entire family is #$@$#$%
Canada and the UK are nice places, but it's still a huge blow to have to pick up your family and move back to another country.
Source: I'm American, so I don't know this pain personally, but I was very close with a Canadian co-worker who was here on a work visa. He uprooted his wife and kids from Canada to come and work here. When our workplace soured, he had to do it all over again. Uproot his wife and children again, tell his children to say goodbye to their friends again, buy a house again, etc. Not easy!
You're tied to a pool of employers and have to get government permission to transfer employment. Your employer has an enormous power over you, with little recourse on your side.... as if employers didn't have enormous power over their employees as is.
Some of the changes I can see a logic behind it. But making electrical engineers not qualify for H1B for a SWE job is just silly and doesn't match reality. Just ask the SWEs in any 1000+ software company how many of them are electrical engineers.
True for the most part. But there are unexpected consequences for this. Startups will be ill afforded to hire foreign talent now. All the immigrants will look for jobs at BigCo. because they are the ones who can pay those high salaries.
Agreed... been saying for a long time, there should be a pay floor of 8-10x minimum wage for H1B workers. These are supposed to be for positions we cannot fill locally, there's no reason they shouldn't be 6-figure jobs at a minimum.
I really don't like his personality, but really do appreciate a lot of the things Trump does in practice.
Genuine question, what type of fraudulent abuse are you referring to? I see this vaguely mentioned a lot without much to back it up, but I'm open to the idea that it happens.
From my own anecdotal experience, I'll admit I have found the rules to be a little ridiculous. Company needs to post a sign in the office advertising the role to any Americans, wait a certain amount of time, and only then can offer it to an H1-B candidate. Of course nobody was following the spirit of those rules, but I wouldn't call that fraudulent abuse. These were companies that needed hires and had a genuinely hard time finding people that would pass our interviews and then accept our offers. We really didn't discriminate at all in the hiring panels between American and H1-B candidates (I think we were probably supposed to discriminate more than we did, and supposed to explicitly prefer Americans?), and it had nothing to do with saving money on salaries.
I recognize that the Bay Area tech boom is very unusual in how competitive it is (was?), but H1-Bs are technical visas and it's often tech companies that get the blame for abusing the system.
Another semi-fraudulent practice I've seen too often: find an H1B worker for a position you want to fill at a sub-US labor rate, then write a very specific job posting that perfectly fits that one H1B worker and no one else, and post the job only on the company website where no one will find it. Congratulations, you've just "proven" that you can't find an American worker to do this job, so you bring the H1B worker over as basically an indentured servant. In reality, there were plenty of American workers who could have and would have taken the role if it was represented properly and actually paid a competitive market salary.
The abuse I've seen most often is that companies hire H1B workers and then contract them out to other companies, and the H1B worker can't change employers, and gets to watch most of what their time is billed for go to the original contracting company which often misleads the people about what they'll find when they arrive.
The worker ends up with very few choices, and the companies at which the workers are working are likely overpaying for what they're getting. The only one truly happy is the "placement" company that holds the workers' contracts.
I finally agree with something this administration is doing.
This is a solid move.
H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
I just hope the new administration don't role back these changes. Typically when a new administration comes in they have a "throwing the baby with the bath water" mentality. I hope they realize the things that the previous administration did which makes sense and keeps them
As a former H1B holder who walked away from a Green Card because being a bonded laborer for 10+ years to a large tech company wasn't my cup of tea
I agree 1000% with you on this -> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
*
It's bonded labor of people desperate to get into the western world and/or get into Silicon Valley/US tech scene
It only benefits large tech companies
A) US citizens have lower salaries (lucky ones) or don't get jobs (unlucky ones)
B) H1B workers are paid less and are bonded labor
C) US itself loses out because many of those people would have started companies
Do you want people starting PinDuoDuo, FlipKart, Meituan Dianping, Shopify type companies in US or in other countries?
Then why instead of letting these 'brightest people from around the world' become entrpreneurs in US
are you asking them to spend 22 to 35 being bonded labor for data surveillance companies like FB and GOOG???
(A) The fact that silicon valley gets access to global talent which make sthe companies much more successful and massively increases the number of jobs available providing far more jobs for US citizens than if the visa program didn't exist
(B) The H1B visa holders are earning far more than they would get by remaining in their home country, and whilst they're bonded labour in the US they can always return to their home country leaving them at a minimum with a choice between a better job in the US or the same situation they had in their home country anyway.
(C) The US gains a bunch of highly intelligent, highly taxable employees who will likely eventually become citizens and can then create startups as well as providing a larger labour pool for the people who are starting companies.
All of your critiques are comparing H1B visas against some imaginary system where people can come to work in the US with no restriction, and let's remind ourselves these changes are from a thoroughly anti-immigration administratrion. The alternative to the H1B system is no H1B system, which is why it's been so difficult to reform. There is no law getting out of congress that reduces the restrictions on immigration.
If the alternative is no H1B that would be very bad for the US.
But I think there’s a middle ground where you can say let’s the keep H1B program but tweak it in a way that benefits the H1B visa holder and American citizens so corporations don’t take advantage of the talent shortage in tech
The only way to make it better - do away with H1B and government restrictions on labor of migrants. (Show your passport, geta job and pay taxes - done)
Point b, "if you don't like it go back to your country"... they might be earning more, but the cost of living is WAY more than in their home country, I agree that they might be able to save some to no go back empty handed or to send back to their family, but why should they suffer in the meantime?
Point C is like a slap in the face of entrepreneurship by making it seem that only after X years of 'bonded labour' will these people be worthy of starting up.
All companies started off by students who came for an MS/PhD & happened to be successful were borderline of the grey-area w.r.t. laws.
But that’s not what’s happening... every H1B holder I’ve personally worked with, while being incredibly nice people, required immense oversight to get any useful output from. 1 U.S. developer/manager to 5+ H1B hires seems to be common.
Shopify is canadian, Meituan Dianping and PinDuoDuo play in the chinese ecosystem and Flipkart is an indigenous solution for a global south country (it isn't that unique, there are ons of them and they dont bring value to the american economy except spotify). Also there is a huge moral assumption being made by many on HN: non-citizens have the right and a moral imperative to participate in the american economy. It's almost as if america's value as codify by their laws doesnt matter and these folks basically view the issue really not about respecting those laws but about the task of influence.
+1 on this. I have a CS masters degree from top UK university and was hired as Software Engineer, but company registered me as a Computer technician. When my H1b required renewal, DoL found out that I was a Software Engineer and company was forced to give a 20k yearly increase, not retroactive. This was Cisco. This is a.great move for people like me that I had no idea about salary ranges and US laws
I fail to see how your points are correlated to the changes. (As far as I grasped them, because wsj is paywalled...)
If a company lowered your wages by wrongfully registering you for a lower paid position, they could still do so, because the crux is comparing the salary to a different demographic. The problem wasn't with the law, but with them screwing you and you not carefully reviewing the visa laws of the country you immigrated to.
It actually sounds like the new visa regulations will make immigration for entry level positions much harder. So your alternative would've likely been not getting a job in the US to begin with.
Well, let me explain you that when you migrate to a new country, apart from dealing with your work Visa you need to deal with driving license, SSN registration, bank accounts, rental, car, new language, new work culture, new life...so yeah I should have known back in 2007 when there was no glassdoor, blind that I was underpaid by that much and company registering me as X when my company title was different.
I'm very well aware of what you have to do as I immigrated to two countries myself.
My point was not that it's not understandable that you were not aware of that, but that this change in law has nothing todo with being unaware of the law.
Your underpayment happened in violation of the previous law and with the new regulation you might not have gotten the job to begin with.
> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small)
I don't see this exactly.
I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders. Many of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Presumably paying a huge amount in taxes for the privilege.
Most software developers I know are not making what I would deem suppressed wages, especially in the current conditions (and I don't have an SV job). Most firms I know would hire more people, but instead are contracting with firms and individuals outside of the US.
I have worked with brilliant H1B holders and also with manifestly mediocre ones. And even a couple "net negative" employees.
To the best of my knowledge all of them played the game diligently and got their green cards, and many of them got their citizenship. Good for them, and in many cases good for us.
But I absolutely did not see any greater level of talent among the H1B's than any other cohort in SF/SV.
While I'm very happy to work with people from all over the world, I do think that H1B has been used to get a lot of people in who aren't any better than your local City College grads. In addition to that being radically against the national interest, it's also really unfair to the "brilliant visa holders" you have had the good fortune to work with.
The problem in the US, as I understood it, is that there is shortage of workers in IT [1]. To me, it sounds like turning off the stream of potential workers, without fixing the underlying issue. With the current rules (85k H-1Bs a year), it would take 10 years for immigrants to fill all the spots. There may be a lot of untapped talent left in the US (based on under-representation of women, that's a discussion for another time), but somehow, the vacancies are not getting filled - what gives?
In addition, it seems that even currently, H-1B program has rules to make sure the wages paid are fair [2] - if they are not, it sounds like a problem with enforcement, or with how prevailing wages are calculated. To me, based on [3], it does not look like calculating the prevailing wage is the problem.
You have to realize that there really isn't a "shortage" of workers in the computer science field. Companies like to pretend like there is, but really it's just about pressing salaries in the long run. I have a friend here where I live who is a well-qualified java backend dev, not completely socially inept but who couldn't find a job in two months now after his previous company didn't renew his contract. This is not an outlier, I have spoken with lots of software engineers who had trouble finding work even in the next big city here, despite 50+ "open" positions. In reality, most of those spots are either a) nonexistend, the company just wants a stream of new applicants in case they can get their hands on a cs master for like 2k/month or b) pro forma because they're required by some policy to open the position to outsiders to fulfill a quota. In my experience the lack of IT workers is bullshit and anyone perpetuating it is either unknowing of the real world or acting in malice.
Isn't that nearly always the case, in every field? I know guys on landscaping who say the same about senior workers who know how to deal with more exotic plants. In education this phenomenon is a huge part of why poorer schools suck, experienced teachers move to the suburbs as soon as possible.
The problem is that it is anecdotal. I have been frequently approached by my skip level manager and asked if I know anyone that we could hire since we have headcount that's open for months (this was MSFT) and we won't be able to work on everything we wanted to. This is also something I heard from other people (managers) as well. So now how do we measure if the shortage is real or not? Your gut feeling?
They can already get geniuses for paltry wages, it's called "outsourcing". I feel that a lot of people operate with the assumption that a person needs to be in the USA to "steal someone's job" - that's not the case, and hasn't been for a while.
But, we don't have to argue about what we think is happening - there's data available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. It should be possible to see how wage growth in tech compares w/ other sectors. My hypothesis is that without shortage, wage growth would not outpace other industries.
> I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders.
I don’t disagree one bit. I think immigrants contributed and continue to contribute tremendously to the US economy. But at the same time policies should not be used to suppress wages by the “C” suite class. By paying low salaries it increases profits for the companies and contributes to income inequality
This isn’t going to have any impact on the number of H1B visas that are awarded. There’s a cap at 85k/year, and most applications get rejected. This is just going to result in the available 85k/year slots being awarded to the intended pool of high-skilled industry specialists, rather than those people being swamped out by a mass of applications from companies that see this as an opportunity to hire cheap labor. I have had a colleague who was probably making $200,000+/year sent back to his native country because all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and all the king’s immigration lawyers too...) couldn’t secure them a continuation of their work visa.
I don't think we disagree with it, it just isn't very significant. A couple of city states agreeing to recognize Israel? Ok, a nice step forward, but it doesn't seem very substantial or that a real solution is in the works.
How familiar would you rate yourself with Middle East politics? From people I know who are quite deep into it, it’s actually a very significant change to the geopolitical balance of the region that will likely have a lot of ramifications going forward.
Answers vary with whether someone is a Trump supporter or not, but again, these are city states, not Iran, not even "almost Israel ally at this point" Saudi Arabia. He also has made no progress with the Palestinians, and has gone plenty backwards on the front (forcing Serbia to move their embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, huh?).
All valid points, but at least the perspective I've heard is it's breaking up the "pro-Palestinian block" somewhat, so definitely changing the power dynamics, and impacting the Palestinian situation as they are losing potential allies. And as for Iran, it's pulling countries away from their sphere of influence.
Who knows whether it will be a positive push in the right direction, but it's certainly changing the dynamics of the region.
"Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict."
How low is your bar for peace medal worthy efforts? If not starting wars is an achievement there’s a bloody long line of heads of state ready to receive one. And yes I do realize the bar was set low by the previous president.
Sorry the discussion is about the commenter not agreeing with any previous policies of the president. If you don't think this quote marks an important shift in American policy I'm not sure you follow American policy.
exactly. although there's more than one way to fix this. one controversial idea, but in line with capitalism is to just give (highly) skilled immigrants permanent residency (other countries do this already, and the H-1B process is also pretty rigorous). why? because right now with e.g. the H-1B, your employer has to petition for a green card. as you've said, it costs a lot of money to sponsor an H-1B. a reason some bad-faith companies do this is because they know the H-1B employee is tied to them (although an H-1B transfer is not too difficult). imagine if it was easier for visa holders to switch employees? i'm not holding my breath though.
in any case, having H-1B be a lottery was always weird. i just hope this doesn't impact any existing H-1B holders :(
Probably harder, actually. Google and other high-paying tech companies have been lobbying for this change for years. There are only 85k/year slots for H1B visas and they are awarded by lottery. High-paying tech companies generally have a high hiring bar and don’t find all that many candidates, so they don’t submit all that many applications to the lottery, and as a result their candidates get swamped out by the hordes of applications from body shops like Tata. This change will drive a lot of applications from low-paying companies out of the pool, and high-paying companies will be able to hire a larger share of the candidates they submit applications for each year.
Most people don't get this obvious fact. Blocking low paid neurosurgeons from coming into your country, never translates to allowing barbers to operate on your head.
It probably means you either go into a wait queue to get your operation done, or you fly to a different country where those doctors are present. Either way the operation will be more expensive, and your country will have less know-how at the end. You also have to now deal with the consequences of having awesome things getting done outside your country, which means the next generation of neurosurgeons won't be coming out of your country. At least not all of them.
Now Google or any other company isn't going lower the bar for hiring, they'll just happily open offices outside US to get the cream of the those countries. The fact that it could hurt your feelings is just irrelevant here.
Its very much like getting hired to Navy SEALs or some into some other elite unit. They have their criteria, they really don't mind rejecting you if you don't measure up.
The new administration will absolutely roll back these changes to kowtow to pro immigration groups and wage sensitive Silicon Valley. Obama administration expanded the coverage of H1B to their spouses (H4 dependents) who previously were ineligible to work.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Obama administration allowed Employment Authorization for dependents of H-1B visa holders who applied and were chosen for permanent residency and were stuck in the backlogs. Many of these people - women, mostly - have been unable to participate meaningfully in the economy of many years. What is the problem with allowing them to work while they wait for their turn to be permanent residents?
< What is the problem with allowing them to work while they wait for their turn to be permanent residents?
Why have immigration quotas. Why do you have to stand in line at Starbucks? You can go straight to the counter and holler. Happens all the time in India right ? Why stand in line at all.
The original idea of the H1-B Visa was these were high paying jobs where the spouse wouldn't need to work. It appears the pay rate has not kept with with inflation and/or cost of living.
They are not denied the right to work, but they are not given the right by default. The spouse can still apply to work via other means, but should not be given a work Visa by default. These restrictions on spouses are the same of every other country I have heard of, the US is the only one that had a special Visa just for spouses.
Nothing is preventing spouses from applying for H1B or other Visas, they key debate with the H-4 Visa is the spouses needed to work to afford to live in the areas. This just highlights the absurdity of the income levels in the H1B program. H1B is a temporary work Visa, everyone that has applied should understand there might be restrictions for yourself or your dependents until your family has a green card.
I do think it’s strange that HN has a supposed stance against political discussion, but allows discussion of the one popular policy from a very unpopular administration. Seems like a double standard leaning to the right.
Exactly this. It has been frustrating watching basically any other news about this administration get flagged to death (or at least shoved off the front page) because "politics isn't allowed on HN." Then, we get an article like this and are expected to pretend that it isn't politics when it's happening in the context of the election being weeks away and while people are literally at the polls casting their votes as we speak.
There's loads of interesting news coming from the administration each day, but when only the items that least offend people's sensibilities make it through the flagging brigade, it acts as a politically biased filter.
Then there are plenty of equally-or-more pertinent policies that should also be discussed. Immigration is the 6th most important topic to American voters this election [0,1]. Trump has unpopular stances on the top 5 topics [2] but headlines related to that are not allowed on HN because they are political. This is the double standard.
Finally, Trump’s legal immigration policy is very anti-immigration [3]. This is a stunt to get an uptick in votes. The reality is that this policy sounds nice on paper but will make it even harder for people to immigrate to the US.
How are changes to H1B's a political issue in the same vein as say the president going to the hospital? H1B's are huge in the tech industry and so of course of huge interest to the tech community directly.
Probably a better link than the WSJ submission – even though I'm a subscriber, I want the facts, and the facts seem to be hard to find
As a matter of fact, I still haven't found the actual "interim final rule" (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one), so if anyone has a link, I'd be immensely grateful
One paragraph I was keen on knowing more about – and which seems pretty uncontroversial:
> Under this new rule, the petitioner will have the burden of demonstrating that there is a direct relationship between the required degree in a specific specialty (in other words, the degree field(s) that would qualify someone for the position) and the duties of the position. In many cases, the relationship will be clear and relatively easy to establish. For example, it should not be difficult to establish that a required medical degree is directly correlated to the duties of a physician. Similarly, a direct relationship may be established between the duties of a lawyer and a required law degree, and the duties of an architect and a required architecture degree. In other cases, the direct relationship may be less readily apparent, and the petitioner may have to explain and provide documentation to meet its burden of demonstrating the relationship. To establish a direct relationship, the petitioner would need to provide information regarding the course(s) of study associated with the required degree, or its equivalent, and the duties of the proffered position, and demonstrate the connection between the course of study and the duties and responsibilities of the position
This was already the case, they would ask for a request for evidence (RFE) how the degree was related. This is annoying if you e.g. studied maths and then started working in IT.
I've seen this abused so badly though--our compliance person in HR was asking me to help write one a while back for a candidate that had a BS in mechanical engineering and no relevant work experience, claiming that a course the applicant had that taught MATLAB was sufficient experience for a role as an android dev.
LOL. You don't know what you are talking about at all.
I have a degree in physics but I have been programming since I was 10. From what I can tell, my programming skills and experience are no less than someone who graduated with a master in CS at a major university.
"Qualified" by whom? By universities? Fortunately, in SE the code talks loud and clear, and discriminatory rent seekers need to invoke the violence monopoly to get their way.
I totally agree on the sophistication--I did a ton of HPC work for my masters thesis.
But a class where you had to write some code to do basic finite element analysis or solve linear systems doesn't make you qualified work on a distributed software system.
Right, that was my understanding as well, but the WSJ article said the rule "narrowed" the list of degrees so I was curious if they had limited to some specific list like STEM degrees + Law + Medical or something like that
That is insanely complicated. I know it would cost a lot of governmemt jobs to simplify, but, why not just a lottery for a set number? Or a set salary floor?
One thing I don’t understand is the ridiculously low “entry level” wage set at 17%. Those are the jobs we need to protect the most to get disadvantaged americans into the pipeline. 17% is the zone of broad mis-classification, like a ‘computer systems analyst’ that works at the library, or academic jobs, or sweat equity workers.
The complexity of the system acts a deterrent to applications. The point is is to force H-1B's to exist as a lever you start pulling when your business depends on it, not as labor force optimizations for capital-flush companies.
You can co-relate the RIN numbers(1205-AC00) in the PDF referenced above and this rule. Just a lot of FUD in the comment and WSJ article. I'd hope they do better research than what I did in 30 mins.
“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.”
This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.
> This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.
It's not a moral issue (except for the big H-1B mills that are gaming the system.)
But nothing has changed: these are not an offer of citizenship. They are temporary work visas with no guarantees: an opportunity to do temporary specialty work in the U.S.
If someone were to bring their family, they have done so with the explicit knowledge that the situation could change at any time.
No one said that it was, but there is a difference between submitting for an extension X months ago and fully expecting to get it, and then the rules changing out from under you and being told "No. I understand you've been here for 10 years, but pack up all your shit and leave".
5 years ago it was technically "and leave tonight" (which I'm sure you understand is unreasonable). Luckily now there is at least a 60 day grace period to look for something else, but still.
You are being rather unsympathetic to people who find themselves in this situation.
Good point, but then would you lose your status even if your h1b ended? Wouldn't the pending GC petition be enough to keep you in status?
It happened to me, I lost my h1b a few weeks after filling for my GC and I had no problem staying in the country. It was a GC via marriage though, rules ma be different for employer sponsored GCs
>It was a GC via marriage though, rules ma be different for employer sponsored GCs
Rules are indeed different for Employment based green cards. Marriage based green cards don't have a limit while the number of employment based Green cards that can be given out in a year is fixed ( in total and within that there is a 7% cap on how much each individual country can receive)
People stuck this way from India & China aren't even able to file for GC's. You can only file for a GC if your country's date is "current" (which is not the case for marriage based GC)
Their only legal basis to stay in the US is the H1-B which they can keep on renewing because they have an approved I-140. In my current situation, i have an approved immigrant petition and i will have to continue to get H1-Bs approved
till i get current (which current projections are about 40-50
years). I've been in the US for a decade and it will be many many decades before i can remove the dependence on the H1.
The math is simple - there are about 400K Indians with approved immigrant petitions. And across 2 categories the maximum number of green cards that Indians can receive in a year is about ~6K. Each petition is roughly 2 green cards
So if an Indian gets an immigrant visa approved today in 2020 , they're looking at wait of 800/6 (133) years even be able to file for a green card.
One thing is a lot of Indians got GC's in EB-1 in the last decade(2000-2020). There were some Indian IT outsourcing firms that promoted people to higher roles for EB-1 GC purposes and then demoted them after they got GCs. Thousands of people got it(thanks to mind boggling levels of office politics), now the EB-1 queue is flooded due to his abuse(fraud?). EB-1 used to be current, now the wait is again in a few years(<10).
Part of the problem here seems to be at least to some extent everyone(us Indians) flooding these queue's while native population keeping these quotas fixed(to control they don't change their society too much).
One also needs to realize there will always be limits to these things. Now given every one wants to come to US, they can't accommodate everyone. There will be limits. Limits to number of H1B's, limit to yearly GCs. What should the limit be? 6K, 60K, 600K? How much?
Imagine India doing this. We recently passed laws to restrict immigration. For some reasons we expect to shut doors to everyone, while simultaneously expecting the whole world roll out red carpets for us.
You do loose status after 60 days in case of employment based green card applications which are approved but the so called priority date is not current. For 100s of thousands of people these priority dates will take literally decades to become "current".
> If someone were to bring their family, they have done so with the explicit knowledge that the situation could change at any time.
I don't disagree - and I'm a US citizen, who previously was a greencard holder, who previously came here via the H1B process.
But look at it this way: the whole greencard approval process sometimes takes years, or even over a decade. When people spend 10 years in some place, the perspective changes a bit. It does become a complicated issue, with moral overtones too.
Make the goddamn greencard approval (or rejection) faster. If processing the papers took a few months, instead of years, after which you got your yea or nay decision, then the whole issue would be much simpler - and, indeed, as you say it would not be a moral issue at all.
But think of someone who spent here 10 years, brought their spouse here, had a couple kids (that clock doesn't stop ticking just because you're waiting for a rubber stamp to hit the paper), the kids go to school, and from a cultural perspective the kids are American - and then they are all told to get the hell out of here. That's terrible.
Speed up that stupid process. Then sure, tweak the rules any way you see fit.
How many years do you think is the limit to being temporary and still being honest?
If they were giving 50 year H1B visa that are not guaranteed to be renewed, would you still say that it is the visa holder's fault for bringing their family?
If not for 50 years, then when should we start blaming them? How many years is a reasonable amount to put someone at fault for putting down roots?
I don't think you can dismiss the moral issue. The fact that there may technically be no "guarantee" does not mean that people ought to be treated unreasonably. The fact that some people may not care about the effects American policies have on people who are not American is not the same thing as it not being a moral issue.
People oh H1B are either very friendly to constant moves or are banking on a path to citizenship through it. The latter category is the vast majority, let's be honest here.
The decision would be ok in most other countries, where the land is some ethnic group's birthright. America, however, is unique in that it's everyone's birthright. The only reason most educated people don't support totally open borders is because there's so much poverty outside the US, but H-1B holders are not poor.
I think they may have been referring to varying citizenship laws across the world. The USA has citizenship by soil and blood, meaning that the country belongs to the people born here and the children of it's citizens. (Let's set aside naturalization for a moment, as that is not a birthright.) Some other countries have citizenship by blood only, so in a sense, those countries belong to their ethnic groups, wherever they may be. So in essence, the USA is more inclusive in bestowing the birthright of citizenship, which befits a nation of immigrants.
I support the free movement of people, but also the sovereignty of individual nations to decide who that country belongs to. For a strange example, the UK belongs to the queen, but she's nice enough to let her subjects have the use of it.
And back to naturalization, these H1b changes highlight why naturalization is important and should be achievable for anywho who ties their life to the USA. Citizenship confers privleges and protections and asking people to make life altering investments into a country without offering citizenship in return is exploitative and immoral.
Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.
This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy by the family like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, entertainment, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India or Canada itself.
If I were in the Canada govt, I'd immediately create a way around the travel ban for workers who's visas didn't get renewed to be able to move to Canada after following a strict quarantine protocol. If the worker was able to work remotely in the US using Zoom, why can't they do the same job remotely in the same time zone in Canada using the same remote working tools?
There is already a small industry in Canada where a company takes a few % of the billing rate in order to sponsor and hold a Canadian visa for people who lost their H1B visas due to increased and inconsistent rejections over the past few years, but whose employer is willing to allow them to work from Canada. This moves a lot of money to Canada.
Also, some tech companies have been outright moving jobs to Canada because they can hire from a global workforce and Canada has been welcoming them. This is going to intensify.
That applies only to people physically within the US. A non resident alien is someone on a work visa or student visa or other authorization. A resident alien is someone on a green card. Those rules don't apply to people in Canada who pay Canadian taxes(otherwise there would be double taxation).
So this is amusingly similar to the argument against a minimum wage increase. People will lose their jobs, families will lose out. In either case, the employer is the actual baddie being forced to either raise the wage to an appropriate level or send the employee home (and then attempt to backfill the job with the local market, probably not easy). So if you are for an increased minimum wage, legislation at least in part intended to eliminate abusive employment practices across the low end labor market, (and I assume you are because of your rightful concern for the families) wouldn't it make sense to praise this legislation and focus your frustration on the inevitable corporations that are taking advantage of foreign labor? Or is there more nuance to this?
There's a big difference between requiring a minimum wage for anyone and specifically requiring a higher wage for existing H1-Bs. In particular, the fact that H1-Bs will have to emigrate if it isn't increased.
The H1B can be and does get renewed by 100s of thousands of people. AC21 provision allows for an H1B to be renewed in perpetuity (even beyond 6 years) until an approved green card petition is pending. The approved green card petition can stay pending for a really long time due to country based immigration queues which disadvantage people from large population countries.
H1-B is a dual intent work visa an you're not required to emigrate. You shave the option to extend your work permit for 6 years or pursue permanent residency.
He didn't say families being ejected is amusing. His point is that the argument that increasing minimum wage will result in people getting fired (made often by the right) is practically identical to the argument that increasing the wage requirements for H1B visas will result in people getting fired (now made by the left).
The amusing part is that both sides now look like hypocrites. The outcomes for individuals and their families is obviously tragic either way.
A non-retroactive raise of the wage scale isn't bad per se - it cuts down a lot of the incentive to flood the system, and prioritizes employees who will add the most value.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that this surprise kick-out is a feature, not a bug.
I definitely think it's a feature, as it has a "corrective" effect. But yes it does uproot people and they should at least allow a grace period to allow the visa holders time to address their family/living situation.
I find this really sad. Knowing a lot of people who work in the US who aren't citizens and have more and more been stressed about their access to return home and back for a variety of reasons, this just adds to a pile of depressing realities people in America are facing.
> I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.
Existing H-1B holders should clearly be grandfathered in, but those aren't the only people who have done nothing wrong. What about the would-be future H-1B holders who would have benefited from working while making less than the new requirements? In other words, the vast majority of people who are going to be affected by these new rules.
I don't approve of seamlessly replacing "people" with "Americans," and the idea that Americans should not care about whether people from elsewhere are harmed by American policies is vile.
This isn’t a good comparison, due to differences in population and wealth of different countries. Just because Governments are required to take care of only their citizens interests doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they need to do. Especially considering the people in question here are immigrants who contribute to the economy and society of the US, and are likely to be citizens themselves in the future.
Americans lost jobs to Europeans after the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and kickstarted the European economy.
Americans lost jobs when Japan industrialized and dominated the semiconductor industry.
Despite Americans losing jobs, the United States Government continued to support other nations on their path to development. Despite losing all those jobs, America continued to prosper, is still the wealthiest nation by far, and most advanced and militarily powerful.
Americans are not constantly being fired and replaced by cheaper h1bs. Some are. There is little evidence to support that h1bs have contributed to any kind of large scale wage depression in the technology sector. In fact, wages continue to grow, and most companies are still hiring lots of software engineers.
If you don’t have your facts straight, I don’t know what to tell you. You can look at localized instances of job losses caused by companies abusing the system. I can point to localized instances of immigrants on h1bs starting new companies and hiring many Americans. This gets us nowhere.
There is no evidence that H1b abuse is causing anywhere near the amount of wage suppression that would cause massive shift in wages across the US tech industry.
What about the Americans that do get a job, are they all privileged? Sounds like the real reason some Americans dont have a job is either they didn't have the skill or not willing to work for lower wage?
There is a thing called career progression. Many people are underpaid earlier in their career but if they are any good it gets better at some point or they at least still get a low paying job. In software if you are a citizen you have great mobility to job hop and get a huge pay bump until limited by your ability.
Btw complains about low paying job in software in the US are bs. US software job market is massively overpriced comparing to the rest of the world, it needs correction to drive real innovation. This is not sustainable at all for start-ups.
IMO the software industry is one of the least innovative industries in the world, constantly reinventing the wheel with its copycat programming languages and database software.
For every job that's done by an immigrant, there are 10 that are moved overseas. Politicians have taught people here to look at the immigrant as the boogeyman while they silently kill regulations that prevent jobs being offshored.
We are facing record unemployment so people are having this happen to them across the board. The people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic but are struggling to find work because of the abundance of H-1B holders also "haven't done anything wrong".
The question now is do we continue that flow of labour while jobs are scarce, or stem that flow while we get back on our feet again? On this, the Trump administration appears to have made a tough, but rational choice.
> people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic but are struggling to find work because of the abundance of H-1B holders
That’s a straw man. Those people do not exist. Look at the data.
There’s currently 18 million unemployed Americans. The majority of pandemic related job losses are low wage retail, hospitality and restaurant workers.
There’s a total of 500k H1b visa holders in the US, the vast majority of which are in IT.
There is very little (if any) overlap between those groups.
You aren’t suddenly going to make more money by kicking out all the immigrants. That’s not how the economy works. Those H1b holders are also consumers who spend a majority of their salaries on taxes and products/services in the US. Kicking out 500k people would further hurt unemployment in sectors hit most by the pandemic.
Eh. I think that's a little unfair on us HNers. I have seen comments like that. But I've also seen a lot of comments about how the H1b visas should be more flexible and widely available so as to give visa holders more freedom.
the problem is that those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted.
so is it unfair to say a community that mostly upvotes plain xenophobic comments has an issue?
and it's not from now -- i've been here for a while and every single time h1b is mentioned, there are upvoted comments saying weird stuff that is never removed.
> those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted
That's far from the case. You might be running into the notice/dislike bias, which unfortunately tends to distort perceptions and leads to false feelings of generality.
From there it leads to painful feelings about the community, which is particularly unfortunate. I wrote about this earlier today in a different context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701584.
Hi, I'm just commenting here because I don't know any alternative way to reach the moderation of hacker news. There was a thread earlier today on the topic of "Ask HN: what do you consider to be essential to being a good programmer" and it vanished in the middle of me having typed out a long response. I couldn't find it afterwards. Do you know where it went or why it was removed?
H1Bs were never supposed to have been immigration visas. Congress set the law to two 3-year stints - max of 6 years and then you're gone.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, they began rubber stamping renewals for anybody who'd paid a few thousand dollars to get into the Green Card line, which is absurd because the Green Card line for Indians is at about 100 years due to their population.
You didn't do anything wrong except assume the corruption would go on forever and Americans wouldn't eventually notice they were being replaced by foreign workers, and vote accordingly.
One does not pay a couple thousand $ get into an eternal line. You need to have an approved I-140 i.e. an approved green card application to remain in line.
To do this a company must (1) hire you; (2) decide to sponsor you for a long, expensive process; (3) interview broadly and prove it couldn't not find an American to fill the role. Not to speak of a number of hoops an applicant has to go through.
Rubber stamp? Have you ever tried applying for an H1b renewal? There is constant anxiety over ever changing rules and RFEs. Not to mention the run around to get a visa stamp every 3 years.
Few thousand to get into green card line? Have you ever tried doing this? There is an elaborate over a year long process to get into this line. and even then its a broken broken system that stipulates that queues are country based, which mean a Lithuanian who enters the queue today will get a green card before an equally qualified chinese or indian person who has been in the queue for 10 years!
This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all.
If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup
or
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop
my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
For "exceptional" people, there's the O-1 visa category. But candidate no. 1 likely would not qualify.
You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2.
Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose you are hiring candidate 1 to write an app that will help you single men find hot women to date in a 5 mile radius in your 4-billion dollar, VC-backed startup.
The second candidate is being hired into the body shop that has been contracted to develop a UI for a CAT scan machine produced by a major healthcare company.
Now tell me who should be preferred.
It's possible to make many value judgments like you and I have done, but at the end of the day they can't all be incorporated into the immigration law. Making the market the arbiter of what's valuable appears to me to be the least bad option, and strengthening that is the best, given the constraints. It still won't make the law conform to everyone's tastes, though.
> You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2.
The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop).
So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.
The scenarios you’ve posed doesn’t make candidate 2 any less replaceable. Maybe candidate 1 is needed for whatever advanced AI the dating app uses, but there’s many non-foreign options for the function candidate 2 is performing at ImportantCorp.
Yes, I think what the parent comment intended to say was that the UI for the CT scan machine is more valuable for the society (and hence candidate 2 should be given preference) than the fancy AI algorithm that goes into the dating app, even if it would actually take an ETH grad to come up with it.
Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost.
Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.
The US Visa system sounds completely broken, but this doesn't sound like a good fix. I suspect the way forward is a skills-based immigration system (combined with a robust refugee and compassionate family reunification system) like in other western countries, but that is likely not going to be politically possible from either party down there.
> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.
I'm virtually certain that Canada will not have a single tech company with the market cap as large as the tenth largest US tech company within in the next 25 years.
If anything Canada is actively losing ground against the US tech industry. In the past it used to have RIM, Nortel, Bell North and Corel. Today the largest Canadian tech company is "Constellation Software".
And the reason for the decline is simple. Canada's best and brightest don't go into tech. They go into real estate and property development to extract value out of the insanely overheated housing market.
And ironically this ties back to the immigration discussion. One of the major contributing factors to the housing shortage is because of Canada's aggressive pursuit of wealthy emigres. The housing market in places like Vancouver has turned into a slush fund to launder the money of CCP party members and other third world kleptocrats.
Canada is not competing with the US on how many Canadian-started companies exist. All the FAANGs have offices in Canada, which they will probably expand more. Immigrants that used to head to the US will now go to Canada instead, enriching the labor market further. If the US immigration system remains broken, Canadian offices of US companies will just get bigger.
And this has already been the case and escalating for some time.
Anecdotally, my wife worked for Apple Canada a decade ago in marketing, and at that point there was no engineering happened / allowed to happen in Canada, really. It was kept in Cupertino pretty strictly. But I've noticed in the last 5 years this is no longer the case and Apple -- who was probably most reluctant to do engineering outside of the valley -- is doing way more of it and a plenty of it in Canada it seems.
I work at Google Waterloo, and though I can't get into specifics about office sizes etc, I can definitely say two things: lots of growth, plenty of it from new Canadians but also a lot from Canadian Googlers returning from the US back to Canada in many cases because they couldn't tolerate the situation there anymore.
Happens all the time. I personally work with 3 people on my team alone who have done it. I believe at Google a transfer between countries involves a new offer, based on local cost of living etc, and it is basically indexed against what you would be making with the same experience, perf, etc. in the new locale, and Google compensation is really good for the region. Only complications are with retirement funds (IRAs vs RRSPs), and tax filing. I believe Google provides the services of an accountant for a couple years after the transfer.
Last couple of years it feels like every week I see an email from somebody asking for advice etc. for relocation.
For two of my immediate coworkers/friends, both did it a bit after they had kids, and began to contemplate having kids in the American school system[s], and away from grandparents, etc.
It certainly makes it easier transferring within the same company. I think many Canadian SWEs coming back to work after being in SV would find the job market to be rather frustrating/annoying if they had to hunt for a new job. Transferring within the same company takes the edge off.
> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones
Positioning the country as a cheap offshoring destination for lower-skilled dev doesn't sound like a good long term bet for the local population.
That’s the point, and the intended effect. They don’t want you to look overseas for the manual UI tester or whatever, they’re saying “that’s not skilled enough to warrant granting a visa based on a claim you can’t find someone in the US to do this job.”
Why do you care whether or not it's cost effective to hire a foreign UI tester? That has zero correlation with whether or not its cost effective to hire someone with experience at CERN. Your hypothetical lists 2 different profiles that would be hired for vastly different jobs, and it seems like you only care that one of them is fucked over - is it just a strawman for racism? Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
> Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
They both compete for the same H1B visas so it has happened a lot of times. The H1B at Tata getting 70k a year took a spot from a software engineer at Google earning more than twice that. That is how lotteries work. Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. And yes, a lot of Googles new engineers comes from India, that is a good thing, the bad thing is companies like Tata abusing the system to get low paid labor into US.
Lets simplify and say we have 1 spot and 2 applicants.
Mediocre engineer with a sponsored job for 70k.
Great engineer with a sponsored job for 140k.
With no salary requirement both has equal chance to get in, meaning the great engineer has 50% chance to get lose the position. With salary requirement at 100k the mediocre engineer will no longer get sponsored leaving the great engineer as the only applicant left and thus guaranteeing that he get in.
Edit: With the old requirements bringing in mediocre engineers was still profitable, with the new requirements it wont be since the salary cap is set at a very high percentile.
There is one H1B lottery, so the two DO compete in the same lottery. And yes, I've absolutely seen excellent colleagues making north of $200K leave the country because they didn't get an H1B visa.
Its weird that people always link the "low skilled" worker to India and the highly skilled one is always someone from US or EU. Lets keep in mind that some of the most skilled engineers in the tech industry are also Indians and it might just be that the one comitting code to the Linux kernel ks also a skilled graduate from one of the top institutes in India and doesnt get a visa because of the H1B rules. Just because you're European or not Indian doesnt mean this system will benefit you.
Truth is, a lot of the current spots in the quotas are awarded to outsourcing firms from a single country. I didn't want to specifically name the firms. Naming countries in my comment was insensitive.
That's not true at all. The engineer from India will simply be re-classified to L1 with a reduced wage requirement. While the grad student will require a much higher wage requirement. In the end it will actually turn out worse for someone trying to hire the engineer from Switzerland
The person re-classified as L1 will no longer be competing in the lottery with the hypothetical CERN engineer, and the odds of an application to hire that engineer succeeding will increase.
What about an Indian student who did a masters from ETH/EPFL, interned at CERN, and _then_ applied for an H1B visa? Will it mean that the said student is from a "rich family background"?
If you had a job that could be done by both types of people you describe, why would you pay 4x extra for the former?
Why should the guy who can write operating systems spend their time doing work that's below their skill and training experience? And if this person is ready to do this, why is the latter person held responsible for this?
>>They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
Yes, because they are being hired to do the same job. Hiring Captain America as a guard at ToysRUs doesn't change the job description of a security guard. It just means Captain America make a bad decision to work the wrong job.
Are you even a serious programmer? Throughout my whole career I've never a had phase where I've done fixed set of things. Nor has my academic training proved to be enough to provide me for all the skill sets I needed to do those jobs.
Continuous learning is how our field works. Its not just ML or any thing, tomorrow if some thing new comes up, we need to learn and work on that as well.
We don't exactly toss out our workforce and re hire kids every time Kubernetes makes a release.
There are two issues here. American companies need workers with multiple skillsets. Your one app startup that thrives on user unwittingly selecting location on might need a highly qualified European graduate with experience at CERN. But the average utility company needs help maintaining their database and make sure they are billing users correctly. They would need a QA tester from India. There's a real shortage of those jobs too in America. You could argue against work visas and wait for 400K Wall Street exceutives switching to testing jobs. You could imagine a market where software engineers are paid Google salaries at utilities. But overall poor people would suffer at the expense of few highly paid developers.
O-1 visas are an incredible pain to apply for, and you need to prove at extension requests how you've "remained extraordinary" during the time you've actually been working. As far as I'm aware, no graduate would be eligible unless they've produced some kind of world renowned thesis.
Let's say you join Google as a SWE on an O-1. If you just perform your duties for the duration of the visa, you won't be able to extend. You'll have to, during the visa, continue to do something "above and beyond" (in SWE, maybe tech talks/events, host conferences, etc.) and show proof of all of this, plus obtain written documentation from employers about how amazing you are. It's not for everyone.
The O-1 works for internationally regarded film directors who want to move to the US and produce work here, but it doesn't work really well for software development.
Sorta, everyone draws in the lottery from the same pool of available slots, but no more than 7%/year can go to applicants from each country. This will have the largest impact for high-salary applications from India and China, but it still increases the likelihood that any high-salary application will be accepted.
I estimated the new prevailing wages for NYC/SF/SEA using z-scores and the new %-iles.
For NYC:
(I II III IV) = (116,003 137,323 160,321 203,405)
For SF:
(I II III IV) = (138,283 162,157 187,910 236,155)
For SEA:
(I II III IV) = (128,082 148,708 170,957 212,639)
The level for an applicant is determined by their education + experience. Level I is supposed to correspond to an entry-level role requiring specialized skills in the field. These set the minimum base salary an applicant in the category must be paid.
N.b. They reflect _only_ base salary and not stock or bonus compensation. These levels will be unreachable for most; even those at FAANG.
I believe thats quite an overestimate. Both Amazon and Google exceed the minimum required wage in each level on average by 93% and 73% respectively.
Separately, that is precisely what the article is doing. Conflating the minimum with wages actually paid to infer that H1B workers at large tech companies are underpaid.
Well, kinda right? I think this may just be reflective of the long/fat tail of tech salaries.
The second column in that table shows how many people exceed the prevailing wage by 20% or more. In the case of Facebook, it's just 47.9%. And for Google and Amazon, it's 58 and 68 respectively.
Confusingly, they don't tell how many people exceed the prevailing wage at all.
Could you please explain how the article is conflating the minimum with wages actually paid?
It gives the number of H1Bs by wage level in Table 5. So, wage level 1 would be those with wages between 17 and 34 percentile, right?
So, I highly doubt if Software Engineering salaries would follow a Gaussian distribution. My guess is that it would have both a fatter and longer tail than Gaussian.
Not an expert in statistics, but that's the case, wouldn't it push the 95-percentile wage level even higher?
What makes this even more of an underestimate is that the actual numbers that will be used are not point percentile but mean of a decile range. That is Level IV wage will be mean of [p90-p100] salaries.
Amazon definitely comes under considering base salary only. I hear they have a cap 165K for base salary (185K in NYC/SF).
No matter how senior the position, it seems the person wouldn't qualify for Level IV. What would the consequences of that be? Can they just hire them at a Level 3?
Let's face it - it's pretty trivial for Amazon to go "Okay, now we have a H1B tier that get x% less stock and exactly the minimum requried base salary". It's not like they have a problem reaching that total comp, they just like to incentivize employees differently. I don't see them dumping the H1Bs entirely simply because they don't want to rebalance.
If I look at the SDE salaries for the first four levels in FAANG and map it to your levels, the salaries seem roughly in line with average FAANG base salaries except maybe Amazon. If you want to extend FAANG club, even Microsoft will fall under.
> Unfortunately, the levels dont map neatly to those categories. Someone with a Bachelor's and 1yoe can be filed as Level II. Anyone who is doing supervision with a couple of years of experience is likely to be 3 or 4.
Two points:
1. Unfortunately, the levels dont map neatly to those categories. Someone with a Bachelor's and 1yoe can be filed as Level II. Anyone who is doing supervision with a couple of years of experience is likely to be 3 or 4.
2. Some people will certainly meet and exceed and this bar. But this is the _minimum_ required salary. For anyone other than new grads, there is likely to be significant variation in base pay and so there are those who will fall under.
Requiring competitive wages is a good move. They should also have allowed H1B holders to switch to a different employer without requiring a new visa. Along with that they should also have increased the number of H1B visas available.
Currently many strong developers are being hired into Amazon and Microsoft but being positioned in Vancouver BC (a Canadian city a couple of hours from Seattle) [1]. These developers take American jobs but pay taxes to Canada, and contribute to Canadian economy instead of American.
I think if corps want to have revenue in different countries, they should consider having employees in different countries. Certainly, if amazon wants to have a CA website, I'd be all in favor of booting them out of they don't have employees in canada.
I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
I vaguely recall that the "indentured" h1b workers (as oppose to the "proper" h1b like I had) owe money back to home, and that debt becomes instantly due if they bail out.
If they were super-stars they would be able to cover it from the Amazon signup bonus (and become indentured to Amazon - your signup bonus is due back if you bail out early). However superstars rarely end up in those jobs. We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life.
Liberating the indentured h1b workers is not just flipping a legal switch, it's a cultural integration project.
Liberating them is probably pretty complicated, and I would love to see that happen, but preventing more becoming indentured (at a cost to the local labor market) probably is a legal switch.
We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty. Certainly the government should not be incentivizing this, which seems to have been the case for a while.
"We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty"
Can I nominate you for understatement of the week? The American civil war was indeed some "difficulty".
Protection against exploitative debt collection practices extends to non-citizen residents with US bank accounts and employers. Granted, it's effective coercion if the visa-holders think it's effective, so there's definitely some cultural integration and teaching stuff there, but it can definitely be done.
Granted, if family in the mother country are effectively held hostage to the debt payments, that's a different story, but there can be enough protection for US law to protect h1b workers against exploitation by law-abiding employers and creditors.
This is just pure xenophobic drivel. There are people of different levels of talent in a large population set. Your characterization speaks more to your attitude than the millions of people that you malign.
*Edit : Apparently I misinterpreted the parent post. Please disregard.
Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.
My read was that OP was saying “kinda average” are typically in “indentured servitude” jobs.
Superstars can pay back money owed back home from an Amazon bonus... not sure if OP meant “from the start” or “if they bailed from indentured servitude job”.
> We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life.
I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.
Oh boy I know a lot of H1B holders. They're far from "super talented" but boy were they cheaper than their competitors. They're not bad people but they're not "super talented" nor were their particular skills that difficult to acquire.
It depends. There are lots of brilliant engineers and programmers on H1B visas, but there are also job shops, like Infosys, that grabs lots of H1B's for contract jobs. They aren't going for stars, they are going for competent people that they can underpay.
I work at a Bay Area tech company with a lot of H1Bs. I consider myself to be an average coder, no formal education, and yet it behooves me why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing.
Not anything original, not anything H1B worthy, just building front-end UIs and basic BE stuff. There's of course H1Bs working on the more complex things too like machine learning (complex to me) but I'm just astounded by the number of "brilliant" H1Bs that I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with when doing my average (at best?) coding.
>>why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing.
As some one who has had the same experience. One of the things I note is many of these people undervalue themselves and their training doing that kind of work for ad companies. They could be writing code for the robotic arm that could mine asteroids, but they write code to show ads to people.
Well people have their own priorities. But the lesson I learn is just because they work with us it doesn't mean the definition of smart gets blurred. It just means they downgraded their aim and are likely hitting it more easily compared to us.
The question one must ask is. How can we learn from these smart people?
I don’t think it’s fair to say H1B holders are super-talented. For example most WITCH consultants are on H1-b and... not super-talented. I’ve worked with some brilliant people on H1-b too but the H1-b system as is does not filter for “super-talented”
What makes you say that? From what I've seen, there's an entire cottage industry of cheap, expendably treated labor which forms the WITCH acronym which exists to abuse the H1B visa. I believe that is who they target.
Wow. That's a mean acronym (whoever came up with it).
FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US and yes, they do that by paying lower wages to folks flying in from India (compared to American counterparts), but it's still a upgrade for these engineers (plus a chance to experience America).
I understand the whole "but they are circumventing the spirit of the Visa" angle, but they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations.
I don't see a big ethical difference between 'I will pay millions to lobby and get laws written in my favor' and 'I will exploit loopholes in the system to better my business'
> FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US
The 1619 project made waves domestically for questioning and highlighting the speciousness of such arguments. It is because these companies are able to pay labor below market rate (by restricting mobility and creating indentured servitude conditions) that they are able to add "tremendous value" to enterprises in the first place. But of course, I question even that.
To those who have ever been in the unfortunate position of the counterparty in either inheriting a codebase or making the argument against them internally, the code produced by these kinds of body shops is frequently ROI negative -- they're the "high interest credit card" of engineering orgs. That is baked into the profit structure internally of these consulting companies. Your loss is their gain. They will promise whatever they need to secure the contract upfront, and fail to deliver results. They are incentivized to do so, because they are incentivized to think short term rather than long term as owners.
You pay less upfront, but the hidden risks and maintenance burdens continue to stack over time. And so from a discounted cash flow analysis, there is a strong argument to be made that they contribute negative enterprise value and serve only to extract cashflow through a sleight of hand. Of course, on a quarter to quarter basis, they provide an easy way for an enterprising management consultant (or corporate financier) to cut costs and increase apparent profit to expenses. But if it was so easy to achieve technical outcomes this way, why wouldn't everyone do it?
> they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations
There are certainly myriad issues with how FAANGs operate. One only needs to look at their previous settlements with the DoJ for wage collusion to see they are no angels; far from it, they often behave in an anticompetitive manner reminiscent of Gilded Age robber barons. With that said, they are still able to create some kind of a long term incentive alignment by generally setting the market price for top talent quite high -- we need look no further than levels.fyi to see evidence of that. And the proof is in the pudding -- FAANGs have continued to capture a larger and larger percentage of the SP500, managing to create growth in market cap at scales that are scarcely possible in other sectors. Their P/E ratios reflect this, and it derives from their ability to turn technology into leverage over the market and a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects. That is a far cry from consulting body shops where technology is viewed as a cost center to be minimized rather than profit center to be fully exploited.
Wait, are you in good faith comparing H1B workers to slavery? I am not an expert on American history, but if you did, that escalated quickly :). The only rebuttal I have is, that no employee on Infosys is forced on a Lufthansa economy class seat to Newark airport. They do it by choice.
The whole "their code is horrible" is shifting of a goalpost. If that's true (and it might well be), then stop hiring them. If businesses see the point you are making, they'll stop hiring them.
On FAANGs adding value - I 100% agree. FAANGs add way more value than any Indian consulting company and that's reflected in the market cap of these companies. But surely,one can appreciate that FAANGs add value and that they lobby to have laws created in their favor. My limited point is that I don't think these American companies (which benefit from the new H1B rule) have any higher moral ground to claim with respect to their stance on immigration laws.
Also, A higher wage is an odd way to restrict hiring. A FAANG company can pay much higher wages for low-end coding job than Indian consulting companies ever can. So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
> Wait, are you in good faith comparing H1B workers to slavery?
Yes. Now I will pre-emptively call out that there is a wide step function gap between slavery and indentured servitude, and indentured servitude and H1B workers. H1B workers can always leave and return back to their country of origin. In this sense they are neither slaves nor bonded serfs. You are well within your rights to question the comparison.
But the question is if we have a binary classification, should it be between slave and non-slave, or should be between free and not free? The historical context of this country post abolitionism implies through the civil rights movement that it should be the latter. And that is why I made the comparison, clumsily hyperbolic or not. When some residents are not free, there is a chilling effect for citizens nationwide. Wages are depressed for all workers. The space is made for a culture of "I'd rather hire an H1B than not because they'll be more loyal because they have no choice." This culture corrodes national freedom.
> So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
The difference is the incentive structure. The consulting company is based on essentially ripping off the customer by selling a high interest loan to them. It runs on services with razor thin margins which are predominantly returned to the owners rather than reinvested in the firm. Fundamentally, the firm owns no proprietary IP, and is not structured to accrete nor reward the long-term strategic thinking that FAANGs do.
The FAANG may pay that same kid 120k a year but that share grant could easily result in 300k a year with appreciation over the long-term. Because they are giving the employee long term incentivization, they are going to want to see long term results or else that employee will get PIPped. Beyond that, if that employee can hack it at 1 FAANG and is underpaid, they'll just go to another one which pays them market. But the gulf between WITCH body shops and FAANG is wide because the employee gains the skills which give them mobility at the latter and not the former.
All of which is a long way to say that body shops dilute the labor pool by exploiting an externality and creating a market for lemons by flooding it with low quality product. I think they create a situation where no one wins but the proprietors of the body shop, at the expense of the rest of society.
You make many of leaps of faiths to get to your conclusion. Let's for a second assume that's all accurate, are you in favour of government solving this problem by an executive decision?
Note that the same State refuses to regulate FAANGs which have stood by as their platforms were exploited to influence elections.
The double standards are staggering
> You make many of leaps of faiths to get to your conclusion.
Not really. It's just the history of the equal rights amendment.
> Let's for a second assume that's all accurate, are you in favour of government solving this problem by an executive decision? Note that the same State refuses to regulate FAANGs which have stood by as their platforms were exploited to influence elections. The double standards are staggering
I am neither in favor of it nor against it. I think it is a PR tactic that will not hold up to the scrutiny of the court. True, lasting change will obviously have to originate from the legislature -- I'd love to see something comprehensive come from there. But these PR "tactics", while not truly standalone policies, nonetheless spark, influence and shape public discourse. In this case, I think that vigorous discourse (and sunlight on the corruption of H1B abuse) is a good thing for everyone.
So, even when thousands of employees of these companies could not travel to the US, their profits soared. Anecdotally, it appears (need more data) that if these companies cannot send someone on an H1B, the job does not always go to an American national, it probably goes back offshore to Bangalore (good for us, we get those tax Rupees).
That may be true, but the ratio of salary to petitions is lowest for those firms and others like it -- consulting body shops which do not in and of themselves innovate.
Am on O-1 visa, would consider myself closer to super talented than internationally recognised. It’s very achievable if you put the right kind of work in.
The best thing to do would be to treat them like local workers -- increased pay AND increased flexibility. This will help retain the best overseas workers in the US.
Even better would be a salary auction where US companies get to auction (higher and higher salaries for the best overseas workers.) The highest auction rates would fill the quota first. Overseas workers win bigtime. Companies seeking talent also win. Local workers win as well. Companies trying to underpay lose.
The problem with this is that H1Bs are not just for software engineering jobs. Other professions that qualify are things like accountants, or health care workers.
If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.
The H1B system is supposed to be for shortages. In a real economic shortage, prices are supposed to go up. If salaries are not going up, it is not a real shortage.
I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a suitable rate.) Their business model should not be to underpay workers, it should be to pay workers high enough to attract them and charge customers appropriately.
> Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants
Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.
I think GP's point is that that's the way it's supposed to be. The shortage of accountants could be due to some combination of:
1. There are not enough people with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants in the US
2. People with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants are choosing other jobs; perhaps because they pay better, or are more fun, or have better work/life balance, or whatever.
#1 is a reason to steal^W import capable people from other countries; but I doubt very much that's the source of accounting's problems. It's almost certainly #2. In which case, if accounting firms want more accountants, they should make the job more attractive: pay more, have better hours, etc.
Correct, this was exactly my point. The last thing is -- if the Accounting Firm business model doesnt work w/ fair wages, then the firms need to re-think how much they charge ("lets abuse desperate foreign workers" isn't really a good business model.)
Entirely possible, but that's not what was suggested.
I think there would also be debate around how the quota is split between categories. I highly suspect that are much few Foreign Law advisors or Psychologists attempting to get H1Bs than there are "IT/Computer Professionals" (and many less positions available for them); giving each category an equal split wouldn't be fair either.
I'm not saying there isn't a way, but it would have issues too.
So what? If there is not enough workers, they'll have to raise wages. What's wrong with healthcare workers getting 80k? (in reality, they'd poach someone elses workers, they'd have to raise their wages, and so on, then slowly there would be more workers due to more people going into field due to high wages, and if not, then get a H1B worker for 80k+).
When you're trying to hire someone, "right now" is important. If I want to hire a nurse, and there are no nurses available, I can't afford to wait 4 years for someone to train as a nurse to be available for me to hire.
If I just keep offering to pay more, then yes, I will eventually be able to hire a nurse that was previously employed somewhere else, but now _that_ person needs to hire a nurse. No matter how many times you go around this circle, there are not enough nurses for everyone to hire.
That is a shortage. A shortage doesn't typically come with the asterisk of "but if I wait long enough then maybe there won't be".
The higher price makes the economics around that job different. It makes it valuable to utilize the existing individuals' time better, it makes employers give them secondary resources to help them perform their job better/faster, and it will punish employers that don't use their highly-paid time properly and to full efficiency. Also, the requirements for said position would be under pressure to be reduced to increase the available labor pool that can perform that job. Not to mention that it'll act as a price-signal for more people to train in that field.
It's not a binary "oh no not enough people" type of deal. It's a sliding scale and the closer you get to each side, the higher the incentives are to revert to some sort of equilibrium.
It really is quite one-sided (and potentially suspicious) to just try figure out "how can we get more of these people from other countries" instead of looking at all the other locally-available solutions. The same "circle" you speak of will happen regardless, even with plenty of immigration, with the double-whammy being that it'll affect the poorer countries that can't afford to keep those skilled immigrants.
Seems like you assume a finite number of nurses. If the pay keeps going up, then new candidate will appear, not immediately but, pretty soon. Market forces and all that.
This is so true. In fact we've seen this happen already. Once big-tech started paying market salaries, their applicant:position ratio has exploded to 100:1. In a prior era, those same workers might have gone to Wall St or Strategy Consulting.
The Market works. Pay fair wages and your personnel problems go away.
And you just cut services that customers want but aren't willing to pay for. Which will likely happen with a lot of the gig economy as-a-service things currently being subsidized.
Or stay more pedestrian. Grocery baggers in the US basically went away for a while. I assuume they came back based in part on what grocery stores had to pay for them to work.
I'm not the commenter, but I'd argue that people who want a service but don't want to pay the cost are irrational and perhaps we should not worry about pleasing them?
Suppose I want a new BMW and I want to pay no more than $300 for it. This doesn't mean that we should force BMW workers to work for free -- it means that my expectations are not rational.
Similiar, if I want a 10km Uber ride for $1, which costs less than even gas, the desire is irrational. Why should workers have to work for free to satisfy this consumer's irrational desire?
Same thing for grocery baggers "disappearing" -- of course they disappeared, there was a pandemic. They werent being paid for the risks of bagging groceries.
I'm talking about in the 80s or so when a lot of things started switching to more self-service. My local supermarkets have baggers today and you're literally not allowed to bag yourself.
I don't see there being anything irrational about not wanting to pay the price for certain services. And I don't expect either individuals or companies to sell me things on terms that aren't attractive to them. But that doesn't mean I don't want those things even if I accept that I can't have them on terms acceptable to both myself and the person providing them.
> I can't afford to wait 4 years for someone to train as a nurse to be available for me to hire
From my comment. Nurses require training. I did not assume a finite number of nurses. If I am sick and need a nurse, I need one _right now_. There not being enough of them is a shortage. It may not be a shortage in the future, but right now, it is.
It looks like you're assuming there's no salary elasticity in the job market, which is probably not accurate.
There are always trained nurses that maybe decided to retire early, considered the stress not worth the pay and switched jobs, or something else like that. Higher pay can get them back on deck.
Demand for nurses doesn't change abruptly and before importing people became a fad it was largely followed by supply.
What profession doesn't require training or experience to do well? I wouldn't hire someone who had never built a house before even if I wanted one built right now.
You're right, you would look outside of your country's talent pool to try to find someone qualified to do it for you.
Or are you suggesting that you would wait around and be homeless for 4 years until someone local built up enough training and experience in order to build your house? If you're going to suggest that you would wait and "live somewhere else", I would point out that people who are trying to hire, for example, nurses, often don't have that luxury. If they wait 4 years, they'll be dead.
No one is suggesting that high skill work status are used for people with no training or experience; they explicitly require training and/or experience in order to qualify. If think you're proving my point; if you need to hire someone right now, and there is no one available locally to do it right now, then there is a shortage, and you need to look outside of your local market.
Is my "local market" the entire rest of the United States? Or just my state/county/city? This still doesn't seem like you're describing a real problem.
It doesn't matter. You can define your market as whatever you want.
The point is that if someone you need to hire is not available, you're going to try to find them elsewhere. You're not going to wait 4 (or whatever number of) years for someone to go to school, train, gain experience, and be available for you to hire.
Nurses require licensure in the state that they are employed in. To hire a nurse in... say Illinois, you need to have someone licensed as a nurse in Illinois first.
Submit an application to take the next state licensing examination.
There are some states that have a compact and getting a multi-state license for those compact states will let you switch practice in multiple states - https://www.ncsbn.org/nurse-licensure-compact.htm
However, Illinois isn't part of that compact so its a new exam for anyone licensed elsewhere.
Aside from all of this... (as related to H1Bs) - nursing isn't a specialized occupation and doesn't qualify for the H1B. A specialist nurse, however, may. https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h-1b-nurses/ ... and that is a different license (in addition to) the RN.
Do you mean, cap the amount of money a company is allowed to pay someone on an H1B? The entire change of rules here is because companies were not paying market rate. Requiring them to not pay market rate defeats the purpose here entirely.
If you mean require that companies pay _at least_ the 75th percentile, then yes, I believe that is what the action that this entire thread is about is going.
I would also disagree that H1B destroys the feedback loop of jobs being needed. I don't believe the number of H1Bs issued is any where near large enough to disrupt an entire industry.
We already have a system for that -- taxes. Why would you underpay H1B workers? It seems punitive w/o cause.
1. It is unfair to the workers
2. The H1B Programme is for top talent, for talent you cannot find locally. If anything you should overpay for such valuable talent.
3. High H1B salaries also come back to the country in the form of taxes just like for all workers, which should improve schools.
Schooling is a shared problem for communities and our country, and should be paid for with taxes -- why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers?
Finally, if despite taxes, we cannot fix our school system, perhaps instead of blaming/punishing immigrants we should be looking at our municipal and state governments.
Employers pay as little as they can. If it's possible to hire someone for minimum wage, you hire for minimum wage.
If it's possible to import and indenture a guy for whom a crowded shared house with an actual bathroom looks like a palace, you'll do that. If you don't, your competitor will.
>why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers
You don't put it on immigrant workers, you put it on industries whose demand exceeds supply.
Also remember that immigrant workers don't come out of nowhere. You imported 100 nurses, India and Pakistan have 100 nurses less. Vacuuming up the brightest people from everywhere doesn't help global development.
K-12 schooling in America is paid through property taxes, so unless they are living in a area with high property taxes you most likely wont be helping much.
College level school funding (state/federal) has basically dried up in the past few decades with budget cuts. The idea is affordable public college education is not realistic for most people. I believe this is what the commenter is talking about needing more funding.
> K-12 schooling in America is paid through property taxes.
That’s probably not true exclusively anywhere in America, and it's not true predominantly in a number of parts of America.
For instance, in California less than 1/4 comes of K-12 funding comes from local property taxes, and the absolute majority comes from State funds which are derived primarily from state income taxes.
> The combination of state, local, and federal school funding makes it so that the districts attended by poor students are funded 2.5% more than non-poor students. And even within districts, “schools with less advantaged students spend at least as much (and often significantly more).”
...
> Property based funding of schools is not likely to be a very effective target for school reform since our current system does not actually have large differences in the funding of poor students. I think that it is more likely that the dysfunction in the schools is best explained by a lack of continuity and efficiency within the schools that serve poor students.
The property tax debate is mostly just an easy but misguided target for explaining the achievement gap. On top of the pure fact that property based taxes have actually still allowed for the progressive funding of schools, we already have examples of states that fund students without a total reliance on local property taxes.
Take Michigan. Michigan has a centralized funding source for their students. The state takes an overall tax and then breaks it up evenly across students within the state (there are extra complexities to this that are addressed in this article). Even with these changes in school funding, it does not appear that the reformed funding strategy had any impact on student outcomes.
In general, funding is not a good proxy for educational quality.
So you have an auction, and you're capping the number of people.
A hybrid monster that takes the worst of both a private market (heavily benefiting the richest incumbents) and government regulations (broad and non targeted rules).
There is already a cap on the law, i'm not proposing that. The government regulations are also already there, i'm not proposing that either.
I'm just proposing we auction to increasingly higher salaries so all those people get nice high wages. The H1b system is to get the best and brightest for talent we cannot find locally, so paying these immigrants handsomely seems like the right thing to do. Its also good business, because high end R&D facilities should not be crossing their fingers for luck in hiring, they should be able to purchase talent by bidding for it.
I'm not sure how this benefits the richest incumbents -- the pool of workers continues to be the same. It benefits companies who desperately need the most talented workers by making them pay fairly for that top talent.
Frankly, if some company thinks they need the best-of-the-best and cant pay fairly for it, do they really need the best of the best?
Why should the overseas workers capture that gain? Seems like a tax which can be used to train US citizens for these extremely in demand jobs would be a better use of that money than sending it overseas.
> under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate
Then the employer would go back to the H1B well, underpay another worker for 6 months until the worker bailed, go back to the well, lather, rinse, repeat.
A couple thousand dollars per H1B hire-attempt is nothing to a big business, especially if they're eventually able to pay each H1B worker a fraction of what they'd need to pay an equally qualified American worker.
Worst case scenario for the business: they lose a couple thousand dollars and a few months of employee development time, then still have the option to immediately hire the qualified American worker (or try the H1B route again).
Best case scenario for the business: they get an overqualified employee at an extreme discount, since that employee is willing to accept less just to be in America. Since that employee knows it's hard to get H1B status, they're probably willing to work for a discount for many years. (therefore the business makes its money back from other failed H1B attempts, and they retain the employee at a discount)
Six months of development is barely useful for most companies. It can take 3 months before a developer is reasonably efficient. Learning the codebase, culture, and business logic takes time in most cases.
This is right. The answer that's best for the economy is to allow more immigration, not less (especially skilled immigration). This move will just make it more dificult for the average company to sponsor H1B workers
An important dynamic very little talked about is the fact that in the majority of industrialized countries within a very short time populations will be decreasing. The battle of the future will be who can bring in a continual stream of people to keep the economy growing. So various countries will likely be battling for highly skilled workers in the future. So the challenge with more immigration is that you have to have some robust level of job creation and growth for the existing people in the country because otherwise you will have a combination of a broken system (people come to the country and get a job, but then their kids never get jobs, or they lose their job and cant get another one), or people will resent the people who are getting jobs, or people will come to the country and then end up leaving. So lots of bad outcomes if you don't actually set things up in a good way. Countries like Germany have a really strong system of vocational jobs, apprenticeships, career ladders, etc so there is a sense that the local people have some career trajectory, so somebody else having some level of success after arriving in their country is not bothering them. Of course that's not universally true, but definitely people will be resentful in a particular area if tons of new people show up and have tons of success while they struggle to get off square one..
> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans?
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
I think this is true when we're talking about a large number of immigrants in general, where a significant percentage of them don't have advanced skills (akin to any large sample-size of humans). The dynamic changes entirely when the sample size is comprised mostly of immigrants with advanced skills.
If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument.
2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1.
3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens.
Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.
Like... software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Architects? I don't see any of these professions seeing an overwhelming number of would-be immigrants to the point that it would destroy the local demand market for them.
And regardless, the point the parent was making is that even if it did, this would be ok, because the broader influx of immigrants would create more demand for all of these professions to the point where it'd be a wash.
Bad analogy and I believe you misunderstood what the parent comment said. They didn't say that an equal number of jobs were created. Just that the wage didn't drop due to the increase in average productivity & new economic activity.
In parent's example, the overall wages didn't drop because the immigrants bought stuff in a small geographic area, so more shops opened to sell stuff, and more warehouses were needed to store stuff, etc...and those new jobs were filled by the immigrants. I'm not disagreeing with that. My point is that this isn't how it works when the pool of people is all highly skilled individuals scattered around the country. They end up just working for cheaper than an equally qualified American citizen, driving wages down and competition up.
We have allowed 100s of thousands of Software Engineer immigrants. Are the hiring prospects of American software engineers impacted? This should be provable with at least a couple of decades of software engineer immigrants coming in.
> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries
How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.
And they didn’t get them because companies are paying H1B workers lower wages? It seems to me that you are advocating for hiring less qualified candidates here.
Most people in STEM outside of CS (including regular engineering) get a degree, never get a good first job (or any job at all in their field), and switch field entirely.
> How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition?
It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.
I don't see how this is a matter of compensation. Companies want to hire the best engineers. Your friends seem to not fit that bill. If there is no pool of good engineers, companies will look elsewhere. I don't see the scenario where less competition is helping anybody here. Your friends should work on their skills.
Seems none of the responses to your question was a true enough scotsman.
Hiring isn't a competition to find the smartest candidate, silly Google interviews notwithstanding. Companies want the "good enough" candidate they can get for the least pay. Otherwise all job ads would express a preference for principal engineers with doctorates, instead of the opposite which is far more common. So yes competition drives down pay, it doesn't drive up everyone's skills.
+1 I was never asked about my immigration status before me accepting the offer. I had interviewer training afterwards and there was no mention of immigration status in interviewer guidelines as well. This was 20000+ employee company. It doesn’t seem logical from company’s perspective to hire a direct employee who’s gonna be with them for many years, just on basis of their immigration status.
The whole purpose of the H1B visa program, according to the economists who designed it, is to stifle wages of American workers. All the other stuff you hear about it is revisionist history.
Not at all. If you import workers, they might fill a slot for one job, but they are also consumers. They need food, and mattresses and haircuts and everything else it takes to live in America. Immigration helps fill the demand for talented workers, and bringing in those talented workers increases the demand for every other type of good and service.
This is actually an insightful question (or at least has the potential to be one), and it's a shame it's being downvoted.
Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs".
There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region.
Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
It's because you want the people who already live here and are your neighbours, your co-taxpayers, your co-voters to thrive. The alternative (lots of miserable and frustrated Americans) can lead to a shitty living environment even for those who are doing fine. Also, as the history has shown, such situation in extreme can lead to end of democracy.
It’s only an insightful comment if you just discard the entire notion of a state and citizenship which most of the world has been structured around for the past several hundred years.
Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules.
I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.
For the kinds of jobs being moved, their merit-based points system grants permanent residency immediately and citizenship in 3 years. In the US, if you are from India, you can find yourself waiting for up to 20 years of indentured labor to get your green card.
I'm not an American, but I fully understand your point.
Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies.
The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please".
It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at.
At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high.
After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October.
It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone.
It is not _easy_ to get an H1B.
If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
> then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
You're right. My initial comment that spawned this thread addressed exactly this. I'm copying it here for reference, because it is pretty high up the thread at this point:
"""
I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
If that is the case isn't the simple solution to eliminate the mechanisms that allow employers to threaten the employees instead of increasing the burden on the employee and therefore the power the employer has on them?
Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
It is. But people will make the (disingenuous) argument that you can transfer the H-1B to another employer...
The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending.
But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special.
It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.
Low skill immigration hurts the poor. When economists talk about it having a neutral impact they are referring to 4-5 year time scales which is different from having zero consequences. Most poor people are not in a comfortable enough position for it to be ethical to tell them "just deal with it" without offering some kind of support.
Start a company and see how much it costs to sponsor some uneducated kid.
You have good intentions towards the kids, but some communist intentions towards business owners. Let them decide how to spend their money. It's their money.
Because educating underprivileged kids takes up to 20 years(school, college, potential post-grad studies), whereas the H1B worker can start immediately. H1B workers also typically have several years experience in the specific position where they're being considered. You need both.
Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?
It’s not the responsibility of the US govt, companies or people to underwrite other countries’ underprivileged people when we have our own we fail to care for well enough.
We had a revolution and a civil war and unrest to fix our own failures. They can work to improve their own self determination. Look, Panama 25 years ago was a basket case. But now they are one of the better economies of the southern cone.
> we have our own we fail to care for well enough.
Tell me more of this “our own”. 25% of the current US population is either 1st or 2nd gen immigrants arrived after immigration reform of 1965. They include the innovators, laborers, entrepreneurs, researchers that pay a lot for your “our own”. Can’t eat the cake and have it too.
Yes first or second generation Americans (or long established Americans) don’t owe anyone else any responsibility. They only owe their descendants and fellow Americans here. They don’t owe non descendants elsewhere anything. It’s not like they can go back to their grandparents country and say hey, remember my grandparents, they were from here, I need help, help me out over here!
> It’s not like they can go back to their grandparents country and say hey, remember my grandparents, they were from here, I need help, help me out over here!
That's not entirely true everywhere though. For example, I was born in the US, as were my parents and grandparents. My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy, and if I can gather the proper documentation, I'm eligible for Italian citizenship. If I ever get this done, then yes, I could indeed go back to my great-grandparents' country and do what you suggest is silly. I believe quite a few other countries also have policies like this.
Importing the most educated, most entrepreneurial people is the most sane immigration policy.
It's infinitely better than importing huge numbers of uneducated fundamentalists whose culture is incompatible with the western values and includes throwing gays off of roofs.
It's better to have a few shining examples of truly great countries in the world, rather than mediocre mush everywhere. So citizens of other countries can point to such countries and tell their politicians and their friends - see, we can do better, much better.
Maybe this comes off as too negative: but that "America is built on the hard work of immigrants" meme is an absolutely tone-deaf talking point. Many people hear hear that phrase, and immediately assume you are not arguing in good faith.
Yes, immigrants built America. But so did enslaved people. So did natives. So did rebellious colonists of the British empire. Most of those people did not consider themselves immigrants - and nor do their descendants.
Many immigrants have contributed amazing things to our nation, and they still do. But immigrants as a group are not a monolith. Many of the "highly skilled workers" that come over on H1Bs, are frankly - not highly skilled workers. Many are semi-skilled workers who are preferred over qualified Americans because they work for low wages and nearly never quit when abused.
Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us. If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants. But it's absurd to say to reduce this to "immigrants = good = America". Not when we know the current system is abusive to both immigrants, and to the Americans who are part of the toxic workplaces that the H1B visa-mill paradigm has created.
Are Colonists treated as bad as immigrants in this country at the moment? The post is about immigrants so that's why I'm talking about immigrants. People who are immigrants are still in the transition phase and this is a clear sign that they are less welcome.
Not many people are capable of traveling from distance places away, learning a new language, and then starting from scratch, with no family or friends. I'd give them a bit of credit, especially since their contributions are still being uncovered after being purposely devalued.
To your point, there are of course other hard working demographics in the US, but limiting the number of H1Bs that can come over is slamming the door on people who rightly deserve to be in the US.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who openly declared themselves a colonizer for some overseas empire would not be welcomed today.
My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today.
The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).
> Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us.
Agreed!
> If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants.
This is really just not a hard problem at all to solve from a policy perspective. Political will has been a big problem; both parties have campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has materialized. Corporations with political influence love the status quo as it allows them to import workers for similar or lower wages who can't quit or do anything that would risk them losing their job without being sent home.
The right solution would be, to require high wages for H1B visas - if you're hiring a developer, the minimum wage for the H1B worker should be (eg.) 1.5x average developer wage in that area/state. This would solve companies firing local workers and replacing then with H1B workers, and still solve the problem of a company 'really needing' that one worker.
H1B employee's can work at any employer for the term of their status. The employee only has to transfer the visa to the new employer. I have done this for multiple employee's on H1B's its nothing like getting a new H1B for someone on OPT or getting a new H1B for an oversea's employee
They can, but it's still a process and not as easy as saying to a prospective employer "I have an H1B that is valid until October 2025, you don't have to do anything". Further, even though it's rarer, I believe that the transfer can still be denied if USCIS decides the new position doesn't qualify.
This suggests the market rate for an H1B employee isn't just, in general, lower than a comparable American employee. If everyone's underpaying H1Bs, we need to counter that.
As a serial immigrant myself - hit the nail on the head there. There is the “pay debt back” (relo, visa/lawyer costs) issue in some companies but this is a very good start.
IIRC having an employee pay for costs associated with H1B and/or employer-sponsored Permanent Residency applications was flat-out prohibited. Is that wrong?
There are ways around it, like “returning a signing bonus” or “reimbursing relocation costs”. Those are usually subjective and super-vague as well, e.g. “approx. $$$” or “minimum of $$$” and they never give you an actual number so it’s extra scary for someone coming from a country where their current monthly wage could sustain them for a year.
Temporary working visas like H1B(US) or 457(Australia) or L(Swiss) are all terrible in their own little ways, sigh.
The main issue is if you make a wrong career move your situation could quickly turn into an absolute nightmare, e.g. consistent abuse at work which you cannot escape.
This will elevate the income of low paying H1B workers, but also decrease the income of average paid American workers. If the market has an abundance of low paying workers, the market overall will pay workers lower.
That is the opposite of what is likely. The elevation of wages for a H1B will mean the average wage in that category of work will increase, for everyone in that segment. What you suggest only makes sense if there is a fixed pot of money in the economy for all wages, which isn’t the case.
Note that this not only applies to H1B visas but also to employment based green card applications (PERM). This will prevent lots of people from getting their green cards (if not shut down by courts).
I’m currently in the process of applying for a green card. This really sucks because I’m relatively young, just moved to the US from Germany 3 years ago and thus probably not in the upper 5% percentile for Staff Software Engineers in my area (surprise surprise). It’s disheartening to see so many negative comments here on HN. This does not apply only to staffing agencies but to most people in tech that don’t have a green card.
H1B related posts on HN will attract the worst kind of crowds. The experience of debating them is futile since their objections don’t come from the facts of the matter but from a misguided belief that immigrants, and h1b holders specifically, are “taking their jobs”.
Most of the work these companies are hired to produce is done in India. People on H1B are few and hired to delegate across time zones. It's hard without someone in the US connecting the bridge. This pandemic made it clear.
It's a possibility that this new policy has very little implication on the overall budget of projects.. unless the companies are financially strong enough to hire local employees at a high salary. When compared to an employee salary in a developing economy, local salaries look very high!
Smaller and mid-sized non-tech companies are hurt during this pandemic. These IT consulting companies work mostly with non-tech companies. Fiscal policy this year has failed to "really" provide loans or stimulus to small struggling companies. They all want tech and that means more work will go to these IT companies that can do at a lower cost.
International trade is done on the mutual-benefits equation. Historically the unwritten understanding is that India allows US companies to operate in its local market in return partly for labor market access to its people through a work visa. That these workers are not creating value is a myth looking at the financials of these IT consulting firms. Getting a grocery purchase order database implemented correctly has far more immediate influence than the work of a futuristic researcher.
Overall this new policy looks like an election stunt to appease a certain electoral audience given its timing and lackluster fiscal policy.
That's called election hacking.
Every economy specializes, influences international trade to that end. It's cheaper to manufacture in China, buy corn from the US, write computer programs in India. I feel just so sick to read comments here calling these companies bodyshops, sweatshops, cheap labor.. whatever word degrading in the context.
The right question is perhaps: how to help create locally employed IT consulting companies that can compete with Indian IT consulting companies... and the answer is more than bad-mouthing or volatile short-term regulations. Is it even in the country's interest to spend resources to become a leader in IT consulting?
Whenever lower wage markets are open to higher wage markets, what happens is the higher wage markets lose - especially their up-and-coming developers who normally would get hired and trained, but instead get replaced.
This normally happens near the bottom, historically. Low wage workers come and work on farms and at other minimum wage jobs, they do actually have an effect on the labor market that is negative for American workers, but since there are usually many jobs on the bottom it doesn't have a large effect.
But at the top - where jobs are far more limited and scarce - it has a large effect.
Further, the companies using H1B are almost entirely large companies. Small businesses are not being hurt at all by a shortage of H1B's.
International trade is highly susceptible to imbalances. Lower wage workers will replace higher wage workers if not protected against, and it isn't always a win in terms of lower cost goods - it often can displace an entire industry that normally would have done well. Especially industries that are important for America to stay strong in, like manufacturing. It also is highly susceptible to distortionary trade policy - see subsidies in foreign nations designed to take over entire industries long term.
Finally, a note on hover governments should work. They should look out for their citizens. That is their modus operandi. There shouldn't be charity, unless the charity in some way truly helps our citizens. And especially, they should care about the average gal. H1B visas are literally taking out a big pool of well-paid jobs that otherwise we could easily be feeding with community college graduates and younger citizens.
This isn't even close to hacking anything, by any definition of the word. It's literally what he campaigned on years ago, if anything it's super long overdue.
When the US subsidizes corn production so much it destabilized local corn markets everywhere else in the world. Suddenly, it's cheaper to import corn from the US than buy at a local farm house in other places. This alone doesn't mean bad news to those other countries. The likely response may not be to increase import tax on corn.
You need to see where the net positive results are accumulating as a consequence.
I don't have a solution to these complicated problems. My observation is today's policy won't solve the problem even slightly.
The US specializes in innovation, incentivizes economy to create innovation. IT consulting is not innovation. When you start hiring local employees at a higher salaries, influences inflation.. and what does this inflation from IT mean to other sectors?
The right question is: What would be the cost of home grown IT consulting that can compete with Indian IT consulting? How fast can those policies be deployed? is it even in the US interest to pursue this direction?
What I don't see is a framework that doesn't look like a patch work.
It's definitely targeted to win elections. The real promise is not delivered.
So your claim is hiring locally somehow “influences” inflation... and does what?
What is the cost of home grown IT? There’s no “cost”, it’s just a shift in market, the wage may go up a bit but business would also adapt, either by being more efficient or shifting budget, etc.
I’m not really putting together where your questions are leading. They don’t feel like they have a coherent point, and they don’t seem to be pointing in any way.
This is an incremental improvement, one that absolutely will reduce H1B which is a good thing for Americans. There’s no shortage of Americans able to take these jobs, and if there is ever at times, the increased demand will solve itself - companies will raise wages, Americans will respond to higher wages by filling the jobs, America will grow stronger with more white collar jobs going to our own citizens.
And it will help win elections because it’s what citizens want, are you claiming any other way it helps win? It’s a popular policy and this is an effective change to it, if it wasn’t effective I doubt you’d be arguing about all these downstream effects you’re worried it will cause - you can’t say it won’t be effective but also it will be effective in a negative way. Tell me how raising wage requirements + requiring higher education does anything but lowering H1B usage and force companies to only get more qualified people on the visa. Win win.
The market's network effects will negatively effect this new tax.
There is cost-benefit analysis to everything one spends from their limited resources. The "just shift" in the market is painful like you said before.. to the weakest Americans the most.
the US companies and individuals are economically so fragile they do have enough operating expenses to absorb a month loss of revenue. When the consumption and stimulus doesn't rise as much as needed within the time, shops close because of inflation.
Lowering H1B only solves the problem when hiring local person does not increase budgets. And there is shortage of Americans applying to these jobs or studying for these jobs.
And US companies operate on lean culture. A food, insurance company does not want to maintain in-house technology team for every project. Again it has to do with complex net of financial entanglements..
So it really has to be a consulting partner, whether American or not, but definitely meeting their current budget constraints.
It is a worthy goal to aspire white collar jobs. Especially when the country specializes in production of high-technology. Something government should provide more to its people..
But I don't see a policy on the horizon in this direction.
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When the forest is on the fire, arial firefighting does not stop it, rain doesn't stop it...
Solutions designed for small-scale problems do not work when those problems become large-scale.
There never should be policy that purposely adds temporary competition to American workers with no proven large benefit to society as a whole. Where it the proof? What it seems you’re arguing is that H1B is proven to be absolutely necessary for American companies to be effective, can you back that up? Because in the absence of evidence of it being truly necessary for us to compete, there’s no argument for it existing.
Americans are more than willing to consult and do IT, we are good at it and it’s our bread an butter. China is not importing cheaper labor sources to take over their white collar jobs, no country that cares about its future would make such a short sighted mistake as to distort its own markets to suppress wages of its most valuable sector employees. It’s pure regulatory capture by the big IT consulting firms and big tech firms who have shown time and time again they will do whatever they can do suppress wages.
Apple and Google got caught colluding to suppress wages. Google is one of the biggest proponents of H1B, and yet since they got busted for illegal wage suppression practices, have they been at risk of going under? Have their stock prices dipped?
It’s not small companies who are relying on these H1Bs it’s the Fortune 500, the most successful companies are benefiting from this in majority.
You’re doing a lot of defending of big rich companies in favor of wage suppression and disincentivizing the next generation of American employees from learning tech.
Even from a long term view: do we want to encourage Americans to move into tech or no? Does this policy increase incentives for Americans to learn IT or no? Simple questions.
And if you truly believe the big companies can’t thrive without 40% more expensive IT (which wouldn’t even be the case, in house firms would optimize over time to compete better), then advocate for higher legal full immigration - at least then Americans win in the long run by retaining good talent. But you need to prove that it’s necessary first, and then you should argue for full legal immigration and be happy H1B are going down.
The only people happy with H1B are those who think indentured servants should be imported to America to suppress wages and save big companies extra bottom line. Even if you support importing more white collar jobs, you should be happy at this news.
First I am not defending big rich companies. If anything I am complaining the government is not doing enough in the right direction to improve the proportion of Americans in tech jobs.
Every H1B petition from American companies is precisely saying the same thing: they need that worker to run the company effectively and they had no other choice.
I suppose each count of the petition ever made is legally binding. Should this be another such anti-trust lawsuit you mentioned, it will be very big! I don't think they are joking this time.
Those H1B workers contributing to the state of the art technology are not replaceable anyway practically should the US want to innovate within its jurisdiction. Companies hiring for these positions are not declaring a ceiling on the number of positions, at least to pubic.. so anyone qualifying their interview gets the job, to large extent if not all the time. But fewer Americans study STEM or apply to those jobs meeting prerequisites. These companies consistently publish in media that they have shortage.. and the H1B petitions point they had no other choice.
Those H1B workers in IT consulting earning somewhat lower wages are easier to replace but still practically hard. Their petitions tell the same story: they had no other choice.
The right policy framework I believe could work is first making the foundation stronger:
- Heavily subsidize university STEM tuition for Americans next 5-10 years.
- Encourage them to pursue STEM in school. There is no way one focuses on English literature in high school and shows interest in engineering at university.
Then there might be enough talent pool that creates local companies and give strong competition to Indian IT companies.
How many home-grown IT companies are there in the US? What's their size and valuation? The pipeline must be fixed from the beginning.. not just at the end.
With enough local sellers could the competition from outside gets weakened.
It's impossible to "compete" with countries with far weaker currencies, you can't refute that, there is no competing.
First, you are absolutely taking the side of large companies, there's no refuting that even if you say it a hundred times.
Second, of course the companies say they need it, that's the only way they can get the visas. But it's not true.
Third, let incentives do the work. Banning H1B immediately would open hundreds of thousands high paying jobs in the US. No need to subsidize and add distortion to distortion, the jobs would be filled as demand would increase.
Fourth, very very few H1B are contributing to "state of the art" anything, the vast majority are taking the exact types of jobs that your entry level college graduate could take. And if they contributing to state of the art, then raising the H1B pay to be more fair is exactly the reform needed to pay them properly and ensure we aren't replacing slightly higher paying and equally capable workers.
No one is master of everything. Economies with weaker currencies by no means have upper hand on every trade. Like the example I gave before: corn exports. Economies could be subsidized by regular interventions like how China blocks international companies competition in its local market, devaluating currency to make their products cheaper on global marketplaces. Such a market is far from "free market". Right now for those reasons they are embroiled in a trade war!
> First, you are absolutely taking the side of ..
I can't help you see fine distinction.
> Second, of course the companies say they need it
Can you please point me to one source where that says majority STEM students are Americans? Let's just get the percentages and see whether they are high enough for unemployment to so high that needs immediate short-term intervention.
I have not come across one respectable peer-reviewed publication that actually argues that position. Are you really saying the companies are discriminating job applications by country against favoring Americans?
> Third, let incentives do the work.
No they don't! LOL.
> Fourth, very very few H1B are contributing to "state of the art" anything,
I don't know what you consider state of the art. But take any STEM peer-reviewed research conference or journal and scan through the number of Americans publishing as first author in comparison to others. I know the numbers but since you are not convinced, I suggest you do the homework.
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The current administration is like -- We didn't solve the problem, but let's just move pieces here and there in a broken system to make our voters feel good. We need votes in 3 months.. probably the right time to register illusions in their minds.
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I don't think you fully appreciate the complexity of entanglements in international relations. How they effect science and technology markets.
Your arguments are weak and it’s obvious you’re losing steam here. Having to appeal to complexity when you’ve failed to explain anything complex at all.
Americans publish a ton of top stem stuff what are you on? We dominate high end stem research, especially hard sciences, drug research, advanced medical research. Also number of publications != quality.
Number of top peer-reviewed conference publications is the closest reasonable indicator of state of the art. I didn't make this up, the community did. Yeah, let's see some numbers in STEM - stack up the university departments and see the numbers.
Obviously I am aware what I don't know and not shy to hide from you. What is funny is you are confident of something you don't know.. and conveniently ignore the statements that require looking at hard numbers.
Well, feel free to provide the data, you’ve failed to so far.
Almost all H1B are working in IT/CS and not publishing, 95%+ of the stats I posted would not be H1B, maybe even more. Only a tiny fraction go into other sciences and even less of those publish.
This is well established, the vast majority of H1B are not doing research at all but working at big tech companies and IT mills. Your points don’t stand, not even close.
And to comment about importing cheap labor. China has 1.3B population, US 400M, Canada as 40M. Population sparsity is proportional to the extent of shocks a local economy can absorb. Immigrants are not distorting the market as much as strengthening.
I've worked at small companies while on an H1B, if you look at the who's hiring posts on HN I think you will see many places willing to sponsor H1s, so it's not just big companies.
No it's not. This term has already been widely abused and I doubt many people take such claims seriously anymore, but widening it still further to mean "making pledges designed to appeal to voters" will just render the term utterly hopeless. Then we won't be able to talk about actual electronic compromise of vote counting systems.
Have you considered that the US workers are also hurting in this pandemic? At some point people need to start thinking about helping out the productive class in this country instead of just the business owners and CEOs who are pocketing the savings from labor arbitrage.
I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field. While I do understand the bad practices of many tech companies, I think the picture is very different when you look at careers in other STEM fields, such as biology, chemistry, and physics. H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia. H1B visas are in fact a beacon of hope that brings many talented students to America, with the promise of finding a job here. As a matter of fact, many of these students go on to work on projects that are important for human health, e.g. COVID-19 research. It is convenient for the country to attract and retain their talent, of which there is currently a shortage.
Not every H1B holder is an underpaid scrum master. Some are legitimately scientists doing on a postdoc in academia, and working to improve lives. For those of you rejoicing, I just want to ask you to do more research in how this rash policy change may impact the lives of real people.
It isn't bias, just look at the H1B distribution, it heavily biased to the CS/IT space. Like for every possible biologist you are imagining, there probably 100 IT/CS guys coming in. I'd love to have the biologists and chemists come in, but the big IT consultancies are massively abusing the system, and that needs to get fixed first.
Look at the top company sponsors, not STEM fields like biology, chemistry, and physics. It is entirely software.
Why? Are there more jobs for Biologists than Computer Scientists/Developers/Programmers?
It looks like this is a response based on demand. Why in the world would you want more biologists when there isn't market demand for them?
This is mostly wishful romanticization of particular "underdog" areas of studies. Makes no sense to me. Even more preposterous is the parent's profound claim:
> I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field
I don't understand why we are talking about bias? It's not like the market goes "Gee ... we are a software company, but only if we would abandon our biases and hire an archeologist from Columbia and sponsor an H1b visa for them. Not sure what would do with them, but we must hire them though. Hey Rob! You got any ideas man?"
Market forces do a poor job driving science. Its too long term, too risky, and you lose to much to the tragedy of the commons. All but the most trivial and mechanical research mostly happens due to government funding, or as a prestige byproduct of higher education (ie, not directly driven by their profit objectives). So in this case, maybe there is demand in a social sense, not a market sense.
Alternatively, large computer science companies may have just greased enough pockets to create regulatory capture of the process, creating the inequality in a non market driven way.
> Market forces do a poor job driving science. Its too long term, too risky, and you lose to much to the tragedy of the commons
Then how did we end up with things like nuclear fusion startups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding? Market forces do a superb job of driving scientific innovation. We live in the most scientifically innovative period of our history.
I find that what people who say this sort of thing actually mean is “the things I perceive to be valuable are insufficiently resourced (according to me)”, rather than “things that are valuable fail to find resourcing”.
> Then how did we end up with things like nuclear fusion startups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding?
By millions upon millions of dollars and man hours spent by governments and universities doing basic research. Markets are very poor at laying the groundwork required for scientific breakthrough, but quite good at leveraging that space to their own advantage, once it exists. This is, in fact, why the US government used to spend so much on basic research, so that its Capitalist economy could advance innovation more quickly.
> We live in the most scientifically innovative period of our history.
You’d have to state your measure for this. Scientific breakthroughs are not advancing at anywhere near the speed of the early 20th century. This may be because we’ve picked off a lot of the easy targets in the fundamental aspects that describe our reality, but would be contrary to this sentiment regardless.
I don’t really get why you think this isn’t a market solution, and I don’t really see where you think the problem is at all. Research institutions compete for fee paying students, endowments, and government funding. When they come up with marketable ideas, those ideas tend to make it to the market.
The fact that private capital can even find its way to funding ideas that have not and may never be proven to work completely disproves your point. Long term, high risk business propositions don’t seem unable to find investors. There is no tragedy of the commons here. If the market values something, there’ll be somebody willing to produce it. The only real room for disagreement is when the market doesn’t value something as much as you think it should.
> You’d have to state your measure for this. Scientific breakthroughs are not advancing at anywhere near the speed of the early 20th century
There’s more to science than quantum mechanics and a good approximation of gravity. It’s generally seen as rather obvious that our rate of innovation is increasing exponentially. I’m typing this comment on a pocket sized computer that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world was on the day I was born.
But what we're slowly learning is that a huge percentage, perhaps most of that "millions upon millions of dollars and man hours" ends up producing terrible papers that don't replicate (in science) or don't even say anything coherent at all (e.g. basically all of gender/critical race theory).
COVID-19 has been an excellent demonstrator of this: at a time when it's become clear that epidemiologists and virologists don't actually seem to know much about viruses, and know even less about stopping them, we have widespread riots and protests against 'systemic racism' that can't be found in any data sources. All this badness is coming from universities which look bloated, over-funded and nowhere near scrutinised enough.
Then finally you look at the tech sector, you look at commercial organisations at the cutting edge. The sad reality is they don't use much university output. They don't. Look at CS, most of the breakthrough papers are coming from corporate labs. The last 10 years saw multiple new programming languages take off and gain critical mass, none of them bear any resemblance to Haskell or other research languages popular in academia. A lot of the improvement in tech, whether it's electric cars, self driving cars etc, it's been coming from corporate labs.
China has four times our population, and we are falling behind on many fields. We need all the manpower we can get.
On another note, I'd like to raise the point that bringing talent to the country also creates demand. Many of the next generation of startups will be biology-based.
THe bias I speak of is in regard to the attitude towards H1B. I have my own different bias, for in my field most people are in favor of it.
It's not necessarily a demand issue. It may be that companies are abusing the system to gain more such workers. I've certainly been part of hiring searches where qualified US candidates didn't get the job. It often came down to money. I'm in a higher cost of living area, so salaries tend to be higher than average. But the company was offering lower than the national average, much lower than the local average. The candidates from the US were often offered the job, then turned it down because the pay was so low.
"I can't afford or don't want to pay market rate salaries" isn't supposed to be a valid reason to grant an H1B visa.
I think there is something weird going on. I am heavily involved in my company's staffing process, and the vast majority of the referrals we get from our recruiting sources are from overseas (and often cheat and have cruddy IT skills).
Absolutely. But perhaps it is precisely for this reason that we need a comprehensive and thoughtful reform that takes into account the value added. I am worried that blanket-raising the requirements solves one problem and creates another.
I think policy should be evaluated by whether it is better on net, not by whether it has any downside whatsoever. The latter is a sure way to be stuck in status quo.
The US needs way more software engineers than is has, and sky-high salaries are the evidence of this. I think we should make it easier for people to come and work in the US.
The existing H1B system works pretty well for employers and employees. When I hear people describe H1B immigrants as somehow taken advantage of, their experience seems far different than mine (I have never seen people mistreated by the system).
The idea that this system makes it harder for native software engineers seems crazy to me. I know many software engineers and both the great ones and the terrible ones have no problem finding work.
We just need to give the money to the people who actually create value, and the imbalance will sort itself out.
Fair market capitalism is way better than the "Free" market.
The window to get kicked out of the country when layoffs happen is pretty narrow, even for people who have lived here for years. It presents a pretty heavy threat if abused because it might be hard to seal the deal on a new job (especially if you're even a little bit selective) before you suddenly become illegal.
From everything I've experienced in the tech industry the thing you've described is just hypothetical. Everyone I know on H1-B wages freely moves between jobs with no problems.
From the outside, it came seem like there are no problems. The process can be nerve-wracking. The interviews need to happen clandestinely because if your current employer finds out and fires you, you have to leave the country in 60 days. After weeks/months of interviewing, your new employer applies for a visa transfer. This process could take 3-4 weeks for application (again nerve-wracking if you are desperate to move), another 15 business days for the application to get adjudicated if you apply through premium processing. Under this administration, denials and Request For Evidence are being issued willy-nilly. So this 15 business days can end up being 30 or more. Again, the mental anguish can be hard if you really want to quit your current employer. Then 2 weeks after resigning. By the time you join your new employer, it could be 2-3 months. By law, one cannot take a break between jobs so you'll have to negotiate with your new employer if you need a break in between. H1B for people from India and China is indentured labor. Even as someone whose compensation is in top 0.5% in the US, it's extremely restrictive. I can't even imagine what the average H1B employee goes through.
In my experience, H1B system works pretty differently for employers and employees depending on whether you're talking about an actual tech company vs. the IT department of an industrial age company.
I fail to see the "problem" here. Most academia STEM jobs are incredibly competitive, postdocs less so than professorships but for fundamental science it is nearly indisputable that academia is flush with labour. If universities deem it too hard to raise postdoc wages across the board (or for specific foreign students) due to a lack of grant funding then they will still have ample choice of American students who go onto do the same research.
Yes, it is unfortunate for students looking to move to the US that the path through the standard academic route is no longer easily viable but that does not mean important research does not get done. There are also plenty of other countries that are in fact seeking such talent that might actually look like better options for the now disenfranchised (for lack of a better word) foreign students.
> If it's harder for foreign people to become postdocs/profs in the US, the quality of US research will fall. Quickly.
I sincerely believe exactly the opposite. The best and brightest in the USA avoid research academia because the quality of life is terrible and the pay is below average. Like, "all my students make more in their first year than I make with a PhD and 20 years of successful research" is a common lament among CS profs everywhere outside of the top tier of R1.
Meanwhile, the "graduate school as a ticket into the country" incentive structure creates a lot of pathological behavior among the foot soldiers of academia.
Exactly this. I would have loved to go for a physics PhD but everything I read about academia in the US strongly discouraged me from pursuing it. I went into tech instead.
The academic system in the US is incredibly sick. The best and brightest students are certainly not lining up to squander their youth being treated like slaves when they can make top dollar in another field.
Citation heavily needed here. I find it hard to believe on face value that foreign researchers are necessarily better than US researchers; especially given the number of both foreign and domestic university graduates from U.S universities is much less than the available postdoc and professorship appointments in STEM.
A lot of the best academics are foreign born. You could look at Nobel prize winners for example.
But you have to also remember that the current group of academics came out of PhD programs in the 1970s. That was a time of expansion in academia. These folks are just about to retire. On the other side of this, I think the universities walk a fine line with respect to graduate student admissions between foreigners and US citizens.
The fact that we bring in foreign graduate students from foreign undergraduate programs either means that our current system is not producing applicants of sufficient caliber who then apply or it is not economically viable. In that sense there is evidence that graduate student research stipends are depressed. Is this due to foreign competition?
There is some anecdotal evidence to this in that the majority of CS undergrads get a job ratherhe than pursue a PhD etc... b/c of the salary differences. Foreigners have to get a masters at a minimum to achieve better odds in the H1B lottery. And after they graduate from a US masters program, they can work at a US company for a couple years anyway.
We're bringing in foreign students to graduate programs because colleges want to grow revenue and demand to go to grad school at all but the top 10% of schools isn't high enough to easily fill every seat. Outside of top tier programs, colleges are fighting for every student they can get, and international students are a good supply.
Ok but then why are graduate student "salaries" (e.g. stipends) essentially universally depressed? It seems like research programs should pay more to attract more students.
Because the supply of qualified applicants for ANY job is unimaginably larger than anyone imagines. Even if you're hiring assistants for the "best researchers in the world" -- which, let's be honest, are all doing the "10 years and retire" game at FAIR/Google/etc. anyways these days -- there are just unimaginably many qualified candidates.
Even killing the H1B program entirely wouldn't directly effect the ability of universities to recruit research/teaching assistants.
Consider if any US trucking line could hire literally anyone in the world. Wages would be below subsistence level. Which, well, lots of the Research Assistants working as Software Engineers for National Science Foundation portfolio companies are barely making enough to support themselves.
Because these wages are near universally low, so no one needs to compete on that. Also for the same reason they're recruiting international students in the first place: Money.
(Note: this doesn't mean the schools aren't fulfilling their educational missions, it just means that revenue is both necessary in itself and as such a core metric that is pursued.)
At least in my field, foreign students don't have H1B. typically F1. H1B is for postdocs and above. I think the whole discussion about foreign students is beside the point here.
Science is by far one of the most globalized fields. The international collaborations that it thrives on are largely formed via exchange of students. We cannot afford to be ethnocentric in this day and age.
As an example, America would never have been first on the moon if it were not for a certain German engineer Wernher von Braun.
There was no argument made for ethnocentricity, nor for stopping a global exchange of ideas. This response seems very non sequitur.
> The international collaborations that it thrives on are largely formed via exchange of students.
1) Students are on F visas, so they are unaffected by H1B changes.
2) There is no magical reason that students educated in another country in this day and age have a markedly different tradition of thinking about fundamental science. The internet has largely erased the differences in access to the latest research in top institutions around the world so the only thing that remains needed for high quality research is a pool of bright people. Perhaps there are some educational tradition differences between Europe and the US but US postdocs are largely educated in the US itself so those differences aren't really affecting current US research anyway.
3) Given the current labor and supply demand in academia, this pool of bright people can be satisfied by either US researchers or foreign researchers, and since there is ample choice between the two, the research of great import still gets done by just as many smart people as before, so once again, I fail to see the "problem" for great research being done.
There are, absolutely, tremendous differences in the way an American student/postdoc or an German student/postdoc attacks problems and thinks about science, speaking for the two countries I worked in.
I kind of agree, but von Braun didn't exactly come to us through "traditional" channels. The Russians were a little more forceful about it, but neither them nor the US gave the individuals a significant choice in the matter as we embarked on that scientist gold rush.
Quality is distributed somewhat evenly. The best and the brightest are all over the world. Not every foreigner is better then every local, but for any given quality cutoff, a majority of talent will come from outside the nation.
If your goal is sufficiency, then the local population will suffice. If your goal is to capture as much of the truly top talent, you have to cast the net wider.
I think we're making mutually reconcilable points here.
> Quality is distributed somewhat evenly.
Starting from that assumption (which I can agree with), here is a simplified (perhaps numerically inaccurate) argument. Assuming the top talent constitutes 1000 best researchers who have just graduated from their PhDs, and all relatively equally qualified, 500 US, 500 foreign.
There are 400 postdoc appointments. Currently if 200 postdocs are US and 200 postdocs are foreign and these H1B rules then inevitably disallow the next generation to have 200 foreign postdocs we still have 200 US postdoc candidates who are just as good and are still top talent.
You put in the assumption that they are all relatively equally qualified. I don't think the 1000 best researches are equally qualified. The x best are better than the 1000-x below them.
Additionally, if the exchange of postdocs is lower (many return to their country of origin), the research quality not only in the US, but world-wide will go down.
It’s just a numbers game. America has less than 5% of the worlds population. Why would you think we would have more than 5% of the worlds best researchers
If not, that is a rather disingenuous reading of what I wrote. No one is saying it "should" be hard for foreign students to get a job in academia, my point was academia has ample domestic labour, so even if H1B salaries are raised, the research attempted is unaffected.
Wanting more researchers is well and good, there just aren't enough jobs and funding for them in the current STEM academic market (which is completely separate from any H1B related issue), hence the rather large number of people who move to industry.
> H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia.
Academia is a great example of how opening up a domestic job market to The Entire World suppresses wages and drives competition for relatively modest paying jobs through the roof.
If every job market in the US worked like the Academic job market, the country would be hell on earth.
> It is convenient for the country to attract and retain their talent, of which there is currently a shortage.
I think this subtle misdirection is how the lie gets slipped in. It's not that there is a shortage for talent. It's that there is a shortage for talent available at the price point that corporations want. Does that mean we should create an indentured servitude system to make that available?
The whole idea of artificially creating an immigration system expressly for those willing to get exploited is pretty distasteful to me and harkens back to a bunch of other distasteful ways this country used to procure its cheap labor. The bandaid has to be pulled off at some point. People will get hurt in the process. But if this isn't rectified now, even more suffering will occur in the future.
In my view, we can never not have a shortage of talent when it comes to scientific disciplines - at any pricepoint. The beauty of bringing more researchers to the country is that they eventually help create as many or more jobs than they "take".
What leads you to say that? I'd take the counterpoint. Much of what passes for "science" these days is glorified p-hacking for conference proceeding churn and sweatshop adjunct work to pump out a minimum amount of monetizable IP to underwrite an ever bloating university administration complex. It seems closer to scientism than to science for me. And I think that is the natural result of intellectual pursuit being diluted into a commodity.
On the comment regarding "p-hacking". I think that is a separate issue altogether and irrelevant to the discussion. Universities have essentially become businesses and they push scientists to "publish or perish". If anything, it is a case for democratizing science even more.
>H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia.
I don't care. It's not the US's job to educate the world. Until someone helps me get into university again I don't give a rat's ass about foreign students coming in. Those students are typically in the higher earning income brackets for their countries.
Sorry. I was going to type something rude. The thing is, by "educating the world", the world educates us. We need to do a better job at helping students like you pay for college, but this does not mean that we close our doors to everyone else.
Student visas are essentially free money for the countries that provide them: unversities charge them more; the students tend to be rich and spend a lot; a lot of students immediately return home and don't actually take any local jobs. There's no downsides.
Exactly the rub then, isn't it? I got the token half off 200% markup while I watched my graduating HS class get nearly free rides. I had similar grades, but was mostly straight A (but in harder honors classes) and was white and male.
The issue is many things, but what I listed is appropriate. All of the women in my class with my GPA got more money than I did, and all of the minorities (as few as they were) did as well.
Two instances stand out to me: Someone 1/64th or less Native American getting scholarships for that, and a girl who just by accident ran into (literally) the rowing coach and was offered a scholarship on the spot.
Part of the problem is that in basic science, it is hard to measure the value of a project until years in the future. But we do allocate money on academic projects -- through federal grants.. nevertheless the base salary for a postdoc is pretty standard across the country, an subpar compared to industry. Hence, salary does not necessarily correlate with importance of the research.
Go to upwork, pick a skilled job, like Java development or mechanical engineering, and then browse labor rates for people outside of the US. You have CAD drafters in Pakistan billing at $5/hr. Easily a 75% discount on a skilled American. Pop-wisdom is that <$15/hr “isn’t a living wage”.
These economies are efficient in the sense that much of their population lives in poverty, the likes of which is almost entirely absent from the US. We basically won’t let anyone starve if they don’t refuse help, and we subsidize even the most stupid and violent members of our population out of compassion (and sometimes for votes). Personally, I would not welcome depressing US wages to a global mean while political apparatchiks and the idle class pocket the difference. I don’t think you really want that either.
Excuse me .. yes $5 is charged but only by the entry level / inexperienced ones. Even $5 does not go much in those countries anymore. Experienced coders charge $30 or above from pukistan but I get your point it is still a lowball offer compared to $100 for a US based developer. But tell me if you are a startup and just bootstraping your company with your own savings , where would you look to get your job done? Would you rather pay $100 per hour to a developer based in US or $30 to an experienced developer from somewhere else if your goal is to get your MVP up and running as fast as you can so that you can then attact some venture capital that you can use to hire "real" developers here in USA?
No that is short term outlook. You need to look long term. But I agree the pain of losing a job is real and that’s where UBI comes in. UBI (Universal basic income) is a must because job losses are inevitable wether due to automation / offshoring / health issues or skill shortage. Where will the money from UBI come from? From the companies that profit because of these mechanisms. Tax them , tax the ultra rich folks. If humanity has to continue its progress in the current path this has to be the future. If you have an alternative in mind please share.
more great logic - we need to outsource jobs so the companies can earn a higher profit to pay UBI to the citizens they displaced.
This is the equivalent of a ponzi scheme if you think about it - unsustainable.
US is a country, not a company - citizens are non-voluntary members - some of them have ancestors that served and died to make it what it is. US did not magically become an epicenter of innovation where Google could be created, it took the whole history of the country to get to this point.
If "more efficient economies" were about to take over, people would stay home. folks continue to come to the US because it is still best here.
some of the "more efficient economies" come from are growing by widescale industrial espionage, made easier by lax controls on intellectual property. People still come here.
Other emerging economies have almost intractable demographic issues that only so much hope can address.
The US would be well served to not blindly repeat the mistakes of other countries for the sake of short term economic gain.
So to your first point you need to understand I am not taking about “needing” to outsource/offshoring to provide UBI to citizens. No, “offShoring” is “needed” by companies to be more efficient and profitable. It is a business decision. That is inevitable if US companies wants to stay competitive in the global market. If not outsourcing or offshoring there WILL be automation as time goes on and many skills will become older or stale. This is also inevitable. If you deny these trends you are living under a rock really. Now in your answer I do sense some frustrations around demographic changes , which is also real , but again that kind of thinking leads to stereotyping biases and sometimes making the wrong judgement, which I think we can all do without and definitely the United States constitution does not prescribe classes of citizens based on ancestry. But to all the other issues UBI is the answer not stopping the profitability of companies.
Secondly the fact is most of the developed countries run on successful immigration policies. Countries like Japan which did not encourage immigration until recently had a stagnating economy for a very long time. Only recently they are loosening up immigration to help boost the economy. In fact the reason USA is a great place to come and work for many SKILLED immigrants is that immigrants has contributed greatly in the last three decades and helpers US companies to dominate in the global competition and increase their profit to stellar levels. Look at any of the global hi tech companies from IBM to Microsoft and you will see immigrants holding not only back office roles but also holding all kinds of positions from middle managers to being CEOs. Do you think these companies could have been so successful without the contribution of the immigrant communities? These companies success are America’s recent success and let us not deny this fact or take steps that will kill this glorious fountain of prosperity and innovation.
Japan is a country that values its citizens over its companies, i think Japanese tend to like it the way it is, and there's a lesson there if you think about it carefully.
I think easy case to make IBM is dying on the back of becoming an outsourcing company. IBM, once a feared titan of global tech, is basically a joke, it's leading tech is a recent acquisition (RHEL).
America in the 100 year view - what was the society that led to the founding of HP, IBM, microsoft, google, apple? that's the secret sauce we need to cultivate, and of course immigrants are part of it, but the current culture around H1B is another story.
reading between the lines, i see the pride in your response of the new CEOs of some of these tech behemoths -
as an engineer who is bad at politics - i know this to be true - getting to the top of a big mature organization is nothing like starting one, totally different skillset.
not to say these folks aren't extremely smart cookies, but it's a different ballgame being played.
Well in the long run you need both builders and operators to succeed. In today’s world Everybody ( I mean everybody individually not any race religion etc) brings their own strength to the game , unitedly we should harness them take care of each other and not become more divisive and blinded in the process.
"If "more efficient economies" were about to take over, people would stay home"
Nazi germany was literally taking over, and people were not staying home! Its an extreme example, but the argument is a non-sequitor.
Like my family left Russia (not for US) bevause they wanted less crime, better healthcare, and they lost a lot if financiall opportunity in the process.
"lax controls on intellectual property" - Our IP laws mean I buy a phone and have no right to know what software its running, what it's doing while i am asleep, if it has security flaws, etc.
Also copyright lasts how many decades after author's death?
How many patents were given for 'slide to unlock' and 'shopping cart'?
If i lived in a developing country, i would absolutely want my government to have super lax IP laws, first so that we can catch up, and then so that a more sane set of laws can evolve.
They have to restrict offshore and outsourcing in parallel to visas or this would be a total wasted effort. It would actually backfire if not done in unison.
Postdocs are not even on H1B the vast majority of the time, because it's considered academic training. It's possible to get on a H1B if everything has been exhausted, but never the preferred option.
I did my Ph.D. in Physics on an F visa, and H1B was my only option when I became a postdoc. Already on the old system, I was paid significantly more than my US citizen colleagues due to the minimum wage. I’m worried about what this rule change will do to my field, where talented postdocs are hard to find. It also never made sense to me to invest many $100k in foreign Ph.D. students to then make it so hard for them to repay part of this investment to the country.
The problem with how academic and science work is currently structured is that there is an oversupply of labor at basement-dwelling compensation. Post-docs work for decades before getting better opportunities, and people are cheap labor in industry labs for long periods of time.
Foreign workers are partially compensated for low pay with a potential visa to stay, while this extra motivation is not there for Americans.
Having a native pipeline of education to knowledge work is important for long term competitiveness and is hard rebuild. If the US falls upon even harder times the foreign pipeline will dry up.
No doubt that H-1B has brought many talented people to the US that have made enourmous contributions. But this has been out of random chance rather than design. The program needs calibration.
The H-1B visa program currently requires to have a "bachelor's degree" or equivalent. When you open the door to any "bachelor's degree or equivalent" from anywhere in the world, results are pretty random. You can get a freaking genius, or a person that cannot implement fizzbuzz, and anything in between.
I think the solution is to give priority to the most skilled applicants in the pool, in this way, the cheaper talent will be left behind and wage depression becomes harder to achieve.
I think we should be expanding the H1-B program, but it is already oversubscribed and if this can reduce applications to the point where the lottery is not needed or is much more certain, I think that would be an improvement.
However, this piece really struck me as a big mistake:
"Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering."
Some of the best software engineers I know are graduate degree holders from neuroscience, biophysics, EE, and more. This might be a distinction that is only relevant in software engineering, but my intuition is that other fields will feel the sting of this decision.
I’m a high school graduate and a self-taught developer. I got hired by Microsoft as a software engineer to the Microsoft Windows Core OS team based on my skills with an H-1B. I made Microsoft millions of dollars with my work. I’m now writing a book on software development published by Manning Books. None of that would have happened if such a criteria existed. That policy doesn’t make any sense at all.
People thinking this is some kind of "good move" need to try to remember what administration they're talking about. If you don't understand the play, it's not because you're not being played.
You don't need to believe the administration is Satanic, white nationalist, or whatever else.
It is politically advantageous for them if fewer immigrants enter the United States, because immigrants tend to vote for the other side. And so they wish to reduce immigration. Like everything else in politics, it is simply about power.
They’re merely suggesting that when considering this immigration policy it should be taken into account that the administration creating it has white nationalists as policy advisers.
How would this reduce immigration? 85k people will still move to US from H1B every year after these changes, it just will be different 85k people from before unless they change the number.
I had good amount of low-level programming experience with Z80 and x86 assembly, including implementing my own bootloader for a file system design of my own. I got the basic data structures and algorithms down and finally, I passed the interview. I had about 10 years of professional development experience when I was hired.
The original poster can give the real answer (I have a feeling you know what I'm about to write and want the _story_) but:
For certain technically focused jobs it's easy for other skilled practitioners to tell that you can do it.
A degree is nice but is actually less useful for signalling than concrete, interesting work in the field because the latter is rarer.
I've seen this play out particularly in computer security and low-level software development.
Where lack of qualifications really holds you back is when you're being hired by non-experts. They usually can't evaluate "direct evidence" and must rely on credentials instead. Paradoxically this means you can have an easier time getting hired without a degree at a "top" company than a mid-tier one.
Microsoft doesn't regard new graduates and industry experts interchangable. When I was hired, I had about 10 years of professional software development experience, especially in low-level areas (such as firewall software, data transfer protocol design, DOS-based GUI libraries, terminal emulation and so forth). I had good amount of operating system architecture knowledge too. I probably didn't have the fresh mind and well-formed education of a new graduate but I think I compensated that with the experience pretty much okay.
If you assume people are more or less fungible except for some "Q" (quality measure) sure, you probably wouldn't hire someone without a degree. You would sort your applicants by "Q" and drop everyone below a cutoff. I suppose I would call this the "human resources" view.
On the other hand if you have a team of domain experts who are passionate about subject "S", they don't actually care about "Q". They care whether you have deep interest, expertise and potential in their domain area. They want to know what you can bring to their team. Now, a lot of times a good candidate will be someone with a PhD in "S", but it's not about the qualification. It's about "S".
"No degree" hires usually don't come in the HR front door as a "fungible human resource". They usually get noticed or referred by someone passionate about "S", for a job doing "S".
I don't actually know if this was the OP's situation; there are other ways this can work. Good recruiters will try to hoover up talent by searching for people with relevant work experience (substituting that for a degree) and throw them into the funnel.
Presumably because this person was provably better than the other candidates.
A degree is valuable in some regards, but it is not a mark of quality of candidate. Similarly the lack of a degree is also not a mark against a candidate.
kernel/shmernel, why not? Ain't like a kernel is a mystical land in a far away galaxy. It's just another program. In DOS era every program was a kernel when was running. If you wanted to play nice with others you'd do a TSR program and make sure you did not freeze the PC. I know it's an oversimplification but the basis is the same. When you write for kernel you make sure to no tip over anything, just like with a TSR in DOS.
Honestly colleges don't teach you much about practical kernel developments. Most people just learn them as side projects. This is the same for other fields as well, e.g., frontend developments.
Requiring degrees for doing anything is a big step backward. I'm working for Google and lots of my peers are from non-CS majors (Physics, EE, even literature), but they are all excellent engineers.
>“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.”
Copying from my comment below, this is likely to backfire.
Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.
This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy by the family like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, medical expenses, entertainment, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India or Canada itself.
If I were in the Canada govt, I'd immediately create a way around the travel ban for workers who's visas didn't get renewed to be able to move to Canada after following a strict quarantine protocol. If the worker was able to work remotely in the US using Zoom, why can't they do the same job remotely in the same time zone in Canada using the same remote working tools? This might be a once in lifetime opportunity for Canada to grow their tech sector, especially if Trump gets re-elected and puts further restrictions.
There is already a small industry in Canada where a company takes a few % of the billing rate in order to sponsor and hold a Canadian visa for people who lost their H1B visas due to increased and inconsistent rejections over the past few years, but whose employer is willing to allow them to work from Canada. This moves a lot of money to Canada.
Also, some tech companies have been outright moving jobs to Canada because they can hire from a global workforce and Canada has been welcoming them. This is going to intensify.
There is a reason this regulation didn't follow the normal rule-making and public comment period. Very likely this wouldn't have happened if there wasn't an imminent election.
> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India. This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India itself.
There's a big assumption in "Since remote work has become acceptable". Some companies are talking about making things permanent, others are already trying to get people back in the office.
And if the remote work swing is both big and permanent, then I think this is less likely a "backfire" situation and more of an "irrelevant" one. Companies looking to save money would hire in the foreign country regardless of the new rules.
>There's a big assumption in "Since remote work has become acceptable". Some companies are talking about making things permanent, others are already trying to get people back in the office.
It costs companies a lot both monetarily and in time/effort to advertise job postings, get applications, schedule interviews ,hire someone new to do the same job, train them and get them set up and acclimatized until they become productive. If they can still have them working that'd be a big boon for them. Of course this won't happen for all jobs, but is likely to apply to a large fraction.
Someone making a conscious decision to hire in another country takes a lot of effort, but an existing productive employee who is already working 100% remotely for the past 6+ months asking if they could work in Canada or India till the uncertainty around the election is resolved will definitely have a good chance.
> Companies looking to save money would hire in the foreign country regardless of the new rules.
You're going to get people who are already productive for the company moving willingly to lower expense parts of the world, while continuing to be identical in disruption to someone moving to Wisconsin.
Companies (more importantly managers) do care about hiring locally, since they have a lot of opportunities to on-board, evaluate and guide - however, once they're all baked in, the shift is less of a concern for the companies.
"Hiring in a foreign country" is different from "We save 18k/employee if they move to Canada and they want to!".
You are grossly overestimating how trivial it is to support remote workers in different nations.
There is at best a 9.5 hour difference between the US and India, which leaves practically no opportunity for real-time cooperative work during normal office hours. Not to mention differences in holidays... and equipment cost... and the cost of doing business in another nation. That all adds up very quickly.
> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.
You will not be granted a work permit to work remotely for an American company in Canada.
My understanding is that Canadian residency isn't particularly strict, but Canadian citizenship is very strict. Besides, most of the companies in question (e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) already have subsidiaries operating in Canada so employment via the Canadian subsidiary is not an issue.
The program that allows anybody to apply for residence is called Express Entry.
They offer something like 4200 positions every 2 weeks, or about 100k per year.
My understanding is that unless you're at the very top of the list (it's score based) you're likely to be waiting a long time.
Edit: For example the last drawing required you have a score of 471 or above. A 28 year old Indian person with a CS degree and 6 years of job experience who has perfect English scores would only have 441 points.
You also have provincial programs which have different/maybe more lax requirements than express entry.
Once you get PR, citizenship is just 3 years away.
There's no prohibition for remote work per se. The American company just needs to set up its legal presence in Canada since only Canadian companies can sponsor immigrants. That would still be a barrier to small companies so I expect the PEO (Professional Employment Organization) industry to come up with a way to make this possible at any scale. And that's before Canada changes IRCC regs to help this use case, which they could very well do.
Which is why I mentioned that there are Canadian companies that handle hiring the employee and sponsoring the Canadian work visa, invoicing the company in the US, taking the cut and paying the employee the rest.
The US economy isn't the same as the state economy. For local revenue states and cities could simply tax the employer a percent of the outsourced employee's paycheck and if the problem did become federal then the federal government could do the same. Since these employees are coming from places with a lower CoL there's no reason they couldn't make up the difference in savings anyway.
Moves like that would be dangerous, because what's stopping the company from moving their office or HQ out of that state or city or even the country to escape taxing of someone that isn't even in the country. And then, forget about the tax on the non existent employees, real local employees could be out of a job.
> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.
If remote work becomes more acceptable, companies in Canada and EU can also move their jobs outside those countries. Less taxes and laws to worry about.
I think working remotely for a US-based company as a resident of another country is more nuanced than you seem to imply. It may require significant changes to their relationship, which in turn may be more expensive than just raising their salary.
I share the same experience. The most talented software developers that I've worked with have just about all been EE's. On the flip side, I've also met some terrible software developers who were also EE's.
I would absolutely speculate that this requirement was made to block many good candidates. After all, the point of a visa system is to constrict the pool of potential candidates anyway.
> After all, the point of a visa system is to constrict the pool of potential candidates anyway.
No, that's not the point. If that's what you wanted to achieve then you'd be best off not having any visa system. So obviously this is not what they're optimising for.
> If that's what you wanted to achieve then you'd be best off not having any visa system. So obviously this is not what they're optimising for.
If you want to change an existing system, slice the salami thinly.
Whether they intend it or not they are optimizing for moving a lot of work overseas. They seem to think the economy is the same as in 1945. And even to get to 1945 the US imported a ton of nuclear physicists and other scientists.
You mean, if you wanted to constrict international immigrants you would block all immigrants from coming here. If there was no visa system, then companies would be free to hire whoever they wanted.
> If there was no visa system, then companies would be free to hire whoever they wanted.
No. I don't know if you're not familiar with what these terms mean, but by default most people don't have permission to work in the US. That's the default situation if there were no visas.
Visas didn't create this default situation - they're the tool that allows you to get permission beyond the default of not having permission.
If you had no visa system... nobody would have the needed permission. You're thinking everyone would get default permission but that's not the case.
The point of any given set of rules is to balance both objectives: expand the domestic labor pool, but also avoid undercutting local labor. As with any political process, the incentives and power-block dynamics shift the line over time in different directions.
In this article, The Economist covers a study credibly suggesting that a world of free movement would be richer to the tune of $78 trillion a year, suggesting that affected by the competition would do better figuring out how to get a cut of the take.
With these kinds of numbers, immigration by default is the only platform that makes sense. The added economic output could do more than fix the highest budget deficits on record; we could be looking at paying off the national debt, free healthcare, and money left over. You're concerned about negative consequences? We can work something out.
Instead, we fret that this is "bad for local workers", condemning the would-be immigrant and our own nation to linger in mediocrity.
World of free movement, would make anybody remotly compent move to one of the huge cities, while the rest of the world would either empty out, or fail horribly with people left over, who are unable to leave.
I lived in a country where the biggest export was the (young, competent) workforce.... I still live here, but the country doesn't exist anymore.
If an expert is brought in from overseas to do something that local people can't do, then it can create additional employment opportunities on projects and development that would not have been possible without their expertise.
I've worked in quite a few fairly sophisticated technical environments, have many friends working in professional positions who have discussed the issue (from engineering, to academia, to medicine), and I've yet to encounter this situation where a unicorn from another country is the only option for a skill in the entire country with a population of over 300 million.
What I often do see instead are situations where local markets seeking a skill can't or don't want to compete with the labor rates needed for to attract or contract the skills they desire. They instead have to look for more leveraged labor abroad to pass their desired cost savings onto who is willing to accept living in undesired locations, working at below market rates to escape even less desirable situations, etc.
Obviously, this is anecdotal. I'm sure the case does arise where you actually need some highly specialized labor abroad but nothing near the labor pools the H1B program allows. If there are labor supply shortages, you shouldn't need to artificially inflate the market with labor through visa programs. Raise compensation and let the markets adjust to attract talent. This sort of competition is what's forced on the labor market while businesses, yet again, avoid competition when it's against their interests.
If you truly need international labor you should absolutely be required to pay near the top of market rates for the talent is truly that rare. If businesses aren't willing to pay above market rates this talent, it must not be so critical or rare. This should prevent the case of manipulating labor markets under the guise of projected artificial scarcity.
I have nothing against immigration, let people move to this country if they so desire and seek opportunity but let them do so without being leveraged by a business holding their citizenship, freedoms, and future hope of prosperity hostage while suppressing local wages, all to make a quick buck.
> Raise compensation and let the markets adjust to attract talent.
But this can take decades.
If Google wants to start a large new compiler project, them opening a job position with a high salary isn't going to convince anyone to go away and do a PhD in compilers, and if it does they wouldn't be available for five years.
If Google want to build a compiler now and they aren't able to hire anyone locally with the skills, what do you want them to do? Abandon the project? That's not great for the US economy is it?
In a 300mio people country, Google can't gather a team of compiler experts?
And this can still be fixed by requiring above-market prices for H1B workers (eg. requiring 1.5x average pay for the position needed, so if an average compiler developer in california is paid 100k, you can only get a foreign developer if you pay them 150k - this would force companies to get local talent by raising their pay to 110k, 120k, 130k..., and when they really cannot get anyone, even at 150k, they are able to get someone on a visa).
In my experience most people working on compilers have PhDs in compilers, yeah.
But if you don't agree, take any example you like that requires at least a few years to come up to speed.
People aren't going to become an expert tomorrow on whatever subject you're hiring for, no matter how much you pay.
If you offered me a million dollars to play the trombone for you I'd love to accept that, but I can't do it until I go away and learn the trombone which would take me years. Offering me ten million dollars wouldn't make me learn it any faster, either.
We say that markets are 'inelastic' - they don't adapt to demand magically.
But there are other trombone players in the country, google will just have to pay them more than the competition to get them and/or the competition will have to raise their pay to make them stay. In the long run, some orchestras might be a trombone player short, but with high(er) average wages, you'll get more people who take trombone-playing as a career path.
There are very very few positions, that you can't fill if you offer above-average pay and working conditions, and most H1B visa carriers now, are not unicorns, but usually just someone willing to work for less money than locals (example: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff... )
I don't think there really is an example that takes years to get up to speed, because if you can't find someone who has the exact experience, you can find someone in a related field. It took me less than a year from writing my first line of code to working as a software engineer. I bet it would take even less now to be a useful compiler engineer.
Well that is the original stated legislative intent, for "jobs local people can't do."
But in reality, this was never an enforced requirement. It is very common for expensive americans to be fired and replaced with a cheaper holder of an h1b.
A minimum wage, set as (eg.) 1.5x avearage wage in that sector in that state would be a good requirement for getting a visa. That would make companies offer more (1.1, 1.2 ... 1.499x average) and get local workers, and if they're still, even with a higher wage, unable to get a worker, they'd get one with an H1B visa.
No, larger labor pool = higher wages, for two reasons:
1. Being able to hire more people means that local companies can grow bigger and take on more work
2. Merely having more bodies in the economy increases demand for goods in that economy
Rural American towns have extremely tight labor pools and can barely sustain minimum wage.
Don't you currently have relatively high unemployment? And how is staying at minimum wage (instead of raising them, to get people from elsewhere to move in) good for local workers? Don't you have a bunch of cities with unbelievably high cost of living (SF, NY,...), where people come (and sometimes live in tents), just because there are no jobs for them in "rural american towns"?
Hehehe... I like this solution. I'm an American citizen, my wife was on H1B and now we're in the middle of transfering her to a green card. This process is designed to make immigrants' lives hard, as far as I can tell.
I would never have made it to the US with that rule. I had a UK BS(c) in molecular biology, had done 1 year of a PhD at EMBL in computational molecular biology, dropped out to focus on the computers instead. 2 years later, hired on an H1B and emigrated to the US.
6 years after that, I was the 2nd hire at amzn, and the rest is history. Does the Trump admin really want to mess with that kind of story?
It’s not supposed to make sense... it’s supposed to make the system unwieldy and frustrating.
There is no requirement that you assume good faith. It’s usually a nice (and calming) place to start, but when the evidence is to the contrary it’s reasonable to not give them the benefit of the doubt.
That just means there'll be fast track CS programs pop up (They already exist - I have a friend who had a degree in hospitality management, who did an online master's program in CS in about 18 months, and she can't write a line of code today)
Yeah, the high level idea of “get H1Bs back to their original purpose” (hiring high skill employees in sectors with labour shortages in America) makes a lot of sense, and I say this as a major Trump hater. It’s a good idea. But some of the implementation details really suck, and this is a key one. It’s incredibly common for outstanding employees in technical fields to come from non-traditional backgrounds.
Screwing up details like this could be simple incompetence - the Trump administration is quite bad when it comes to putting “yes men” with little relevant experience in key decision making positions. Or it could be malice - a strongly anti-immigrant policy disguised as something less anti-immigrant. I can easily see it being either one.
There is a lot of political science research that speaks to growing xenophobia when immigration is unleashed. I understand the sentiment—I'm very pro-immigration—but with respect to domestic policy my primary goal is stability and faith in government.
Personally, I like how my country, Canada, does it. Points based system that rewards multiple factors, including skills, employability, and fluency in English and French. A large, sensible limit and a separate target for refugees. Some affordances for family reunification, but fundamentally economically and societally stable.
I like the Canadian system too, but it was recently pointed out to me that the Canadian system is biased towards wealthy immigrants. Many of the points are things that take money to get (like advanced degrees and knowledge of French).
And then you end up with the "PhD taxi driver" problem too.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Wealthy immigrants are more useful to a country than poor immigrants, unless those poor immigrants have a lot of promise which is most easily approximated by educational credentials.
The PhD taxi driver isn't a huge problem because it's voluntary on the part of the immigrant and usually those people send their kids to top universites.
> the PhD taxi driver isn't a huge problem because it's voluntary on the part of the immigrant
Of course it isn't voluntary. If you had a PhD would you prefer to work as a taxi driver?
It's a mix of multiple factors:
- Some masked racism (usually in form of "needs Canadian experience" meaning for most people: either you spend some time in a cashier/cleaning/etc job or you aren't getting through to us)
- Curriculum stuffing/PhDs from some smaller countries might not be worth the paper they're printed on (which should be easy to sieve in an interview - but a Canadian won't go out of the way to help you - not even a bit)
- Peculiarities of the Canadian job market (centralization depends on area/specialty, etc)
I say this as a naturalized citizen who went through this process myself a few years ago: it's our country and we can decide which people we want to let in. It's not their right, it's a privilege we provide them with the expectation that they will contribute to our society more than the average Canadian. So, yes, we cherry-pick the applicants who will most likely contribute the most.
People running away from war and famine have a different humanitarian immigration path into Canada which is not built with the expectation that they will become net contributors to our society.
>People running away from war and famine have a different humanitarian immigration path into Canada which is not built with the expectation that they will become net contributors to our society.
Or at least, not in the first few years of their stay - there is every reason to expect them to become net contributors in time, it just might take a few years longer than the point-based immigrants
Half of the world's French speakers are Africans who learned it for free. I'd be curious to see the demographics of Canadian visa awards - I wonder if this actually helps them be a little more open to immigrants from Africa than they would be otherwise.
I was surprised, when I got my citizenship, just how limited the family reunification up here is, but I'm also okay with that. It might be different for people who come in via refugee channels (they've been forced to leave their home and may not have a valid and safe path to reunify if they need to) but, as an elective immigrant the only automatic ins I've got are nephews and nieces in the case of orphaning. I'm pretty okay with that.
While the rest of my US family is freaking out a bit right now I think it's a lot more just to bring in folks looking for work with skills to support them.
Xenophobia is more expected, when the immigrant population is ghettoized, alienated, given fewer opportunities and stricter policing, and made to compete with the local population for limited jobs.
A more reasonable policy would be to make sure the that doesn't happen. Say by abolishing racist policing, better urban planning, better labor laws, and partly socialized job market.
EDIT: Changed wording, previously incorrectly stated that immigration was natural under these circumstances.
> A more reasonable policy would be to make sure the that doesn't happen. Say by abolishing racist policing, better urban planning, better labor laws, and partly socialized job market
It’s not clear to me that these things are true. Unions and socialized job markets, for example, often exacerbate ghettoization by excluding née entrants from the labor market.
It’s hard to argue with the success story that is the US. Nearly every immigrant group in the US has seen incomes converges with the native population within a few generations. Even today, that’s happening for Hispanic immigrants.
That’s true few other places. Fourth generation Muslims in France, for example, are still often ghettoized.
Xenophobia is never natural, it's comprehensible but there are a lot of folks able to resist falling into it as a scapegoat from bad circumstance. I agree with improving society to help less folks fall into it, but I don't believe in allowing any excuses for xenophobic views.
I would have thought that the comment "xenophobia is natural" is fairly uncontroversial. It's certainly not an artificial construct forced upon people (although certain expressions and targets might be). That's why there are articles like http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-ot... . After all, even animals can exhibit xenophobic behaviors.
I don't think runarberg meant that xenophobia is acceptable or proper.
I wanted to clarify that my comment was just to specifically pick at that wording and lean toward correcting any implication that it is acceptable or proper. I think runarberg's comment added a lot of helpful information to the discussion and I don't at all think it was made in bad faith.
My response may have been a bit touchy since the US is dealing with some pretty big issues right now but I think that the meat of what he said w.r.t. improving quality of life as a way to address increasing xenophobia is spot on and I'm very much of the same mind, when people are trodden on some object upwards and others find other people they can trod on themselves (transitive bullying or some such?) and bringing QoL up across society with good supportive social programs can really help minimize Xenophobia and shift it from a belief embraced by a group that has been sorta-kinda denounced by politicians to something entirely fringe (like neo-nazis and the KKK were in the 90s).
I didn’t, but it was a poor choose of wording non-the-less and therefor deserved the criticism.
It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups. Or at least any experiments that previously have demonstrated such biases have had biases them self. I at least wasn’t ready to accept a theory of outgroup prejudges being ”natural” without resounding evidence from good experiments.
A Marxist might argue that given the previously mentioned conditions (in particular worker alienation) would create an alienated “outgroup” which others (including the working classes) would learn to despise. However this is hardly something that some might call a natural condition. And marxism is far from being an accepted theory of human behavior.
> It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the literature of psychological biases, but I don’t think there is a clear case that we have inherit biases towards outgroups.
There is an abundance. Check out the literature on adult development. I’m partial to Kegan’s model, but others work.
Kegan might not say that stage 3 folks are inherently biased towards outgroups, but they are certainly defined by their in-group. This can lead to challenging perspectives when dealing with other groups.
Like I said, its been a while since I read up on the literature, but when I did (more then 10 years ago) there were similar models backed most of them not backed up by any evidence, but those that were usually had some flaws in the experimental design that made the results biased.
E.g. they were asked to rate neutral images as positive or negative, some were primed with images of outgroup person while others with ingroup. The outgroup group would respond more negatively. But there is a problem with this design and they found out that it is not bias towards the outgroup that created the result. Maybe they have experiments that demonstrates (without a bias) that xenophobia is natural in humans, but I doubt it. I want to see some extraordinary evidence before I believe such an extraordinary claim.
a bachelor's degree in computer science, oodles of experience and holding high positions in large tech companies, fluent in english and very high IELTS score - not enough in the Canadian points system, because of age. (Age outweighs points for experience)
That system is geared towards young masters holders fluent in English/French.
All systems exclude a certain demographic. I guess that's just how it is.
> There is a lot of political science research that speaks to growing xenophobia when immigration is unleashed.
From my experience these days, many statements or positions are deemed xenophobic or racist when they are actually not. Even your example of the Canadian immigration requirements could be deemed xenophobic or racist towards foreigners that don't speak English. Then there are the "open borders" people that believe countries should hand out visas willy-nilly to everyone that wants one and that any opposition to that idea is xenophobic and racist. Do you think that is warranted?
Early on the Trump administration floated the idea of a point based system and they were instantly savaged for being racists and white supremacists for even suggesting such a thing.
The howls of outrage died out fairly quickly when it was pointed out that many developed countries use a point system.
The new rule is that H1B workers need to earn higher salaries relative to the distribution of salaries in their profession. The worker must make the 45th percentile wage, where previously it was 17th. Won't this primarily hurt people early in their career, or does it also take into account experience level?
I think this is by design. You don't want to issue visas to "people early in their career" - those jobs should go to Americans first. You only hire from abroad if there really is a shortage of specialists in some profession, and you want those professionals to prove their worth in their home country first, before allowing them to the US.
Exactly. The H-1B program is intended to be for highly skilled workers. Most folks early in their career (GP is probably thinking straight out of school) can hardly be considered highly skilled. And surely there are plenty of American recent graduates from similar programs as the recent graduate H-1B applicant.
Well, it's possible for there to be a shortage of early-career specialists. Even now, with CS majors stuffed to the brim across the country, entry-level software engineering salaries keep rising and the big companies hire as fast as they can.
I see your point broadly, but I think it's possible for that to be true and to also take university-grad H1-B employees.
But still, you want that shortage to stay there for a while, because that provides the incentive to US universities to create more spots in CS programs for US teenagers. If you go straight to hiring foreigners you are leaving US kids behind.
Typically younger working age people are a net benefit to the system. They pay taxes, but their kids dont go to schools, they dont require as much healthcare (which can be publicly funded in some countries).
Ahh, I see. There's a logic to it, but I really don't agree with this zero-sum mindset. The tech sector is one of the few where the US is (arguably) a leader, and it seems like we will all benefit in the long run if the most talented people in the world build their careers here. It seems like there must be a better way to ensure that native workers are not harmed by it, such as collective bargaining.
> Umm no. Everyone but Indian/Chinese H1b holder, get their green card in 1-2 years.
That's false. Maybe this was true in the past.
First, they cannot self-sponsor. Which means that the hypothetical company would have to apply as soon as they step foot on US soil. There are no incentives to do so and incentives against it. So they generally won't.
Expect the process to start a couple of years before the H1B visa is set to expire.
Even if started immediately, just for processing time alone you are looking at around 2 years. 2 to 6 months for the PERM process. I-140, similar. The AOS stage can take 10 (or more!) months to process. The last two can be filed concurrently. It's still one year on the absolute best case with no RFEs or audits whatsoever, counting from the moment the application was filed, assuming all documentation is instantly available (like employment verification letters from past workers, translations etc) and assuming lawyer time is zero (which obviously is not the case).
Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.
If you work at FAANG, they file immediately(and many more do, it's not a big deal). Are you aware for rest of world i-485 and i-140 can be filed concurrently.
> Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.
My understanding (I have always been a citizen of the US) is that the processing time to get a green card if you are Indian is so long it might as well not be an option.
The H1B system is so unkind. We invite people into our country, only to trap them with a particular employer with the constant threat of losing work authorization. Then we don’t even lay down specific rules on how one can get out of this situation.
> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile.
This is pretty abstract and probably the most important detail. How much would a software engineer have to make to qualify? I'd figure it'd have to be at ~200k if it's 95th percentile. A number high enough and it truly would be for only highly skilled, hard to find software talent, rather than just labor cost cutting. Does anyone have concrete numbers?
Right now you can use it to see the biggest H1B employers and their median salaries for workers on visa. Open to any suggestions on how to make it more useful!
How is this dataset being updated considering considering the data from the iCERT system is not available real time anymore ? Are you relying on their annual disclosures ?
People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough.
While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, especially for information workers like programmers.
Take this real example.
Google has offices in both Mountain View (USA) and Bengaluru (India). The hiring bar is the same and Google employees can easily transfer between offices.
A SWE in the BLR office makes ~40K USD (due to the local cost of labor), while the same SWE would make ~150K in MTV if they decided to change teams. USA gets $0 out of the 40K that the BLR SWE makes, while it would make ~55K in federal and state income taxes and even more in payroll taxes if the same person moved to MTV. And I am not even counting the sales taxes, and general velocity of the money that person would spend if they lived in MTV.
Either way for Google a SWE is a SWE and if the US made it impossible to hire them in the US, they would just increase hiring in India.
How is this a better outcome for the US or its citizens? Unless you ban all outsourcing, you are only increasing the chances of shifting the labor entirely outside the country by having strict immigration control, as opposed to labor that lives in the country and pays taxes. It's ironic that most of the H1B rage is targeted against programmers, one of the MOST remote-friendly professions as COVID lockdowns have re-affirmed. It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding.
Historically the US has had the benefit of being a desirable place to live in, due to being a developed country that largely had its shit together. That encouraged the best minds from around the world come and live here, whether researchers or working professionals, even if they had to jump several hoops to do so.
It feels like the US is extremely insistent on killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Due to the constant volatility in immigration policies, university toppers and budding researchers across the world are already wary of choosing the US as a place to work or live in. It will be a few decades before the chickens come home to roost for the US, but it will be too late by then.
> It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding.
I'm curious if you've ever actually worked at a US company that was almost entirely Indian. I think a lot of this has to do with people's personal experiences at work.
I worked in a subgroup of Fortune 10 company that was 98% Indian (3 white people out of about 200). The amount of cronyism was really eye opening. Personal friends of the bosses were the only people hired by the parent company (others were "consultants" for an all-H1B sponsoring firms). There were fairly reliable rumors of company leaders having their own "staffing" companies that took cuts from many of the H1Bs as well. We had a number of wives (and in one case a husband) of developers who couldn't program, but would get programming jobs as personal favors - a few on each team. Our head boss was chosen because she and an executive lived in the same apartment complex and their kids played together. This is the kind of stuff that went on. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked. There was almost no accountability for people being bad at their job. Almost all had Masters degrees and a few years experience, but were no better (and usually worse) than recent college grads from the local state university.
I'm pretty sure this isn't isolated because you hear about entire departments becoming all Indian at some companies (Cisco, UHG, ect). Basically, everyone who can't stand the cronyism leaves and the Indians bosses only hire their friends or friends of friends or other Indians.
I'm sure many people have good experiences working with Indian H1Bs (and I've had good experiences when they are part of a much larger and diverse team like what you'd have at a FAANG company), but one bad experience like I had can really sour you towards what's going on.
I think it's more like ~100k USD in Bangalore vs ~250k USD in the US if you include stocks. (Checking typical L4 Google salary in Mountain View vs India in levels.fyi)
Companies do prefer to have most of the development done in the US as far as possible, because there are intangible benefits from being in one time zone/in the same office etc., and for that office to be in the country which brings in most of the revenue.
It's a better option because the strengthening of India and the transformation of India into a developed country is a more important long term national security and prosperity interest than american hegemony in any particular industry
That's hope, but hope is not a concrete plan/strategy.
So as far as India is concerned, the overall quality of talent has only reduced. Thanks to all the regular office politics and general cultural problems we have, the quality of management is lower than ever. There is more job hopping than ever, there is lesser quantity of serious work done compared to previous times. People don't exactly train for skills the same way they do for interviews and the whole thing reduces to acing gatekeeping. The kind of leadership talent you need to build talent and skilled people on the longer run is just not there. So we just get the outsourced work done, and send it back(services). Even the Google offshore center described by the OP is that way. Most offshore centers in Bangalore don't have autonomy beyond that.
When you have this you just can't take on technically challenging projects or the kind of engineering projects which actually count for something.
This is one of the perennial problems in the Indian system. We are unable to move beyond services, and low level IT jobs. Even the product ecosystem like Flipkart etc is not comparable to innovation coming out places like Amazon. Its not really a money problem, because Flipkart actually got tons of funding. All this leads to the ultimate result. We are really a country of resellers, and service economy people. We make money by reselling or servicing things, not by making things. So even to make our metros transit systems, we need to hire German/Japanese firms. Or that our national monuments and statues are engineered and assembled in China. We don't make 747's or F1 cars here. Let alone that Maruthi Suzuki- Suzuki makes cars and we(Maruthi) do servicing.
Basically unless we have a larger culture of merit, fairness and justice- Topped by engineering and industrialized economy the bigger gains won't come.
Lots of this has got to do with culture and priorities. The only way this can be changed is politics and the current political priorities of India aren't anywhere close to this.
i think google would save themselves the 90k/engineer if they could so this doesnt hold up. Also, to a worker it might be about not having to code for minimum wage because expats might, but Trump doesnt care about workers. he never worked a day in his life. It's about something else, namely your nations future.
In Google and similar big cos, certainly. If anything it's harder because college grads in India and China are some of the most zealous and effective when it comes to Leetcoding and similar preparation techniques.
The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of less-paid and supposedly 'bad' H1B talent comes from 'IT consulting firms' like Infosys, Cognizant etc. who files 10s of thousands of H1B applications, compared to say Google which filed 5000.
Maybe there's something I'm missing about the appeal of H1B, but I don't understand why this announcement would be a big game changer in a post-Covid-19 world. Organizations are in the midst of more drastic adaptations and H1B appears as relevant as the DVD in a world of video streaming. My understanding is that it allowed organizations that were more comfortable doing things the "traditional way", show up to work every day and sit in a cubicle, a way to spend money and energy to bring people over, so that they would do just that. Covid-19 forced them into a reality they dreaded and they survived and are adapting. Now that remote is becoming a norm, the new edge will be to do it across wide regions and time zones, which in my opinion is an even easier adaptation than the previous.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I fail to see the point of H1B in that reality. How did remote-first or remote-only organizations used H1B before March?
As someone who has worked with lots of remote teams, I'll give you a simple answers: timezones matter. A lot. Especially for relatively early stage companies where tight collaboration on new products is key. I have actually refused, and will continue to refuse, work that requires me to collaborate with someone 11.5 hours different. It sucks for everyone involved.
Years ago I had a job when I worked noon-5 and then 10pm-1am to overlap with colleagues in India. At first I thought "Hey, I'm a night owl, this will be great." I grew to hate it pretty quickly, and I'll never do it again.
Contrarily, I've worked with colleagues in Brazil who were only 2 or 3 hours off from me, and it worked out great.
You do realize this world won't last right? There are a lot of states opening up. Hollywood currently is churning losses because they can't release anything. States are opening up and there are very few fatalities.
Some people love 100% remote and choose it, but there a HUGE number of people who do want to be back in the office, at least one or two days a week anyway.
It's used as a modern indentured servitude. I think you said it well, they love the "traditional way", which includes dangling someones life above their heads to get them to work in situations where other people wouldn't put up with it.
To me, it's the legal version of having your passport stolen for ransom in a third world country.
H1-B transfer process is relatively straightforward.
Personally I’m not a fan of the hyperbolic slave-era language used to describe a relatively flexible work visa. Nobody describes the other closed work permits this way.
> Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering.
But it does equal to unemployment in the United States because you can only get limited mileage out of OPT. Moreover, you need to work in an industry where employers are willing to sponsor an H-1B. Many of us have had to "pivot" to industries like Software when we realized that we were un-hireable in non-software industries due to our immigration status.
That example was likely conceived by the journalist and not the administration, I don't see it in other articles on this. I don't believe it will be that strict since degrees looks so different in different parts of the world.
I'm actually curious on the effects of this on international students who come to the US to study CS. One of the biggest reasons international students come to the US is to be able to live and work after graduation. If anything, this will deter international students from studying in the US, thus reducing much needed out-of-state revenue that colleges get from international students, which consequently only raises the costs for in-state students. I see the point of this rule, but I'd be interested in seeing the tertiary effects of it as well.
There is still the OPT program though, which allows students to work for a few years on a student Visa. I agree though that this would certainly discourage many students.
Natural "extension" of the OPT program is the H1B... It's even in the rules, where your "OPT visa" (F-1) is on purpose not dual intent - you need H1B if you want to apply for a green card. And that's how most students do it:
F1 -> OPT (w/ extension if able) -> H1B -> GC
Increasing the H1B threshold makes the next step very expensive, and it will cause more companies to be unwilling to hire w/OPT, therefore reducing the attractiveness of top US schools to the best candidates.
Many countries (that I am familiar with) have a very straightforward path to residency after completing education in the country. US makes it on purpose very difficult. And one problem is, in the eyes of the "system", a degree from Stanford/Harvard/MIT is equivalent to a degree from any other school capable of issuing the "same" degree.
A key problem with H1B visas is not just the wage requirements, but the fact that the requirements are ever changing, the fees keep getting higher, and that you can get rejected for some arbitrary reason even if you meet all criteria. This means most companies barring the biggest Silicon Valley employers, banks and Indian consulting companies are simply not willing to stomach the perceived administrative expenses or uncertainty that comes with visa sponsorship. It doesn't help that vested political interests use administrative hurdles as workaround to decrease immigration because they fail to pass legislation.
It would benefit all parties to have a system that is more transparent, predictable and administratively simpler.
I can't access the link, but if the headline is accurate, that's probably a good move.
For FAANG companies - they usually pay all their employees including H1Bs pretty well.
But it's hard for Google/FB/... to even get a H1B visa for their prospective H1B employees because the cap is filled by a number of consulting companies that imports people from other countries (I think mostly India) and treat those people pretty poorly (bad wages, they might don't have the skills to make it in the regular job market).
In the long run, I think this problem will go away because people working from abroad is becoming much more common: these consultancy jobs and other H1B jobs will see a lot of pressure to be outsourced.
I doubt FAAG base pay would be 95th percentile for level 4 Software engineer wage. A sizeable chunk of the compensation is in equity which doesn't count when benchmarking prevailing wage against employee pay.
If it doesn't count for prevailing wage, does it count for the evaluation of the compensation distribution in the first place (genuine question, I'd assume no for consistency of measurement but yes if e.g. W2-reported compensation is used as reference)?
You can doubt it all you want. I was also not claiming that fangs pay 95th percentile wages. I said that in my experience they pay h1bs pretty well (not that different from domestic entry level engineers).
So many folks here with a "its a good thing". The challenge that this rule also creates is that there are people in this country who have a spot in the green card line based on the US government approving their petition who have to provide their H1B worthiness every 3 years. Those people now get weeded out. That green card queue is country based. So a Norwegian person who wasnt qualified for the H1B under the new rules already has a green card, but an Indian person is now going to get locked out. This is discrimination based on country of origin, which should be illegal but unfortunately isnt for immigration law.
While I'm definitely for preventing companies from taking advantage of the system and foreign workers by underpaying them, there seems to be many obvious and clear negatives to this (some are highlighted from others)
- Restriction of qualifying degrees
- Contraction of months for contractors
- Retroactively forcing salary increases
- ... not explicitly stated, _more headache for doing H1B visas in the first place_
The H1B process is already heavily complicated and difficult and I've seen many strong candidates be denied because either the company they were applying to didn't find it worthwhile. Two personal friends had to leave the country after they had lived and worked here and found employment in other countries simply because it was such a headache.
Step 2 should be banning consulting / contracting services with an H1B workforce. If you're hiring an H1B it should be a full time employee for direct employment, not a pass through body shop. No clue how or if it'd be possible to enforce such a provision.
Here we go with the protectionism. If we had SWE unions they would be making sure that all foreigners were evicted. You can read this thread to find out.
That's my number one reason to oppose unions: they will be super protectionist. I derive that knowledge from the fact that lots of SWEs on forums like this are pro-union and simultaneously protectionist.
The "wages will rise because we harass foreign workers" camp fails to realize that other countries are either actively working hard to allow companies to set up shop in their country or actively attracting tech workers to boost their own labor pool to sustain a large number of tech companies.
All we are doing here is harassing people, businesses and shooting ourselves in the foot by shrinking our labor pool in exactly the industries where we need them to expand: tech, medicine and advanced sciences.
For those still not able to wrap their head around it, we are actively shipping away our ability to tend farms by restricting farm hands for short term benefits.
This story has played out before with factories. Soon, it will be tech and stem work.
"The only exception to this rule is for fashion models, who aren’t required to have college degrees." - I just can't stop laughing with how on-brand this is :)
> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile.
Looks like there's going to be a lot of new entry level guest workers as existing visa holders get shuffled around. It'll be interesting to see if the wage distribution stays lopsided once the situation stabilizes. If the program is fulfilling its intended goals, they should match their domestic coworkers in the same age brackets.
It's not gonna take a long time before, most of the tech jobs move to Canada/rest of world. Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in usa, if they can hire at same price much senior engineer in same time zone? After successful taste of work from home, things have changed a lot. Unfortunately, now USA have not much to offer (rising healthcare cost, continuous degradation/humiliation of non white immigrants, rising intolerance of society, high cost of education etc). Let's see how it works out!
In your scenario, American workers will eventually just accept lower pay (we're overpaid already anyways). Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in Canada, if they can hire at same price the same level engineer in the same city?
Look at the work force in other business sectors. What do you see? Do you see competition? I think tech world have changed quite a bit post Covid (I might be wrong),health care cost is rising(irrespective of where one lives in USA, ), college education cost. There is no competition. The general consensus in American civil society after Bernie's defeat is, there is no need to keep majority of Americans healthy and educated. Sorry.
Good point. Why hire an American at all, for anything, ever, if you can just hire someone for less money in China or India? According to economics, America can't even exist! Impressive.
IMHO, new layers of rubbish regulation on top of old layers of rubbish regulation. Would be better, I think, to throw the whole thing away and start over.
it's easy to say. But it suddenly causes more than a million people forced out of this country after following all the rules for decades. Think of human cost here.
I'm currently looking at moving to the US next summer and I can't believe how awkward the process is for me. My partner is starting a 2 year postdoc at Stanford and I can get a J2 visa to go with her, but then need to apply for a work visa which can take several months to process. I currently work remotely for UK-based companies earning around ~$100k including overtime/freelancing work yet I'll have to quit these roles rather than just take them with me. Because I don't have an undergrad degree I'm unable to get a normal work visa or have my employer relocate me.
I wish there was some globally accepted visa like what Barbados has recently rolled out where if you earn over a certain salary remotely you're allowed to move there for a finite time period as you'll be able to contribute more than if you were unemployed and waiting for a work visa for a few months.
If anyone has any advice on how they did something similar I'd really appreciate it (I'm from the UK).
You are allowed to work full-time with J-2 without a work visa. But you need to get an EAD ("employment authorization document"). Not sure about the recent processing times, but I usually received mine in ~50-60 days from sending the application.
Can somebody reconcile these points, they seem to be conflicting:
- they set the new threshold for acceptable wages at 95% of the distribution for that position
- they say that this will affect 1/3 of applicants
- they say that h1b workers are underpaid
Those can’t all be true at the same time can they? If 2/3 of applicants are in the upper 5%, they’d certainly be earning more and not depressing salaries.
The distribution is complex because visas are awarded by lottery. Many companies are treating the program as expected, and applying for a small number of high-skill high-wage specialists. Then there are a much smaller number of companies that flood the lottery with thousands and thousands of applications each year on the premise that their applicants are interchangeable and the more applications they submit the larger their share of the visas will be. Because most companies don’t have 100x as many qualified foreign applicants as roles to fill or places to put those people if they unexpectedly got a few more approvals than planned, they cannot avail themselves of this strategy. So H1B holders are a bimodal distribution of very high wage workers and below-average wage workers.
Found a cool link elsewhere in the thread. You can see the effect manifest pretty clearly. You see a lot of Cognizent, Tata, Infosys, etc and low salaries, but in CA the largest H1B employer is Google and in WA it’s Microsoft, and in those two states the average H1B wage is much higher.
I can see your point, but I think the effects of this regulation are misunderstood here. Prevailing wage is based on locality. H1Bs in California now have to be in the >95% bucket of prevailing wages for their county. Even FAANG engineers would have trouble reaching that threshold as it only takes base salary into account and not total comp.
I know most of tech community believe open USA. But I think that view is heavily biased because most tech guys in Silicon Valley is relatively rich and many of them are even foreigners. In order to understand the problem, I want to know opinion which support H1B visa restriction. Anyone who work for tech and support H1B visa restriction?
I'm an American who worked for a year in India and another few months for a large H1B "WITCH" company in the US. It was an interesting experience, but it took me about 2 weeks to understand how it was not about "best and brightest" but about US multinationals gaming the system to push down wages and use indentured servants.
If it were up to me, I'd set the limit at something like $250K tied to average home prices in the area where the H1B worked. If home prices go up, so must the minimum salary.
This would push wages up rapidly for medium IT and software jobs for Americans, including American blacks, hispanics, etc. who Corporate America pretends to care about while employing 80% Indians in their tech departments.
Google, Apple, and etc. could still pick the cream of the crop from around the world, while all the banks, IT staffing companies, and others making CRUD apps on AWS would be forced to hire and train Americans at higher wages which would push more smart students into the field and out of law, finance, etc.
Companies that play games like opening offices in India or Canada or wherever would eventually be caught by the local cities and states who need that tax revenue more than ever, so I don't fear a huge loss of talent and jobs overseas.
The problem with training Americans is that due to at will employment, they can leave as soon as they are trained and can get a better job. Whereas if you can find someone who already knows how to do this job, even if they leave in a 2 years, you get 2 years of work out of them.
Good point. You know what would be great for corporations? If we could just bring back slavery. Then we wouldn't have to worry about churn at all! Except when we work them to death. But life is all about tradeoffs.
Really, the only two viable options are either H1-B's or slavery. You can't honestly expect corporations to promote people in accordance with their skill, or increase people's wages in accordance with their skill, right? Next you're going to tell me they should compete with other employers for their employees! Hahaha just imagine that.
I'm not saying H1B should be the option. Just pointing out why corporations don't train employees. Even if they could, maybe the bigger ones can afford it but what happens to the 20-person startup that's trying to get by with Series A funding.
Well it seems as if all parties will be better off in the long term if this gets implemented correctly. It certainly would reduce many of the bad incentives in the immigration system.
I don't mind the salary part much (see below) -- it's such a hassle to bring someone in on an H-1 anyway (at least if you are scrupulous about following the rules) that that's not a big worry. I've only done it when we really couldn't find someone local.
The degree issue is short sighted though.
The salary issue will be a legitimate problem for some people though: I was on a school board for a private foreign-language school and we needed teachers fluent in their native language and familiar with the curriculum. It was already a nightmare for us when the H-1s would run out in October or December as teachers look for new jobs during the summer. Trying to meet 45% of the median for local senior, unionized teachers might be quite difficult. Still, it's a cost of doing business.
While I'm in favor of the move, wages are just a band-aid fix. The core of the problem is that the premise of the H1B visa itself – extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US – is complete bullshit. Everyone participating in the program (including the government) knows this, and yet they have to do the entire song and dance of years long approval processes, fake job listings, RFEs and whatnot.
Fix the real problem, and salaries will take care of themselves.
Another problem with simply raising the salary bar is that there are actually professions (especially in healthcare) that genuinely have a talent/supply gap. A small hospital in the midwest, however, isn't going to be able to compete with a hotshot SF startup with unlimited venture funding to throw at foreign hires.
Most companies I see using H1-Bs are startups looking for people to get technical work done as cheaply as possible. These are the same people who give employees 0.1% of a series A company and whine about how there's a "skill shortage".
When in truth, there is no "shortage" -- it's just that software engineering is one of the only (somewhat) high-end careers subject to absolutely no credentialing whatsoever, meaning, if you can get someone here (to the US) and they can do the work, great, they're hired.
Contrast this to the absurd coddling present in other professions. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, etc. have massive barriers keeping people out, competition down, and in the end, prices of their services up.
It blows my mind what middling lawyers can charge: $300/hr or more for mediocre law work for my California HOA. These people have zero side projects, don't study a minute out of work, and work strict 8-hour days, with the expectation of earning $250k/yr or more mid-career. This is what the cream of the crop in our field earns (Google SWEs making 350k or so). The cream of the crop for layers make millions/year at places like Cravath or Orrick billing $1000/hr or more. Even my wife, an architect, is now billing out at $250/hr.
It blows my mind how underpaid software developers are, given how difficult the work, and the working conditions are, compared to other similarly demanding fields in terms of professional education, and raw intellectual horsepower required to do the job. A typical H1-B can be productive a few months after a good software education anywhere in the world, assuming they speak passable English. My best friend's sister-in-law, an Indian dentist, had to retake the last year of dental school before she could touch a single tooth in the US.
The biggest winners from the H1-B regime are high-skilled professionals in the US. Low-end labor doesn't care about any of this. They work for cash, and still pay sales and property tax (through rent) just like the rest of us, and all for absolutely zero government benefits.
As someone who worked in Architecture first, you’re way wrong about at least that profession. SWEs make a LOT more than Architects. My first job as an entry level SWE was 2x more than I ever made as an architect.
Really? What if you need a bunch of translation/localization work done. America has a shortage of people who are bilingually fluent and have the engineering skill, in many of the needed cultures and languages.
Do you think companies are going to go to war bidding up salaries for a tiny number of qualified American candidates who can do this work, or are they going to outsource to overseas firms that can do the work?
So then the question is, do you want this work being done here, in America, paying taxes here, or do you want some consulting company in Asia or Eastern Europe to get the money?
It's not "extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US" though, it's for skills for which there is a shortage in your market, similar to the subclass 189 visa here in Australia.
When you say "extraordinary skill" you are probably thinking about the O-1 visa (which is similar to the Australian subclass 124).
The H1-B program prevents the tech industry from developing its own domestic supply of skilled engineers by shutting out domestic applicants for entry level positions. Remove H1-B's from the equation and the labor market will move back to equilibrium.
What are you paying and do you post that information on your job description? I am a software engineer with 5 years of experience in Chicago IL and am open to new opportunities. What would you offer me?
This is a good move, I think. If anything, it'll force employers to give higher pay to immigrants, where they typically offer as low as they could go. It'll also give employers a bit of incentive to hire locally, I think.
But, who knows. It could just all blow up in our faces too.
Announced, not implemented. It won't take effect any sooner than 60 days from now.
Much the same thing was previously announced back in June. And something similar was announced back in April.[1] Besides, there are still L-1 visas, for foreign companies who have employees working in the US.
> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile.
If you've got an undergraduate degree in CS looking for work as a SWE does that mean you'll need to get paid at p95? Won't this isolate all employment opportunities to places like the Bay Area at companies that pay a high base-salary (no equity counted)?
I do have a few thoughts on this issue but chief among them is: does this really matter when the election is around the corner and so much instability is in plain sight?
I'm not sure I care about a specific policy change driven by this administration when so much about everything may change in the next few months, one way or another.
What I am sure is I sure do have my plan B if things don't go my way, and I hope other people have one too if they can afford to.
>"Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work"
For software development positions I suspect it is the dumbest requirement ever. When I used to be employed by company we've hired and brought over many people from former USSR republics. Some of the best programmers ever and not a single one had specific programming education. All were graduates of various universities.
Why are the Indian consultancy stocks up today? Are they effectively a cost plus business model, and as the costs increase, so do their profits? Have they transitioned to a US based workforce? Do they expect that their existing H1B employees will remain unchanged, and provide them with a long term advantage as other growing competitors can no longer access the cheap labor? Are they expecting this legislation to be overruled by judges?
Some work that was done in the US by directly hiring H1B employees will now be done remotely, in India, via a subcontracting relationship.
If I'm hiring an Indian, I can reasonably sponsor an H1B. I can't reasonably set up a branch in India to hire Indians and maintain compliance with Indian laws. That's a project out-of-scope for all but the largest tech organizations.
It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1].
For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 1M. This means Canada brings in ~5X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. [2]
[edit] This rate has been consistent since 1992.
[edit] I originally stated the US brings in 140,000 immigrants per year, this was a mistake, my cursory search led me to the cap on employment based green cards, not total. Factoring in family members of US citizens, it's ~1M. By Immigrants I include green cards per year, as everyone else is by definition a non-immigrant. It is my understanding the Canadian number is the same category.
Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation. As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
The US has set a target cap of 18,000 refugees next year [1] vs Canada's now world-leading (per capita) 28-33,000 [2]
You are correct that I was off re: 140,000 (that's the quota for employment based green cards), the number is ~1M total and I have edited my post to reflect. This is based on the total number of green cards available, as they are the only "immigrant" visa. Every other class is considered to be non-immigrants -- temporary workers, or visitors.
However, the fact 20% of the world's immigrants reside in America doesn't mean nearly as much on a per capita basis.
I'm not sure you're using the term 'per capita' in the way it's intended or normally understood. If Canada allowed 28-33000 refugees per capita, that would effectively mean every person in the world could move to Canada.
My multipliers were per capita. Canada brings in 2X the US refugee count per year in absolute numbers, but is 1/10th the size, so ~20X per capita migration rate of refugees. Napkin numbers of course.
My parenthetical section indicated that Canada's numbers are world-leading per capita, not in absolute numbers.
> However, the fact 20% of the world's immigrants reside in America doesn't mean nearly as much on a per capita basis.
What? We have 5% of the world's population and 20% of its immigrants, 4 times second place, but that's not enough for you? Wild moving of the goalposts.
I have not moved the goalposts. I never mentioned the total number of immigrants already in the country. That number is pretty close to 98.4% of course, since the number of First Nations or Native Americans is 5 million. Everything in my post is focused on the rate of new immigrants per year.
The UN classifies a migrant as a person that has moved across an international border [1]. If you are born and live in America, you are not a migrant by definition. So I am not sure where you are getting your 98.4% number.
While immigration policies can always be improved, your initial statement was that America is "anti-immigrant." This is hard to reconcile with the actual immigration numbers.
From the UN [2]: "The United States of America has been the main country of destination for international migrants since
1970.15 Since then, the number of foreign-born people residing in the country has more than quadrupled –
from less than 12 million in 1970, to close to 51 million in 2019."
We can debate whether the number should be increased or decreased. But it is unfair to classify a country as "anti-immigrant" when it is leading the world in immigration. Even on a per-capita basis, America is way up there (look at the map on page 23 [2])
> Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation.
That's fine by me. For the vast majority of startups, the equity compensation should be considered worthless anyways.
> As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The average American doesn't work in a job for which an H-1B would even be permitted, so I'm not sure what this point means? I'd expect everyone in an H-1B position to be making more than the average American.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
It's expensive, yes, but it's still a very small amount compared to their overall compensation and benefits. If your entire staff is on visas maybe you'd have a bad time, sure, but otherwise it's usually a drop in the bucket.
The real joke is that H-1B is still a lottery, and in the time it takes people to get theirs, they might reconsider living somewhere else, like Canada.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
Actually, "more than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000)."
Those are non-immigrants, guest workers or temporary workers. Immigrants are defined, in US law, a green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards to be issued at 366,000 (140,000 for employment based green cards) per year. [edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens.
This is incorrect. A green card holder is a “permanent resident”. But that’s not where the line is for being considered an “immigrant”. Someone on an H1B without a green card is still an immigrant. As are temporary workers (for example on an agricultural visa).
"The term is often used generally to refer to aliens residing in the United States, but its specific legal meaning is any legal alien in the United States other than those in the specified class of nonimmigrant aliens such as temporary visitors for pleasure or students. Immigrant is also used synonymously with lawful permanent resident."
As this article was about US immigration, I was using the US immigration definition of an immigrant, which is roughly speaking, a green card holder.
H-1Bs are considered non-immigrant visitors, although it is a dual-intent class meaning they are allowed to possess immigrant intent for immigration purposes.
FWIW I am an immigrant myself (in Australia) and I am in favour of strict regulation. Skilled migration schemes should bring in skilled people, I've seen many people migrating on a skilled visa only to end up making a living as taxi drivers.
Some people ending up as taxi drivers actually have skills; their skilled visa isn't based on lies. They are just not able to continue in their field in the new country for whatever reason. Their accreditation is not recognized, or they don't interview well or whatever. Meanwhile, there are bills to pay and food to put on the table.
If so, then maybe they shouldn't have been issued "skilled worker" visa in the first place. Part of the visa process should be verification that a person really has the credentials to work in the profession they declare on their application.
Of course there also could be a process to get that accreditation without coming to the country. Something like bar exams for lawyers could be held in US embassies around the world, or online.
Of course, I didn't mean to deny that, actually I was out of my field for some time at one point, and I was working as a waiter to just to pay the bills. On the other hand, I've seen people on skilled visa who never actually worked a day in their nominated occupation.
My previous comment is more related to the fact that some migrants that follow the rules, may suffer from the fact that other migrants don't - for example at first my wife could not join me in Australia, because she comes from a country which had a high number of irregular applications in the past and for this reason that country is now considered "higher risk".
For this reason, many migrants are actually in favour of stricter regulations.
This fact is often not evident if you're not a migrant yourself, that's why I wanted to bring it up.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
The US had 1.8 million new immigrants (legal and otherwise) in 2016 and ~13% of the population is foreign born. Canada exceeds that (~21%) but nothing like the 20X rate you're claiming.
~1.2 million green cards were issued in 2016, with the rest of the 1.8 million immigrants being undocumented. I'm not sure what data you're looking at?
And also, 2017 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Table 6, “Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status by Type and Major Class of Admission,” Department of Homeland Security.
There's the problem, you're comparing the overall immigration numbers for Canada to just the capped employment portion for the US. In addition, Canada isn't as accepting of illegal immigration (estimates of 35-120k in total there now), while the US adds 600k+ yearly.
> Immediate family of U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens can sponsor their spouses, unmarried children under age 21, and parents for a green card. This category does not have annual numerical limits.
> Family-sponsored preference visas. There are 226,000 green cards reserved each year for other categories of relatives. U.S. citizens can sponsor adult children and siblings, while green-card holders can sponsor their spouses and unmarried minor or adult children.
> The Employment Route. There are 140,000 green cards available each year for immigrants in five employment-based categories (formally known as “preferences”).
The Canadian numbers are number of new permanent residents, so the equivalent of new green card holders in the US, in all classes.
The US number is also the number of new permanent residents, however if my mistake was in fact that I excluded immediate family of citizens, then the number is 5X, not 10X. However, still, dramatic. I'll have to dig in more to make sure that's what I did.
[edit] Thanks for your help in figuring out my mistake!
>The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
You might not be, but there are certainly companies where H-1Bs are their bread and butter[1]. Taking Cognizant as an example:
* their wikipedia page says "The company has 281,200[2] employees globally, of which over 150,000 are in India", which means there are at most 131,200 US employees
* in the year 2017 they brought in 28,908 H-1B workers. This works out to 22% of the US workforce. If we include 2016 as well that works out to 38% of the US workforce.
* the figures above are conservative estimates. We probably overestimated their US workforce and underestimated their H-1B population (we've only looked at 2 years of visas, but H1-B visas are good for up to 6 years).
Startups in the 1980s had the same challenge because the H1B minimum salary was a really good salary then, average salaries just rose, lets do that part again.
Immigration quotas have remained constant at about 1% of the population per year since 1992.
Low wages in software compared to the US for sure, but that's in part because Canada has very low income and wealth inequality compared to the US. Most people make a living wage, and there's not a huge spread.
The US ranks near the bottom of the world in income inequality [1]. Canada's GINI coefficient was 33.8 in 2018 vs the US of 43.4. This puts America at 51st in the world (lower being worse) vs Canada's 107th.
The issues of income inequality, most people making a living wage are non-sequiturs to the argument that says if you have an ample supply of cheap labour, the wage goes down.
I guess the argument I was making is that you can't at the same time have "low income inequality" and a short supply of a particular skillset which drives them to receive disproportionate compensation. To the extent that software engineers aren't paid drastically more or drastically less than people in comparably skilled professions, I would argue that's the system working. Not everyone would agree with that to be sure.
I think you'll find the "low" wages in software here are lowish in comparison to wages in the Bay Area but are comparable to other professional salaries.
But also, the cost of living in the GTA has gotten completely out of control so that's part of it.
My wife and I bought a house in a "bad" neighbourhood of Toronto back in 2005. It was $280,000 CAD and that was the cheapest we could find in the GTA for a 3 bedroom detached home still on decent public transit.
At the time both of us were both employed in tech, and we still had to struggle a bit to scrape together a down payment. We didn't perceive $280,000 as a trivial or cheap amount. And even back then we wondered how families that didn't have our (pretty decent) income level could possibly be buying homes.
That same home would be now be worth over a million. I just can't grasp how that's conceivable at all. I make really good money as a Google employee, but I'd still find it frustrating to scrape together money for that. I don't understand how my kids will ever own a home.
So I think it's less that people are under-compensated in our industry as much as costs of living have just become stupid due to housing price inflation.
EDIT: wife went to go check the mailbox and it was stuffed full of real estate flyers only, including one from an agent who will give you a free lottery ticket if you come to his open house. I smell doom on the horizon, but I've been saying that for a decade, so don't listen to me.
Mind sharing some numbers? This is a patently false statement. Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.
But gross wages are also lower here. If anything almost everyone I've came across here in Canada talks about their salary using the gross amount. So not only are wages employers advertise pretty low already, they are usually pretax too.
Unless there's something more that is taken from wages that isn't shown on paychecks. Which would be weird considering that paycheck stubs usually have a full breakdown of where your money went and how much taxes were taken.
>Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.
Not really. They (and most other developed countries) simply pay less of their GDP towards healthcare.
I'm not implying that Canada (or other developed countries) are cheaping out on healthcare. I'm only pointing out that your initial claim (that the differences in pay can be accounted for because of the various taxes paid) isn't true, or at least isn't telling the whole story.
For Software Engineering pretty much all jobs will have great health coverage included, on top of a higher salary. So when you add the value of the coverage, the wages looks ever lower in comparison.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000.
I don't know what definition of "brings in" you are using, but around 1.1 million people obtain permanent legal resident status per year in the US. By this metric your Canada numbers are about right (a bit low, around 340,000 in 2019).
Perhaps you're looking at purely comparing Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program with just H-1Bs? If so those numbers are still a bit off -- there were around 190,000 H-1Bs issued in 2019 -- but also that's only a small sliver of all temporary foreign work visas issued in the US (there are again over a million per year).
Canada does admit many more immigrants per capita and generally has a much better immigration system but the numerical difference is not quite as huge as you say.
I believe the cap on the number of green cards issued per year is 366,000 -- 140,000 of which are employment based. [1] Is mistook the latter for the former and have updated my post to reflect.
[edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens. Updated.
Similarly Canada's 300,000-ish per year number is also the number of new permanent residents admitted per year. [2]
My goal was to track immigration, i.e. becoming permanent residents, not temporary migrant workers, including those under H-1B.
Where are you getting the 140k new immigrants each year number from? Wikipedia says: "According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016"
And refugees are only one type of immigrant. Should illegal immigrants count as refugees, since many frequently claim to be fleeing violence, even if they don't get officially declared as a refugee by the US? If so, that means the US admits closer to 500,000 refugees per year.
Do you have a reference? The numbers I'm familiar with have the US adding over a million new permanent residents each year (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra...). (Good numbers for "immigration" are hard to find because programs such as H1B aren't legally considered immigration.)
First of all, I'm pretty sure the US accepts way, way more immigrants than that. Also, how is it anti immigration to ask employers to pay H1Bs a competitive wage? Yes the process is expensive, but so what?
If you really needed H1Bs, you'd be willing to foot the bill. The program shouldn't be used to get access to cheap labor & it shouldn't be used to save money.
I am all for immigration, but not at the expense of suppressing wages for anyone. That money that was suppressed (indirectly) goes to the pockets of the C suite and contributes to income equality. What is wrong in addressing one of the reasons contributing to income equality?
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 366,000. This means Canada brings in ~10X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
I love Canada, would move there in a heartbeat, but the he IT salaries in Canada are pitiful compared to the US. Maybe one of the reasons?
Refugees != immigrants. The US admits over 1M immigrants per year. [1] We have the largest immigrant population of any nation in the world and it isn't even close (our immigrant population is larger than the total population of most countries) at over 50 million immigrants (current population not born in the US). [2]
The rest of your comment is incorrect because of this misunderstanding, so I'll give you a break. And I'll also give you a break for accepting current Trump policies as standard American policies.
> The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
> More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year.
What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
The US has changed since the 19th century, when we needed endless amounts of unskilled labor. Things are much different today, and the H1-B Visa has been abused for decades.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
Good. It sounds like it's somewhat serving it's purpose. Hopefully these changes will improve it more.
> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
Well, "generous" is a big word. There's not much handed to you when you move to the US, you'll have to work hard for your money, like everyone else. If you want to know what generous looks like, try talking with an immigrant in Europe.
Immigrants are defined in US law as lawful permanent residents, i.e. green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards issued at 366,000 per year. Therefore, the number of new immigrants to the US each year is 366,000. The 140,000 number I initially used incorrectly was the number of employment based green cards as compared to family based. I've updated the math. [edit] It's 1M once you factor in family of citizens.
Everyone else is a non-immigrant visitor, and not relevant to my numbers.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.
> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
Canada brings in 25X per capita the number of refugees and 10X per capita the number of new lawful permanent resident.
I likely excluded the number of US citizen direct family members, which means Canada brings in 5X per capita not 10X - or even the 20X from before. That's still a startlingly large delta.
> Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.
Well then why are you replying to me?
> You are the one who is mistaken.
I'm wrong about lots of things, and my goal is always to get it right, and I've edited my responses for clarity, with a statement of why. However, the fact remains, 25X more refugees per capita and 5X more immigrants per capita is a lot.
Thank you for your help in figuring out where the delta was! I didn't mean to come off smug though, I saw other folks had varying definitions of what an "immigrant" was.
> there is a reason you can press 2 for Spanish on nearly every single companies help line
1. If you're trying to imply that the majority of people who speak spanish in the US are illegal immigrants from Mexico, I suspect that you're highly wrong on that.
2. I'm sure there are many people on tourist visa's who over stay. I'm sure there are many less people who came over on H1B's who overstay. H1B has a path forward (no matter how bad that path is), which allows you to still work at your career. You can't group every type of visa together to make broad claims like that.
As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow and steady pace of quality over quantity before liberals came into power.
It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1]
The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure.
>The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over.
In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration
>> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
>This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
If you look at the chart, you'll see there is a substantial global negative correlation between income and fertility. High income countries have low fertility. Everywhere.
The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
Applying pressure through substantial incentives is probably the better way of expressing it. I guess incentivizing someone enough is the same as forcing them but I digress. Why substantially incentivize locals to have children, when there's strong worldwide negative correlation between income/development and child birth? Why are local children inherently better than immigrants? To the extent that the society functions well and immigrants integrate into the broader country, what difference does it make?
I would further argue that "bringing in immigrants" isn't the "easy way out" or even likely the "cheap way out" but rather probably more challenging. Creating a society that deals well with the gaijin isn't easy.
I see no evidence that free daycare or longer parental leave actually incentivize adults to have children. The birth rate in Finland is 1.49 and falling rapidly, Sweden and Norway are 1.8ish. Iceland is 1.75. Germany is 1.57. Spain is 1.34. These places have incredibly generous programs and are well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Finland's mat leave is 4.2 months and pat leave is 2.2 months and offers public daycare centers. If that's not long enough or free enough to boost their brith rate over 1.49 I'm not sure what you'd suggest.
Yes, mat/pat leave is great, and should exist. So should free daycare. However, I don't see any evidence that'll move the needle. If anything, it appears that pushes the birth rate further down being correlated broadly with increased development.
eh... sounds typical right wing comment. Japan has low immigration rates, yet they are not having any more babies. So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants), Italy (lax about immigration), or even Albania (has outflow of people).
It is a world wide issue in all western countries, and it is independent of net 'in or out' immigration. The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
Even if you stopped immigration, people would not be making more babies, as countries that don't have net immigration still don't make more babies. Baby making seems independent with net immigration rates.
>So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants)
Hungary incentivizes its native population to have larger families, a policy of Victor Orban's, and has seen consistent growth in its fertility rate since ~2010. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the way it should be tackled.
> The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
America and the UK's birth rates nose-dived in the mid-60's and hasn't recovered since. I'm failing to draw a connection to these countries being drastically more developed by the end of the 60s than they were at the start of them.
Right, in the long term it would be beneficial, but the infrastructure takes time to build up. Most immigrants understandably crowd in either Vancouver, Toronto or a couple of other big cities because that's where the opportunities are. Not sure where you live, but the food and rent have gone up dramatically in these cities. Forget about being able to afford buying a house or an apartment even if you've been responsibly saving up. The commute before covid was killer. I don't understand this off-hand dismissal of concerns because I don't have citations.
Immigration to Canada has stayed very consistent over the last 20 years, check the wiki article [1] for details. It's not political (well, the rhetoric is political. The actual policies and statistics are not.)
There's a lot to be said for a slow steady pace. Society's relationship with politics tends to be oscillatory. If you push too hard in one direction (liberal or conservative), things swing back the other way and you end up with two steps forward, one step back and a loss of power for your team.
A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage.
The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.
If you're expecting HN, in all its "rational glory", to be anything but extremely pro-migration to the West when most of the users' are likely either 1st or 2nd generation migrants to the West themselves, then you're very naive.
It's about _carrying capacity_, not "infrastructure". We can only absorb people at some maximum rate and still have a chance of bringing them on board with hard-fought Canadian cultural values, getting them up to speed with our official languages, and integrating them into local communities. Past that rate, the tendency is for newcomers to seek out people who are from their home country and speak their language. This creates insular bubbles of culture and damages any effort to actually create a cohesive whole.
Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.
Well, there are certainly areas of Vancouver and Toronto and their outlying suburbs that are on the verge of this; but it's more of an issue with recognizing the potential issues by looking at other countries that are further down the demographic path than Canada is. Or do you think it's necessary to have a problem in order to understand it?
Thank you for explaining it so well. Like I said I am not against immigration as I myself am one. I would just like our government to be mindful about the challenges it poses as well and adjust the rate based on how much we are able to take in at any given point without stressing out the system and making life worse for people already here.
> This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
> This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
You assert this as though it's just automatically a good thing with no actual analysis as to the impact on Canadians. What happens to the cultural cohesion, wages, and living standards of Canadians when immigration is at such a rapid pace? Is this not a factor? Or is the sheer availability of cheap, undercutting labour just a natural capitalist good that we should accept regardless of the hard to measure, intangible impacts?
The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
The standard of living in Canada is just as high as the US. Canada's Human Development Index is .922, 13th globally. The US HDI is .920, so a hair lower. 45% of the Canadian population lives in 6 of the 35 most livable cities in the world.
"Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.
> "Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.
Again, asserted, no evidence, no argument. Social cohesion is absolutely an issue. We feel it when we have no community organizations, don't know our neighbours, and have nothing gluing us to where we live. The famous Putnam study on social capital is a fine piece of evidence here.
I believe we can surmount Putnam's identified problems, but only if we have a rate of influx that is sustainable. That means each newcomer has a chance to get proper language training, recertification, and actually integrate into a local community, which I'll somewhat arbitrarily define as having made some real friends out of the group of local or fully-assimilated people. This is the core requirement of being able to fully participate in social life.
> The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
Putnam's study cover the US not Canada, if I'm not mistaken. Do you have any evidence that the rate of immigration is "too high" to sustain social cohesion in Canada? I would suggest that as you're the one that introduced it the burden of proof is on you.
> Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
The immigration rate of 1% per year has been the same since 1992 and I see no evidence of inequality increasing in conjunction with immigration. Do you have evidence? And once again, dramatically increasing wages by cutting off immigration increases income inequality. The GINI has remained a consistent .33 from the late 1990s through the present day, in spite of 1% per annum immigration.
You're going to need to back your case if you want to sway my mind.
Canada is selective about immigrants (they have a points system), so all the things you call out are accounted for in their model - they bring in those their country needs. And from what I see from down south, they benefit a lot from it.
With housing prices in Canada now it’s terrible to be young. As a landlord it is working great for me when I can get $2000 a month for an apartment in Hamilton.
Demand for housing in Canada has in part been driven by foreign non-residents real estate speculators who are looking to park their money in Canada, and other places. New Zealand banned all non-resident foreigners from buying property there [1,2].
I would assume that if a population remains stable as a result of migration, that as many people are leaving houses as entering them, and there shouldn't be substantial pressure on housing prices. I don't have specific data for this.
Yes, this is correct, and is largely responsible for how Canada has been able to do so well despite high numbers. However, there is no guarantee of that program continuing perpetually, considering the criticism of such ideas pouring out of the USA.
(Though we'd have to be really mad to replace it with a lottery...)
I feel like rather than pitting immigrants against native born workers, and trying to come up with the perfect arcane rule, we should have sectoral bargaining where the workers could negotiate pay standards directly with their employers. Then it wouldn't matter where someone is from, because they'd be covered by that contract, and the government could get out of the way of the labor market.
What is this even supposed to mean? We already have bargaining between workers and employees. When you have a larger labor pool, market forces will obviously shift the market towards lower wages in the absence of government intervention.
People who oppose H1B oppose it because they think that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the labor pool thereby depressing the wages.
I'm referring to sectoral bargaining where workers negotiate sector wide for things like wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining. I was thinking of how Nordic countries don't have minimum wages because the unions prefer to negotiate directly with the employers.
The bargaining you refer to is between an individual employee and an employer, where the employer obviously has drastically more power, particularly in the case of immigrants on visas. Even having a single-company union would be beneficial, but the problematic companies here would just be non-union shops.
The point of sectoral bargaining is exactly what the H1B system is trying to accomplish, where you establish wage guidelines for the whole sector to prevent companies from undercutting wages with immigration. Except that because the government has to make this one-size-fits-all rule, and doesn't understand the specific needs of each sector, it's hard to come up with the right rule. Under sectoral bargaining, each sector could determine its own needs and goals, and because companies and employees each have representatives, the end result is fairer for all.
Pretty sure that comment was in reference to syndicalism - a theory of government where worker-controlled unions would have leverage over laws that relate to their domain... But that hasn't been a relevant system of anything since Revolutionary Catalonia was a thing in the 1930s.
(disclaimer, I actually love syndicalism as a concept. In an ideal world, syndicalism could ensure that naive and bought-out politicians wouldn't be able to arbitrarily outlaw encryption - because laws which relate to technology would be in the domain of people who actually work on technology. But like so many systems that sound nice in an ideal world - getting there and making it non-corrupt would be no minor feat).
_Stop trying to make syndicalism happen! It's not going to happen._
But seriously, I love the theories behind systems like that, but practically it's not something like that will hold in the US any time soon. Unions are still a hard sell to most folks. And that's exactly what you need to make that happen.
Semi-related: the effects that cheap H1Bs and H1B subcontractors might have on unionization efforts sounds like a fascinating topic.
Secondly, there is no law that currently prevents moving the H1b labor pool to a offshore heaven like India or Philippines or whatever! so what if this actually increases the bottomline of major h1b users?
Finally , what exactly is the 45th percentile salary? this is a vital question because the base h1b salary is $65k?! would that be increased to $100k? how many delta jobs that are we talking about? or all is this for the elections?
Across the US, about 20% of the spots to get a computer science degree are occupied by foreign nationals. The research at these universities is funded by US research grants. If there's a need to create more skilled tech workers, it might make sense to tie federal search funding to changing these numbers until the need for H-1B visas falls below a threshold value.
Right now, the US taxpayer is funding the education of skilled foreign workers to take jobs from US citizens. That's messed up.
Typically a university will take 50-90% (Yes, up to 90%) of a research grant to fund the university (keeping the lights on, etc). And universities are the ones making the decision to fill available slots in CS departments with foreign nationals.
Tuition and university funding are almost directly connected. They are doing so because 50-90% of those research grants is not enough to keep the lights on and professors employed. A lot of universities (barring the most well endowed ones like Harvard, Yale and Princeton) admit international students to help fund the university and either increase the spots for local students or subsidize their school fees.
Tuition is a drop in the bucket of the funding model for a research university. The majority of university funding comes from research grants and that's why the piece they take off the top is so outrageously high.
Note that I don't question your point about the use of international student fees to subsidize domestic students. I'm just saying reducing the cost for students can be done many, many other ways.
The point I'm making is that the US tax paper should not pay for foreign students to take US jobs. And if we tightened up that we might not need so many H-1B visas.
First, thanks for the awesome tip about 990 forms. Had no idea. It's interesting in that these numbers differ from the conversations I've had with academics who tell a different story. But I had those conversations decades ago, so perhaps the inflation of higher education has had an impact here.
The number you cite is inflated because in includes both US and international students. Is the revenue from international students broken out anywhere?
But that doesn't change my point. If the number is >0, it's a problem. The US tax payer should not pay for foreign workers to take US jobs.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to international students. I'm just saying that when it comes to impacted majors like computer science, where not everyone who wants to study it can do to capacity constraints, the US government should incentive universities to offer the opportunities first to citizens and then to international students. Right now, for some universities, those slots are reserved for international students.
This is welcoming move for both sides,qualified individuals will get well paying h1b jobs and Americans will get more home job opportunities which were previously abused by h1b sponsoring companies.
I wouldn't mind this being done in the netherlands. We only have a skills requirement now. One thing to compete against hungarians or polish. They are europeans used to a certain quality of life. We are also allowed to work there. Usually they return after a while because they like their countries better even if salaries are slightly lower. Quite another to compete against a Bangladeshi who is used to getting paid poverty wages back home. They'd code for minimum wage no problem.
Is it only me, or does this sound pretty empty? Except for narrowing of the `specialty occupation` moniker, all the rest seem like things that are already part of the H1-B program?
I'm not anti-immigrant in any way, but I'm wondering if things like H1-B have just run their course. Why would I pay to essentially import a worker to the US instead of just hiring staff in another country? Currently, my teammates could be 5 blocks away or on another continent and it makes no difference.
In my mind, the benefits of the program have been mostly met. We've helped other countries increase their IT capability. Of course the offshoring of work will only increase with this change. Companies had been bringing work _back_ to the U.S. and now they will be moving it once again to offshore locations. It's not going to do what the administration thinks it will do...unless they started some nonsensical regulatory penalty against offshoring.
I think you’re missing something essential. There are only a limited number of H1B visas awarded each year, and they are awarded by lottery. Far, far more applications are submitted than slots are available, and most applications are rejected. After this change the number of H1B visas awarded isn’t likely to go down.
The new rules will work through the end of the year and the entire program is shut down (no new visas). My guess is that corporate America will hold its breath until the election. A Biden administration is likely to be much more H1-B friendly. But if Trump were to win, corporate America would turn to virtual offshore talent moreso than it has in the past. Labor cost is labor cost. If the rules make it expensive here, talent acquisition will happen where it is less costly.
I think you’re still missing the point. “H1B friendly” or no, the same number of H1B visas are going to be awarded. The application pool is massively oversaturated. A bunch of large and high-paying companies have been lobbying for this change because it will increase the odds that they can bring in their own hires at the expense of hires by low-wage companies. This is going to shift the distribution of H1B workers from a mix of high and low wages to just high wages, but it’s a 1:1 replacement of low-wage workers with high-wage workers. Each slot that might have once gone to an Infosys employee who is now going to be offshored is going to be snapped up by Apple or Google or Microsoft to bring to the US a star foreign employee who is currently stuck working out of an office in their native country or in Canada or another company with more open immigration policy.
I haven’t read all the comments, but does anyone have a good explanation for why software engineers in the US (especially in the Bay Area, seattle and New York) make so much more than anywhere else in the world?
Even looking at relatively high cost of living / high services places like Northern Europe it is hard to make the comp work out. E.G. levels.FYI says an E5 at Facebook in London averages lower pay than an E4 in the US.
Most people don't realize this is just going to lead to a massive amount of outsourcing to India. At least before, the H1B guys were spending their money in the US.
this is do dumb. People will just leave to Canada/Mexico and pay taxes there and continue to be employed at their current workplace remotely (if this is IT). So jobs will continue to be offshored, this will even accelerate offshorization of high-paid IT jobs.
While number of nurses will decrease and healthcare system will suffer in form of poorer service/higher healthcare costs.
Trump has good intentions, but his policies do more harm to Americans, than the benefit they make.
There are only 85K h-1b visas awarded annually (with advanced degree and work experience required and stuff), while family reunification visas account for tens of millions of green cards.
Trump has no idea how to create legislation that works, this is purely populist move targeted at uneducated voter base to get cheap points before the election.
Don't fall for this cheap populist move, Donald ia just being desperate to score any cheap points from swing states, given Biden's increasing lead
H1B visas have always been about suppressing the wages of tech workers. America can be competitive on the world stage and pay a market rate. It's not true that these workers have skills that are not available domestically. Make the H1B salaries the same as the senior tech employees you're trying to displace and the calculations on firing all your senior employees goes out the window. This ultimately will be good for the foreign workers, as they will be compensated equally. This is equitable and just. anything else is modern day indentured servitude.
You do understand that if there is a way to pay half the money for the same work, every single one of the company would have done so right?
The only reason that isn't happening right now is because the top talent largely congregated to the USA, utilizing those visas, making finding talent in other markets harder as you usually just can't find the same level of talent out there.
That is going to change, especially when COVID eliminated a huge part of inconvenience - everybody is at home anyways, the person on the other side can be 20 miles away or 8000 miles away, it doesn't matter all that much.
Talking about abusing H1B, India took 70% of the H1Bs alone, China, which has larger population, takes less than 10%. For these top 2 consumers, India H1Bs are mostly from India, Chinese H1Bs are mostly graduated in USA directly.
The S380 senate bill was trying to get unanimous consent(UC) in senate to give amnesty to India visa holders so they can get greencards without waiting for too long, if that passed, all other countries will have no greencard quotes for at least one decade.
We can not reward those who gamed the system, meanwhile, H1B does need to be reformed.
Immigration is a tricky one, regardless of country. Me: UKoGB and an employer: I'm keen on it.
My firm only grades pay on function and time served. We also grant shares based on time served.
I have an employee who lives in Poland and is Polish. He used to live here in the UK. We came to an agreement when he wanted to go home, have a child, get married and get Britain out of his system! His granddad flew and broke several Hurricanes on behalf of the RAF a few years back. Granddad survived quite a few scrapes.
I see a lot asking for the specific salary numbers but no answers. I believe (could be wrong) that the required wage increase for old->proposed new H1B requirements changes would be close to the below examples:
1)Software Developer in Chicago - Old $71k->New $105k
2)Software Developer in San Francisco - Old $96k->New $145k
My Opinion:
1.
Free trade is generally good. That includes things, people and ideas. But the effects of immigration policies are very uneven throughout society.
Imagine if the US had 200 qualified TV meteorologists. If the US opens its borders to unlimited TV meteorologists from the developing country of Meteoroligistan, what would the effects be? It's pretty clear that the news networks would be able to hire cheaper meteorologists. Because the meteorologists are cheaper, the news networks would also hire more of them. TV viewers would then get better, more frequent weather forecasts. The networks and the consumers win! But conventional wisdom says that the original 200 qualified meteorologists here lose.
But I kind of think conventional wisdom may be wrong. I'm not sure there aren't significant second order effects. With so many meteorologists, maybe the US becomes the world's capital of TV weather people. Maybe because of that, new weather companies are formed and new opportunities arise for those original 200. This really seems to be what has happened in the technology industry.
2.
It seems completely dumb bring in some of the most talented students from abroad, train them at our universities and then send them home. H1B is primarily how these students stay in the country. Without H1B most of these bright students will go elsewhere after graduation.
3.
And for the humanity of the H1B program. I'm mixed...
The worst parts about being in the H1B program: uncertainty, stamping process, delays, the constant fear of losing a job and being kicked out within weeks - serve no benefit at all for any side.
But to my most controversial thought which I have no data to support. I see many H1B workers who feel entitled to so much from the US without feeling any sense of gratefulness back to the US. Unlike many of our Grandparents who immigrated here and who seemed to feel grateful for their new country - I get the feeling many H1B workers+current immigrants are here just because it's a good place to make some cash. They don't take the time to appreciate what this country is and what it has given them. Maybe that's fair given that the H1B program also seems to view them as temporary labor.
To the H1B holders who have been here for years, had children here, bought a house and just yearn to be part of the American dream - I'm sorry our country hasn't given you the stability that you desired when you arrived.
Re: "gratefulness". I don't see on what basis you're concluding that somehow grandparents were more grateful and the current H1B workers are less so. It seems purely anecdotal at best, and more likely a declinism bias. Regardless, why does it matter whether H1B people feel grateful or not for US ? It may matter for their own mental health, but it clearly doesn't for the rest of us living in this society - what matters is whether they can support themselves, and whether they follow the law and integrate with the society.
I think this can potentially affect startups who may want to hire H1bs at a lower than prevailing wage for their area(even if they are paying their American colleagues the same amount).
Other than that, the biggest issue might be to IT consulting companies (mostly based in India) that tend to have their employees work at a lower rate than tech companies.
I don't even live in the US but this is a great move and I hope other countries follow suit. It will actually benefit US industry by forcing companies to only select the most highly skilled workers. It will raise standards in all industries.
It will even give foreign workers an incentive to improve their skills in order to meet higher entry requirements. This will give people something to work towards.
In the software industry, managers and company owners have a false idea that they can get things done faster by throwing more people at the problems and having access to cheaper labor is the solution... Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. There is such a thing as a 10x or 100x developer (companies like Netflix have already figured this out). Unfortunately, most companies will not figure this out on their own while they are addicted to cheap labor. Companies need to be taken to detox.
In a normal capitalist environment, these cheap-labor addicted companies would be wiped out at regular intervals, but in our crony-capitalist environment the government is keeping them on life support; so the least the government can do is force them to increase their standards.
I mean they will pay H1bs higher but still doesn’t make a company pay a us citizen higher. Maybe it will open up space for lawsuits based equivalent responsibilities and help the equal pay for equal movement. Even excluding H1bs we know there are people doing the exact same work for vastly different
"The employer needs to demonstrate that the worker is being paid at least the prevailing wage for that region and occupation, and comparable to native workers in the firm, and that employing the worker will not adversely affect current workers. The employer does not need to demonstrate that there is no qualified native U.S. worker for the job."
Compare that to:
Employment-based visa (such as EB-2 visa, or EB-3 visa) that provides a path to permanent residency (a Green Card)
"The employer needs to demonstrate that there is no qualified U.S. worker willing to do the job at a comparable wage, and needs to have made a good-faith effort to recruit a native U.S. worker."
You only need to demonstrate an effort to recruit someone when applying for a green card.
It is true - as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first, which becomes a part of the documentation you submit to USCIS. I went through that as a part of my own visa process.
EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)
> as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first
No, this is only part of employment-based greencard (LC) process. For H-1Bs, as part of the LCA process, the employer needs to advertise that a candidate is going to be hired.
Trump is doing a pretty good job of trying to earn votes lately. First appealing to the Black vote with promises of $500B of investments, and now going for the Tech vote with these changes in addition to breaking up the monopolies. I think it would be okay for 4 more years at this rate (until the opposition can generate a decent candidate)...
I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas.
But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.
Personally I think there's a middle ground that's very important, which is that I think anyone who received a university degree in the US and passes the background check should be able to get an unrestricted work visa.
The US should want to keep the talent it selects and trains. These are people who build the economy, generate IP, and create jobs in the long run. Not only that, but these people who have spent 4+ years in the US university education system are extremely well-adapted to life in the US and will thrive at making the US a better place.
(Yes there's OPT, but it's not long enough and doesn't provide a path to permanent residency.)
No. No. No. That would mean that anyone from the University of Oxford would be out until he got himself a masters degree from the Christian College of Lost Hope, AR. There are far too many paid masters degrees around already that serve exactly that purpose and that are good for no one except the useless college.
> masters degree from the Christian College of Lost Hope, AR
Yeah no, screw that crap. I don't know the exact regulation framework that would accomplish my intent but you understand what I mean.
I'm talking about all the people with bonafide degrees and skillsets. 4-year bachelor degrees, PhDs, MDs, and the like. These people should be treated as assets to the country. (Maybe just excluding masters' degrees is the answer, but I'm not sure.) It's dumbfoundingly stupid as a national policy to invest so much in resources to train a person and then send them back to another country instead of giving them every incentive to stay.
Singapore and Australia (and maybe others I don't know about) allow international students to apply for permanent residency if they meet certain very reasonable qualifications and it works out very much in their favor for retaining talent.
Talking with friends that were international students, who also knew about the abuses of the current system, we came to the conclusion that to avoid abuse and get actual world class talent you would want to tier the system. Master's and PhD holders already benefit in the current system so better to expand the idea.
Undergraduate degree holders would only be rewarded for completing degrees in in the US in emerging and vital fields (mostly STEM). Awarding permanent residency to someone completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US is simply inviting abuse. Master's holders would get permanent residency in an expanding set of fields and ideally PhDs in every field. There may be some cases of abuse, but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country because they didn't win a lottery.
> Master's holders would get permanent residency in an expanding set of fields and ideally PhDs in every field.
Unfortunately, this is ripe for abuse. You're basically allowing educational institutions to sell green cards. If you thought almost-unlimited-student-loans inflated education prices, you don't even want to see what selling green cards would do.
> but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country
I agree with the premise, but this is kind of like "It is better than 1000 guilty men go free, than 1 innocent man be wrongly convicted". It sounds great in premise, but in practice can't reasonably happen. Again, I agree with your premise, but I think it needs to be approached in a different way.
> Unfortunately, this is ripe for abuse. You're basically allowing educational institutions to sell green cards. If you thought almost-unlimited-student-loans inflated education prices, you don't even want to see what selling green cards would do
That's pretty much how it's done in Australia. It props up a massive industry (education was the fourth largest export in 2018-2019) whilst ensuring a supply of qualified applicants for residency.
Prices for locals are still set by the government. So, whilst there is inflation, disadvantage to locals is limited to there being fewer places available to them. Whether it's morally okay is another question but the economics seem to work out pretty well.
Australia does /kind of/ do this with the skilled occupation list, but it's not like getting a Bachelor of Accounting means you are guaranteed a path to permanent residency (thanks to many of the recent visa pathway changes). Graduates from an Australian university can get a Temporary Graduate (485) Visa which lasts 2-4 years, but the pathway from then on usually requires getting an employer to sponsor your permanent residency (186/187) after 3 years of work experience, unless you get explicitly invited to some of the other programs (189/190)[+]. If you live in a regional area there are more options (887 for instance) but most people don't and might find it difficult to live in regional towns and cities.
As an immigrant to (and citizen of) Australia myself, I find it pretty appalling how hard it has become to become a permanent resident in Australia even if you are reasonably skilled (and the fact that permanent residency requires nomination by an employer -- which is unlike most other countries, where permanent residency is based on your own residence and skills). The work-based streams are becoming more and more narrow and it's longer the case that studying in Australia gives you any guaranteed pathway to residency (and I would argue it hasn't been the case for a fairly long time now).
You'd be surprised there. The degree that gives best odds in law school is actually philosophy. If you want to keep the tradition of Latin alive you need kids who have taken decent Latin in school. Chemistry and the life sciences, on the other hand, there is a terrifying oversupply of graduates. I agree with the need for quality control.
GP:> completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US
I think the key here should be "worst college in the US" and not the Bachelors in communication. If you got a communication degree from Mizzou or Columbia that's a totally different bar than a communication degree from a community college. The institutions and programs should be accredited, and demonstrate some standard of selectivity.
You want talented people in every field to stay in your country and create value and jobs, and selectivity for university admission is often a good proxy for that. The bar doesn't need to be insanely higher either; anyone who creates value and by doing so either directly or indirectly creates more jobs is worthwhile to keep.
If this is true regarding the philosophy degree then the student would continue on to the law degree to secure their residency. Regarding the saturated science fields they would then not be considered emerging nor vital.
The universities, yes, but at least for 4-year bachelors' programs, the country should be viewing it as an investment considering how selective they tend to be for mid- to higher-tier instutions. From a national government standpoint, they bring in some revenue to the economy, but it's miniscule compared to the GDP value they will create, directly and indirectly, with their newfound skills in a lifetime.
I'd even argue in favor of government financial aid for international students that meet certain bars of merit or talent. Give them a free ride if they are that talented. Then let them build the next company and hire a bunch of Americans. Hand them a US passport as well if they get there.
Also, PhDs are another story -- they are not revenue sources for the university, but they are a means to quality research, and very much an investment.
> Singapore and Australia (and maybe others I don't know about) allow international students to apply for permanent residency if they meet certain very reasonable qualifications and it works out very much in their favor for retaining talent.
I don't know about Singapore but this definitely isn't true for Australia these days -- visa programs in Australia are far more strict than they used to be (in fact, my parents and I probably couldn't have migrated here under the current visa system -- we came to Australia in 1999).
The Temporary Graduate visa (485) is -- as the name suggests -- temporary, and only lasts between 2-4 years if you graduated from an Australian university. If you want to go for permanent residency you (generally speaking) need to be endorsed by your employer through the Employer Nomination Scheme visa (186) which requires 3 years work experience in your field -- the practical upshot is that you would need to have been granted a visa that lasts longer than 3 years (no guarantee of this), get a job in your field immediately after you graduate (seriously no guarantee of this since many employers in fields like engineering illegally discriminate against people who hold temporary working visas), and find an employer (within the last few months of your visa) who is willing to nominate you for permanent residency and has an existing labour agreement with the government.
It's not impossible to do, but it's hardly a simple procedure and it's definitely not true that graduates have a guaranteed roadmap to apply for permanent residency. There are some visa programs which in theory would allow you to apply for permanent residency earlier, but they are invitation-only and usually have pretty high requirements which most people wouldn't fulfil.
The issue is that America is allergic to sensible regulation so never would you find a way to craft a law that allowed those 4-year bachelor degrees to be counted without pulling in all the for-profit unis and if you attempted that you'd be buried in lawsuits and public outcry.
I actually think that anyone—regardless of criminal background; as long as they’ve paid for their past crimes—should be allowed to live and work wherever they want, no quotas, no visas, no restrictions.
But barring that pipe dream, yours seems like an acceptable interim step.
I want to believe the prosperity gospel because it would mean that my moral-interest and my self-interest coincide, but it seems much more likely that it's just hustle from the owner-class. The American middle class has gotten absolutely wrecked over the last few decades while eerily similar promises about globalization have failed to deliver -- except to the owner class. I think this is just another instance of that, and I think many of us are in denial because it's much easier than acknowledging that we're next on the chopping block.
> I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans
A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats. Think of all the services that would need to expand -- markets, restaurants, hair salons, etc.
Furthermore, immigrants contribute more to the tax base than citizens because they pay the same income taxes without getting all the deductions, they pay sales taxes and other taxes, and do not get the same benefits.
It's well established that an immigrant with a job is a net contributor to both the economy and the tax base.
Do this thought experiment -- so many immigrants come to the US and contribute so much to the tax base that there is enough to pay every US citizen $75,000 a year in UBI and provide universal healthcare for citizens. Now you can do whatever you want, work or not, it doesn't matter.
You are proposing a huge, non-citizen working class, who's labor is taxed to support citizens? That is not what I was expecting. Yes, that may be good for citizens.
So a thought experiment for you. Can you find any historical precedence where these two-tier systems were implemented. And how did that work out?
The largest example would be undocumented immigrants and it seems fairly mediocre. A large portion of the country resents them, there's large demographic/cultural changes, another portion of country/political class wants to provide citizenship/welfare(voiding the GP's calculus), racial/cultural tensions are still issue.
Well heeled thinktanks can continue to try and bamboozle people but after watching every contracting crew in my area become 99% low paid latino immigrant I have no reason to want the same thing to happen to software development when it's one of the few remaining paths to a nice middle class life. I guess I'm supposed to retrain as an attorney or something right?
You are both correct. Immigration does increase GDP, and wages are also stagnant. The problem is that the GDP gains created by both immigrants and native born workers have concentrated in the holdings of the capitalist class (to which even many upper middle class Americans belong in varying degrees), because of low taxes and asset price inflation.
As a result, public investment funded via taxes has moved to deficit spending and sporadic and selective philanthropy, exacerbating both the inequality of wealth and opportunity.
> A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats.
Funny, most Americans who aren't working for FAANG would absolutely disagree with you here. It's almost as cliche as the "wealth trickles down" or supply side economics.
Maybe that's just cause I'm old enough to have seen these bullshit statements evolve.
The "rising tides" lie started in the 80's and 90's and was constantly used by our leaders and the media to ensure the blue collar workers who were being devastated by offshoring and the beginning of a huge surge in immigration. Don't worry guys - even though all your factories are being dismantled and reassembled in S. China and Mexico, the gains will be spread around for everyone. And, something something retraining...
By the 2000's, enough blue collar workers, especially in the Rust Belt, had never seen any improvements, so the lie changed. It was now, "You need to get an education". I think if you're old enough here, you should remember that during GW Bush and into Obama's presidencies, that was combined with "Some of these jobs just aren't coming back..." which was appended because our leaders knew that wages weren't rising enough in the third world to ever bring the manufacturing back - not when the system now depended on a permanent devalued Chinese Yuan, Mexican Peso, etc.
So now we get to somewhere around Obama's times, during the Great Recession, when tens of millions were already unemployed and now almost NO college grads were getting offers. That was when the game was upped: "Did you idiots think we were talking about any degree? You need to get one of those STEM degrees. Haha, underwater basket weaving ain't gonna help you", cried the Boomers at the WSJ and Cato Institute. That was after college costs had been rising exponentially for a decade, so now those non-STEM majors were fked. Oh well.
But the truth is that most STEM majors aren't even having an easy time in most areas outside SV and during bubbles. Do you think the average EE or Chemistry major is getting a dozen offers in the labs when they're also filled up with hundreds of thousands of foreign students on Opt visas and who don't have to pay payroll taxes (neither their employer)? CS isn't any better: Go on to https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/ and you'll find post after post with decent CS grads giving up after applying for 12 months without getting a single call back. We have recruiters here that tell us they get 1000 applications for every job, so this isn't surprising.
The whole H1B system should be shut down, all those who are not being paid minimum $250K given 1 month to leave for each year they've been here. Those who are get a Green Card. That $250K is tied to housing costs in each city, too. They go up, so does the minimum.
Shut off the L1 and Student OPT programs completely, too, and give our burdened students a chance at a decent job. Better than them joining Antifa and burning down shit.
Let's dare these billionaire executives to either start spreading the wealth around to the whole country which gave them their opportunity, or they move themselves, their families, and their companies to the third world where they seem to find most of their workforce nowadays.
Then Silicon Valley might be actually forced to hire "diverse" black, hispanic, etc. Americans instead of giving it lip service while employing 70% non-diverse Brahmins from India.
It depends. Short term and long term there's a lot of shuffling that would happen until it settled into an equilibrium (Maybe. On the other hand maybe it would be extremely sensitive to global issues). Those people all need food and housing and need to buy goods and services, so it's not like you're obsoleting an existing person's job, you're adding demand as you add supply. Whether one eventually outweighs the other is dependent on many factors.
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
The problem beyond simple policy choices is infrastructure takes time to build. If hypothetically 100,000 people show up in NYC tomorrow there is some slack that might accommodate them. But, how do you scale the transportation network to handle even just 1 million extra people in NYC? Now extend that to every other part of the country.
Sure that seems unlikely, but when millions of people are willing to become undocumented immigrants, it’s likely a more open policy would see dramatically larger influxes. Especially in response to local events like civil wars. Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Manhattan's peak density was in the early 1900s. There are cities on the planet denser then NYC. The transportation networks in Asia blow the MTA out of the water. We can do it here. All we need is the political will.
> Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was writing the above, but didn't want to get too into the weeds on what I wanted to be a short answer to the original question (I have a habit of going on...).
Like many things, an immediate large change has repercussions that are detrimental and can possibly be alleviated with a measured change over time.
That's how you acclimate fish to the temperature in a new aquarium. That said, it's also how they tell you to boil a frog...
Just as an aside, the original boil the frog experiment first gave them a lobotomy. Without that they just out of the pot even with very slow temperature increases. On the other hand dump a frog in boiling water and they just die.
Ha, nice to know, thanks. All the best idioms seem to be completely broken when you look into basis for them, so I'm not surprised. Not that it matters too much (although it would be better if they were more accurate), they do still let us express somewhat complex ideas concisely. :)
Our current system is kind of strange when you stop and think about it. We're OK with foreigners doing much of the labor for lower wages - as long as they do it overseas, and then ship the products here. However, if you think about it, there would be benefits to having the work be done domestically rather than requiring it be done in other countries. We could lower transportation costs of goods (and the environmental impact on transportation), we could have more flexibility in production, we could keep higher wage jobs associated with the work (management, machinists, R&D), etc. We could also have a more equitable balance of globalization - for instance, right now it's easy for a U.S. doctor to benefit from overseas manufacturing workers, but it's hard for a U.S. factory worker to benefit from overseas doctors.
Maybe, but I find it hard to square the idea that someone capable of and willing to do my job for less money shouldn't have the opportunity to better their prospects at the expense of mine.
At the same time, the people in a given geography should have a say about what the companies in the area are doing. If a company decides to be anti-social with the people already in the community, I see no reason why the people in the area shouldn't object to it. It's clearly a balance, and both sides should be willing to play ball.
There are studies showing a slight decrease in wages, studies showing a slight increase in wages, and studies showing nothing conclusive. There's basically not enough scientific consensus to use for decision making, which means it's more a moral choice than an economic one.
Basically, the UK fruit industry was worried that it might not get "enough workers" because of COVID restrictions.
Which of course is brazen corporate double-speak. There are workers in the UK, like tens of millions of them. It's just that they're not willing to work for miserly wages. So there's only two options: (1) increase local wages, or (2) import cheap foreigners. Business obviously prefer the latter. ("But but but strawberry prices would increase" isn't a good argument - agriculture is heavily subsidized anyways.)
Somehow businesses forget how supply and demand works when it comes to labor, and "journalists" aren't, so much as they just transcribe whatever falls out of rich peoples' mouths and call it 'balance'.
We'll be back to feudalism in a couple generations.
Are you really dismissing research on the basis of anecdotal news articles? It makes total sense to question the value of the types of studies I linked to, but "the real world disagrees with research" is kind of a bonkers take.
We can dismiss it because one example is academic and the other one is anecdotal and patently obvious. If it was cheaper for farmers to use local labor they certainly wouldn’t go through the trouble of using a migrant work force.
What has happened in other countries that has similar systems, like the UK and Australia (to name two I have experience with)? I don’t think that happened there.
I don't know if there would still be 350,000,000 interested after the first 350,000,000 arrive. Interesting to think about how that number would change based on America's changes.
You would still have to have a job lined up to get a work visa. So there would need to be 500M new jobs.
If our economy grew by 500M new jobs, that would be unequivocally good. Those 500M people would be paying taxes, buying goods and services, paying for housing, etc.
The general idea is that once you are here you can stay. But since you're not a citizen, you can't "live on the dole" since you wouldn't qualify for any benefits.
So you'd either have to live off of your savings or get another job or go back to your home country.
Ok that was missing from your original statement as a condition. Some work visas dont need a prior employment offer as precondition.
I still think that it would drag salaries down significantly. I know employment and salaries are not a zero sum game, but the offer/supply ratio is a parameter.
You can do that today. Set up shell companies and apply for H1B visas. But at the end of the day those people still need an actual job or they won't have any money to live.
In the US, over 3 million Puerto Ricans are now allowed to migrate to the mainland US (say to DC). The borders are completely open to them. In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t.
Just because people are allowed to migrate, it doesn’t mean they will. And in the case of an overwhelming majority, they won’t.
> In the US, over 3 million Puerto Ricans are now allowed to migrate to the mainland US (say to DC). The borders are completely open to them. In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t
According to Wikipedia, as of 2018 there were 5.8 million Puerto Ricans living stateside. The population of Puerto Rico is around 2.8 million. There are more than twice as many Puerto Ricans living on the mainland as there are in Puerto Rico.
This number includes people with Puerto Ricans ancestry (therefore not born in Puerto Rico). Some of them might have migrated out of Puerto Rico 100 years ago, I don't think looking at number is relevant at all to this discussion.
This only makes my point against the GP stronger. So half the population of Puerto Rico has already migrated to the mainland US, without anything terrible happening to the mainland US as a result.
The myths about the negative consequences of open border policy have no basis in reality.
Most people don’t migrate away from their home country/state. But even if they did, it would be of no negative consequence for the place they migrate to.
> In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t.
Supposedly allowed and not at all welcome. Like most affluent countries, Sweden doesn't actually want poor people immigrating into their country. So they make things very difficult for those people. It's also why they shut down the big immigration flood, their society was highly intolerant to it.
Americans - commonly ignorant to the details of rest of the world - would be shocked to learn how regressive Scandinavia can be. From very strict immigration to virtually bulldozing minority neighborhoods in Denmark [1][2], to attacks on immigrants in Sweden and burning immigrant camps, to large political parties derived from former neo-nazi groups.
From Reuters in 2015 (the Romanians got the message):
"A series of attacks in Sweden on beggars, many Roma, has highlighted a dark side to a country considered a bastion of tolerance but where the far right has been gaining support by claiming society is under threat from waves of immigrants."
"An influx of thousands of mainly Roma migrants has shocked affluent Swedes, with beggars now a common sight outside supermarkets, IKEA stores and subways in the capital."
"There were around 300 reported attacks on Roma in 2014, up 23 percent on the year before, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. Police say the figures underestimate the scale of the problem."
"The government reckons around 5,000 migrants, some of whom also come from Hungary, are in Sweden begging. Many live on the street or in squalid camps. In recent months, attackers have thrown acid at beggars and burned tents and caravans."
"Many migrants in Sweden say they want to work, but lack of education and language skills make it impossible for most, leaving begging as the only alternative."
"When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six."
Agreed. Thanks for pointing this out. As a Scandinavian my self I am aware of this. And I raised a nibling comment pointing out that bad policies (like racially biased policing, lack of labor laws, lack of – or unenforced discrimination laws, etc.) cause issues in immigrant communities, not open borders.
Sweden and Denmark are easy to point out as they have very racist and discriminatory policies on a national and local level. But Iceland and Norway also have terrible refugee policies and rampant xenophobia (especially in more rural setting).
I do empathize with putting a priority of intention on setting up formative values and influences in their society rather than doing nothing about culture and relying reformative government programs - which clearly have their limits. Not in favor of the violence but the need for cultural integration is a real thing unless you want the planet sinking to the LCD.
Well could it be dependent on employment and housing availability? Are there 500m jobs that need filling? If not then they would not be able to apply. If there was a flood of people coming the housing market would see a shortage so again these people would need somewhere to stay before being granted a VISA. I don’t think unlimited necessarily mean without restrictions.
The real bottleneck in most American metros is more people than not loath density and want a garage and a yard. Without changing that, or finding a way to make it work, it's hard for the States to absorb people.
I think that's just a coastal problem - granted that is where a bunch of folks want to live but if you shift to some of the middle-america tech markets then housing becomes a lot more reasonable.
I really do think that Americans need to figure their crap out though - either you live in the middle of a city or you get your yard. I hate cars so I'm pretty happy in the city but that isn't the opinion of everyone.
We actually already tax immigrants more than citizens. They pay the same taxes we do but don't qualify for all the deductions, and pay into social security and medicare even though they can't get those benefits.
As an American I do not qualify for either of those things but have to pay into it, you need to pay into the system for 40 quarters (10 years), and meet other requirements. It is currently underfunded and most likely wont have much money left by the time I could withdraw. If you have a higher income and/or a spouse that works you generally pay in more than you will get back in benefits as well because it is a progressive safety net system. I've seen many people see the high salaries and the good quality of living in the US, but many of these things take high taxes to pay for.
I guess the idea would be that the employers are taxed, not the employee. Also, H1Bs are already taxed all the regular taxes even if they return to their country before they could use Medicare or gather enough SS credits.
People have a choice of where they want to go for work. If you tax them so hard that anywhere else is better then you may as well have simply not bothered pretending like you wanted it to be easier for them to come at all.
If your talking about the First Step Act that was a bipartisan bill that passed in the Senate unanimously. Semi props for embracing it, but this gets into a bigger issue of whether an administration can take credit for the bills passed underneath them.
There's polarizing issues, but actually a lot of issues I find myself agreeing with lately. Anti-war sentiment is a big one (I love hearing about troop draw downs in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria).
And Trump accuses the IC community of unconstitutional spying on politicians and Americans, the same thing technorati have been saying (at least until 2016, when it became cool to trust the FBI and CIA).
How’s it ineffective? The previous administration spent 8 years coming up with a terrible agreement that all candidates wanted to quit. Meanwhile the high tariffs have forced companies to leave, and sure, Biden has said that he’d end Trump’s China tariffs, but at least the many companies that have already setup shop elsewhere are unlikely to return.
For years countries have also been forced to waste taxpayer money to deliver cheap junk from Aliexpress/Wish/etc. because Universal Postal Union wouldn’t allow countries to increase postal rates from China. The previous administration was unable to do anything about it, but Trump succeeded where they failed.
Huawei has also been significantly hurt. Being banned from using Android and chips with US tech has effectively destroyed their mobile products (as their stock runs out), and countries are abandoning their 5G deals (either as a result of USA paying them to drop Huawei, or simply because China/Huawei’s reputation has dropped so much in the last four years). Trump also dragged other countries into it by e.g. requesting Meng Wanzhou’s arrest, which resulted in China arbitrarily arresting Canadian citizens.
He’s also the first US President to speak directly with Taiwan’s President since 1979, and has made the largest arms sale to Taiwan in the past few decades.
TAIPEI Act and Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed under his administration, and Hong Kong lost its special status.
If judges hadn’t temporarily stopped Trump’s executive orders then TikTok and WeChat would also be banned now (it’s absurd that the west for decades have put up with China blocking western companies from their markets while freely allowing them into our markets).. hopefully the bans will go through, and hopefully TikTok/WeChat will just be the first of many.
Trump is also one of the few world leaders who continuously remind the world that China are responsible for the pandemic, and China still won’t allow WHO/others to investigate the origins in Wuhan.
Trump has also been pushing for China to lose WTO developing country status, which will surely happen if he’s re-elected.
As a liberal I disagree with most of Trump’s policies, but I could really go on-and-on about his effective/positive actions towards China.. you could make a solid case that Trump in four years has done more to stand up to China than the rest of the western world combined (including the previous administration) has done in the past decade.
This is not. As with anything in the Trump admin, this is not well thought out and just focused on election based xenophobic messaging. The people who can game the system, can easily do that. However, many people who really benefit from H1B will be shafted. For example, doctors and nurses in rural areas. H1 also is a path for many engineers, doctors, and phds to enter the workforce. With blanket higher salary requirements, it will just deny a path to the job market for many international students graduating from Ivy league universities. Also, this benefits FAANGs, and if you are a startup looking to hire someone on H1B, forget about it.
Trump is literally a one trick pony. Stop anybody not born in the US from being in the US.
This will really hurt their economy. Elon Musk as made the point, really logically countries should advertise and do recruiting for the best people. That is what would allow more technology, production and growth in a country.
I just don't understand the logic. I understand the 'poor people come here and take jobs' even if its wrong, but high payed people this clearly isn't an issue.
>The Trump administration announced an overhaul of the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers that will require employers to pay H-1B workers significantly higher wages, narrow the types of degrees that could qualify an applicant, and shorten the length of visas for certain contract workers.
This seems like a great move. It corrects the incentives to hire foreign workers over domestic workers, and also ensures that foreign workers aren't abused with lower wages due to their immigration status.
I've written on HN before that the Trump admin's revealed immigration preference is, in effect, "as few immigrants as possible" [1]. Every past move this administration has made with regard to visas has been ill-advised and badly executed (imo). That they solved problem 1 (ill-advised) does not mean they've solved problem 2 (badly executed).
In that light, I can't help but think this is just another RFE hole: "you studied math and cs, and now want to work as a data scientist? That's not closely enough related" or "quantitative economics is not STEM, even though 12/15 required courses were math, stats, and CS, and we previously approved the program" (both objections I've heard raised in the past year, _before_ this new emphasis on degree-job relatedness).
This isn't a bad policy - it may be good, even! - but I hope it gets implemented by the next administration.
> "you studied math and cs, and now want to work as a data scientist? That's not closely enough related"
This could be trivially avoided by simply aggregating the job posting requirements for similar positions or doing any sort of survey of the qualifications and education of currently employed highly paid data scientists.
If someone is keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing, they already don’t have an incentive to bring someone in and pay benefits. This is a false narrative.
it possible that someone keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing but didn't do it because it still affordable enough to bring someone in but now with the higher cost to bring someone in, they will chose to outsource instead.
How can you, an american, with a family, mortgage, car payments etc., compete financially with someone from a "shithole country", who's willing to work for very little money and live on a bunk bed with 7 roommates in a two bedroom living container? (literal situation currently in my company)
Life is about trade off, if the American want to be paid more in order to have all that then they better provide more value for their employer compared to someone from "shithole country"
Fair trade policy has consistently been the one thing on which I agree with the Trump presidency.
It hasn't been enough to outweigh all the other absolutely horrible stuff, but it is one thing.
I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade that allows corporations to import totalitarianism via near-slave or even actual slave (see Uyghur prisoners and forced labor) wage arbitrage to crush domestic wages and liquidate the middle class. This isn't even getting into the export of environmental destruction ("out of sight out of mind") or the export of American technological expertise to unfriendly totalitarian states.
H1B programs can be shady this way too. It's not as shady as actual slave labor or near-slave sweatshops, but there is certainly a serious power imbalance when your employer can pay you sub-standard wages and threaten to cause you to be deported if you don't keep your head down.
The three worst are: normalization of racism after 50 years of steadily decreasing racism in America, terrible COVID response responsible for 100,000+ deaths in excess of what average countries have achieved, and vast corruption that has destroyed hundreds-of-years-old norms on presidential conduct (Secret Service forced to buy rooms at Mar A Lago, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs participating in a political stunt in uniform, political campaign letter included in food boxes, etc).
The election is basically that of a homeowner deciding whether he wants the guy who is spraying a flamethrower into every corner of his house, or an empty cardboard box. If you loathe your house and want it destroyed, the flamethrower guy is who you want. Just be careful, there’s no insurance check when the house burns to the ground.
* Separated families at the border fleeing violence
* Installs government officials with conflicts of interest or intentions of undermining their goals (EPA, Post Office, Dept Education)
* Asks foreign nations to dig up dirt on his opponents
* Cosies up to authoritarians while insulting our allies (NATO anyone?)
* Undermined the free press by calling everything he doesn't like fake news regardless of its validity
* literally trying to call the next election into question so he can bring it to the supreme court by not agreeing to a peaceful transition of power and stoking fears about mail-in ballots o__0
But his trade policies are ineffective and scattershot. Literally nothing he's done on trade has improved anyone in the US's wages, net profits, or way of life, nor has any of it set up the conditions for that to happen in the future.
I see posturing as an improvement over the wholesale selloff and export of the entire economic and industrial basis of the US middle class to totalitarian regimes.
That being said, I agree that Trump has only been marginally effective here and generally has no coherent plan... for this or much of anything else. Donald doesn't plan. He blusters and postures.
For such a liberal country, the US have a very strict immigration control. In Europe, many countries are rather the opposite - the state has much more control yet immigration matters are much more relaxed.
I am genuinely curious where this „tradition“ comes from, maybe some historians or experts in geopolitics here?
> “America’s immigration laws should put American workers first,”
Quotes like these irk the heck out of me. American workers is a subset of the populace and no, they should not be prioritized over other competing groups. For example, American Business owners, American Retirees, American disabled folks...
It's a lot less about the specifics of this article/case and more about how the "Jobs" aim has become impossible to balance
EDIT: If you're going to downvote then leave a rebuttal to the point. Why should Immigration laws (or any law for that matter) focus on a subset of Americans?
This is our country, where "we" are the people who already live here. Most of us were born here, many of us moved here, but we have a pretty good thing going on. New immigration should be a net benefit for our society and it should favor the side of the workers - e.g. Americans in general - not the bottom line of a business class looking for ever cheaper labor in order to extract additional money from their efforts.
Personally I'd like to see the entire H1B program scrapped entirely. If you can't find an American to do a job, hire and train one. If you don't want to, don't do business here.
The rest of your comment is semantic quibbling. "American workers" in this context means Americans. Nothing in that phrasing implies carving the country up into ever smaller groups based on certain characteristics and including or excluding them.
It's a good idea, but it misses something very important.
The last company I worked at I was one of 6 developers in the US. The rest of the developers was a team in Pakistan - 30 to 50 employees. The 6 employees were paid about the same as the 30-50 in Pakistan (combined).
So before I would support this, I would support the US making remote technical work illegal without also increasing that pay to match the equivalent pay in the US.
You want the US government to step in and start dictating to companies what it pays employees in different countries? If that happened, there is an almost-0% chance you get the outcome you want (which seems to be the staff in Pakistan getting paid more).
We'll let's take a step back just to start here - a company in the US that makes some dashboard widgets for a hospital chain. The hospital chain pays this company lets say $1M per year. Half of this money goes directly to people in Pakistan that are "employees" of the company. The other half goes to US citizens. So overall, things aren't so great. We've just contributed $1/2M per year to a country that's let's face it - has a history of supporting terrorism.
I want that kind of outsourcing to stop. I mean, what amazing things can come from that scenario?
Maybe my original comment didn't capture it, but I would rather force the these remote style companies to not really have that giant pay advantage. I mean what do you think is the total combined amount of dollars leaving the United States per year because of relationships like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=4