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Comment by biocomputation | Hacker News Reader

>> We interview a ton of Americans as well, but there just aren't enough strong candidates to fill the positions.

Access to jobs is a bedrock social justice issue in America.

If your company didn't have access to foreign H1-B guest workers, you would have two primary options: 1.) hire and train American workers, or 2.) recruit more aggressively by paying even higher wages. A wild guess on my part says that your company would hire the weaker candidates and train them.

I'm all for the first option, but the second option is okay too.

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You forget the most viable third option - relocate the job to where engineers are available

Sure, since it isn't going to an American anyway.

Hiring an immigrant vs offshoring has many more benefits. Tax dollars to start with, but immigrants also spend that money on food, housing, etc

That's what Amazon is doing with their Vancouver office. Since getting enough hires into the US is too complicated, it's easier to open an office really close to Seattle and give those tax dollars to Canada instead of Uncle Sam.

Plus they can pay people drastically less because the Canadian job market is a joke.

Amazon's problem is completely different. The management disgraced the company and no self respecting American wants to work there. Some of their tech departments are 70% Indian. They want to hire people in American, but, surprise, America is full of those damn Americans, none of whom want to work there.

>If your company didn't have access to foreign H1-B guest workers, you would have two primary options: 1.) hire and train American workers, or 2.) recruit more aggressively by paying even higher wages.

Or 3) offshore the work. This effectively gives smart people overseas on-the-job training, sends money into the economies of the nations of which they are citizens, and teaches them how to compete with US businesses.

Protectionism _never_ works.

>> Protectionism _never_ works.

That's a very convenient aphorism, but it's not true. There are thousands of laws in this country that do a great job protecting people. Intellectual property laws and labor laws are a great example of "domestic protectionism" if you will.

It's socially unjust to make American workers compete with foreign nationals for jobs. If the end game of a company is to simply offshore all their jobs, then they can also plan on giving up the benefits of being based in a stable democracy like the US. EX: it's highly unlikely that their assets will be nationalized.

You realise that Singapore, Britain, most of Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are also stable democracies?

Many of them notably more stable, in fact.

Yes, I do realize this. Would companies relocating jobs to these locations have any reasonable expectation of paying lower wages and less taxes?

I think you're losing track of your narrative: this is about finding skilled engineers, not about money. The EU, Singapore, New Zealand, etc. have plenty of talented people.

Face it, even cutting off H1-Bs entirely, which thankfully is not what is being proposed by Trump, would not make weak candidates attractive to hire.

> If the end game of a company is to simply offshore all their jobs, then they can also plan on giving up the benefits of being based in a stable democracy like the US

Or you take a trip a few hours north and you get a stable democracy which will happily take in skilled workers.

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