America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"Kerr suggests allocating H-1Bs not by lottery as they are now, but by salary — the more that a company is willing to pay for a foreign worker, the quicker they can get a visa."
"A second change would be to allow H-1B workers to apply for permanent residency green cards on their own, without having to be sponsored by their employers."
Both of these would ensure that we can get smart and talented individuals from outside the US and would drastically improve the ability for the US to compete while continuing to provide broad-based wage increases.
Would need to be artfully worded so that sign-on bonuses and short-term employment is not used to game the system by permitting averaging down over time.
What do you think is actually is the problem if highly compensated employment is used as a fast track to immigration and perhaps even citizenship?
If the salary ever drops the visa is invalidated and becomes available for bidding by other companies.
I'm not sure the first change is a good idea. Wouldn't it give a huge advantage to bigger companies? Haven't really thought this one through.
An auction based allocation would favor ad selling companies that can pay juniors 200k to do A/B testing.
Then sure, it would partially solve the abuse from cheap IT consultancies, and that's better than nothing. But there would definitely be adverse effects.
Outside of the west coast and FAANG companies, salaries aren’t that crazy. I haven’t seen any difference in comp based on company size in most of the US. They all have to compete for the same talent pool.
So, making hiring these employees based on salary only means that places with a higher cost of living will be able to hire these employees for more typical rates, where-as companies in lower cost of living areas will have to pay well above average for the same employee. If actual salary wasn't a requirement, then midwest companies could still be competitive even while offering lower salaries.
If you set a quota and give to the highest bidder, you're going to see private sector executives and financial roles being filled in cities with high costs of living and competitive wages. Salary is a function not only of demand but also location and industry.
This will discriminate against rural and middle America by depriving them of the skilled labor that they need to survive.
Salary is a function of location, industry, and demand. Discriminating against American businesses that need skilled labor and are not in the most competitive industries or locations is not the purpose of the H1B program.
>There is no reason Tata and Infosys should be hiring 70k contractors to do shitty jobs.
This is a different problem, which is being solved as USCIS is cracking down on consultants who are registered in one region but work in another.
The point is that switching to an auction with the H1B causes more problems without really solving any, at least within the scope of the program's purpose.
If you're paying 20x what a civil engineer gets then you might as well go with E5 Investor Visas. Its true that auctions have issues, but we could go with (for example) second price (aka Vickrey) auctions for salaries.
I'm not sure why you are turning to hostilities. Please review the legislation.
Bringing in a lot of foreign civil engineers may be more total economic value brought in, but in a way that doesn't justify the cost in unassimilated people.
An "auction" by how much employers are willing to pay is indeed much closer to what the policy is trying to optimize for.
The lower-paid high-skill jobs should not be using the scarce H1-B spots, but should raise wages to draw more Americans, since the premium is much lower than you'd need to hire an American for the higher-paid jobs.
The choice is instead between 20 low paid engineers and 20 high paid executives/engineers/employees.
This makes the answer to this choice much more clear.
Again, auctioning H1B with quotas doesn't solve a problem, it just creates new ones.
The remaining concern is distorted markets like foreign language teachers (brought up elsewhere in the thread), where it may be politically infeasible to raise compensation to match the value workers create.
The purpose is not to give visas to the wealthiest bidder in the wealthiest locations and industries.
Prevailing wage requirement already solves the problem of wage velocity, so this is just creating more issues without solving any.
H1B and similar programs should be used to fill in the holes that are on the national level - i.e. where there's no labor force anywhere else in the country that could be enticed to move.
The H1-B system seems designed to allow big companies to exploit foreign labor to drive down wages and hold those foreigners hostage while they're here. Ratios better allow mobility of foreign workers and allow them to seek market rate salaries. If I were in control of immigration policies, I'd set a 3:1 American-to-foreigner ratio based on job classification/salary bands and make it apply to any company with more than 50 employees. Any immigrant who passes a DHS background check and can get an offer from an eligible company should be able to get a work permit, regardless of their home country, with no time limit when they'd be sent home. Only failing to find employment at an eligible employer within, say, 6 months should force someone to leave. And after a 5-year working period, they should be able to apply for citizenship. At worst, it becomes a jobs program that forces employers to employ American citizens to get the workers they need.
That's kind of already happened. Since the recession almost all new jobs created were in cities and metro areas, and mostly to educated workers.
Rural and middle America have this problem all on their own: skilled labor does not want to live in rural and middle America. Especially young skilled workers. There's even the concept of rural brain drain, as the top 5 % are sure to leave right after they're done high school.
I'm unsure about this, and think it's kind of a chicken and the egg problem. I know tons of people who are from the midwest that would prefer to be there, but tend to flock to the coast simply because it's hard to find as rigorous of a professional environment back home.
Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it a little more I can maybe sympathize a little bit. I prefer to live in rural areas in some ways due to my hobbies, but I'm never going to as the economics of a tech company, or even a company that needs skilled, educated workers makes no sense in rural areas. So there's something to the want vs. choice angle, but what one fantasizes about has little to do with economic realities. Plenty of people want high paying low skilled manufacturing jobs to be a thing again, that doesn't mean it's realistically going to happen.
I'm not suggesting that a headquarters needs to be in these smaller cities either, but often times right now, there isn't even a satellite office with any engineering.
Having higher paid workers push out the lower paid ones, is kinda the whole point. I want more skilled labor to move to where they are in demand.
Yes, that's the point. Skilled labor immigration is for skilled labor.
It should not by a subsidy to companies that cannot afford to pay prevailing wages and/or are unwilling to invest in their workforce.
> This will deprive rural and middle America of the skilled labor that they need to survive.
Middle America will be fine; Chicago, KC, Pittsburgh, etc. can and do compete with the coasts for skilled labor!
That said, I could get behind a rule that adjusts for cost of living so that e.g. 100k in Pittsburgh or KC == 200k in SF. That seems fair.
As for rural America, there's a reason these areas can't attract companies or talent.
> As for rural America, there's a reason these areas
> can't attract companies or talent.
The fact that the concerns of rural communities are summarily dismissed when making policy was one of the big contributing factors to the election victories of both Brexit and Trump. (Possibly more due to resentment rather than as a rational response, but that's irrelevant.) Urban vs Rural is becoming one of the more significant divisions in this country, as wealth consolidation favors urban.
And, more fundamentally, there are people who live there. The actions of a democratic government are supposed to be for the benefit of its people. That includes the people who live in rural communities. Policy that lets the economic advantage of urban areas snowball more is something that should be given more thought than "it wouldn't matter anyways, those places suck."
Maybe there isn't a solution, or maybe this policy in particular isn't the best place to address it, but it deserves at least a modicum of thought rather than a dismissal that is, frankly, disdainful. Those places do suck, but we should treat that as a problem to be addressed rather than avoided.
[edit]: Let me clarify: I am not saying the urban-rural divide is caused specifically by the lack of high-skill immigrant labor. I am saying the urban-rural divide is exacerbated generally by dismissing the concerns of rural communities when making policy. I don't think this policy suggestion in particular is the highest-value one, but I also think that no individual snowflake is responsible for the avalanche.
It would be much better if more small towns had similar offerings such that the 10% aren't overrun by people looking to get away from the city.
Do you think that an influx of underpaid skilled labor is going to ease the tensions that created Brexit and Trump?
Your assertion here appears to be that Trump voters were pissed off that more immigrants weren't making it to their hometowns. I find that assertion... highly implausible.
> Policy that lets the economic advantage of urban areas snowball more is something that should be given more thought than "it wouldn't matter anyways, those places suck."... Those places do suck, but we should treat that as a problem to be addressed rather than avoided.
Oy.
1. IMO they don't suck. They have many advantages. But they aren't particularly good locations for doing highly skilled labor.
2. There are a lot of policy levers that can be used to help rural areas. Trying to turn them into immigration-fueled discount tech/med hubs is doomed to fail and is therefore definitely not the right lever.
3. It's also worth noting that even rural economic development tends to be geographically concentrated. Just as wealth concentrates in cities with 10M people compared to cities with 100,000 people, wealth also concentrates in cities with 100,000 people compared to cities with 1,000 people. And BTW, those 100,000 person towns where skilled labor would invariably concentrate are in many cases already doing quite well.
Even rural development -- and ESPECIALLY rural development based on skilled labor immigration -- isn't going to help the rural places that have been hardest hit in the past two decades, which tend to be in the 1,000 to 10,000 range.
The argument isn't that policy should benefit urban America. The argument is that trying to bootstrap tiny local economies with skilled labor immigration is doomed to fail.
H1B visas are only granted to people who are paid more than the prevailing wages of citizens working the same SOC code job in the same area. There have been consultancies in the past who have gamed this, but USCIS has cracked down severely on this in the past year or so.
I am sure that many of these places would be very happy to have less H1Bs living there.
This is, of course, an intentional behavior of our system of government. You can even make an argument that it's a positive one. (I would disagree.) It is not, however, "democratic", nor does it point at some kind of underrepresentation.
These cities may as well be "coastal" relative to their regions. There are a lot of hurting small PA towns less than 100 miles away from Pittsburgh experiencing a brain drain, for example.
IF KC and Pittsburgh aren't "middle america", then the term ceases to have much of a meaning and we might as well stick with "rural".
There are a lot of smaller metro areas that are far rural, but aren't big cities - for example, my hometown - Erie, PA, which has a metro population of just over 275k - is very much a city - but is too far from Pittsburgh to benefit from their economic growth. Pittsburgh is fine, but Erie is in decline.
If "middle america" refers to every non-rural city between the coasts, then it is a meaningless term. There is too much economic variation to lump them all together for a single analysis.
What jobs are rural American companies hiring H1Bs?
Rural and middle America needs to get off its collective ass. I have seriously considered moving to one of those places -- alas, while I can get a house cheap and have what I need to survive inexpensively, I cannot get high speed internet even if I pay $1,000.00 per month.
That leaves nobody to complain.
If you insist on deciding what is best for rural and middle America, I sure hope you don't object when they return the favor, deciding on your behalf that cities would be best off without any immigration.
It’s difficult already as teachers switch jobs over the summer which over the past couple of decades has been when the supply is already used up.
[+] English teachers are recruited from the California system. Unfortunately CA schools are so terrible that if the kids go back to their jobs,encountry they are frequently behind in English!
The problem with this approach, of course, is that you need a judge/executive who follows the spirit of the law so that I can't get a bunch of cheap tech workers by saying "oh, job ABC in town XYZ is its own industry/sector and not comparable to SWEs at Google".
The RAND institute, among others, concluded that the reason US citizens have turned away from graduate degrees in the sciences is a rational market response to poor pay and working conditions in favor of fields that offer better salaries and career stability. In short, there is no shortage, just a desire to pay extremely low salaries and establish exploitive working conditions - which you can do when you control someone's right to live and work in the US when these rights are difficult to come by.
Not only do I think that there's no reason to prop up a system that suppresses salaries outside tech/finance/med (or within those fields, that happens too, especially in tech), I think there's real harm in the market distortions these schemes produce.
Arguably by making postdocs underpaid, the US as a nation is getting cheap scientific advancement, in exchange for dangling the promise of eventual American citizenship (and the American dream) in front of said postdocs.
Money is a very good proxy for demand after all. If company's can easily place people for 350+k jobs that's going to lower the pay of those 350k jobs.
PS: Effectively, your describing a planned economy where someone picks the level of expected pay for each job with more foreign workers available for overpaid jobs.
I was looking through online records and found folks being brought in for sub 50k jobs that looked like low level ... customer service roles.
I'll see if I can find it later.
This also addresses the concerns about salary differences between different industries and regions.
In practice you're right though. Most companies have limited experience with this process and just don't want to get into it.
- The green card process doesn't completely transfer over.
- Filing a petition to transfer an H1B puts the employee at risk of getting a denial. Every petition sent to USCIS is risking an audit, denial, and at the very least, many headaches.
People are making offers to candidates with undefined start dates many months in the future. The candidate has to commit to switching jobs when the transfer is submitted. If current job gives them a promotion in the interim and they decide to stay, they can’t just cancel the transfer. Their current employer (who didn’t know a transfer was happening) has to file a reverse transfer with the same delay that puts them in some kind of limbo.
It’s a complete clusterfuck and is making it really hard to hire for some positions.
I went through 2 H1B "transfers" (so in total I have been employed by 3 different employers as a H1B) 7-ish years ago so I'm very familiar with this process. At least, the way it was working at that time.
Spain isn't interested in getting an American immigrant just because one of its nationals moved to the US.
This was I think also what was envisaged when the EU first wrote free movement into law -- general mixing, rather than one-directional floods.
But my point was that free-movement between near-peer countries seems like almost pure benefit. And this was where the EU started, knocking down walls in benelux... you would struggle to get many people upset about that.
Integration all the way to Romania etc. is more recent, really quite a different thing. The hope was for rapid convergence, and the evidence is mixed I guess.
I do not disagree with your claim about near peer countries.
Granted I acknowledge that has potential to be messy in reality without a whole lot of work to get a framework - let alone one that would be accepted. Perhaps some sort of "social service fee" minimum for benefits in taxes paid to prevent free rider issues for instance.
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/effs-letter-eus-copyri...
Its going to be a infinitesimally small fraction compared to the number of people from those regions that want to work here.
For really dodgy areas not soft postings like UAE / KSA you also get a premium. I remember a colleague who was on +80% for Angola (he got robed twice on the trip from airport to town)
This is a separate argument from allowing economic refugees asylum into a country.
You basically described a green card (except it's nominally five years to citizenship, not six).
After some years of high demand and high prices, I imagine that the price would drop to some stable level. When that happened, we might have an opportunity to bring some sanity to the illegal immigration problem in the US. In some more sane world, both parties might agree that a person that can prove they have been in the US for some number of years can pay for a green card at the auction rate (gov financing available).
As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better education.
When I was brought to work here on H-1B visa, I couldn't understand why the US would need so many immigrant software developers. Now that I've had 5 years to see what your schools are teaching kids, this is no longer a mystery to me. Your education is appalling and is the main reason why I'm planing to leave the country eventually.
Used to be, at least in my region of the USA, companies made local investments to build the talent pool needed.
Tektronix is a stellar example.
https://watch.opb.org/video/oregon-experience-the-spirit-of-...
People literally walked in off the street, got jobs, got education and went on to do great things.
It costs more to do that, but the benefits are easily seen.
Today, we see much less, and demand for people, largely from places that do continue to invest in people, has grown dramatically.
It's not that we don't produce educated people, it's we don't consistently produce educated people across the board and your location and income is a huge factor in your future success.
Those living in West Virginia have almost no chance, and those living in California have much better opportunities. The US, like many countries, falls prey to sweeping generalizations that are at best partly true.
Some state schools in not well known areas of the country are excellent and very affordable (IU, Purdue, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon).
Never mind the issues with union staff you can't fire despite their rampant ineffectivity...
I had some good teachers growing up, as well as a number of bad ones. The good ones all fell into one of these categories: 1) they were young and idealistic 2) they were doing a sabbatical or gap-two-years before going back to their day job as a children's book author, radio astronomer, or medical student 3) they were an independently-wealthy trust fund kid on a mission to do good. I also had some Google coworkers that taught CS in elementary school; they also fell into the "independently wealthy and semi-retired" category.
I come from a family of 3 generations of teachers, but when my starting salary as a computer programmer was within $3K of my mom's retirement salary as a teacher and I made more in 7 years of programming than she did in 39 years of teaching, it's very difficult to justify entering the profession.
(My mom also has stories about the cultural differences in how people treat teachers. The parents of her Asian students would bring her gifts, always treat her with respect, and effusively compliment her on the difference she was making in their child's lives. The parents of many - not all - of her native-born students would treat her like a glorified babysitter, yell at her, threaten legal action, and generally take a complete disinterest in their children's lives. You get what you value.)
When they show up at parent-teacher conferences, they're usually mad that little Johnny is failing...even when little Johnny has literally turned in nothing all year, even classwork you gave them time in class to do. And hasn't retaken that test you've given him three times to do it at home. But it's my fault that I just don't get him a straight passing grade, despite all this. Or, their parents don't come/get mad when the kids cheat and get marked for it, etc. And, of course, often the parents of the best students do come, when they're the ones I need to talk to the least!
But, contrast them with my Hispanic students (particularly the Guatemalan ones, and the Mexican ones; the Puerto Rican ones are different). The Guatemalan students themselves are always so focused and wanting to pay attention, and the two Mexican girls usually are. They get frustrated at the Puerto Ricans, who goof off a lot.
Now, I don't see a lot of their parents, but that's more because they all work night shift (as do my students). However, if I offered (extra) credit for them to email/call, or show up to parent teacher conferences, every single one of them would be there. And usually they contact us, often through their kid since they don't speak much English, if their grades drop asking what the kid can change. It's very different in the attitude they have towards teachers compared to my American students (in general), and I think anyone who deals with a lot of them daily and gets to know them (one class is solely Hispanic students, so I don't have to worry about balancing language issues between them and American ones).
For what it's worth, I didn't go to any elite universities and I make less than 35,000 per year, so I don't have a horse in this race.
What I'm saying is that if you actually compare people with similar demographically-expected IQ and socioeconomic situations, Americans stack up fine. It's the extenuating circumstances that drag the overall averages down.
All that really means is that overall averages across 300 million people aren't that useful.
And if your point isn't race or culture, but of economic disparity, that is sort of my point.
The US is a uniquely diverse country, and such a diverse country necessarily will have a tough time competing in average performance scores with better countries that are not diverse and, instead, have a quite uniform culture. So, right away on average scores, the US will have a tough time competing with much of Europe and the better Asian countries.
Also understand that the famous, prestigious US universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, MIT, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Columbia, most of the SUNY schools, most of the Big Ten, CMU, Chicago, U. Washington, most of the University of California campuses, Stanford, Caltech, University of Texas, Rice, Georgia Tech, etc. are RESEARCH universities and do not concentrate on technical or vocational training for software developer positions where H1Bs are common.
Okay: We're considering education quality and using test scores as evidence.
Well, it is Social Science 101 (my wife's Ph.D. was in mathematical sociology, and my brother's Ph.D. was in political science) to control on other likely explanatory variables.
So, an obvious candidate alternate explanatory variable is culture of the country of the recent ancestors of the students.
So, to compare education in the US with that in, e.g., Japan, we should see how (A) US students of recent Japanese descent compare with (B) Japanese students in Japan. So, now are holding culture reasonably constant and, thus, doing better comparing the schools and whatever else we have not controlled on.
Not to control on culture would be grade F in Social Science 101 and give total garbage results.
I.e., no fair blaming the education in the US when the real cause of the differences is culture and not the education.
Sure, people might be motivated to immigrate here by your universities. Even when I was a teenager growing up in an Eastern European country, I had heard of MIT and dreamed of studying there. But there's a long road to go down before you arrive at your university's doors.
Another thing I would like to point out is that an important aspect of an education system is the access to it. It's kind of like your health care: some of the most advanced treatments are available here, but there's a huge inequality preventing vast numbers of people from having access to those treatments.
Bottom line is that the overall quality of your education system should not only be measured by the quality and prestige of your universities, but a myriad of other factors that influence the final outcome -- that outcome being an apparent shortage of your own skilled citizens.
You can't pay attention to achievement metrics or school ranking systems either. They are almost all relative to American schools only and fail to measure well across different global education models. You may find your local public school as an "A" grade from some rating agency, but it means nothing. The only reliable metric is how many of the graduates are accepted into top tier liberal arts colleges.
Frankly, I'm not even trying any of that mess with my children. We teach them ourselves.
The interesting thing is even when we had millions of people out of work who worked in technical fields, SV and other major tech hubs were pushing for even more H1-B's.
It really has nothing to do with skilled citizens and more to do with the salaries they demand which tend to be on the scale of 1-3 times more expensive to hire and keep then the off-shore people they're hiring.
Just an anecdote for you:
I was hired as a contractor on a financial application at a major health care provider here in the states. I was the only US born developer on the entire team. That included developers, project managers, and scrum mangers, On a team of 18 people, I was the only American. Several times I overheard team members talking about salary and what they were getting paid. It was shocking to me that I was getting almost twice as much as they were per hour for virtually the same work.
It's not the skills or education that are lacking, it's the cost of the labor which is considerably lower for off-shore talent or H1-B contractors.
Of course, I don't have any direct experience with the few companies that are famous for pushing the boundaries of the H-1B visa.
The k-12 numbers are easy to find. Google Pisa.
I believe I already stated that more immigration is not the solution, in my first comment in this thread.
> especially labor that like you is here to take what they can, selfishly, before they jump ship.
What's with the hostility and personal attacks? I'm paying the same taxes are everyone around me, but without the right to influence the system because I can't vote. So I can't see what makes me selfish, except the fact that I plan to "jump ship", as you put it. I came to this country with high hopes and expectations, with the idea that I can not only enrich my life and that of my family, but also work on marvelous tech and make the world better. What my actual experience turned out to be is out of scope of this discussion, but would certainly be a prerequisite for judging me fairly.
for all the talk of "liberal snowflakes", i do find that americans possess a decent amount of personal responsibility, insofar as they will take action to improve their own lives. as for improving their home country, i don't really see many americans doing much other than talk. the only people i see taking action in this way are members of marginalized groups working to improve things for their group and my white liberal friends taking selfies at protests.
Again, I might be wrong, but every time I've read or heard the word "selfish", it was always used as a judgment.
> ask yourself how you can have a positive impact and make your new home a better place
I was under the impression that having a discussion about how to improve things with a group of people who might be in a better position than average to help improve them was also a way of working towards that goal.
> Perhaps that sense of personal responsibility is an American affectation.
This is the third country I've lived in, including my own country of birth. My experience is limited, but it's still more than the average person gets. From that experience, it seems to me to be a generational thing, much more than cultural. It can be seen in different attitudes that different generations adopt towards their employers: generally older generations see their employer as part of their life and a kind of a "family", whereas younger generations view it as a business transaction with severe imbalance of power. I expect same thing happens with patriotism.
There does seem to be at least one cultural aspect to it, though. Americans, as well as citizens of other countries where capitalism has advanced to similar extremes, seem to view things with a sense of "personal responsibility" rather than collective or communal responsibility.
> As one of our leaders once said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That seems even more apropos for those who have made the conscious decision to adopt this place as their home.
Why would it seem "even more apropos" for immigrants? I honestly don't understand this logic: why would you expect guests in your home to take better care of it than you do yourself? And I use the word "guest", rather than "fosterling", because not all immigrants come here immediately convinced that this will be their new home.
Here's a truth about a lot of us immigrants: we come here with a hope, but not with a conviction. We would have preferred to live a happy, fulfilled life in our own country and we tried, but for whatever reason we couldn't and we decided to leave. The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Besides, we're not talking about what the country can do for me. We're talking about what the country can do for its future generations. I already have an excellent education. But I have a much bigger responsibility to my own son, than to your country or even my own.
that's wrong, what you are referring to is "individualism vs collectivism", there's definitely very developed countries who favor collectivism, the perfect example is Japan.
Where did you go to school? How did your education differ from what you've seen in America?
You do make a good point. Perhaps america is only using 2.5 of it's 5%. Half, in other words.
But that's still tiny compared to the sheer amount of foreign tech talent america has been able to benefit from.
The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed:
Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough.
Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to the rest of the world in 4 years. U.S. college graduates are no worse than say UK college grads in terms of ability, even in technical disciplines. Elite U.S. colleges arguably produce students of equal or higher quality and the elite universities in most countries.
Taken broadly, U.S. grad schools are on par with the rest of the world. Its elite grad schools however are heads over heels better -- which is why everyone wants to go to grad school at a good US university. The funding is way better too.
Certain European countries like France, and funneling societies like India and China, produce more highly trained technical types at the college level, but these advantages wash out at the graduate level.
Most of the world optimizes education at the K-12 levels. The U.S. optimizes education at the tertiary level.
At the graduate level (Master/PhD) I'd say it becomes comparable, but there were very few Canadian students compared to Chinese and Iranians.
That is really not that hard to explain. Once you solve hunger, clothing, mobility and housing. You basically take away the most important of human instincts which drive a person to work insanely hard for success.
At that point a person has to call upon his internal human enterprise to succeed. That's hard.
America is just a victim of its own success. This is also called decadence.
"The answer, I think, is that in education and in science, as in fast food and popular culture, America is not really worse than the rest of the world, we are merely a few years ahead of the rest of the world. What we are seeing here will happen everywhere soon enough. Our colleagues abroad can take what scant comfort they can find in the promise that our dilemmas in science and education are on the way, along with Big Macs and designer jeans ... Most elementary school teachers are poorly prepared to present even the simplest lessons in scientific or mathematical subjects. In many places, Elementary Education is the only college major that does not require even a single science course, and it is said that many students who choose that major do so precisely to avoid having to take a course in science. To the extent that is true, elementary school teachers are not merely ignorant of science, they are preselected for their hostility to science, and no doubt they transmit that hostility to their pupils, especially young girls for whom elementary school teachers must be powerful role models. Even those teachers who did have at least some science in college are not likely to be well prepared to teach the subject."
of course "the US" is not a monolith. it's a collection of competing interests. big corporations, consumers, and the existing stock of US-based workers each claim to be "the US."
I'm NOT summarily against H-1B's but wish to insist they be used ONLY to fill in true skill shortages instead of those manufactured via job ad word-smithing.
I agree there is some fluidity to IT labor, but there is a limit to it also.
Besides, the stated on-paper purpose of H-1B visas is to fill (alleged) skills shortages. After the dot-com crash there was a big surplus of labor in the area, yet us citizens were competing with H-1B's still. The stated goal was missing the target during that time.
This scenario is explicitly forbidden by the provisions of the visa program and it is illegal to select a guest worker in preference to a domestic candidate. That is why there is a public notification requirement for all jobs open to guest workers. Obviously all it takes is one minor reason to deem you unqualified. The Disney IT incident shows that there are no consequences for abusing American employees.
Are you suggesting that everyone in the world should have the right to live and work in America?
Primary reason an H1b with a net hourly rate same as a US citizen is more attractive to hire, is because the costs of firing that employee are too low. Unlike a citizen, especially if the citizen is older.
With the suggestion made in the Bloomberg article, it’d have probably been a positive outcome for you if H1b was distributed by way of highest salary first, instead of lottery (which I think didn’t exist during the dot com boom).
Take for example a job posting I had up for more than 3 months. I needed a solid mid-level mechanic. oil/air/tires/suspension and electrical a plus. I dont want my apprentices doing this work because theyre learning to do manifold rebuilds and such. And i dont want my old timers doing it because it will cost a fortune and i need them on harder problems.
So for weeks on end, I get at least 3 interviews a day from grossly unqualified immigrants. Why immigrants? nobody wants a kid who grows up to be a successful mechanic i guess. Everyone "goes to college" now. just ask my alignment tech with a masters in english.
- Ive had a slew of random tourists from europe backpacking around in the US who want a job, and cant seem to understand the gravity of a visa violation. They all want three times what I'm paying and health insurance.
- Ive got college drop-outs from china, russia, you name it, who either blew through all their money or were never qualified for college in the first place, and need something to keep afloat while they fake college.
- and finally, perhaps most controversially, I have central and south americans. Theyre either trapped here because of american immigration policy, or theyre fresh off the boat with a slip of paper written by a friend dictating what they will work for in cash. Most of them speak about 8 words of english. They are radioactive as far as im concerned; you would be insane to hire them.
We're always going to need doctors and engineers. not everyone grows up to be a rocket scientist, and thats okay. But im frustrated at how Americans have turned trade jobs (plumbing, auto work, electricians, linemen, pipefitters, etc...) into some kind of field that no kid can ever enter lest they be disowned.
update: I should clarify. These applicants are upset they must wait 90 days for benefits. we do provide health/dental/401k, just not on day one.
Yes, indeed... as long as a soul-crushing job sitting in a chair and staring at a screen comes with health coverage, and a job in the trades does not, then my hope as a father is that my kids will take the health coverage route. Until we fix our crazy system, blue collar work it is a very frightening prospect.
Is health insurance not something you give out? If that's common enough in the trades to be a complaint about employee desires, then no wonder no one goes into the trades. There is definitely a stigma attached to blue collar work, but part of that is it not paying. All I had to do was read a few tutorials online and a few years later and the only way I'd be making as much money in the trades is by owning my own business or in super specialized niches.
Why would anyone looking at a career pick the trades over that?
I think the main reason is that you can easily find an office job where you won't be doing much other than showing up and participating in the office politics, that pays comparably to the jobs you offer.
Your salary constraints are obviously dictated by supply/demand (i.e. what others agree to work for and what the customers agree to pay for the repairs), so it's not really your fault, but I see the same trend in many industries - plenty of bullshit jobs pay more (or comparable) to the "real" jobs.
Frankly speaking, it spooks the hell out of me because it reminds me of the last decades of USSR before the big crash happened.
The fact that you name health insurance as a problem is a big enough warning sign.
A personal attack as your response? Am I on 4chan?
What about if you had skilled immigrants applying for the job? Say, some qualified mechanics, whether from Germany or China or Mexico?
The problem with America's immigration system (from an outsiders perspective) is that skilled immigration visas (i.e. H1B) are only worthwhile for high skill white collar jobs, and in particular for larger companies who can be bothered with the visa lottery.
I see no reason why skilled immigration for lower paying, but still skilled jobs, like auto mechanics shouldn't be possible. In most developed countries, they run a points system. If you want to move here to Australia and become an electrician or any other high demand job, it's relatively easy as long as you have a qualification, good health, and can speak English, and I think that's the way it should be. Obviously long term you should be trying to train more mechanics, but that's a 5-10 year process, and doesn't fix the problem that you're facing right now with a lack of mechanics.
It sounds like you have a bigger problem than simply a lack of qualified candidates. Do you have any unqualified Americans applying for your job? How little are you offering that European backpackers (who in my experience will work for a pittance) are asking three times what you're offering?
Bingo. I think you nailed OP’s problem right there. If you’re offering to pay in bananas, don’t be surprised when you get a line of monkeys out your door.
I also agree with a many Americans who are anti-H1b that it suppresses wages, hence makes it attractive to higher foreign workers, quite often for jobs that are not truly state of the art, but do require the technical know how.
This is why it makes sense for the H1-B to be a highest paid gets first kind of a visa. That way there's a strong incentive to not hire lowest paid employees.
In fact, I think a better way would be to give two 3-year temporary green cards. if at the end of 6th year if the person still has job, it becomes a permanent job. This removes any control that an employer has to depress the wages, and be fair to the American as well as immigrant labour. Such a system can be made available to at least the undergrad/grad/doctoral degree holders from the US universities.
By limiting the immigrant talent, US has already ensure China is taking a huge leap in terms of tech advances. India will figure out how to make the leap soon.
All the while, Canada is making the most of USA's anti high skilled immigrant situation, but inviting them in droves. We'll see a different Canada in the next 5-10 years, mainly due to the huge number of tech immigrants (of Chinese or Indian origin) moving to Canada.
No, the entire reason companies get away with paying H1Bs below market rate is because the visa is tied to employment.
It needs to be decoupled so that visa holders can freely and easily switch jobs without worrying about losing their status.
ie grant them to people being paid the highest wages first, and limit the h1b holder to mandatory 1 year employment with the sponsoring company then 5 years of free to switch at will.
We'd still be willing to sponsor as we aren't keeping h1bs via the visa; we keep employees because they want to work here. The pain with sponsoring isn't the cost; it's the time and uncertainty. Sponsoring costs compare favorably to the standard 25% a contingency recruiter charges.
I'm against that because it would give FAANG a massive advantage, since they can afford to pay really high salaries compared to, say, a startup.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-workers-earn-six-f...
Further, why shouldn't we allocate visas to the most valuable, ie highest paying, uses?
For this question to be valid, you first need to demonstrate that someone's value can accurately be determined by their salary and their salary only, and that any difference in salary between two people is the result of differences in the value they offer (as opposed to, say, being able to interview well, or knowing someone high up in the company).
Fields that’s get affected negatively could be offered some kind of respite wrt quota. Eg a medical professional on h1 probably won’t be subject to quota.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
"During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs."
...that's how it was explained to me by an executive at my former job (a big part of the reason why it's my former job).
You can't have it both ways.
We recently had a candidate who's main language was python but failed to even run his code on the command line. Saddly this isnt overly rare.
Speaking from personal experience, the number of people with multiple years of experience and multiple degrees in CS (usually BS and MS) who can't pass FizzBuzz is really high.
http://www.gayle.com/blog/2016/1/fizzbuzz-youre-doing-someth...
It doesn't sound like this is the problem, though, in all the cases. It sounds like someone who majored in CS was unable to write this.
Which seems inconceivable to me. And yeah, "inconceivable" is often based on wrong assumptions (it was the basis of one of the oft-repeated lines from cinema: you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means).
But... is there a chance that maybe "CS" just means different things from different programs. I feel like it should be... well, impossible for someone who graduates from a proper CS program to fail to write fizz buzz.
I know, I know, the "no true scotsman" is already getting typed into the response field. But here's the thing, I'm not defining a "proper" program as one that results in an ability to write fizz buzz. I'm defining it as a program that contains, at a minimum, basic algrothmns and data structures. Do people graduate with CS degrees without coding a linked list, binary tree, doing basic sorting, and set permutations?
I'd say if you take that one required class, it should be more or less impossible to not write fizz buzz. I'd be interested in knowing what the "CS" curriculum was for people who can't write this.
I know people confuse CS and IT/CIS, but even at that, those majors generally require at least one basic CS class.
That said... I keep hearing about fizzbuzz, and I'm not sure what I think of the complaint. I hear something along the lines of "We need to do technical screening because you wouldn't believe how many people can't do fizz buzz", but the questions aren't fizz buzz, they're "find all matching subtrees in a binary tree", often at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes. I'm not saying that this is (or isn't) unreasonable, just that there's an awful big difference between fizz buzz and the kind of questions I've encountered in a typical tech interview.
Or keep two extra counters that you increment every iteration and reset when they hit 3 or 5.
Not knowing modulus or bitwise ops etc isn't a good sign, but it isn't disqualifying. Not being able to get fizzbuzz working should be disqualifying, though, unless you're willing to teach someone to program completely.
I am sure that any CS major couos write fizz buzz, on their computer, for the purpose of their homework assignment or whatever.
Whether or not they can do the same thing, in 15 minutes, on a whiteboard in front of someone is a different story.
The moral of this story is that writing code, on a blank slate, while having to have all the syntax memorized, and having everything conpile without having access to a compiler, is a real skill that many people haven't even attempted to do.
I straight-up tell people I don't care if you use the wrong method name (in Python is it ends_with() or endswith? toupper, to_upper, or upcase?). Heck, I even tell them I don't care what language it is as long as it's not too weird.
A few months back I interviewed someone who was currently employed as a software engineer at a major company in Silicon Valley, who couldn't even figure out how to write a tiny little program which kept track of state across method calls. I told him that he could store the state in global variables, make an object to track the state, or anything else he wanted; still couldn't make any progress outside creating a single stateless function. I was truly puzzled.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
if ((i % 3 == 0) && (i % 5 == 0)) cout << "FizzBuzz" << endl;
else if (i % 3 == 0) cout << "Fizz" << endl;
else if (i % 5 == 0) cout << "Buzz" << endl;
else cout << i << endl;
}
} #include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
bool t = (i % 3 == 0);
bool f = (i % 5 == 0);
if (!t && !f) { cout << i << endl; continue; }
if (t) cout << "Fizz";
if (f) cout << "Buzz";
cout << endl;
}
}
That's not even close to true. I've interviewed people with Ph.D.'s in Computer Science and a documented 10+ years of experience as a "developer" of some sort, who can't write Fizzbuzz.
We had a guy come in for a programming interview. He claimed to have 3 years experience with a programming language we commonly use. We gave him a simple challenge (connect to a database using a database connector, read some fields and update another field based on data from the read fields). We told him it's fine to use google, and left him alone for four hours with a computer.
He asked to expand his interview time at the end of the four hours, we grant him an additional two hours. At the end he didn't have code that compiled, much less connected to the database.
This story is not atypical from my experience.
The worst I've hard was a person with 20+ years of consulting experience for top companies in firmware could not code 3 lines of C code to traverse a linked list. Literally didn't know the syntax to dereference pointers!
I feel like the whole question here is simply: how much commitment to the existing US labor pool should US laws/regulations require from US employers?
Over the last decade, the answer has been "not much." But, now, because of political and economic realities, that answer might change.
You used to be able to get hired and taught on the job, now the employers expect you to pay your own way through a technical school for several years before applying for a minimum-wage job. So you've got (a) lower wages (b) you need to pay to educate yourself (c) you need to pay to support yourself during those years of training and (d) you're guessing which job skills are going to be in demand after N years, so after spending the time training and taking on debt there might not even be a job waiting for you.
I understand it's better for the companies and perhaps the economy as a whole to import labor, but it seems worse for me. Is there research on this subject or something I'm missing?
There are other effects too of course. Letting in Sergey Brin may have competed down CEO wages (as per theory) but arguably more importantly drove up demand for engineers. Letting in lots of H1B engineers no doubt drives up demand for gardeners & house-cleaners.
If protectionism causes a rival to Google to be viable in other countries, that could hurt your salary prospects back home quite a bit.
The most likely competitors are in China. The actions of the Chinese government have much much more to do with this than the actions of the US.
Historically, attempts to keep a lead by any other path than leading ahead haven't worked well.
High quality talent from abroad improves the competitiveness of the US ecosystem and drains talent from other ecosystems. I'm going to go ahead and guess that US wages actually go up with less restrictive immigration policies.
The vast majority of these jobs aren't that challenging, hence the immigrants. They're mostly looking for monkeys, not 10x devs.
Company A hires a worker and invests in training them, then before they can get their value back out of the education the worker changes to a higher paying job at Company B which doesn't have the training expenses to recoup. Our example worker and Company B are both making their best possible rational decisions.
There are solutions to making this work:
• It could be unlawful for the worker to use their skills, paid for by Company A, with another company until they had 'paid off' their training. Effective non-competes based on skills. Not a PR win for Company A. Also, you never want a judge to cite the Emancipation Proclamation to you in court.
• Company A could train a worker and have the worker incur unavoidable debt so that should they switch companies Company A will still be reimbursed for their training costs. This combines student loans with for profit workplace training. The conflicts of interest are huge and the optics are horrible for Company A. Again, you don't want a judge to say "indentured servant" to you in court.
• The worker could independently train themselves in something they feel might be advantageous in the work place, incurring any costs themselves in the hope of recouping that investment. This is the usual method in the US, there are some problems with workers making bad investments and incurring lifelong financial burdens.
• Both Company A and Company B could shoulder the cost of training/educating workers and have access to the resulting workers. This is known as taxation and state sponsored education. Workers still may make bad decisions in their training selections.
This is the paragraph where I espouse the best way to move forward. I've got nothing. I like the fourth one, but when you add in educational institutions with their own interests and some desire to steer the educational funding to studies which are in demand it gets very complicated.
America has the whole idea of skilled temporary immigration completely backwards. You want the equivalent of Ivy leaguers from other countries but want to treat them like slaves with a ton of documentation and constant fear of deportation?
That is not a life Ivy-League level folks of any country want to live. Just look at other developed countries. America has really not kept pace.
Here's one site that better explains the Republican position: https://www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-immigrat...
"Republicans believe that family and skill should be prioritized when granting citizenship to those who go through the proper legal channels to enter the country. Priority should be given to children and spouses of immigrants that are already legally in the country. They believe the government should emphasize the skills that our economy needs most when determining eligibility, and that the Labor Certification Program should be overhauled. These two measures together would help match qualified workers with work that is in urgent need of filling positions in the country. Despite accusations of being anti-immigration, Republicans do understand the value that immigrants bring to this country, when entering via legal methods. In the Republican Platform adopted at the 2000 GOP convention, the Republican Party declared that it supports increasing the number of H-1B visas, to ensure that high-tech workers are provided to specialized positions, as well as expanding the H-2A program for temporary agricultural workers."
The current administration has repeatedly demonstrated their antipathy to legal immigration.
The current administration has never done anything to show antipathy to legal immigration, the first lady is a legal immigrant as are her parents.
Also school visas are not immigrant visas if one wants to be pedantic about it.
The existence of a list at a certain point in time doesn't mean anything if the current administration is the one that uses it in a policy it created itself.
School visas are the foot in the door for young scientists and engineers to employment in the US.
You're being disingenuous in claiming it was motivated by religion. You're incorrect in stating it restricted legal immigration. It stopped immigration by countries deemed a threat to the security of the US by Congress and the previous administration.
I also don't think it's disingenuous in stating it was motivated by religion when the circuit court for Hawaii declared it was and 4 members of the supreme court agreed.
https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/trumps-attack...
The siren song of those who have no argument.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/18/trump-legal-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/now-trump-admin...
Your second link is a bit silly. Perhaps you're not acquainted with how immigration works. When a person is sponsored to immigrate to the US, their sponsor signs an agreement to essentially pay for them for the next ten years no matter what. I know, I've actually filled out and signed that form along with the I-130. Use of public assistance programs is a significant red flag on a citizenship application (always has been), due to the fact that means the person probably somehow does not have the means to support themselves, and thus is not likely in compliance with our immigration system. Our immigration system and citizenship system is based on allowing people to immigrate who can provide for themselves or have people who will provide for them -- that's a feature, not a bug. You may disagree with the program, but the administration is simply enforcing policies that are current law. Previous administrations may have chosen to ignore those laws, but that doesn't remove them from the books. There are plenty of features built into the US Government to change those laws if the people so desire -- the people in the US have chosen not to do so, your feelings notwithstanding.
The census flap is about counting citizens, not illegals. We all know that some people want all illegal aliens counted as it would skew things in some areas, but again, change the laws if you don't like them.
Uh, 'chain migration'?
Putting all other issues aside positive and negative, if you turned off the foreign immigration tap, the people in power (corporations) would be screaming at Washington to fix American education system so they could actually find qualified candidates. In that would be a lot of value.
Yet my area has a gross shortage of skilled trade labor. Want an electrician, prepare to wait 6 months. Need concrete poured at your house? Zero chance of getting a legitimate contractor, you'll be hiring someone doing it illegally. And you'd better treat your plumber like your best friend and not grouch when they pad the bill by a couple of hours.
Also a student loan is how you claim the poor can go to college. But I stated that most countries have free schooling. Being poor then immediately adding debt doesn't help yourself at all. Perhaps you should go hang out with some poor people and hear it straight from the source. Not trying to be rude or anything, as you make good points about skilled labor.
I’ve know too many friends and relatives, all American-born, who got into tech despite of rather than because of their state-funded primary and secondary education.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=strawberry+picking+machine&for...
gotocake says: "this hard and unpleasant work":
http://whvaustralia.net/fruit-picking-hard/
Certainly we don't need to castigate anyone. But we don't need more (illegal or legal) unskilled immigrants taking jobs that will soon be supplanted entirely by automation. We need skilled professions: doctors, engineers, nurses and (God forbid) lawyers.
We'd be fine (indeed, we'd be better off) w/o _any_ of the 7,000-14,000 migrants headed toward the USA's southern border right now.
Swiss people clean their own damn homes at a wage which, in India, would justify several servants. This in turn drives a market for Roomba early adopters... but also just for less obvious technology, like houses well-enough sealed against dust.
It's incredibly naive to think it was ever unintentional.
And yet, California has an above average poverty level, below average per-capita education spending and achievement and all-too-frequent state budget problems.
How can this brain-driven economy coexist with this poverty and inequality? It's not the result I would expect. How do we explain this? More important - how do we reduce the poverty and spread the benefits of this brain-driven economy more evenly?
Short term, sure it's beneficial for the US, but I don't think it's a good idea to reflect in a vacuum or only thinking short term. Emergent countries being able to develop is beneficial for everybody.
Silicon Valley is successful partly because noncompetes don't get enforced in California. It makes things slightly worse in the short term for each company but better for both the individuals and the world overall.
The US has been successful partly because it's attracted so many skilled immigrants. It makes things slightly worse for other countries in the short term (though remittances!) but is better for both the individuals and the world overall.
I certainly think it's better for the rich as it drives the stock market up, but a blanket "better for the world overall" is certainly an interesting take.
In theory, yes. However, in practice, "participating in the development" can mean working for crappy employers, for a pittance, on some ass backward php/delphi/whatever system that has been accruing technical debt for the past decade. Not all developing countries are friendly for entrepreneurs either(bureaucracy, corruption, taxes, limited access to credit), so options may be limited.
In many cases, they wouldn't be able to contribute that much, but they may be highly skilled, and the United States works as a force multiplier.
Source: came from a third world country, had a company for a couple of years, spent another couple of years trying to officially close that company after operations had ceased.
I grew up in Spain and got all my higher education for free. The state essentially spent large amount of money in me, hoping that I would give it back to the economy as a skilled worker.
After the 2008 crisis I moved like thousands others in my same situation. Now other countries will benefit from the ROI that my home country made on me instead.
Really? Why? It can't find enough people to educate among 350 existing million?
While the pay gap between companies exist even today, the difference is today small & medium companies can afford the foreign labor.
1. It will create a huge shortage of skilled professionals in America and will significantly drive up their costs and salary. This will result in more people choosing to enter those fields.
2. It will increase the global support of skilled persons as those who remain in their country of origin will be able to train and support more professionals.
My basis for this is looking at number of engineers per capita, the developed world produces an order of magnitude more engineers and doctors and scientists then the developing world, but then we take the few they do produce which inhibits future growth.
I think for skilled labor in the US there are way better ways to accomplish this. Lower the cost of education, and work to improve education on the whole.
But your idea is punitive of people in poor countries who have skills, yet are limited in how much they can improve their lot in life due to lack of demand for them.
Moreover, a lot of immigrants that arrive to the US end up having a greater impact on the world as a whole than they would or could have had in their home countries. This is the ideal scenarios of the sometimes true concept, "Land of Opportunity". I don't presume you are ignorant of this, but conditions in many other countries are worse for a lot of reasons.
My own anecdotal evidence: One of the main factors the lead to my own father's emigration from his home country was because the "old guard" at his university effectively blocked him from progressing any further lest it be a threat to their own established position. Arriving at in the US, he had no problem rising up to the top in the more merit-based system here and effecting major, positive change in his field.
So, as is the case with so many other issues, this one is not as cut-and-dry as your comment makes it out to be, and prevents a lot of other good from flourishing as well. There are not equal opportunities for world-benefiting success everywhere.
His take-home would have been slashed by about 70%, so he gave up the idea. Have things changed since then?
The biggest challenge: to stay here for longer, try to learn German well. It is not that difficult if you take your time.
Thats the problem. You used the dollar symbol, but even if its euros, the upper range you gave is 160k. That's way, way too low for an upper range if someone's thinking of salaries on one of the US' coasts (especially west, but also east). Insurance is mostly for if you lose your job...as long as you have one, its a pretty tiny part of the paychecks, retirement matching is pretty common, food isn't that expense (I dunno about Germany, but compared to other countries Ive lived in, its cheap). After the difference in taxes, the delta in the upper range is a significant factor.
Im curious about the property taxes part though. Do you have some examples? Real numbers are hard to google.
If you really count in the high rents on east and westcoast, I doubt there is high net difference of money to live from. If you are working as a freelancer, your tech income will also be rather in the 160-240k$ range (and quite stable nevertheless)
In percentage? Probably not a big difference. In absolute numbers? OOoooh yeah.
I can only speak from my personal experience, but my take home money after -all- expenses, including after feeding my retirement fund (basically what ends up in my savings and investment accounts unrelated to my retirement budget) is generally more than what a lot of people make as gross income in many other countries.
There's no argument that the money comes at a high social inequality cost, but I wouldn't be able to get close to that anywhere else.
But it comes at the cost of...well, everyone else.
When I was considering moving to Europe, I thought of Germany, but quickly dismissed, and then came to the conclusion that the Netherlands would be a better fit. But I'm not sure how accurate that assessment was.
In Berlin, you can certainly work and live a 100% English life. Then again, salaries are lower there as you compete with cheaper workers from Poland and other Eastern European countries.
Of course. But being able to at least perform basic functions while also adapting to a new country is important(and it is overwhelming already without language issues). After a while, you're doing yourself a disservice by not learning the local language.
My aunt lived in Japan for close to two decades. She can't speak Japanese and knew barely enough to get by. She never really had to, as she's married to a native japanese, which doesn't help matters. But that's absolutely not the way to go.
"This does not mean open borders but a smart and lawful methodology for determining who should be allowed entry."
The closest quote I can find from a national politician calling for open borders is Donald Trump in 2013.
"We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability."
That's an inaccurate summary of what he said that's been going around right wing news sites. Here's what he actually said:
> “And so corporations, certain people who get certain rights, can go back and forth across the border seeking out the lowest wages, but people, regular people, cannot go back and forth across the border seeking out the highest wages. So what it creates is an imbalance. It creates an injustice.”
He isn't calling for open borders. In the context he was pointing out problems created by allowing corporations to move back and forth between borders to seek out the lowest wage employees, but not allowing employees to move back in forth to seek the highest wage employer. In the context of the interview, he was talking mostly about market protectionism to correct the employer side of that imbalance.
With respect to the shirt he was wearing. It was band merch for an rap group. It's an inspirational quote empathizing with people crossing the border to improve their lives, not a literal call to remove border checkpoints. He may even prefer a world with open borders, but he's not saying we can or should actually implement that unilaterally.
Again no one thinks Donald Trump wants open borders because he thinks one day we will have to "leave borders behind".
His his actual immigration platform:
"I believe immigration rules need to be straightforward, fair, and predictable. They currently are not. I am committed to passing comprehensive immigration reform and have co-sponsored such legislation in my two terms in Congress. I believe that our reformed immigration system should include a clear path to citizenship for those who are already in the U.S. working and paying taxes. We need to put families first and have an expedited process for family reunification and believe that the federal government has an obligation to clear up the lengthy backlog of family visa requests. I also believe we need to pass The Dream Act, which is legislation designed to increase access to higher education for the children of immigrants and give them an opportunity to succeed and give back to their communities."
Notice nothing about open borders.
I don't understand this. Corporations are not allowed to move back and forth between borders at the drop of a hat- you have to satisfy legal obligations to be recognized as a corporation and hire people in any nation. Legal immigrants have also have to wait in a queue and satisfy formalities. The analogy just breaks down for illegal immigrants who are neither interested in following laws or awaiting their turn. So national borders are not creating any injustice.
Please note that he wore that T-shirt at a "May-day" parade in a video published on his own twitter channel. It is rather "nice" of you to re-frame his stance that it was in support of a "Rap Group", but you and I both know that certainly wasn't the case.
I'm not arguing for or against open borders. But I'm telling you Keith Ellison isn't arguing for what you think he is.
>Legal immigrants have also have to wait in a queue and satisfy formalities.
For 99% of the population there is no queue to wait in.
>who are neither interested in following laws or awaiting their turn
Again this is a right wing talking point. For the average person in Mexico, there is no turn. There isn't even a line to get in.
>So national borders are not creating any injustice.
You're arguing with a straw man. He never said that. He said that it's too easy for corporations to move between borders because of NAFTA (not frictionless, but too easy), and too hard for employees. That imbalance is what he's saying creates the injustice, not border security.
>but you and I both know that certainly wasn't the case.
I do know that it wasnt to support a rap group (also no need for scare quotes here--rap group is an accurate description.).
I never said it was only or even partially to support the group itself. It was to show solidarity with a group of desperate poor people with an aspirational quote.
You can believe and even advocate for a future world without borders as an aspirational goal, without believing that it's possible today or likely possible ever.
Do you think Donald Trump's quote that we need to leave borders behind meant that he wants to just stop gaurding the border?
Speaking from an immigrant family - there are lot of procedures to formally migrate into the US. You need an immigrant visa for starters and this is not easy to get - you can be rejected for several reasons and need to reapply. Then you need to work towards getting a green card for at-least 5 years. There is a waiting list. You may not get your card for more than a decade - sometimes even 20 years!. So I do not understand what you mean by "99% of the population, there is NO queue to wait in". That doesn't make any sense to me at all. The only way there would be no queue if you hop the border and claim false refugee status. For folks who have had a long, long road to legal immigration into the states, this is very bitter pill.
About Donald Trump - it obvious that he is a closed border/anti-immigrant politician. Thats the plank he ran on for office. His one misleading quote is offset by thousands/ten-thousands of his other statements in favour of reduced immigration.
About a future world without borders - only possible when world-wide legal frameworks are in place, common law enforcement, similar systems of government and world-wide elections.
>there are lot of procedures to formally migrate into the US.
There are specialized visa for celebrities, athletes, people with extraordinary abilities, investors, refugees from certain countries, and qualified asylum seekers. Almost none of the of people in Mexico will qualify for these visas, and there is nothing they can do to change that.
For everyone else in Mexico, there are 3* ways to immigrate to the US.
1. You have close family who are US citizens, who are willing to sponsor you.
2. You marry a US citizen.
3. You have an occupation that is in high demand, and you can find an employer to sponsor you. (For most professions the employer must also win one of a few slots in a visa lottery)
For all of those categories except refuge and asylum, your family must make 1.5x above the federal poverty level for your family size including yourself (this disqualifies most of the Mexicans who do have family in the US), you must pass a Civil Surgeon exam, and a background check.
If you don't fit into one of those categories there is no way for you to legally immigrate to the US. There is nothing you can do about it. There is no line to wait in. There is no immigration visa to apply for.
When you see poor Mexican families crossing the border, it’s because they had absolutely no way to legally immigrate. Even if they waited 20 or even 50 years, they wouldn’t get in because there is no line, no process.
>You need an immigrant visa for starters and this is not easy to get - you can be rejected for several reasons and need to reapply.
Again unless you fit one of the above categories, and the vast majority of Mexicans do not, this does not exist. There is nothing to apply for.
*There are also a small amount of diversity visas awarded each year in a lottery. People born in Mexico and most other large countries don't qualify for the diversity lottery.
Most of the thread is managing to stay focused on the specifics of this article. Please emulate that instead.