Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=2
What's the abuse?
Just a random link, but the contours of the problem:
https://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-pr...
In fact, there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/3pi8vo/highsk...
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.
There's no "if" here.
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.
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.
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 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"
The other main article https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf is more positive but there is no way you can call it a rosey picture.
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?
Contrast that with the previous year: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/Appr...
You can see that the outsourcing firms have fewer and fewer approvals. Of course with this latest change it will decline more.
"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.
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.
find a job
get/consult a lawyer to make sure everything was good
do the whole change
and end up in the exact same situation
Situation: You are tied to ONE employer and if something goes wrong they can just end your job and kick you out
I've done the change so let's not pretend it is some super easy, doesn't matter thing
Also, if you have to leave US where do you have to go?
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 #$@$#$%
If you have to go back to UK or Canada that is no big loss
If, on the other hand you have to go back to China or India
or AFrica then your entire family is #$@$#$%
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!
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.
H1B is just your regular temp.
That's probably about the handful of consulting companies doing shady stuff. Not the overall program as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
It's horrible. Govt is not even remotely interested in fixing this
It's literally telling someone that wants to hire a particular person to not hire that person, because you think that that person is wrong.
Would you like me to advocate for the government telling who you hire as your barber? Advocating employment restrictions - is just that.
Adding "benevolent coercion" to the mix, doesn't negate the coercion.
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.
Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.
They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
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.
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.
(Not sure why doingmyting's comment saying the same thing is flagged. Virtually all of this user's comments seem to be flagged for some reason.)
But otherwise I agree with rest of your points.
I’m guessing you don’t know very many Indians?
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.
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?
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.
The secondary information is more useful in practice, because it represents the actual practice, not legal theory.
> I said "could ever not", not "could not ever", but that's a moot point now.
Ah, sorry, I misread, it's my bad.
https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt
I believe the I-140 is for employment-based green cards.
The long wait times are due to annual quotas by country, not slow handling of paperwork.
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.
Or they don’t want other people to see what a comment is saying.
The tall nail gets the hammer.
The inconvenient facts get the gray text.
The backlog is due to: 1) the limited number of immigrant visa defined in the law and 2) country based diversity quotas.
Pretty quick would be a month.
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.
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.
This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/23/application...
when the basis is country-specific, and all countries are treated equally, it is purely supply/demand.
No one applies from Afghanistan, so it is easier to get a GC -- so is US biased towards Afghanistan?
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.
Maybe something like upper 2% of salaries in the county.
A fixed number will never be appropriate for all the areas in the US, and a fixed number will always need to be adapted.
[1] https://wallethacks.com/average-median-income-in-america/
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)?
If the labor pool shrinks a bit, their negotiating power will rise and this will solve itself.
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.
So your assuming that being a good little Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist" is a good idea, and we should touch our caps to the software mill owner.
Graduate salaries are starting to push high 30's!
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'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.
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.
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.
It's the same in the US, so salary figures are directly comparable (after currency conversion).
Taxes are lower in the US, but healthcare costs are much higher and it roughly balances out.
But of course, that demand drives up salaries across the entire USA to some degree.
Boston, Seattle, and New York would instantly qualify.
Some might say Denver and LA as well as many others would have plenty of well paid developers.
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.
If they are, there's nothing wrong with this situation.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
What country would be number two? I bet there would be a spirited argument.
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.
An extra $100k would have been really nice.
Of course housing costs have gone up significantly relative to pay in the past decade, so who knows.
Point is, by international standards, USD $170k is a very high salary for software engineers too, even for a specialist.
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.
Yep this is a problem, some (many) H1B people do not have a relevant degree in CS, not sure how this will work out for them.
I am not the person you are replying to, but a bachelor degree in one of the engineering disciplines is very common.
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 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.
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.
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.
if you are claiming the usa is not a well functioning representative democracy, i agree.
A claim on the intent of a government can be made without making a claim whether that intent is being fulfilled
if Flint isn't an indictment of US democracy, what would be?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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 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.
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
This is the same argument that is used to justify slavery. You don't want to go there.
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)
Romanians(with GDP of 8k per person) didn't just get up and move to UK once they were completely free to do so in 2012.
US also had mostly free migration between Mexico and US, till some xenophobe decided to put up a legal wall.
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.
PPP GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
Murder Rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
The US is not really a functional democracy or represenatative republic at this point. Money and power run most policy: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-cor... (from 2015).
Lobbying dollars hugely outweigh voter preference in policy: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014...
And if you are a company looking to make a profit lobbying may be the best investment to make over capital or other useful growth moves: https://medium.com/numbers-that-matter/return-on-investment-...
That's right, ROI on lobbying is about 200,000% though 10 years it ago it was closer to 20,000%: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/04/09/return-on-lobbying...
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.
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.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
If the answer is no, how does this apply?
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.
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.
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).
So if you want to regulate who I have in my home, then maybe I should regulate who your barber is.... and I would choose Sweeney Todd.
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.
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.
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?
Your views are fascinating.
They said, a nation with self determination can decide what it wants according to its laws. It’s that simple.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems pretty double standard.
Its the classic 'Do as I say, not as I do'.
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.
India isn't one person that holds all these opinions.
But I do find myself feeling sorry for the fact that they basically discriminate against those whom are not rich and/or are lesser educated.
In many cases they're the people that would benefit the most from being allowed to walk away from a system thats failed them.
I don't really have a solution, just a thought.
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?
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.
Doing something like that at scale seems like an easy way to get caught and go to jail.
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.
Do you believe that H1B is not inherently abusive?
Do you believe that if US agrees that someone is useful, they shouldn't get residency immediately?
Do you think that indentured servitude is a reasonable tool?
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.
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.
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'.
I'm just genuinely curious
They were sending their money home to India as well.
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.
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.
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 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 :-)
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.
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.
This not meant as a personal dig at you, I'm glad that it worked out well for you.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If I may ask, what has been your career path since your H1B days?
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.
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.
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
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.
That Romanians should be kicked out of EU because they are stealing "R jerbs"?
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.
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".
Not sure what fraud these new rules will prevent, if they are implemented.
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.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
And those points matter towards getting a Permanent Residence Status.
There's no fast track for masters. It's entirely points based.
Source: I work at Google Canada and submitted my PR application last year.
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.
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.
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/th...
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.
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.
[1]https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eoDetails?rrid=131148
[2]https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.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.
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.
Especially when there are just two sides.
This has nothing to do with the US, it applies just as well to e.g. Europe.
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.
Is there any other independent confirmation that it was withdrawn? I can't find any. The PDF is still up.
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
You can correlate the RIN between the Rule and the PDF: RIN 1205-AC00
Also the rule does mention the new wage levels (eg. pages 147 and 148).
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.
I really don't like his personality, but really do appreciate a lot of the things Trump does in practice.
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
in any case, having H-1B be a lottery was always weird. i just hope this doesn't impact any existing H-1B holders :(
As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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 suspect that's going to ramp up more.
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
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.
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.
[1] "In the past three months, U.S. employers had about 918,000 unfilled IT jobs, according to IT trade group CompTIA." - https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-got-talent-just-not-en... [2] "Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater." - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b [3] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...
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.
Be grateful! Not all of us are so lucky!
"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."
Isn't this significant?
Who knows whether it will be a positive push in the right direction, but it's certainly changing the dynamics of the region.
If your goal is to screw the Palestinains, this is a good thing. Otherwise, they should have a voice.
> And as for Iran, it's pulling countries away from their sphere of influence.
This is a nonsensical statement: those Sunni countries are already deeply opposed to Shiite Iran even more than they are to Israel.
... and those of us (perhaps sufficiently few) who work on H1B legally, for the visa's purpose (insufficient American expertise).
And no, the consultant chop shops haven't been an issue for at least four years now since USCIS started cracking down on them.
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.
But just because "the spouse" doesn't need to work, doesn't mean they don't want to work.
"The spouse" shouldn't be denied the right to work just because their partner has an H1-B.
For shame.
Given vs denied is a weird dichotomy. If you read the US constitution, you will see how it's about re-affirming rights rather than giving them.
Anyway. Needing to apply to work still admits that the default case is not being able to work.
Wow, that's a bit regressive view that high earning people must marry unaspirational spouses.
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.
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.
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
But xenophobia will not let that happen.
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.
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.
0. https://news.gallup.com/poll/276932/several-issues-tie-impor...
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-is...
2. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/where-president-trump-...
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/26/fact-...
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.
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
EDIT: Here's the unpublished ruling in PDF: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.pdf
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 looks like a rule that will block all the self thought developers, which are plenty and some are among the best.
The US has a jobs training program for foreign workers/grads. It's called OPT.
That's abuse.
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.
This is called -- prejudice.
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.
And if your working on big clusters you will using a distributed software system MPI Map Reduce Hadoop etc
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.
Not true. I know this was "withdrawn" yesterday.(see my comment below).
https://redbus2us.com/h1b-perm-wage-levels-rule/
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.
https://twitter.com/gsiskind/status/1311766795217514499?ref_...
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.
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.
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.
Does the Indian government care about americans? How about the Chinese?
Americans are constantly being fired and replaced with cheaper h1bs.
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.
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.
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.
USA is also part of a larger community of countries, treating their citizens with less dignity is not a smart policy.
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.
E.g of companies handing Canadian compliance and billing their US clients. https://syndesus.com/why-u-s-companies-need-a-peo-to-recruit...
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.
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.
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.
Considering the backlog for green cards if you're from india/china, there are _tons_ of people in this situation.
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
Edited to correct the form number
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.
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.
BY DESIGN, as H1Bs (as well as L1s and a couple others) are dual intent
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.
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?
The amusing part is that both sides now look like hypocrites. The outcomes for individuals and their families is obviously tragic either way.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
Hiring for the later will hopefully cease to be cost effective. But the former should still be worth it.
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.
How does this follow?
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.
Colleges are unrelated to visa refusals.
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.
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.
However I am confident that if the US keeps on the trajectory it's on this will change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
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.
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.
Is it? One could do both jobs (Advanced ML & QA) but I'm not sure the other could.
Question is: Should the job of guard at ToysRUs be considered a specialty occupation?
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.
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.
More details - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vSeeTD1O...
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.
What do the levels you mentioned exactly mean?
> 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.
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?
https://www.flcdatacenter.com/download/NPWHC_Guidance_Revise...
Of course, Netflix won’t need to change anything. They already pay twice as much as the highest number here, all in cash.
source: https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
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.
Source: p52 on https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
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.
Table 2 on Page 54 is even crazier.
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.
The departments methodology in setting these levels is quite amusing for anyone with a basic grasp on stats. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
For NYC: (I II III IV) = (116,251 150,010 183,768 217,526)
https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...
For SF: (I II III IV) = Not provided. Some notice seems to imply that any level must be >208k.
https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...
For SEA: (I II III IV) = (139,880 167,918 195,936 223,974)
https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=4266...
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.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/prope...
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
I wouldn't take anything they publish about foreign labor seriously, especially how they cherry pick stats on that report.
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.
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?
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.
That and US doesn’t need to pay a dime for them developing their skills while getting to skim the cream of the crop.
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.
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.
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.
It actually kind of seems like we can do this. We do that by increasing the visa requirements, as this new directive is doing so.
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.
As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.
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.
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.
"""
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.
"""
Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
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.
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.
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.)
More reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le...
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.
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.
Why?
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.
I know multiple Americans who are good software developers with good credentials who would be qualified for that job and similar but never got them.
An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your company has to declare what industry segment they're in when submitting annual returns anyway (here), not sure if it's the same case in the US.
The sacrifice to the "right now" bit is immense, it destroys incentive to learn pretty much anything.
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".
Possible solutions are:
-Require the hirer to contribute to scholarship funding in the area of work
- Limit H1B to 75th percentile in salary terms.
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.
I can't find anything specific about the new requirements.
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.
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.
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.
...
> 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.
https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Demand for nurses doesn't change abruptly and before importing people became a fad it was largely followed by supply.
The Market works. Pay fair wages and your personnel problems go away.
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.
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.
And when you reach 80k (or whatever the number was), you'll also be able to get H1B nurses.
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.
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.
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).
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?
You can do that though: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?year=2019
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.
That is 6 months, plus a couple thousand dollars minimum, to try to get an H1B status for someone you want to hire.
If an employer is knowingly expecting the person they hire to bail after 6 months, they won't go through the process.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
TCS has made an announcement that they will not have any layoffs during COVID https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/tcs-not-to-lay-off-e...
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).
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.
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.
https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overa...
Some blogs for the curious:
https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-f...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
If someone can get hired and hold a job paying, say, $25 an hour and keep it for a year, let them stay as long as they want.
It would probably put some pressure on wages, but it would also increase economic activity (create demand).
In any case, it aids in my job security.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php
https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/top-ten-countries-rese...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01231-w
You are the one that’s confident in something you clearly don’t know and ignoring hard numbers.
US ranking at the top does not mean its Americans!! That's whole point of hiring H1B workers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2020-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/1.19431!/menu/main/t...
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.
"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.
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.
No, programmers are underpaid, deliberately. We just had a story all about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689582
It has been suggested by Eric Weinstein that the H1B visa was deliberately designed to cap wages of PhDs... this is a side-effect.
Restricting the supply of software engineers to the US will help software engineers at the expense of everyone else.
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.
It's not a "problem" if you hear this and think, "Yeah, it should be hard for them".
Ultimately, people explicitly disagree with your initial position and framing.
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.
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.
> 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.
Would this not still retain equal quality?
As an example, America would never have been first on the moon if it were not for a certain German engineer Wernher von Braun.
> 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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why should a university give a "rat's ass" about you when a foreign student will pay more?
The issue probably was your parents made enough to not qualify for extra financial aid.
That sucks, and I empathize. I'm living it trying to get finaid for my kids private school.
But, let's not blame immigrants for a broken system. If anything they aren't to blame because they didn't vote for it.
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.
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.
This is short sighted.
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.
That's the point of the visa.
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.
It should simply be a fixed number of visas allocated to the highest wage applicants, like an auction, end of story.
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.
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?
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.
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... )
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In banking, you have even more diverse backgrounds than software development.
>“ 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.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/799402801/canada-wins-u-s-los...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-07-...
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.
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.
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.
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 will not be granted a work permit to work remotely for an American company in Canada.
Canadian Immigration is actually quite strict.
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.
https://syndesus.com/why-u-s-companies-need-a-peo-to-recruit...
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.
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.
Sounds like bullshit knife hanging over American tech workers heads. Cut the rope, let's see what happens.
> Some of the best software engineers I know
Presumably the best be ok as they'll be able to get in on the O-1 visa for people with exceptional ability? It's everyone else who will be in trouble.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember, this was shepherded by Stephen Miller and others in the administration whose explicit aim is reducing immigration by every lever available.
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.
As far as I know there is no actual audit of what the contents of the work are.
This is evidence that H-1B shouldn't apply to those positions, they don't require any skill set that is in actual shortage.
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.
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.
Edited the previous comment to reflect this.
I don't think runarberg meant that xenophobia is acceptable or proper.
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.
There is an abundance. Check out the literature on adult development. I’m partial to Kegan’s model, but others work.
Here is an accessible article on Kegan’s work:
https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And then you end up with the "PhD taxi driver" problem too.
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.
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
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 recall the last PhD taxi driver I had when discussing this had their PhD in “Geography”.
PhD in Geography could mean a lot of things but among those the chance that it's a fluff degree is high I'm afraid (and it might not even be a PhD)
The howls of outrage died out fairly quickly when it was pointed out that many developed countries use a point system.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It’ll never clear without reform.
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!
It would be great to be able to sort by the median salary (maybe highlight which companies are taking advantage).
It would also be useful to compare it with "median non-H1B salary" which also might highlight where people are taking advantage.
If you click the column heading in the second table, you should be able to sort by median salary for the major H1B employers.
Any suggestions on where to find non-H1B median salary data, aside from doing something like scraping Glassdoor?
I think some digging would be required, but I believe it's required by public companies, there are some sources like here: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/how-does-your-pay-stack-up/
The part that is still problematic is that it obviously varies by region, definitely not an easy problem.
Scraping Glassdoor might be easier/more accurate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To me, it's the legal version of having your passport stolen for ransom in a third world country.
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.
As an EE, that is rough.
This is one of those policy decisions that I guess might sound reasonable on the outside, but has absolutely no bearing on reality.
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.
It would benefit all parties to have a system that is more transparent, predictable and administratively simpler.
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.
- 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.
It's also important to remember these are not the only changes that have taken place to H1B visas in this administration, and that it's already become more difficult. https://www.investopedia.com/news/impact-trumps-h1b-visa-cra...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4893923/user-clip-sen-durbin-...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Who’s we? Rent is astronomical
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).
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you say "extraordinary skill" you are probably thinking about the O-1 visa (which is similar to the Australian subclass 124).
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.
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?
You're thinking of the O-1. The H-1B is a specialty occupation visa, not an "extraordinary skill" visa.
But, who knows. It could just all blow up in our faces too.
This sounds good in theory, I'm wondering how well this is going to be executed in practice
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.
This is mostly a PR move.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/apr/21/trump-us-immi...
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)?
“Let’s pit you tech workers with lower paid foreign tech workers and make you blame the wrong group of people”
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
[2] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...
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.
[1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...
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
>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?
The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/vancouver-...
(Though we'd have to be really mad to replace it with a lottery...)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I would not consider startup equity equitable to salary compensation.
Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!
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.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/ma...
Not really. They (and most other developed countries) simply pay less of their GDP towards healthcare.
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.
Canada in general has much lower income inequality, which is an a-OK trade off for slightly lower wages, as long as basic needs are covered.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
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)."
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
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.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/immigration/common-immigration...
The split in the US for family vs employment immigration is around 80/20. In Canada it's around 40/60.
> 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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
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.
You're simply mistaken.
From: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/tab...
Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2018
Year Number
2018 1,096,611
2017 1,127,167
2016 1,183,505
This also obviously doesn't even count the number of illegal aliens coming here every year.
> The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.
Native Americans came from elsewhere at some point too, I suppose they are immigrants also according to your meaningless definition.
Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.
You are the one who is mistaken.
> 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...
[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-to-admi...
On an annual basis:
The US brings in 100-200k refugees. Total immigration is 1.0-1.1M. The US grants citizenship to 700-800k immigrants.
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.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/refugee-cap-historic...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/19/canada-now-...
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.
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])
[1] https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/migration/index.... [2] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf
My parenthetical section indicated that Canada's numbers are world-leading per capita, not in absolute numbers.
Apologies if that was unclear.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b...
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.
I was likely neglecting the Immediate Relatives of US Citizens? Is that un-capped?
[1] https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/03/visa-bulletin/
[2] https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/immigratio...
[3] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45447
[4] https://www.congress.gov/116/crec/2020/05/12/modified/CREC-2...
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.
> 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”).
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/explainer-how-us-leg...
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!
> 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?
They just have to be legal.
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.
(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).
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.
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.
I agree none of this is likely, but we can make the world whatever we want, so let's start thinking about it :)
Yes there are abusers (& outright fraud - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/telugu... ) of system, and on other hand we still need brilliant Computer science engineers !
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?
Right now, the US taxpayer is funding the education of skilled foreign workers to take jobs from US citizens. That's messed up.
For reference: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347
It's about funding of the university.
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.
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.
Looking at Form 990 for several top private research universities:
Harvard: $1,462M tuition vs $592M government grant
Yale: $680M tuition vs $528M government grant
Princeton: $369M tuition vs $293M government grant
Stanford: $938M tuition vs $1,299M government grant
As you go down in research activity, the differences only get bigger.
Rochester Institute of Technology: $501m tuition vs $113m government grant
University of New Haven: $214m tuition vs $6m government grant
U.S. taxpayers are not paying for foreign students. Foreign students are paying for themselves, and then some.
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.
Synchronous communication with your teammates in time slots reasonable to each of you is a huge difference.
Companies will just stack-rank everybody into the 'entry level' positions. Not so good for candidates but we have to see how the new rule fares.
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.
It’s great if the program is abused less, but there are a ton of other problems with the work visa programs in the US.
What happens with the non-tech fields that can't find skilled labour, but aren't money printing machines?
Best time to start an outsourcing firm
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
Level 1 - 17th percentile
Level 2 - 34th percentile
Level 3 - 50th percentile
Level 4 - 67th percentile
New Wages
Level 1 - 45th percentile
Level 2 - 62nd percentile
Level 3 - 78th percentile
Level 4 - 95th percentile
Source: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=1698...
[2] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=4186...
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)
The actual wage: This is the wage paid to other employees in the company who do the same work.
The prevailing wage: This is the wage for that occupation in the geographical area.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application##1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Labor_Condition_Appl...
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.
Temporary work visa: H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3
"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 could also lead to more jobs moving to the Midwest away from higher cost of living areas.
But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
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.
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...
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.
This is from May 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/19/quarantine-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/s
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.
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.
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.
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).
[+]: A quick look at the EOI statistics <https://api.dynamic.reports.employment.gov.au/anonap/extensi...> shows that 7.2% ((LODGED+INVITED)/SUBMITTED ~= 7.2%) of people who register their interest end up being invited.
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.
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.
> I'm talking about all the people with bonafide degrees and skillsets. 4-year bachelor degrees, PhDs, MDs, and the like.
I know what you mean, but that's not good enough; you'd need to find a way to make it legislatively watertight, and I'm not sure that's possible.
But barring that pipe dream, yours seems like an acceptable interim step.
I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans, except the owner-class.
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.
That's why it's good for citizens.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Would be fun to build super cities at a rapid pace over the next decade though :)
Oh yeah. It's the _one_ thing I can agree with them on.
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.
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).
But we will have lots of not needed managers? Well, let the chips fall where they may.
Why would anyone, except for personal reasons, want to move to the USA anyway?
Absolute non-starter.
Fix the rest of the country first, then talk to me about a new visa program.
I'll check back in a couple of years.
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.
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.
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.
yes if the American can't find their competitive edge.
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.
Based on his latest rhetoric, he seems to have adopted Sanders's views on trade, which is mostly protectionist.
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.
It's all bullshit posturing.
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.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/09/15/u-s-median-h...
I am genuinely curious where this „tradition“ comes from, maybe some historians or experts in geopolitics here?
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?
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.
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.
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.