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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

Is there data or research to suggest H1B actively dilutes the talent pool? There’s no doubt the system is abused — not too long ago, I was at an oil and gas company who contracted out to a company that brought in H1Bs. Many of the guys spoke zero English and couldn’t write code at all. Yes - that kind of indefensible abusive. But how rampant is this stuff?

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yeah - you could see in prior years how most h1bs were allocated to WITCH companies.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

Since h1b is a lottery system, these companies flooding the system with their applicants at lower salaries was directly impacting the chances of employees at other companies. I anecdotally knew a coworker at a FAANG who failed to get his h1b consecutively for two years in a row, with his OPT expiring the next. Looking at the data from the latest year though, it seemed as if they had already started addressing the problem.

You are mixing that up with the Greencard, which is a lottery system. H1B must not be a lottery system, and it must not be a way to offload expensive domestic labor to cheap imported labor. Which the well-known Indian H1B cheating companies did. The minimal wage is mandatory to exclude those abusers of the H1B system, so they it is not overloaded anymore. But 200k is definitely too high for the rest of the US, which needs highly qualified workers also. It should be dependent on the region.

Agree with your post totally.

H1b is a lottery.

I am H1-B and it is definitely not. You might be too late, there's a cap. The latecomers are not being let in by luck.

Greencard is a lottery on the other hand.

You are confused.

There is lottery for the Diversity Visa program, but that is not the only path to permanent residency and there is no cap on the number of applications for permanent residency.

The H1-B has always used a lottery when there are more applications than visas. There is a cap on both visas granted and applications. There are three caps: Regular, C/S (treaty obligations with Chile and Singapore), and US Master's (US master's degrees or higher). The USCIS will publish a memo when enough applications are received, closing the application season (normally six months) until next year.

Applicants with a US master's degree (or higher) have two chances to receive an H1-B visa. A lottery is held to award the visas available to master's degree holders, and those not selected are entered in the regular lottery.

Basic economics would predict that H1B visas drive wages down. Anything different would be surprising, and would require extraordinary evidence.

I don’t doubt that H1Bs drive wages down, but I disagree anything different is surprising or that it’s easily explained by “basic economics”. If H1Bs are being awarded to a handful of exploitative firms, then it makes sense that wages face a downward pressure. On the other hand, if H1Bs are being awarded to truly exceptional workers, then that’s a brain drain for their home country and a benefit for the host country. In the latter case, if the H1B applicant is the right employee for a job since a local candidate doesn’t meet or exceed the bar, then there isn’t much of an increase in the labor pool to drive down wages.

It is not so simple. We do not act in a world with perfect information to predict the supply and demand curve. There are only 65,000 H1B in a year of which 20,000 are prioritized for people with a masters degree in US. Given the economy of size of US and the kind of roles being filled by H1B, it is doubtful that they have any meaningful impact on wages. There are bad actors who take advantage of H1B to get people to work for lower pay, but that lower pay is not at minimum wages.

It has just become a talking point to take a few instances and beat a dead horse. The big stink from the Disney instance that employees were asked to train their replacement. It is a insensitive move by Disney and the contractors and they deserve to be called out. But if a job requires minimal skill and there are substitutes available, isn't it just what capitalism is all about?

I do not see the same talk about H2 (agricultural workers) coming in to work in US and people arguing that they are making the farm wages depressed. How about TN1? At the end of the day, it is the kind of job that defines the value and pay for the job, not the visa.

Just to note, outsourcing does play a big role in bringing a substitute product and hence making jobs redundant, but that is a different argument.

Edit - spelling mistake

> do not see the same talk about H2 (agricultural workers) coming in to work in US and people arguing that they are making the farm wages depressed.

That’s just because people affected by that policy are not able (or educated enough) to make their argument in any forum you might be reading, and have long resigned to the idea that they are shit jobs anyway so might as well leave them to the poorest of the Earth — particularly when it means everyone benefits from low food prices.

The same happens in the UK (and other wealthy European countries). Society as a whole has accepted that seasonal rural work should be left to a transient workforce from poorer areas in order to keep food prices down. Locals wouldn’t be bothered with those jobs without a significant wage increase, which would push prices up quite dramatically. Even in the context of an isolationist and xenophobic wave, it was always assumed the UK agri sector would be exempted by migration restrictions - and effectively it has been. In many ways, it’s a more honest and frank argument than in other sectors, in its brutality.

I’m a migrant myself but I’ve long come to the conclusion that we should be a bit more honest in this particular debate. Yes, we do keep salaries down, which increases profitability and competitiveness for companies, keeping the supply-side of the economy well-lubricated in the age of global competition. This is largely necessary, unless you want to stagnate like early-00s Japan. It just has to be compensated with higher corporate taxes and more quality services / low prices for everyone, to keep society fair.

There's belief that lack of demand from locals is prejudice, when imported workforce is a system and established business processes, one can't really go and change this system.

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