‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce | Hacker News Reader

‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

washingtonpost.com

81 pointssoftwaredoug116 comments

Non-paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...

Another "shortage of workers" article aimed at the plutocracy that should be retitled "shortage of pay" to attract them.

"We've tried everything, including raising pay $3 an hour!" => after a wave of significant inflation. Really?

I understand many service workers are undocumented, but where are the I-9 forms going? Every job I've had made me fill one out, by law. Here we have a number of organizations outing themselves in print (in the capital no less) as not complying. Well the article implies that anyway.

Are they paying taxes on these workers? How does this actually work?

> I understand many service workers are undocumented, but where are the I-9 forms going? Every job I've had made me fill one out, by law.

You can just be dishonest on an I9 form. It's a piece of paper, not a mindreading lie detector.

Yes you can lie on any form. Eventually it catches up with you, especially when your organization is featured in the newspaper.

The article doesn’t expand just takes widespread fraud as a fact of life.

Another fun bit. In four years we're going to see the impact of the great recession on the workforce entry and housing formation. The birthrate fell during the great recession and then never came back as a result of making rentiers whole on the backs of young families.

Is it a welcome slowdown to improve worker bargaining power and wages?

It is hurting corporate profits though…

Is it though? The evidence suggests (caveat below) that most salary increases have been eaten up in inflation. In the meanwhile businesses are suffering and customers are getting poorer service.

Caveat: The actual numbers show that salary increases at the bottom have been slightly higher than inflation. However, food, energy and housing inflation have all been higher than overall inflation, which are items people at the bottom face more. So those who’ve seen their salaries increase the most have also almost certainly seen higher inflation than the headline number.

Also, wages were already increasing prior to the pandemic due to several successful efforts to increase minimum wages, etc. So even without the pandemic and the associated immigrant slowdown, there would likely have been some continued wage increases.

A lot of people who thought they were above certain kinds of work are finding that they are not. This is creating a lot of socioeconomic tension. On the flip side, it is probably making people better appreciate those willing to do hard, unglamorous jobs.

Only superficially does it increase wages.

Studies show that immigration counter-intuitively improves the wages of the lower class, mainly through 2 effects:

1. Immigrants spend money. "A rising tide floats all boats". 2. Immigrants take the entry level positions. So in a country without immigrants a high school dropout might become a janitor. But with immigrants the immigrant becomes the janitor and the high school dropout now has differentiable skills -- aka a solid grasp of English. So they get a position as a manager or customer facing position or something.

Put a different way, with immigration the wages of janitors goes down, but native born citizens are more likely to have better jobs than janitor.

This sounds like the argument given by Washington to the failed rust belt.

“Don’t worry that your wages are lower, the white collar workers in NYC/SF are making even more, so our average wages have actually increased!”

Also another factor, once employers start paying a market-clearing wage, then increase their prices, supply will meet demand.

…or not raise prices. I think the root cause of our broken economy is that way too much of gross margin has been flowing to owners/capital instead of workers.

That is because in the short-run everything is sticky so they resist spending more on salaries. So everyone is hiring, but nobody is willing to pay more. If conditions persisted then they'd be forced to start raising wages in order to increase output.

Due to the fact that we're also still fairly supply constrained on output they also resist hiring more workers at higher salaries when they're finding it hard to source their inputs (and since everyone is in that same boat, they're not missing out compared to their competitors by not focusing on increasing output).

And right now the Fed is also signalling that they're going to crash the economy so it makes absolutely zero sense to start hiring more people at higher wages right before a recession.

It's interesting how the roles reversed between the two parties over the decades. Here's a video of George Bush and Ronald Reagan tag-teaming pro-immigration policy speeches[1] that would have them tarred and feathered by the republican party of today.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok

You're hard pressed to find a democrat who is actually earnestly pushing for immigration reform either. I'd claim the republicans largely swapped and the democrats are only for it just enough to foil the republicans!

> democrats are only for it just enough to foil the republicans

Absolutely not. Modern Democrats are neoliberals to the extreme. Neoliberals are very pro-immigration.

That's true rhetorically (the favorite specific topic being the "dreamers"), but there is no will to fix the H1B program at all by Democratic leadership. The status quo is great for businesses, a big part of their power base. It's not even bad for support from organized labor (though that matters less and less in real elections as union membership has been in decline for decades), since H1Bs are largely employed in nonunion industries.

It's bigger than that, democrats currently just cry about how bad the Republicans are to get votes and donations then when they're in office they do nothing to fix anything.

That's funny (and I'm not disagreeing with you) because the Republicans are the same.

That isn't funny at all, the whole problem is that both parties are the same. They do the "bad cop good cop" routine, the cops are working for the same team.

Step #0 to any significant policy reform is eliminating the Senate filibuster, followed by step #1: controlling both houses and the presidency.

The only truly radical policy that has come out of Congress in decades was Obamacare, and that was precisely because the Democrats were just barely able to assemble 60 votes in the Senate. (Most Democrats wanted single-payer, or at least a single-payer option, but a bill including single-payer couldn't clear a 60 vote hurdle as at least one Democrat, Joe Lieberman, publicly opposed single-payer.) And even then, with the death of Ted Kennedy they immediately lost the ability to beat a filibuster, which is why the House was forced to pass the Senate bill verbatim, which was unusual. Usually there's a reconciliation process for bills passed between the two houses, after which each house has a pro forma vote on the reconciled bill. But even a pro forma vote on a reconciled bill is subject to a Senate filibuster, with the exception of purely budgetary bills, which Obamacare clearly wasn't. (There were subsequent changes passed as budgetary amendments, though, both by Democrats and later by Republicans--e.g. elimination of the individual mandate penalty.)

And don't forget, precisely because the Democrats passed Obamacare, the Republicans swept the 2010 election, taking the House and taking 6 Senate seats from the Democrats--who went from 56 in 2010 to 53 in 2011, not counting the 2 seats lost earlier in 2010--in December 2009 Democrats had 58 votes plus 2 Independents. The 2010 election was the biggest rout in 60 years.

Unless and until the Senate filibuster goes away, you can't really make any sweeping claims about what policies a party could or would actually enact. Because of the filibuster the parties are beholden to a handful of members. I'm not entirely sure the filibuster should be eliminated, but if I were a Senator I probably wouldn't stand in the way, either.

If you follow the politics, both houses and both parties could easily enact significant immigration reform on a simple majority vote. Albeit not radical reform so long as the filibuster existed. However, immigration has proven a tremendous wedge issue for Republicans, which Trump leveraged to great effect. Moreover, even though a vast majority of Americans and Congressmen wish to change the status quo, any specific, concrete policies lead to a lot of heated disagreement because it turns out different people have conflicting motivations for wanting reform, especially within the Republican camp. Moreover, the Republicans learned a lesson watching Obamacare--if you can't enact perfect reform (i.e. Democrats being forced to compromise on single-payer), your own supporters will crucify and disown you. A big part of the Republican 2010 sweep was upset Democrats walking away because they didn't get their preferred option. So especially for Republicans, immigration reform is a lose-lose-lose.

Take a look at Biden's 2020 platform. It's relatively broad, specific and actionable. And then look at his attempts to get it passed. First he had to throw out anything that couldn't be passed through reconciliation. Then he had to significantly water down even the reconciliation bills due to the DINO's Manchin and Sinema. And he also had to fight with a conservative court. And yet despite all that he managed to pass several major bills.

> Neoliberals are very pro-immigration.

Is this really the case? My experience with neoliberalism is they are certainly pro-globalism, but would be quite happy physically keeping everyone where they currently are (all the better to exploit the wage gaps).

Do you have any concept of how much more productive people are in developed countries than undeveloped? Unskilled labour in the US gets paid a lot more than ten times what it does in Haiti. Investing in the third world is what you do because you can’t get labour in places you already know too do business in, where you’d want to live.

Wage differences for the same job have almost nothing to do with productivity and almost everything to do with the rate of exploitation.

How is this supposed to work? There’s an awful lot to exploit in Ireland or the US and pretty much nothing in Cuba, even less in Haiti. In between in Vietnam, Thailand or China. Is your model that the Irish/US elites are more benevolent and Vietnamese ones less?

Workers in Germany, Romanian and Vietnam doing the same job at similar productivity are paid very different wages. You can see this quite clearly in German companies that open factories in poorer countries to extract higher profits.

Capitalists pay the lowest wages they can get away with. While they exploit all workers (by appropriating as profits much of the value created by those workers), they exploit the workers in the poorer countries far more than those in the rich countries.

They can get away with this largely because the poor countries are underdeveloped (and are often kept that way on purpose). Workers in those countries have fewer options, thus can be exploited more.

Only because of voters. There has always been a bipartisan consensus in the House and Senate on increasing immigration[1][2]. The Republican representatives don’t want to lose their seats though and they know increasing immigration is the best possible way to get primaried[3]. Corporate Republicans want more labour[4], the same way Democrats do, without expecting that the immigrants will vote for them. Opposition to further amnesty has always come from below, not above.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(immigration)

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/last-minute-push-to-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/2...

[4] https://www.hoover.org/research/republican-case-immigration-...

No it's not. Immigrants tend to adopt to native sub-replacement birth rate and bring their elderly parents to live in US and often make use of social security. Even to the degree that they have children, children take two decades to enter the workforce. Bottom line, it's impossible to solve US labor shortage with any reasonable immigration levels under current policies. Unless you want a Dubai style system where only active workers are welcome and those don't get benefits of the citizens.

three decades of declining wages and increasing demands, plus de-facto "illegal" workers in every city in the USA.. perhaps a factor?

US real median household income is 55% higher in 2019 than 1990.

https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/160341481147113472...

your source, some guy on twitter from the "american enterprise institute" marketing his book "the american dream is not dead", is cherrypicking from the low to high points of the business cycle:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

from a dataset which actually tracks data outside that range:

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-11/58353-HouseholdInco...

a more robust dataset, which you would get by simply searching "US real median household income" and opening the first result citing census data, indicates that, charitably, real median household income has risen about 25% since 1980:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOeD

wikipedia's article, which has thoroughly succumbed to link rot, in addition to citing the above data, also provides historical census data neatly summarized on page 5 of this census report pegging an increase at about 15-20% since 1964:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

this took me 3 minutes

The difference is mainly that the number I linked is "after taxes and transfers".

Also surely 2019 is not the peak of the business cycle? Feb 2020 is.

Peak-to-now real income is up for bottom 50% of households since then (https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=income&incomeend=09012022...) but flat for the rest due to inflation.

"Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven hourly wage growth for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for the last four decades, despite steady (if too slow) productivity growth. " --Elise Gould, Senior Economist, The Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

The sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs; The problem is that these companies don't want to meet the market demands of that labor pool by paying what that market is asking to keep that sustainable, so they want to import people who they can abuse to temporarily lower labor prices for them.

And the number of Americans I know who work in tech who are looking for work right now as H1B's post on LinkedIn and publicly make deals to keep Americans out of jobs proves this. Its all being done in public.

The thing is, the original H1B ideal is temporary; and so is they cant meet market demands sustainably that way, not if they are growing, and they should be growing or they are dying, and so such companies end up being dependent on offshore imports of H1B people and end up dying when they cant replace them or grow new roles without them, because they started to depend on them and then could not be sustainable outside of that bubble on the real market.

The dependency they have is on subsidized cheap labor from other countries that don't asked to be treated like humans, not a lack of skilled tech workers. They have more tech workers than they need, many with more skills and more years of experience at higher end tech roles, many who are looking for work right now in the holidays, and they are just not hiring them because they want to save a few pennies and hire a developer that they have legal ownership of as an indebted visa-slave.

And if your hiring software developers, I know many who are looking for work, who are American citizens, who would gladly take the job that an h1b is currently sitting in.

This is the root issue and it's systemic wage suppression. It's also surreal when entire management structures are h1b1 visa workers and speaks to deeper cultural issues that nobody wants to talk about.

> speaks to deeper cultural issues that nobody wants to talk about

Could you explain further?

The idea that H-1B workers suppress US wages is a harmful myth that gets thrown around HN a lot.

The study that supports the claim that the H-1B program suppresses US tech wages is about 20 years old, and no longer reflects the current reality.

In fact, a 2017 Glassdoor study found that the wages of H-1B workers were 2.8% higher than their American counterparts: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/h1b-workers/

The US creates several million new jobs each year on average, and the H-1B cap is 85K, which is an order of magnitude less than the number of jobs created per year. In order for the H-1B program to meaningfully impact the US labor market, the H-1B cap needs to be increased significantly.

> The US creates several million new jobs each year on average, and the H-1B cap is 85K, which is an order of magnitude less than the number of jobs created per year.

H-1B hires are not evenly distributed across all job types. A large fraction of them going to particular industries, like is seen in big tech, could move the needle in those industries.

It’s not a myth. I worked for a prominent US company that routinely hired non-Americans based on price. There are innumerable ways around the H-1B limits. I quit the company.

Name a name then

Looking for work?

Perhaps it is a myth with no basis. That said, increased supply decreasing demand is usually the null case, yes? So I'd want to see evidence that additional workers do not supress wages.

Basically what you're asking for is protectionism. How is it different than putting tariffs on Japanese cars to make american cars less uncompetitive?

I made no argument on any decision, only on a means to answer a specific question of measurement.

I am not purporting that the H-1B program has no effect on tech wages, just that it has a negligible effect due to its small cap relative to the number of tech jobs available.

Any increase in labor supply would have some effect on the wage level in an industry.

Or 20 years of wage suppression worked and now they're at parity.

Getting paid more than domestic workers doesn't mean you don't lower the wages of the sector overall, it could just mean you're competing with the top end of the market.

I was over there working on an E-3 a few years back, and I'm pretty sure I got hired because it was easier (e.g. cheaper) to set up a hiring funnel in another country than within the US. That doesn't automatically mean lower wage growth, but it could.

I tentatively think that skilled migrant workers lower wages within a single sector but have a neutral or positive effect on wages overall, and the US tech labour market is so hot that I don't feel bad for making its wages drop, stagnate, or increase slightly slower than they might otherwise, assuming the overall impact on every other sector is positive.

Any additional workers in an area will lower wages in that area. Simple supply & demand and off course you are right that they also grow the overall pie. I do wonder though how much the added friction when changing jobs as an H1B holder creates a downward pressure. I'd bet comp in all areas with lots of H1B workers would go up if we made it much easier to change jobs while on an H1B and give a lot more time to find a new job when suddenly unemployed (1-2 years instead of weeks)

What happens to demand when supply is increased?

There might technically be enough Americans who would like to make FAANG-level wages and know how to use a computer and are willing to be an engineer.

But there's definitely not enough Americans skilled enough for those jobs.

Should FAANG be forced to train Americans rather than hire H1B workers? I don't know.

It's a mystery to me they bring people to the US instead of just employ them in other countries in the first place.

But if the US didn't allow H1B workers, they definitely would.

Should American companies not be able to have foreign offices staffed with foreign workers? I don't know.

But this sounds like a recipe for handicapping American companies vs global competitor...

FAANG are the worst example because they turnaway more applications who can perform those roles then apply. FAANGs shouldn't be allowed H1B workers.

I think it's hard to export the SV software engineering culture to foreign offices. You have at most a few people to seed it, but then it's overrun by people with totally different backgrounds that have no idea what it's about.

> In fact, a 2017 Glassdoor study found that the wages of H-1B workers were 2.8% higher than their American counterparts

The problem with this is that H1B workers work a lot more than 2.8% harder, on average, and companies know this.

Many H1B workers are practically abused. They may be doing the work of two engineers. Unlike a typical work relationship between an upper-middle class professional and a tech company, separating from the company may not be realistic recourse because the work-visa immigration status is a Damoclean sword.

I've seen this bite even harder for L1B immigrants who work for multinational tech companies and get lured to the US from abroad, because even if you find another company willing to sponsor your H1B you are still subject to the caps. It's pretty messed up.

also consider that we issued more than 350k student visas this year. if the h1-b cap is 85k then we are giving immigrants some of best college-level education in the world and then refusing to hire >75% of them. this has never made sense to me.

Or we force them to marry locally.

Ah yes, entitlement all the way down. The American complains that only Americans should be hired despite same skill for cheaper elsewhere. After restricting to Americans, the SF dev complains the company hired a Denver dev who is cheaper for the same skill. Then in Denver, the dev complains they hired from Omaha. Screw the guy from Omaha!

Markets are global especially on the internet. If Facebook and Twitter don't compete on a global scale, TikTok will eat the lunch you believe you are entitled to.

The entire article discusses that immigration is needed and American's don't want those jobs. I don't need a team of the most skilled and experienced PhDs. A big portion of my team are just reliable people who can keep the lights on.

Markets are not global. The immigration market is highly regulated and the H1B visa is an abusive system which keeps Indian and Chinese immigrants enslaved to their jobs for up to 20 years while waiting for a green card. It’s a perfect labor group to take advantage of. You want a real global market for international labor? Fix the immigration system.

One of my points was even if you restrict the employee market, customers remains global, revenues remains global. Forcing wage costs higher will eventually make the US uncompetitive.

Yea and there are Americans that want those jobs to keep the lights on and get paid over 6 figures.

>Ah yes, entitlement all the way down.

This is the hard truth but people don't want to face up to it.

You are correct except that it's L1 visa driving wages down. H1Bs are typically employed at FAANG and are paid top of the market. Instead of a lottery system, they should use it for top of the market jobs or proven specialization like published papers in that field or certifications.

There are way way more H1Bs working for bodyshops that lease them to non-FAANG Fortune 500 companies than work for FAANG.

https://h1bdata.info/topcompanies.php

8 of the top 10 H1B filers are bodyshops. And of course the average salary for the 8 bodyshops is way below the 2 non-bodyshops.

H1B is an easy scapegoat. You see people of certain nationalities on visa and think ohh the companies are bringing in cheap labor. The reality is that most of them would be citizens if the immigration laws were created equal. You wouldn’t see that many people on visa if they didn’t have to stay on it for decades.

People come from Europe all the time and become citizens, and you don’t say “ohh look at all these foreigners on visa taking away all the jobs and suppressing the wages” because they transition to citizenship and you don’t see them on visas for long.

Create a fair immigration system and you won’t see H1Bs around for long.

>Create a fair immigration system and you won’t see H1Bs around for long.

You hit the Nail right on the Head!

H1B is being used as an easy scapegoat for all the ills plaguing the US labour market.

You guys have no clue about US immigration system. There are equal green card quotas for each country, which is the main merit path to citizenship. Of course some countries have a huge population or huge demand for US visas, but that still means that green cards for that country are equal in number to green cards from other countries. And for example, there are a lot of countries in Africa.

On the other hand, children of undocumented immigrants get citizenship without any quota. So there are many more new citizens from Mexico and Central America vs Europe. I am not saying they are bad citizens, but there is some rational limit to immigration that protects native culture from sudden disruption against wishes of existing citizens. So, defining what is fair is not as easy as you might think.

For small European country. I remember one my co-workers. He used to work in USA for some years, got green cards for himself and family, I think in months. Then returned here and simply just returned those cards.

The system truly isn't equal. And from outside is bit bizare.

I think when you have a country which many more people want to live in than it can realistically sustain, you're bound to end up with a system which isn't equal. It's like a game of musical chairs with 500 people and 5 chairs.

The US has 50m foreign-born residents, the second highest is Germany at 16m. There's no country on Earth which takes in more immigrants (I'm actually one of them!) yet my whole life I've seen nothing but people demanding that they take in even more.

It is really very easy.

1. If you want equality then apply it to H1B itself. Why is it that you want equality when it comes to green cards that give people equal rights, but not when you want to bring them in to do work? Apply country caps for H1B visa and let’s see how that works. Equality for employment green cards but not for visas is not a system of equality.

2. Apply equality everywhere else as well, family immigration especially.

3. You could design a system that is more equal if you really wanted. You are quick to blame huge populations, but also ignore the fact that countries like India and China are almost as big as Europe. Take into account the size as well if you wanted equal representation.

Defining fair is not easy, but you can at least try.

+1B. Unfortunately no one cares about legal immigration in the US so all this talent is sitting around for decades and wondering why years or decades assimilation isn’t enough to walk through the front door.

One of the major competitive advantages of the US is that it brain drains the rest of the world through its education system and career opportunities, but that’s starting to dwindle after a decade of neglect. US’s loss and Canada’s win, I guess.

Canada has one of the worst housing markets in the world, mediocre pay for software engineers, and a slowly collapsing public healthcare system (and private healthcare is illegal). Many of those issues are exacerbated by Canada's ridiculously high per capita immigration rate. The US has its own dysfunctions, but Canada does not look like a model to emulate.

H1B is a dual intent visa. It has never been just temporary, the idea that H1B workers can seek permanent residence is built into the visa. (It is not built into most other visas.)

Many H1B workers wish to become citizens but can't due to decades-long backlogs. If your post is actually meant to campaign for them to get quicker green cards and citizenship, I applaud you.

>H1B is a dual intent visa. It has never been just temporary, the idea that H1B workers can seek permanent residence is built into the visa.

This needs to be repeated time and time again until people "get it". It was designed as a "legal way" of immigrating to the US.

>The sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs; The problem is that these companies don't want to meet the market demands of that labor pool by paying what that market is asking to keep that sustainable, so they want to import people who they can abuse to temporarily lower labor prices for them.

This is a bogus self-serving argument that is offered by many entitled "American programmers" who want wage hyperinflation. Tech workers are among the highest paid professions anywhere, and still people like you complain about wage suppression, ha! How self-serving & entitled of you.

There is 100%+ employment in tech, and the people "looking for work" you speak of, wouldn't even pass a basic programming test and unemployable IMO.

Perhaps as a: MIT CSAIL Alum, AI+Machine Vision researcher passionate about using technology for societal good.

Not everyone is an MIT Alum and full employment is a dream that could only come from the halls of MIT

In my view you are both wrong for different reasons.

There are not “enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs”. There is virtually no unemployment among competent software developers and almost every team I have ever talked to consistently struggles to hire. It doesn’t pass the sniff test, as there are relatively few of these workers in any case.

Equally, workers are absolutely entitled to complain about companies abusing people in precarious positions—such as H1B visa holders—to reduce costs. Certain orgs are notorious for this. It is not “entitled” to think that workers should be paid the market rate for their work, and the reality is that software developers are highly-paid in part because their skills are hard to come by and drive significant financial benefit (i.e. they are worth it). You don’t need to put the effort in to defend companies who have famously colluded to suppress wages!

Is the real problem not the existence of a silly visa system in the first place? If you want workers, then allow them to enter the country and compete freely at market wages for roles - without making them so subject to the whims of their sponsoring employer. That system is basically designed to facilitate abuse.

ty. I think you made my point more eloquently than I could. Agreed that h1b has _several_ flaws, but then so has SS, Medicare/Medicaid, VA etc. Those aren't shining examples of good governance either. All its flaws notwithstanding, quite a lot of good comes out of h1b - the number of foreign born CEOs and entrepreneurs in tech is telling. I'd go so far as to say, no other program has done more to keep America competitive in tech than h1b.

There's widespread support in business for reform. Many of us are supportive of a points scheme for visas using salary indexed to COL, academic credentials etc as a better filter. Unfortunately congressional gridlock makes it extremely unlikely.

My objection was to the smug, sneery condescension about "cheap labor","wage suppression","no shortage if you pay enough". IMO it's driven in large part by racism and nativism coupled with self-serving avarice (delicious irony there) - not "wage concerns" or "h1b worker exploitation". That's the BS cover story!

H-1B workers, look around you. This is the top comment here. Imagine for a second that you support a union. When you take your seat at the union meeting, someone like this sits down on your left, on your right, in front of you, and behind you.

Imagine you provide a tech union with manpower. Who do you think will hold the reins? You or some guy like this? Will you arm them so that they can execute on what they dream of?

Consider carefully what a union of people like this can do. Consider carefully what you will support. In the end, they have themselves to look after.

>The sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs;

Absolutely wrong!

Software Developers and Engineers Shortage in the US: The case for Global Talent: https://www.revelo.com/blog/software-developer-shortage-us

Uhhh, no? I don't think u realize how big of the gap between the average programming work vs fanng+ companies. Note that I didn't say the quality of the candidates, because I don't think it's hard and most of the ppl can achieve that level if they really tried. But the difference in work is so huge it's basically 2 type of jobs. In typical fanng companies, most regular ppl wont survive. It's highly competitive and require ppl to be able to ramp up repidly. At the same time, u need to maintain high performance all the time. Hard deadlines everywhere. Required to lead different projects and be oncall at the same time.

It's highly competitive and demanding basically the opposite of what ppl going through in the regular school system right now.

I’m calling bs on this. Many people in faang companies I know are pretty average work effort required is also pretty average, could you provide more concrete examples of where this isn’t true?

Lets start from faang, Amazon/meta/Netflix have high review bar, u r behold to biquaterlly review and sometimes quarterly review. If u havent heard of ura, go look it up. Google is somewhat more relaxed as their culture encouraging improving the employees instead of performance based firing outright but this might change, look it up regardless. apple's wlb is suprisingly bad as their very top down, of coz the pay is good.

Outside faang,twitter was famed to be a more relax place. its gone now after elon take over. stripe is famous for being aws 2.0. these are the places are either i worked at or have friends there. Also consider thr currently layoff is largely performance based

for wlb, 40-50 is the norm if u r good. if u are average in putting out the effort, i dont think u can survive the ramp up in the first year with less than 50h per week. companies like amazon doesnt even give u time to ramp up.

But if u survive the first 2 year, u r probably fine. An 'average' employee in this sense will be vastly capable of dealing with the org chaos and oncall, and churn out the commits at the same time. The wlb will be much better if he is in a stable org. He will be more experienced in gaming the reviews too.

Once again, i never mentioned the quality of the candidates, i only talk about the work and performance. i think most of the ppl are capable,just whether they really tried.

You described politics not performance. 40-50 hours is pretty standard across most industries. It’s rare to find non-unionised places that truly do 40 hours. I’d say in the software industry 50 - 60 is gut-feel where I see a lot of people working (just my own personal network).

I think companies that went remote probably automatically shifted it up towards 50 as default, just because the home/work separation became more leaky.

(No data to back any of this up, but I’m still unconvinced that the FAANGs are anything special other than being big mega-corps)

You don’t become more competitive by creating limits. China limits what people can read, say or do. US limits movement. It became great through free movement of people and reinvention of society, and creating any limits means you skew the outcome. You limit supply, so prices rise artificially.

Unless you’re Native American, your forefathers and mothers moved to the US at a time where it was easier to do so. That’s a lottery you happened to win and now you want to shut the doors. Your parents helped create the story of success, and that’s how the story will continue. No visas means no Jobs, no Nadella, no Brin, no Tesla, no very many people who create and sustain so many institutions that make you great. Immigration and entrepreneurship are the lifeblood of your story.

Don’t worry so much about slicing the pie. Grow the pie.

When my ancestors came to Canada, they settled their own land, lost half the family in the winters, and many of them still ended up trying to return to Ireland. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how that's an "easier" experience than the route taken by folks today. There's tens of thousands of acres unsettled land left in Canada, but for whatever reason the vast majority of our new Canadians end up in the GTA.

The process of immigrating to North America today is so entirely different from how it was the 1800s it's a bit disingenuous to equate the two.

Easier from the perspective of getting a visa. You won the lottery is what I said.

I live in a country where we seem to work hard to keep people from neighbouring countries out. It does nothing for our competitiveness, just allows the current inhabitants who pretty much did nothing except have the right ancestors to get benefits and opportunities that neighbours don’t have.

In your case, Canada benefits greatly from the US having a more restrictive immigration policy. Net positive for Canada. It’s a total failure to have smart people not able to enter your country, because they’ll go somewhere. Quote SamA: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1554459751353683969

If that doesn’t convince you, consider the case of Russia now, with people leaving daily. If immigration is net negative then surely Russia is winning hand over fist because people are leaving the country in droves. Obviously not. It’s a horror show for them.

How can we muster the political will to try to get more immigrants to come here? It’s really important

It's not our responsibility. Don't worry though, if the people in charge believe an immigration deficit needs to be cured, we'll get our medicine in the form of pro-immigration news and media.

I don't think people want to come into the US anymore. The country has been in a serious decline since Bush Jr, and it's not going to be changed by a one or two terms of a democratic presidency. Even developing countries don't have the same issues with abortion rights, etc...

I don't think abortion rights are a big problem.

But health-care, education both primary and later. Raising costs of living and housing. It is not exactly pretty picture from outside.

Abortion rights and healthcare is the same. For a lot of non Americans those two are the same thing and they’re both considered during immigration

Just move to a state where abortion is allowed and it isn't a problem, so it isn't like the healthcare issue at all.

Abortion? I bet most of the immigrants watch the old american movies and imagine how they live in their own house with a green lawn. They chase the american dream.

Unpopular opinion, but I'd argue the last ~50 years of legalized abortion, with over 60 million lives lost, also accounts for a large percentage of the missing workforce. (Even more so when you consider the loss of their children and their children's children.)

> 18% of the workforce has been wiped out by abortion, and this number will climb to 23% by 2035.^1

> While labor force participation may rise in the short run due to mothers choosing to work instead of taking time off to raise kids, unrestricted abortion is likely to decrease labor supply in the long run. Since the Roe decision in 1973 an estimated 63 million abortions have occurred in the United States. If all of these aborted babies had been otherwise carried to term and survived until today, they would add nearly 20 percent to the current U.S. population, and nearly 45 million would be of working age (18 to 64).^2

(1) https://www.hli.org/resources/abortion-affect-united-states/ (pro-life site warning, but it cites sources including the Census Bureau and Planned Parenthood's own research arm, the Guttmacher Institute)

(2) https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c...

Declining birth rates as a whole are to blame for this, not just abortion. Plus, legalized abortion helped reduce crime rates. https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalize...

Out of those 45 million, how many of those unwanted kids would end up getting enough education that they can participate in a modern knowledge economy? And how many would end up needing society's support to make ends meet?

Restricted abortion leads to the availability of plentiful cheap, low-level labor, but mostly not the sort of labor that the modern economy really needs.

Those are interesting question, but what are the answers?

Are you suggesting that abortion be illegal for the sake of maintaining a sizeable workforce?

Literally oppress and remove women's basic bodily autonomy so that Amazon can keep paying people $20/h

Presumably, hormonal birth control, condoms, and allowing women to get educations and have careers has slowed population growth far more than legalizing abortion. That and just becoming a rich country. If we could have stayed more like Niger, we might have 2 billion people by now and wouldn't need immigration at all.

I guess that's what sucks about public policy. You have to pursue many goals and some of them may conflict with others.

Personal liberty and societies needs often conflict. I am happy we mostly choose to favor liberty and I am convinced in the long run this make a better and more productive society. Even if it isn't that is clearly the society I want to live in.

> Nearly 45 million would be of working age.

And how many of those would be well-adjusted productive members of society?

I can't see any systems in place for raising 60 million unwanted children. Would you be able to raise any yourself?

There's a gap between understanding the numbers and practice.

That's 60 million children missing over almost 50 years, or ~830K/year. But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men.

As for the truly unwanted ones, ~33 million couples in the U.S. are infertile. There are untold thousands of families waiting to adopt. A few of them are listed at https://www.americanadoptions.com/family_profile/browse

As for me, I'm raising several children. My wife and I have considered adopting on top of that. I was adopted.

Steve Jobs was adopted. So was John Hancock. Nelson Mandela. Leo Tolstoy. Ray Liotta. Simone Biles.

In terms of economic and societal impact, I'd wager somewhere in those 60 million missing children, there were a few hundred kids that could have grown up and made a real positive impact on our lives. We'll never know how many diseases would have been cured by now, or Olympic medals won. Millions of lives. Just gone.

Most of the sites I found were not primary sources and many were clearly cut & paste jobs to fill some content quota or something. All the same, from what I gathered, it sounds like about 100,000 children are adopted every year, and it is about half of those were due to step-parents adopting the children of their partner.

So say about 50,000 adoptions that are foster children or given up at birth. Who is going to adopt the extra 830,000 per year? Maybe those 33 million infertile couples? There are 400,000 kids in foster care right now and apparently those 33M are not jumping at the opportunity to adopt them.

Yes, some famous people were adopted. So were some terrible people. I don't see either one being an argument for or against.

And women that want to can still go trough with pregnancy and adopt the child out if they want to. It is their right to choose if they want to dedicate 9 months of their lives to giving birth, including sacrificing their body and possibly going through the most painful and dangerous part of the lives. Made even more difficult now as many hospitals in red states are holding back needed medical care just so they don't get accused of supporting abortions.

It is certainly not our right to demand this so we can get cheap labor.

I mean, if we're talking about what might've been then there are easily a hundred million lives lost each year to menstrual cycles in the US alone. Just gone. Think of how many Einsteins, Mozarts, and Davincis have already been lost to us! Abortion is <1% of this much bigger problem, practically a rounding error.

^This may sound ridiculous (I certainly think it does) but I think contrasting it with your post is a good thought experiment. Can you see any meaningful difference between your comment and mine? I can't, but I'd be very interested to hear your reasoning if you feel they are different somehow.

I don't know how I've not come across this specific argument/perspective in this conversation before. I'm stealing this for the future, thank you. :)

>But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men.

So if they didn't abort, how exactly were these children going to be raised? By homeless single mothers now that the cowardly, responsibility-shirking men have left them?

You seem to think that preventing abortion will magically turn accidental parents into good parents.

>We'll never know how many diseases would have been cured by now

We'll also never know how many people who made big contributions would have been murdered by unwanted, abused, and neglected children who grew up to become criminals.

I agree it's difficult to care for an impoverished child. My mom was a single mother that was close to becoming homeless, and we both survived. There are many free resources for single mothers. (for example, WIC, a program that provides nutritious free food for Women, Infants, and Children)

But imagine a two-year old child in front of you. His mother is poor and feels she cannot care for him. He lives in the slums of a country where children cannot be adopted. Should his mother be allowed to kill him?

> We'll also never know how many people who made big contributions would have been murdered by unwanted, abused, and neglected children who grew up to become criminals.

It's probably true that if we kill impoverished unwanted toddlers, future crime rates could potentially decline. That doesn't make it moral to do so.

So basically you want to condemn countless women to being forced to living in poverty and raising children in poverty, while letting men off scot-free. Bodily autonomy means absolutely nothing to you, because to you, women's only real role in life is as an incubator. Nice values you have there.

Interesting perspective, I see how my argument doesn't work. Still, I can't help but feel that forcing a woman through pregnancy is justified if it's not consensual... I hope the technology for artificial uterus is developped during our lifetime

Population is not synonymous with workforce. Those potential children would have overwhelmingly been low cost labor. Flooding job markets with people is how we have work that doesn't pay what it's worth.

That assumes that people would not have changed their habits around sex and birth control. I've heard this is what has been happening in states that recently restricted abortion. Also there are illegal abortions, which have always been a thing. Women aren't stupid, they have always had options if they don't want to have kids. Birth rates go down everywhere with more urbanization and education. It doesn't pay to have kids like it used to when we were all farmers.

The difference is that bodily autonomy is good, actually.

The meta level is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Most arguments are best evaluated at the object level.

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