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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why work visas are an acceptable thing?

How come the government can know better than the companies who should they employ?

Is there a risk of Apple employing an Afghan shepherd as a product manager if there wasn’t a visa requirement?

If it is about creating artificial scarcity to rig the job market, I’m not sure it works for the employees since the work visas are tied to a job so as a result you end up with employees who can’t stand against their employers of fear getting deported.

IMHO, the visa reform should be abolishing the visa regime. Just security checks.

Why not have a meritocratic job? And no, nationality is a skill.

Very unpopular opinion - I know but just can’t get an explanation on why everyone loves visas so much. Why do you love being limited with your options and controlled by the bureaucracy.

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Your domestic workforce would rapidly be replaced with cheaper alternatives.

Sounds like a free market to me. Maybe everyone should be paid fairly. If you can be replaced by a third world country immigrant, you should be. You should have acquired enough skills in your prosperous country.

There isn't such thing a global "free market". Other than that, you've accurately described why there are sharp political divides about globalization manifesting in many nations today.

There isn’t, but there should be. Not very long time ago there was. The visa regime is something very new.

A country's registered voters vote to support policies that aid their employment prospects.

That doesn't seem so difficult to understand the motivation.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

I say that like I think that GP thinks it's a bad thing. I think it's a perfectly normal/natural/understandable/healthy thing and that it's well within the rights of a sovereign nation to decide whom to let in, take up residence, and work within.

So they just choose to rig the market by limiting the supply?

I find this motivation, misguided. The more people work, the more prosperous the place is. You can’t just limit the number of workers and create prosperity because you’re paid in something that you can’t use directly.

Do you think that you can limit the number of workers to 10% of population and get incredibly high salaries, and just tax them so high and distribute the money to the unemployed? If you can do that, then you will have a bohemian society where everyone is having a great time or being paid amazingly. However, you can’t have that your society needs to produce as much as consumes.

What you’re proposing is unlimited immigration. The government checks are to make sure the limited immigrants we get are of high quality.

I think OP is just doubting the government's ability to know which immigrants are higher quality vs. the companies who seek to employ them.

Exactly. I don’t believe that a company can be worse than the government in picking their employees. If the government has the ability to pick skilled employees, maybe all the employees(not just the immigrants)should be picked by the bureaucrats.

but the companies are picking their chosen employees-to-be. the companies are literally the ones submitting the H1-B forms asking the government to approve their choice so they can employ them.

the government does not say "this person is not the right choice for this job." the government does however do the necessary criminal/education/security/background checks etc to make sure the candidate (or company) isn't lying. some of these checks may be difficult for a company without government-level resources (maybe?) to perform.

so if the checks are passed, and the company has performed the labor cert properly and there are visas left (quotas), then a visa is issued to the candidate that the company picked.

Have you ever heard about the concept of visa rejection? It’s a real thing that’s why there is also a visa lottery.

That’s why for companies it’s not the same thing to hire someone who has a foreign passport and the local one. H1-B it’s not just a form that you fill when you’re going to employ a foreign national.

That’s what happens now. The company picks their own candidates. Did you think the government assigned employees to a company? Visa rejections may happen only if the immigrant has issues with their background, the paperwork/process was not done correctly or the quota has been hit.

The company needs to get permission from the government to employ that employee. That permission is the visa. It’s something you might or might not get. It’s not just a form you fill if you like to employ a foreigner. The company and the employee they want to employ have to win fking lottery to have their application processed. Read the article.

The government has a quota for how many immigrants it will let in per year. That’s why you need to win the lottery. If you lose the lottery, the quota has already been hit. The only reason the government doesn’t give “permission” is if it has hit the limit for that year.

Which brings me back to my original comment, you’re advocating for unlimited immigration.

Quota is just one reason for not being able to employ whoever you want.

Just because you can point out a reason, the reality doesn’t change. Nothing happens without a reason.

However, I agree that it’s nicer than European/British/Australian/Canadian point based system. At least US don’t try to pretend that it’s about skills.

Quota is virtually the only reason besides background checks.

Unless you’re referring to the requirement for a bachelors degree which in my opinion is perfectly reasonable. In that case the company won’t even put in the application.

" the limited immigrants we get are of high quality."

and this is why I couldn't care less to emigrate to the US.

Does immigration work differently in your country?

Some countries let in a lot of refugees which would presumably be bottom of the barrel tier immigrants.

> Can someone explain why work visas are an acceptable thing?

Without something that functions like work visas, you have no mechanism to control immigration. And while racism is perhaps the main argument against employed against immigration, there are a few non-racist arguments you can make.

One of the primary reasons that work visas specifically exist in the first place is to ensure that immigrants do not become indigent and net drains on the state.

Why do you reject working people then? Then the visa requirement should be something like “if you find a job you’re welcome to stay”.

Because the citizens of the nation don’t want to be undercut by foreigners in the job market.

Outside of supply constraints, there’s nothing stopping everything from being a minimum wage job.

A few comments up I wrote why this way of thinking is wrong. Artificial limit of worker supply isn’t doing anything good for the society.

FIY, the same argument was made against women’s employment. More people working doesn’t reduce prosperity.

It does seemingly benefit workers in the US. I know people who had a huge salary increase, working for the same company, by moving ~150mi from Vancouver to Seattle solely for moving.

And yet, before women entered the workforce it was possible to sustain a middle class household on one salary. Now it requires 2.

Capitalism always finds a way.

What happens if the employer fires them 5 seconds into their first day of employment? Or the employer decides to offer the employee, say, 5 hours of work a year? You need some sort of program to verify that the job exists and is "real" in some fashion--this paperwork is the work visa.

Don't get me wrong: the US visa polices are a shambolic mess that is counterproductive to its own aims. I'd very much prefer a system that's a lot closer to "employer can sponsor anyone to come into the country if they need to hire from other countries." But what's preventing that isn't the existence of work visas; it's the unwillingness of politicians to advocate for such an immigration system (for which the primary reason I'd suspect boils down to some variant of racism--they feel immigration should be extremely difficult for various undesirable groups).

Companies can employ whoever they want wherever they want. No one is stopping Apple from hiring that Afghani shepherd. The primary purpose of work visas (and visas in general) is to regulate who can visit and live within a country's borders. Why is that not acceptable?

Apple can’t employ whoever they want. They have to ask for permission from the government(the actual logistics can differ, it may be framed like that employee which Apple wants to employee has to ask the government, but it’s the same thing).

What makes you think Apple has to ask the government for permission before hiring someone?

Because that’s the law, they can’t employ illegal immigrants. They need to go to the government to make that immigrant a legal one. The government has to give permission for that immigrant to become legal.

Why does that person need to be an immigrant at all? If they find a skilled Afghan then employ them...in Afghanistan.

Because not all jobs can be remote or in different time zones. If they can employed them in Afghanistan, they would definitely do that, since they will be able to pay much less due to the local cost of living. It’s the same thing with employing people in SV and employing them remote in, say Utah.

Apple can employ whomever they want. They might not be able to employ whomever they want in the US (or insert any other specific country here), but they can employ whomever they want if they're willing to put up with the paperwork to have employees in other countries.

> Can someone explain why work visas are an acceptable thing?

Because citizens vote and migrant workers don't?

I don’t understand what this means, but you can always change the laws to allow the migrants to vote I guess?

> I don’t understand what this means

It means that politicians are going to protect the labor market for their constituents. Visa restrictions are a form of trade protectionism except that the "good" being protected is labor.

Sometimes companies win subsidies or protectionist tariffs just with lobbyists. Workers have actual votes.

The Congress is given the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations by the Constitution.

I never said it’s illegal

You asked "Can someone explain why work visas are an acceptable thing?". It's literally a power of Congress.

That's still dodging the question. The United States Congress manages United States visas, but the idea of a work visa or even a passport aren't American inventions, they are international norms. The question is why they are accepted by the global community, not how they are implemented in a local community.

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