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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

I was a hiring manager. H1B candidates got exactly the same wage as native born. There were no differences.

Being paid the same as the other guy doesn't necessarily mean the wages themselves stayed the same. Adding H1B candidates to the talent pool exerts downward pressure on salary due to the law of supply and demand. I can't say for sure whether the allure of a green card or threat of deportation play a material factor in lowering the average salary that H1B immigrants are willing to accept. But in an environment where talent is treated as fungible (even if it isn't always so), any such downward pressure affects everyone.

The prevailing wage for H1B software engineers is a very good salary for most software engineers in the world.

It's common for the prevailing wage to be double what that person could earn in their country of origin.

And still exert downward pressure on wages. Just by virtue of having more people in the pool.

This would only make sense if there are a finite number of possible jobs and that more jobs are never added as an economy grows.

This would be interesting data to collect - given some field F, for each immigrant that enters the workforce, what is the delta between:

* The expected marginal increase in supply, from immigrants looking for jobs in F

* The expected marginal increase in demand, from immigrants (or non-immigrants identifying an opportunity) starting companies that need experts in F

And how strongly does that delta correlate with average salary in F?

That's the parent's argument. Prevailing wage in country A is X. Prevailing wage in country B is Y, and according to your numbers X > 2Y. Person from country B emigrates to country A and accepts wage 1.9Y, putting downward pressure on the jobs in country A at wage X.

Yeah, I'm agreeing.

You don't need the carrot of a green card or the stick of deportation to make a software engineer on an H1B accept a depressed wage, because it's not depressed relative to their alternatives.

The idea is that the "same wage" you are talking about is too low to hire enough employees in the time needed that the company needed so they had to look abroad for people willing to work for that amount.

When they're on visa managers know you can work them harder, especially during the PERM process

I've never heard of a company giving a standard wage for a team. All the companies i've worked for (Tesla, Apple, Applied materials) give me a specific offer... Not a single person on any of my team's got paid the same. Some negotiate the base offer, some come with a higher base offer based on experience.. etc. So, based on the fact that no single US worker gets paid the same, it's very hard to imagine what you are saying is true.

I was an H1B and this is a fucking lie.

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