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Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine works in shipping at a reputable and profitable firm. His roommate, a Greek national also engaged with the firm, was "deported". Twice. He wasn't literally thrown out of the country but it amounted to as much, having similar visa issues.

His employer, unlike the author, sponsored him. However, two separate lawyers were unable to secure him a place in the country. One made a costly mistake and was fired, however the damage was done. My friends roommate made it back to the company for a month or so, before having to permanently relocate to one of the other offices, again, this time permanently.

These stories are not unique. People who are well educated and top performers in their sector are being turned away. Look at many successful entrepreneurs, Levchin, Musk, Collison, etc. and it is obvious the US benefits extremely well from allowing well qualified individuals immigrate.

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Has it actually been shown that if we were to throw open the borders to STEM employees that it would result in a net economic gain? Because as far as I can tell, movements to get droves of women and immigrants into software is entirely driven by companies' desire for cheaper labor.

I don't know of a comprehensive study that has been done (although there probably is) that links qualified individuals immigrating with net economic growth. However, if you look at it like VC investing, it would be worth letting 1000 people in to get an entrepreneur capable of making a Stripe, Tesla, etc. According to this forbes article[0] 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants. Obviously, many were started a long time ago, however I think the sentiment is the same. We want to benefit from brain drains in other countries, and we want smart people who are emigrating to see America as a top choice.

[0]http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

I think it sounds good on paper but in practice… the question is more along the lines of: is it worth depressing the wages of 1M employees in order to try to capture the next Zuckerberg, who creates a company that only employs a few thousand people?

Well presumably, facebook and the surrounding ecosystem would offset those costs. Without hard data there is no way to run the proper analysis. Facebook as a company, and as a platform, have created a ton of value in America. Tesla has helped out import/export ratio, Stripe has allowed us to transact globally, and SpaceX has raised our competition in the space industry.

Why does your cost-benefit calculation not include the benefits to those foreign workers who are allowed to compete for jobs in the U.S.?

The academic literature* shows much, much larger productivity and income gains to those who migrate to richer countries than any negative effect to native workers. Even if an influx of immigrants depressed some existing Americans' wages by a small amount, that delta would only pale in comparison to how much better of the immigrants would be.

Do you oppose efforts to educate more American's as computer scientists? This too would "depress" the wages of existing computer scientists but you would (hopefully) find it abhorrent if someone used your "wage depression" logic to stop teaching CS in inner-city schools.

Unless you think that the lives of non-American's are not worth considering, these hugely positive impacts of immigration should be part of your calculation.

* http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jkennan/research/OpenBorders.pdf?ne... http://www.cgdev.org/files/1425376_file_Clemens_Economics_an...

Would you willingly train/mentor somebody if you knew the outcome would be that she would compete for your job personally, or that your wage would go down 20%?

Frequently calls for equality are made by those who imagine their own situation could not possibly worsen; it's always some anonymous others who will pay.

I agree it sucks for anyone to lose their job, but using that as an excuse for xenophobic policy is a non-sequitur.

Do you honestly think there would have been a national uproar against Disney if they'd asked their employees to train other Americans?

Try replacing "foreign H1B worker" with "person of another skin color" and see if your arguments don't sound abhorrent. If you think the later sounds racist, the former is xenophobic.

>> it's always some anonymous others who will pay

Couldn't agree more. In the case of immigration and labor policy, the anonymous others who pay are those that didn't have the good fortune to be born in this country.

It's more like replace "H1B worker" with "anybody". The idea is that tech workers are being asked to expand the labor pool and basically contribute to eroding their own value without realizing it. It doesn't matter the race gender or citizenship; by reducing the scope to individuals instead of anonymous groupings it becomes clear what is happening.

It is probably noble to say that you would personally hand your own job over to somebody else. But of course it is never framed that way even though that is what is actually happening.

Except would they have been able to create that company NOT in the US? The US dominates the world with pop singers. Do you think the majority of talented singers are only born in the US? No. They are just in the best environment for turning talent in to a star.

That link is to a welcome page. Forbes uses a system where when you go to a page, it redirects to that welcome page, with an ad, then after a pause lets you go to the original page. Looks like you copy&pasted in the middle of that.

We're not really talking about opening the borders to STEM employees. We're talking about keeping highly educated people, educated at US universities, in the country.

There is some exploitation that happens, but by and large people are going to pay market rate +-15%, minus administrative costs. Administrative costs for hiring immigrants are extremely high, so it makes sense that their wages might be a bit less. (The best way to raise their wages is to reduce the administrative costs.)

The system as it is structured right now is basically designed as a foreign aid program. It encourages foreigners to come to the US, get a degree, work for a few years while saving a lot of money, then go home and invest it in building a new business not in this country.

How is it foreign aid for students to come here pay higher tuition to some schools who would be much worse without them, spend money in the US and then go home? Most students don't come here and save a bunch of money.

They are taking money from their home country and spending it in the US. It is like anti-foreign aid.

Not the parent, but:

From the perspective of the students, yes, there is a financial transfer to the U.S. However, from national perspective, there is an economic transfer to the other nation. The U.S. university system represents the product of decades (centuries in some cases) of public and private investment. Foreign students and the societies they return to get the benefit of that investment - a better educated than could be trained locally - without having made it themselves. Hence, an economic transfer from the US to the other nation.

You think all those going to school in the US are brilliant students? There are a ton of students who just have money and go to school in the US. They go to US universities who are in part propped up by the money spent by these students.

Having these type of students go back is not a lose. In fact they bring with them a demand for American goods, and culture.

I said it was foreign aid, in that it benefits their home countries more than the US. But economics is not zero-sum, so just because it amounts to foreign aid doesn't mean it's a loss per se, just that the US could be getting more out of the deal than it currently is.

I think it would probably be better for everyone if we streamlined the process of transitioning from an H1B to permanent residency, and it would definitely be better for the US economy.

There's no way to show that but to do it. I welcome such an experiment.

By similar logic, it is obvious that the US benefits extremely well from allowing political asylum.

Levchin's family got political asylum in the US. Levchin was about 16 yers old at the time. Unless you include political/religious oppression as one of the qualifying attributes, his immigration to the US wasn't due to 'allowing well qualified individuals [to] immigrate'.

Sergey Brin's family also decided to move to the US because of political/religious oppression. His father had a PhD in math and a job at GOSPLAN, then a temporary research position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Did that make him well qualified?

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