It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12.
It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.
> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
Fuck no, it's about getting your "membership benefits" from a communal system that you've contributed to. Americans get paid more by Americans because those Americans pay more to Americans, and invest in the American economy and interact with American laws.
Who you ought to be disgusted with are the people who break the rules in order to enrich themselves from "arbitrage" opportunities. On a fundamental level, that's called theft, the only difference is the kinds of rules being broken.
Ideas such as "membership benifits" and "Americans pay more to Americans" seems to create an us vs. them mentality and imply that the us party receive govnt benifits. The idea that country A receives befits over country B can be abstracted to simple free trade theory.
If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource" and accept the idea that country A and B can ingage in "trade", than it is easy to see how US h1b style imigration worker laws are basicly tariff. They distort the price to protect domestic, by making foreign more expensive.
David Ricardo (Supply/Demand economist) and many other economists have shown countless times that countrys are better off in the long run by engaging in free trade.
If we removed the worker "tariffs" we would get more engineers, companies would be able to make more / do more. In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.
No, it simply recognizes a situation which already exists, because different nations have different laws and economies. If you want a world hegemony, it's up to you to find a route that doesn't inordinately harm specific groups (e.g. US workers) while transferring value to others (e.g. US companies and arbitrage groups.)
> If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource"
Oh? Seems to create a "people don't matter because they're just objects" mentality :P
> In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.
Unemployed or underemployed consumers never have more/better choices.
Yes, but US labor and citizens fought generations for those wages. Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that. US taxpayers paid for our economy through blood and toil.
You don't think high wages just happen because companies feel generous do you?
Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life? I understand that it gives you more chance of a better life, but just by the luck of the lottery of birth, not by any actual fairness.
Did civil war soldiers really know they were fighting for high wages 150 years later? Were taxpayers really choosing to pay tax because they expected it would give their grandkids a higher salary, or because it was the law and they'd be fined or imprisoned if they didn't? Every country had wars, and they're just meaningless wars. They weren't fought for the good things we eventually got. They were fought for a meaningless feeling of needing to support whatever group each soldier belonged to.
If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.
>Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life?
Look at it this way. I work hard and I pay a lot of taxes. I pay attention to elections and I petition governments because I want an opportunity for a good life for my kids and my kids' kids. I think soldiers who fought in the Civil War certainly wanted a better life for their kids.
This has been going on for generations. This generation is the first generation, I think in US history, that isn't expected to have a better life than their parent's generation, excluding possibly the depression. There are more young adults living with their parents since 1880.
I'm certainly not anti-immigrant, I think immigrants are the bloodline of the US economy and culture. What I'm against is companies outsourcing labor to other countries to save a little money while excluding US workers for consideration of those jobs. It's the companies I'm dissatisfied with, not the labor. If I was destitute in China or India, I would take those jobs too.
It's bad short term planning. Not only is it gutting our market, but China is stealing billions of dollars of our IP for their own use, and that includes military IP. Very few people benefit form this and the cost is great. Had US companies not outsourced and politicians not gutted labor unions, the US market would be much bigger. That's good for big business, small business and labor. Why do you think Trump and Sanders are so popular? There is massive dissatisfaction with opportunity in the US. It's about to bite us in the ass.
>If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.
The phrase "grandfathered in" refers to familial relations for a reason.
Your post is precisely what I mean by "entitlement." 500 million not-so-red Chinese don't give a hoot about the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that.
To understand the position of workers in the rest of the world, see above.
> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
Sure, if you don't want to think critically about the issue at all. Absolutely agree under that circumstance. But since many foreign workers are not able to job shop, they become a lower-cost source of labor that depresses wages for everyone (other foreign workers included) because their commitment to their host company is like a figurative gun to the head. I have literally no problems with the H1B system except for when companies bring them on primarily to lower their own personnel costs. I don't even mind when companies use them despite there being existing labor in the talent pool for them (which is usually the case, despite protestations), but then to pay them below going market rate* is my issue.
I'm not a software engineer here like most, though I dabble for fun. I am, however, experienced in labor market analysis and workforce planning. And, again, I don't care how many foreign workers any given organization has provided they aren't used primarily as a cost-reduction mechanism (if they are onshore). If a company wants you to work in America they should pay you like an American.
*This isn't a terribly fuzzy metric. Typical compensation for a given job in a given geography is readily accessible. Market-specific salary surveys, benchmarked by contribution level, are a transactional norm for any company with a competent compensation team. They typically guide vs. determine and are often 18 months out of date (at least in my experience), but they're not a white whale and very useful.
My point is that you're competing with those unwashed, underprivileged foreign workers whether they work here in the US or not. Our economy is, and should be, global in nature. If we build the wall that some posters in this thread apparently want, we'll find that instead of locking everybody else out, we've locked ourselves in.
There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer, unless we deny ourselves the benefits of the work done by the latter. To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
> There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer
Nobody made any claim of the sort! In fact, I made the opposite: when they enter into a labor market with local considerations (cost of labor, community investments) they should be treated as an equal. Right now, they are not. And one of the primary ways they are not is by being employer-constrained. That's the main issue I take umbrage with! Bring as many over as we want, but let them exist in the labor pool.
> To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
These are not artificial factors for any of the players involved. May we be better off without them? Probably so, in the long-run. But they do exist today. Maybe in a computer simulation they can be treated as such, but right now those "artificial factors" have exceptionally real consequences in the world we live in. While national boundaries may be an "artificial factor", cost of living is not, nor is added cost of labor due to social commitments at the national level. Nor are dozens of other things.
I agree that being locked to one employer is a kind of market distortion. Would you say non-compete clauses are too? I know they're not enforceable in California, but other states effectively lock local workers to their company because they're not allowed to move to another company in the same industry within a year or two of quitting.
Should we try to prevent companies from legally hiring local workers with non-compete clauses in their contracts? I think so. And I think it's a bigger issue than immigrants from the point of view of artificial wage distortion. Yet somehow these threads about immigrant workers get a lot more enthusiasm than threads about non-compete, so there's obviously something else to it. And I can't see what else besides the GP's "I'm an American".
It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12.
It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.