It's unfortunate that most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries), and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).
This approach seems deliberately lazy, as though it's some kind of head-scratcher that the displaced IT support guy hates his outsourced replacement; while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.
Also those are cash salaries, tech companies also give generous share-based compensation. While share count is guaranteed (offer/contract) their $ value is not so they cannot be counted.
I get your point but I was talking about public companies since they were mostly mentioned in the article for which shares are convertible to cash right away.
> while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.
Yes, and exploit those workers with lower salary than they deserve because those workers only have a small sliver of the job market available to them that their US Citizen competitors do.
The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers, which is why you see big corporations like Microsoft and Facebook pushing to remove caps on it. Not because they generous but because they would love to have more engineers who are underpaid and have a very hard time leaving the company for years until they can one day become citizens (and from what I understand the path to citizenship for an H-1B worker is not easy despite them being extremely productive and high contributing members of society.)
The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers
This is patently untrue when it comes to companies like Google or Microsoft.
I came to the US on an H1-B. As I'm sure you can imagine, people talk about their salaries. I compared mine to my colleagues who were US citizens. We were all paid about the same.
I'm pretty sure these companies would get busted if managers were informed by HR that "this person is going to get a smaller raise since they are on an H1-B".
Even with equal compensation, having an employee who is not only worried about their job, but also their immigration status, could be of benefit to the company. Theoretically they might cause less trouble, demand less from management, and are less likely to leave, saving the company all sorts of turnover costs.
Agree on this. My peers at BigCo who were citizens made a bit more than I did and usually got promoted quicker. Managers had the pressure of retaining them otherwise they would leave. Immigrants don't get that option.
I'm glad genuinely glad you came to the U.S. and found gainful employment. I have many friends, some very close, that likewise have come to the U.S. and the U.S. is better for it.
That being said, even if the salaries are all the same, it doesn't mean that wages are not suppressed. If you import supply and demand stays consistent, prices drop. I think the burden of proof is on the people saying otherwise to prove that importing tens of thousands of engineers doesn't suppress wages.
In other words, if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures (better dev tools, better hardware, more administrative assistants, etc.).
At this point I just don't understand your argument. You seem to imply that there is some "correct" supply of engineers, and anything that increases the supply above that is "suppressing wages." That would mean that scholarships for engineering schools, programs for encouraging engineering careers, all forms of immigration, and even internal population growth, would all be things that can "suppress wages."
It seems to me that H1B supporters are the ones saying there is a correct supply of engineers and that the U.S. is below that threshold.
I'm arguing that the supply is more fungible than that, especially in the long run and especially given a floating price point, and that changing the laws and regulations to solve challenges in particular business models is basically an indirect form of lobbying for special interests.
Actually, all those things are things that suppress wages.
Think about it: WHY do we need programs to encourage engineering careers? Do we have programs to encourage people to go into law or medicine? Why not? Well those professions don't seem to have a shortage of people willing to work hard to get into those schools. So why does engineering have such a shortage?
These programs assume that there's something wrong with young people, or with the culture, causing them to avoid these careers.
Maybe, instead, there's something wrong with the careers themselves, and the employers, which cause people to avoid them. So why are we, as a society, subsidizing these rich companies to help them get more workers? If these companies really need these workers so badly, maybe they should foot the bill to recruit people into the profession and then train them (I mean their entire college costs here). If an employer isn't willing to pay $100k for a kid to go through college, who otherwise isn't willing to take that risk himself, then why should the rest of us try to brainwash that kid to do it, or help fund a scholarship for him?
> if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures
Or perhaps, move the job to another country which has a larger supply of workers.
Nope. It's simple: if this were an option, they'd have already done it.
Microsoft could easily just pack up and move all their dev work to India. There's a large supply of workers there, and they can pay them a fraction of what they have to pay here.
Why aren't they doing this? The big companies threaten this, but they never do it.
Simple: if it were really this easy, they'd have already done it. There's obviously some good reasons why they're not, and why instead they choose to import people under H1-B, pay them roughly similar salaries to US workers, and pay for lots of immigration/paperwork-related costs on top of this. They might be (and I think they are) helping keep salaries down this way overall, but that's nothing compared to just dumping everyone and moving operations to India and paying 1/5 of US labor rates. So why aren't they doing that?
Google runs large engineering offices in a number of foreign countries. If there's talent out there that can't be imported the next best thing is to go where the talent is.
Ok, then tell me why they haven't done that already. They could save huge amounts of money by just laying off everyone in the US and hiring new people in India (or relocating everyone to India). The salaries in India are easily 1/5 or less than those in Silicon Valley.
Probably because they need the highly-skilled people both in India and US - to put together fruitful collaborations like these [1] (which, incidentally, created a sub-field which employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, Americans included).
At the moment, it might be more economically sensible to convince the Indian to move to US than to convince the American to move to India. But if you make it too hard or impossible to do that, Google will re-evaluate options at their disposal and decide accordingly.
If they "need" the highly-skilled people in the US, who cost 5-6x the ones in India, then there's something clearly lacking with the people in India. Otherwise, why not just dump the US workers altogether and move all new operations to India? They can even move their American workers there and offer them a salary that's 1.5x-2x the standard salary in India and still save a bundle over Silicon Valley salary levels.
Seriously: these companies keep threatening this, I wish they'd just do it and see how it works out for them. It just sounds like an idle threat to me to try to get their way in the US. I'm really sick and tired of their threats.
Companies would need to invest in continuing professional development, as lawyers, doctors, PEs and so on need to. Not just hire someone with the latest buzzwords then discard them when the fashion changes.
H1Bs sponsored by Microsoft / Google are the lucky ones. When I started back in 2008, in the east coast, they gave me 50K and I had 10+ yrs IT exp, with previous Wall St company experience too. When my contract expired, they were so shocked why I quit so fast ;P. The small desi company in NJ who sponsored my didnt know they were shit.
I've been toying around with the idea that some sort of auction might be a good way to distinguish between efforts to find the best and efforts to undercut the local market. That seems borne out by the salary graph in the article you cited, outsourcing companies offering lower pay than the tech companies themselves.
FYI: 'Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'
But he didn't read the article in full, and made an uninformed opinion that is now at the top of the comment section... Bad comments need to be put on blast. Save your rule book for something more inane.
>most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish
My response assumes you're saying the journalist of the NYT piece is among "most of the people" not able to make a distinction between the 2 categories you laid out.
category 1: >between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries),
NYT article: "Proponents of the H-1B system argue that it is an important vehicle to attract top talent to America. After coming to the United States, these visa holders may apply their skills to start new companies or create new, innovative products"
category 2: >and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).
NYT article: "The H-1B program’s critics say the system provides a way for American companies to turn over technology departments to outsourcing companies. These are gaming the system to snap up the visas so they can replace American workers with less expensive, temporary staff members."
It seems the NYT journalist has correctly distinguished both categories. (There are more paragraphs in that article that add more details about both categories but I only copypasted 1 example of each.)
It is true that the NYT article mentions the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.
Farther along it becomes even clearer when they say suppressing wages is good for the economy but at what cost.
"In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries."
@ericseppanen's point is that the two groups are not the same.
(A lot of the other critics in the HN comment section also seem to argue that the innovative tech companies are doing the same thing as the outsourcers.)
>@ericseppanen's point is that the two groups are not the same.
The NYT journalists are aware of that. The commenter ericseppanen with his incorrect interpretation of the text has done a disservice to the HN readers trusting it as accurate and upvoting his comment to the top.
One of writer's profiles is of Mr. Jeff Tan and how he's harmed by HCL Technologies which is an Indian tech firm (similar to bodyshops abusing H1B like Infosys.) The critics' commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket of people.
The other profile is talking about "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found" and the examples of that in the article include Microsoft and Google. The proponents commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket.
The authors of the article have interwoven both groups together throughout the narrative which may be confusing for some readers -- but that doesn't mean that the writers are so clueless that they completely don't understand the distinction between the two. They clearly do. Interweaving the text for stylistic purposes does not mean they have mistakenly conflated the 2 groups.
To summarize the 2 different groups being profiled:
"HCL Technologies" example != "Google/Microsoft" example
"HCL staff in India replacing Mr. Tan at UCSF" != "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found"
>the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.
No, not the same phenomenon:
critics("outsourcing companies with less expensive, temporary staff members") != proponents("top talent to create new innovative products")
I know you are asserting this, but even on rereading it, I find that the authors do not make the distinction that you claim they make.
In the article cited, the authors only mention Google and Microsoft once:
"... Technology giants like Microsoft and Google have pressed for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.
But for tech workers like Mr. Tan, the program has had very negative consequences."
If you don't see that as conflation, I don't know how we will agree on this.
>, the authors only mention Google and Microsoft once:
It's the not quantity of times Google & Microsoft is mentioned. The point is that they are mentioned in the same paragraph as the preceding sentence, "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found."
The specific text you pasted has a line break to signify 2 separate paragraphs and the 2nd paragraph starts with a "But..." Those two spatial organization cues in the text is telling the reader to parse them as 2 separate groups instead of conflating them.
The Mr. Tan anecdote is for the other group harmed by H1B abusers such as outsourcers replacing his UCSF job with cheap labor.
NYT's 2 groups:
group 1: "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills" (Google, MS)
group 2: "outsourcers cheap labor" (HCL, Infosys)
ericseppanen's 2 groups in his parent comment:
group 1: companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries),
group 2: and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).
ericseppanen's original complaint was that the writers didn't understand there are 2 different types of companies. Yes, the writers did understand that and they provided dual anecdotes for both types. The writers actually made the same distinction that ericseppanen wanted them to make!
>If you don't see that as conflation,
I will offer up a theory as to why some readers think the NYT writers mistakenly conflate them: the article only has "humanizing" profiles of real people hurt by the negative H1B abusers. The writers didn't bother to add human stories for the positive H1B "top talent innovators" such as quoting a rare PhD scientist from Germany helping them invent flying cars or whatever. (The examples of Google + Microsoft + proponents espousing benefits are "abstract" citations not "human" ones.) Because the story is one-sided in quantity of anecdotes emphasizing the negative H1B, readers may think the writers conflate the categories.
Although the authors may be biased for emphasizing the abuses of H1B by outsourcers, that doesn't mean they are not aware of the other type of H1B companies that attracting the best talent in the world.
There is a difference between proponents and critics describing the same activity in different terms and noting that different companies treat the system differently and that it is roughly bimodal: "Google's" use and "Infosys'" abuse.
I interpreted the two quotes you pulled as the former.
>There is a difference between proponents and critics describing the same activity
The 2 quotes I pulled for 2 different categories are not describing the same activity:
"top talent to America" != "less expensive, temporary staff members"
The "top talent innovative products" is intended to describe Google or Tesla hiring a rare PhD scientist from Germany to work on deep machine learning or automated driving algorithms.
The "less expensive, temp staff" is meant to describe loophole abuses like Infosys.
Not the OP, but it was brought up several times, though it wasn't the focus of the article. I'd quote each area, but I'm on mobile, and considering the number of different areas I'd have to quote, it would be annoying. Suffice it to say, it's in there and your criticism is unwarranted.
> It's unfortunate that most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries), and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).
That's an eloquent way of saying, "This is why we can't have nice things.".
The visa system is prone to abuse as long as it is the sponsoring company that controls the visa. The visa should be issued to the individual and be valid for a fixed length of time.
Of course, doing this would almost entirely eliminate the economic incentive for companies to bring in foreign workers since they would be free to negotiate better deals once here, which would rapidly reduce the demand for H-1B visas by US companies and the number of foreign workers who come to the US under that program.
That's completely not true - the programs goal is to bring in skills that are not available in the market. The fact that it's being used to reduce the cost of the skills is arguably an unintended consequence (though my personal opinion is the lobby that helped make H1-B a reality fully intended this consequence).
A much better use for these visas would be to bring in workers we need at competitive US salaries. There are plenty of positions that need filling that would still make sense to pay full market salary for. (Speaking from personal experience trying to find certain skill sets in LA.)
Well, that's my point. In theory, this program is intended to provide US employers with employees who have skill sets that they cannot find here.
In practice, it's ludicrous to think that the vast US university system cannot produce employees with whatever skills are in demand, so workers must be imported from countries that have much smaller education complexes.
The reality is that many US employers don't want to pay market rate for those skills. I would argue that this is especially true in tech. The same or similar forces are at play at the bottom end of the labor market, which is what has driven much of the illegal immigration through the southern border.
Dont get me wrong. But to my understanding these visas would be used by a lot of people from countries with way better education systems. Hence the whole reason for this.
Edit:// as example. Right now barely any swiss tech pros consider the U.S. as interesting destination. A lot of husstle for just minimal more pay.
As a Swiss working abroad (in Berlin right now), it's not always about pay, two years ago I interviewed with a dozen of companies in the US because there are just so many more opportunities.
Yes indeed. And high salaries don't make up for everything. And these days companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon,... are increasing their engineering headcount in Europe (they must realize how cheap European engineers are with the strong USD :)
Sadly in my case I was applying for jobs at companies that are relatively big but concentrate their developers in the silicon valley.
If i learned one thing in switzerlands IT is that it is easy to earn a lot but also relatively easy to earn more than enough while still having a lot of free time and beeing able to enjoy your job.
I just throw in the money argument because almost always i say anything against SV someone comes with the money argument ;)
I would prefer to live in Switzerland over Silicon Valley too. And a generation ago I might have argued that the US education system was as good or better than Switzerland's, but I can't make that argument now. But it's still better than most places, and certainly good enough to provide qualified workers.
It is not about education system. It is the dream of lots of third world natives to have a shot at 'dream life' in the first world. So any kind visa including asylum, religious freedom etc are prone to misuse and exploitation.
Yeah i cant disagree that this opens missuse but i also dont really see the issue. Except a few countries (like the U.S. recently) the world is pretty free already and shit did not go to crazy until a certain war made basically a complete country moving west at once. The general consent, except the phanatic freaks, was "we've done that, we deserve that"
> In practice, it's ludicrous to think that the vast US university system cannot produce employees with whatever skills are in demand, so workers must be imported from countries that have much smaller education complexes.
Many of the students in the US universities need a work visa to work for a US employer. I've worked with several people who finished a US degree, and apply for an H-1B visa for when the OPT visa runs out. As far as I can tell (I didn't read everyone's posting), their wages were comparable to mine, so it doesn't feel like a cost savings move to me.
> ... their wages were comparable to mine, so it doesn't feel like a cost savings move to me.
The logic is that employers would have to invest more in their employees (training, scholarships, salaries) to get the number and kinds of employees they want.
To the extent that all salaries are equal, there is equal treatment. But increasing the supply of labor does help employers keep costs down at the expense of others (like almost-qualified U.S. workers who can't find employment).
> In practice, it's ludicrous to think that the vast US university system cannot produce employees with whatever skills are in demand, so workers must be imported from countries that have much smaller education complexes.
No, it's ludicrous to think that a vast network of overpriced liberal arts colleges with chronic grade inflation can produce enough high quality engineers and scientists for the largest economy in the world, especially when the majority of its industrial capacity is in high value add manufacturing like aerospace and defense, clean(er) energy, pharmaceuticals, and other specialized fields. The rest of the world takes education a lot more seriously than we do and even though they may not be ranked highly by the US News World Report, the rest of the world's universities easily produce enough talent in their top 3% to leave the bottom 80-90% of US STEM graduates completely jobless, at any salary. Paying someone more after they graduate isn't going to make an 18 year old take their education seriously and the best universities in the world can't help a student body obsessed with everything but their education.
It baffles me to no end that a few H1B immigrants from some podunk mining university in Siberia can bang out a complex PCB on their own faster than the vast majority of MIT/Caltech/Stanford EE graduates I know. Even though the latter have a year+ of internships each under their belt, they're useless without months or years of on the job training. When they do get that training, they're still years behind someone who had no choice but to work 40 hours a week while going to school in a poor country with few prospects. This isn't a hypothetical: I've met and worked with half a dozen different people in SoCal from the same Siberian mining university (because it was one of the few in the Soviet Union without institutional anti-Semitism) who came here shortly after graduating to fill long empty mid-to-senior level engineering positions. None were underpaid or exploited and many filled positions that their employers were actively trying to fill for years.
I'm sure that higher salaries would push a few people in the direction of STEM fields, and a few of those would be capable of filling positions that an immigrant would take. If the salaries went high enough, I bet it might even obviate the need for skilled immigration entirely but Americans as a nation just don't want to pay the price, full stop. It would mean doubling the amount of money we give out in research grants, let alone every other corner of our economy. Just look at a variety of goods in Italy or France: the public is willing to pay more per article of clothing or furniture so there is a large industry of highly paid artisans with job security and high quality of life, willingly supported by consumers.
Disclaimer: the above probably does not apply to a significant portion, if not majority, of annual H1Bs because they go to Tata, Infosys, and other sweatshops. Those are absolutely abuses of the Visa program meant only to depress wages.
Edit to add some more concrete info: based on my parents' old high school/undergrad textbooks and my own experiences, the average American STEM college student spends the first few years of undergrad catching up to the level of a good but not great high school junior in the Soviet Union. Five year dual BS/MS degrees including institute R&D were the norm back then so how do you think the average 23 year old Soviet graduate stacked up to the best 20-anything American? The level of education doesn't even compare.
Sounds like you had a very rare experience with a few H1B immigrants, but I would hold off on making a broader conclusion about a vast country like Russia, each state sized entity is a country unto itself, similar to our states. Education varies (as I saw when hosting many exchange students) and some parts (Kazakhstan) were much better off post-USSR as they became fully autonomous.
Those were just the more colorful examples because they were all from a single unknown university in Siberia, a rather sparsely populated region. These examples are very common, just not as concentrated in one company like Tata or Infosys. Just around the LA Eastern European and Caltech community, there are tens of thousands of immigrants who came here on H1Bs from the top of their classes and found high paying, extremely specialized jobs usually getting green cards and citizenship. If you expand the network to the LA metropolitan area including all the universities and aerospace companies, you're talking hundreds of thousand. Hundreds of thousands more in the New York metropolitan area.
Tens of thousands of H1Bs go to universities and smaller companies every year and many of those go on to get permanent residency so over decades, the numbers really add up. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of abuse, but you have to be extra careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In my humble opinion, the STEM education in the US is not even in the same league as that of EU or Russia.
What baffles me the most is, not only the education is lacking some of the most basic items but it's self perceived as world class. That perception extends out of the US, at least it did to me at some point.
The mirage of the ARPA funding during the sixties and its undoubtedly success still resonates deeply, but the H1-B system and gaming it's only a canary of a deeper problem: the education system in the US is not on par with the rest of the western world anymore, possibly for the last twenty years. And indeed the public is not ready to even acknowledge it, much less to pay for it.
"the average American STEM college student spends the first few years of undergrad catching up to the level of a good but not great high school junior in the Soviet Union."
That is because colleges in America do the job of professional high schools in the former Soviet Union. when you count in those too (e.g. not just kids meant to go to university), average math levels gets real bad.
American students dont to that badly on an international tests, not compared with former Soviet Union. America has bigger variety - best juniors do real good and worst one real bad. Former Soviet Union tends to even things out and sort of kill a lot of talent.
Well the reality is that US needed to offer labor market access to countries where they wanted US products access. When times were good nobody bothered about H1 value etc but in tough economic times labor market access is one of the top concerns of politicians.
The low level details of salary, duration, mountain of paperwork etc for visa were adjusted as per demand and supply.
> There are plenty of positions that need filling that would still make sense to pay full market salary for.
If it made sense to pay market salary, why aren't they filled? Market price, after all, is a look back on the transaction once it has happened. The market salary is exactly what it took to get someone in that seat.
Perhaps you mean it would make sense to pay below market salary, necessitating a change in the market (i.e. increase the supply of workers through foreign imports) to meet that lower price goal?
If I have some work that is profitable at a cost of labour of $100k/year and no American wants to work for less than $120k then I can either hire an H1B for $100k or abandon the project. It doesn't benefit anyone to have the latter outcome occur.
If I could sell a Mercedes at $20k, that would only be profitable if I could pay <$20k for the car.
Mercedes and the economy are missing out because of the commerce not being transacted right?
The idea that work that's profitable at $100k and not at $120k -- that means that the work isn't profitable if the market cost is $120.
Everything is profitable if the cost of inputs is less than the sales price. It's an absurd argument.
Essentially, your statement singlehandedly destroys minimum wage arguments. "If I could pay less, then I could be profitable, otherwise I am not profitable and thus won't hire anyone."
But you are also admitting that the purpose of H1 isn't to fill shortages -- it's to fill shortages of people willing to work at a rate below what the market dictates. It's like the illegal immigrant advocates that claim that Americans don't want to pick fruit -- at $5 per hour, probably not. But at $15 per hour, suddenly there isn't a shortage.
Except in rare cases, H1s are not used to fill actual shortages but to lower costs. A junior level Tata engineer isn't filling a shortage of skills, they're filling a shortage of engineers willing to work for $50k per year.
> Essentially, your statement singlehandedly destroys minimum wage arguments. "If I could pay less, then I could be profitable, otherwise I am not profitable and thus won't hire anyone."
Yes. That statement shows exactly why minimum wage is economically unsound in the long-term. e.g. why else would McDonald's feel the need to automate their cashiers?
> Essentially, your statement singlehandedly destroys minimum wage arguments. "If I could pay less, then I could be profitable, otherwise I am not profitable and thus won't hire anyone."
Yes, it does. Minimum wage laws are not good economics. We would be better served scrapping them and instituting a basic income to ensure a quality-of-life floor instead.
No, it still works this way, but society has put in place rules and regulations defining what is allowable and what isn't.
Companies can cut costs by dumping waste in a river and burning garbage, too, but we don't let companies do that any more. If a company wants to operate in a country then they need to obey the laws of that country.
Also, this applies to the skills of the employee. If your skills aren't good enough that people would pay top dollar for them, then you should find something else to do.
But in this case it doesn't suck for the rich management and shareholders (they'll manage just fine without doing the project at all) it mostly just sucks for the taxpayers who get less tax revenue, the community that has one fewer consumer, and the foreigner who has to stay put in his country working at something even less productive making $25k.
If it is always better to move forward with a project with the cheapest labour available to fill the role, what purpose does the H1B system serve? Why not just grant entry to everyone who has a wanting employer without all the unnecessary hoops?
I assume the purpose is to select only those who are going to be employed securely enough at a high enough salary that they're extremely unlikely to ever go on welfare or otherwise be a net burden on the US.
I don't think they do -- it's pretty basic economics that price fixing and/or supply shocks can result in smaller net economic output.
For a thought experiment: imagine if the price of a haircut was fixed by law at $500 (or that 99% of barbers suddenly died and the price naturally surged to $500). Enough people would start cutting their own hair at home that the entire haircut GDP and employment of the nation would go down. Even though the lucky few who still have jobs have excellent wages and there is still a steady supply of haircuts to rich people willing to pay $500 a pop.
So long as there are more jobs than people with the skillset to fill them, that just shuffles the vacancies around - at least until some of the jobs move to another country. Which is probably not a good thing when, for example, the job is a specialised position required to keep a factory that used to employ a whole bunch of people up and running and the only way to move it is to shut that factory down and set up operations in a different country.
Simple solution from signing-bonus land. Sponsoring company offers to pay your visa fees. If you quit before X months you owe it back. X is defined by regulation, and should be linked to costs and value added, not the term of the visa.
No. No employee should be in dept to thier employer. If you want them to stay with you, treat and pay them well. It is a fine line between paying visa fees and debt bondage. Everyone should be free to walk away from a bad employer.
Walking away from a bad employer is exactly what this allows. Today that's very difficult and can result in losing the visa entirely, while in the visa fee scenario you're just out some money (which is exactly the same as in the signing bonus example).
Would it be more palatable if the employer did not pay the visa fees but did have a signing bonus equal to the visa fees?
It's slippery slope territory to start putting employees in a debt situation. Even if there is a cap on the fee, say the paid fee plus a max $50 admin fee, many companies will claim ignorance, start charging more than the $50 fee, then call in a debt collection agency, pile on interest and more fees, then campaign for a rule change, then claim ignorance of the law and so on and so forth. And for people who are often vulnerable and in a foreign country who aren't aware of the rules/laws and have no representation. It's a slippery slope best avoided.
And sooner or later, we have the same system as in soccer,
where millions change hands when a player changes employer.
Do we then also get a fantasy league to bet on teams? Oh, wait, that's what the stock market is for.
Which is exactly the desired outcome if you take seriously that the law explicitly requires companies to pay the prevailing wage to all H1-B visa holders.
> Of course, doing this would almost entirely eliminate the economic incentive for companies to bring in foreign workers since they would be free to negotiate better deals once here
This is ignorant ranting at it's worst. Changing companies for H-1B visa holders is one of the easiest operations in otherwise byzantine world of US immigration. The only restrictions are that the new job should be in same or similar area of expertise which is usually not a problem at all (except in case the person is drastically changing career fields) and should pay at least prevalent wages etc. H-1B holders can and do use these opportunities to find better jobs (usually with higher pay) all the time.
Previously, if your employer found out that you interviewed elsewhere (due to to a reference call or other means), they could fire you and there was only 10 days where you could wait for the new employer/offer to materialize.
Previously you didn't have 10 days to find a job when you were fired. Based on USCIS rules previously, you had to be employed the day you file your H1 transfer. So in case you are fired, and if uscis asked for your latest pay stubs covering your employment of date of filing, you would need to leave the country, file it again and come back in.
When I filed an H1 for my startup, they issued a Request for Evidence just because the documentation mentioned our investor pitch "founder previously employed by LinkedIn". They thought I had already quit my job. Luckily I was still employed and was able to send the pay stubs.
I switched jobs while I was on H1B in 2004. I don't think legally a company can fire you just because you are looking for a job, that too without giving a notice. They have to put you on some sort of a Performance Improvement Plan or something like that right ?
At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships
in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is,
without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning.
Notice period is typically 2 weeks and company can pay for that period in lieu of notice period. So none of those things are comforting for an employee on visa.
You can change companies, but your ~7 year wait for US permanent residence will reset. So you basically can't change companies if you intend to immigrate.
EB2 green card visa wait times: only China and India (for now)
EB3 green card wait times: Mexico, Phillipines and other countries
I think most folks may not realized that there are a variety of green card paths, even within the employment category, and the requirements for EB1, EB2 and EB3 are completely different.
Unless they have an advanced degree (I believe a PhD, or at the very least a Masters), foreign workers, even highly paid silicon valley software engineers fall under the EB-3 category, which has a further backlog than that. I have friends with Filipino passports working at Google/MS/etc for 4+ years and still waiting on movement on their green card applications.
I stand corrected! Wow! I used to check the State Department's visa bulletin all the time when I was waiting for my green card. Back then China and India were the only countries with backlogs.
Looking at the current bulletin.[1] It now looks like China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines all have some backlog for EB-3.
Yikes! However, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras only have a ~4 month backlog.
Only India have China have significant employment based immigrant queues. Some of the other countries you mentioned are severely backlogged in the family based categories.
However an H1 is a non-immigrant visa. So if the intent is to immigrate, that's the wrong visa and thus permanent residency eligibility ought to be irrelevant. H1s being used as back door immigrant visas is a misuse of the program and violates the intent.
H1 is a dual-intent visa. Meaning that it's deliberately set up so that you can file for a green card on it, and not get kicked out of the country immediately (as is the case for e.g. tourist visas).
So, no, it doesn't violate its intent. And, pragmatically speaking, it's the only viable track to green card and, ultimately, citizenship for the majority of skilled immigrants into the USA.
Yes, it is still a silly setup, and most other countries have an explicit skilled immigration track that covers the same niche. Most of US immigration law and regulations is so ad-hoc and randomly slapped together (due to widely differing polices and a lot of knee jerking), that it is like that in general, though.
If you hold one H1-B, you can get a new H-1B without needing to win the lottery again. That's usually referred to as a "transfer", even though you are technically getting an H-1B.
It's not, and companies do H1 transfers, which come with their own fees. There are some other hooks - employee might be liable for filing fees if they quit too soon, and if the company has started a green card petition, there are multiple small steps involved as far as paperwork and deadlines, which makes a potential change of employers risky.
I have a certain level of sympathy for unemployed Americans who the government could be retraining as technology workers. There are some H-1B workers who legitimately have skills that are highly valuable and uncommon within the U.S., but the majority seem to employed by large contracting firms who specialize in bringing in folks to perform relatively simple labor.
I have much less sympathy for folks already in the tech industry who are complaining about this. Tech is basically the most overpaid career there is. And not because it's especially hard or valuable, but because as soon as some CEO starts getting the idea that they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg then all rational thought goes out the window.
Hiring developers is basically rich people's version of blowing all their money on lottery tickets. The entire industry is completely unregulated despite putting the nation's critical infrastructure and economy in grave danger, which artificially drives up wages by externalizing the risk onto everyone else. And H-1B workers are placing basically zero downward pressure on wages as far as I can tell.
Overpaid? We're paying people $30M a year to throw a ball into a hoop, and we're paying other people millions to recite a few lines in a movie.
Why shouldn't engineers, part of a class of worker that arguably brings much more benefits to society than actors or athletes, get paid much more?
If the natural labor market dynamics were allowed to occur, we would be seeing top engineers being paid $500K to $1M+ per year. In fact, during the SV wage fixing cartel, this is precisely what the executives of these participating companies were complaining about in the emails that were disclosed in court filings. Will you believe tech company executives when they say that it affects wages? How many earnings calls do you have to listen to where executives talk about how labor market dynamics and immigration policy will affect their payroll costs? I'm sorry but if you think immigration doesn't affect wages, I've got a bridge to sell you...
Not only is the H1B program putting downward pressure on wages, but all immigration is putting downward pressure on all wages.
Any time you hear a tech executive talk about "shortage of workers", what they're really saying is "shortage of workers willing to work for a lower than market value wage".
> Tech is basically the most overpaid career there is.
It isn't because if you don't maintain your skill set by constantly keeping up with the latest frameworks, data stores, or even languages then you become obsolete. Not all of this can be done during work hours. Consequently it's a career that's prone to ageism.
I was responding to the comment and not the article. Still what I've written also applies to sys admins. You can see it in the evolution of the position from sys admin to dev ops. Sys admins / dev ops now need to know how to program, use something like chef, ansible, salt or puppet. You also have to learn kubernetes, docker or some other container now. You still need to be constantly learning as a sys admin unless you want to become obsolete.
>Tech is basically the most overpaid career there is.
I think we get paid what a middle class wage should be. There was a huge downward spiral in wages due to rapid economic changes that cause a large fraction of the workforce to make very substandard wages.
FYI if you think devs are overpaid, it's generally in SV (and even there, they make average considering the cost of living - a good idea is to look at the end of month savings instead of earnings).
With that said, we are getting paid a lot less than the value we add - seriously - the entire world around you works on software and if it were to stop for even an hour, we'd have a lot of issues - so with that in mind - we should be getting paid more.
Now i know you'll say a CRUD developer adds no value, but I could argue that neither do most lawyers or traders - but they get paid a lot more no?
> we are getting paid a lot less than the value we add
Keep in mind that hiring developers is a lemon market. Imagine if any other industry worked like tech. E.g. if when you took your car in for an oil change, there was a 50/50 chance of the mechanics taking it for a joy ride, totaling it, and then charging you tens of thousands of dollars. Or if you went to the doctor the only treatment they were familiar with was sawing off your leg, so that's what you're getting regardless of what the problem is.
If this sounds absurd, it's probably because you're in the tech industry. The average small business owner's experience working with developers is handing over a good portion of their life savings and then either having the dev team just take the money and run, getting back something completely broken and unusable, getting back something half done and a year late, etc.
I literally became a developer myself because it was the only way to reliably avoid these sorts of issues. The only other industry this broken is maybe the medical system, but at least they're taking (small) steps in the right direction.
And we have quite a lot of bad lemons (if I may), who basically have 0 clue of what they are doing. They join teams or take on projects, blow away loads of $ and have nothing to show for it.
But imagine if every doctor or lawyer was paid based on such bad lemons for example (considering that we can still had bad lawyers and doctors even after having licensing exams).
> The entire industry is completely unregulated despite putting the nation's critical infrastructure and economy in grave danger, which artificially drives up wages by externalizing the risk onto everyone else.
I don't see how adding regulations to ensure safety of critical infrastructure could possibly reduce developer wages. If anything, they'd be increased because now you need more of them and they need more skills.
I work in WA and there is no state-required professional certification for software engineers, so no one needs to sign-off on anything safety-critical (where no-other class of professional engineer would either, like a HIPAA/PCI compliant system as opposed to avionics engineering), and that does concern me - because I would like the opportunity to both have the skills for safety-critical work and to be recognised for it. I feel it's important now with IOT vulns and data/privacy security, and as a side-effect those jobs are often legally unexportable.
I believe it's underpaid. I earn my company at least 20x my salary every year. If all the software developers and maintainers left, the company would cease to function competitively and probably collapse within a year.
You have to understand how reliant companies are to their software systems today.
The majority of the value of a Ferrari are in the materials and engineering, not assembly.
The value software and it in general bring to a company are way more than the sum of salaries. A multitude higher. If it were actually based on supply and demand you'd think salaries would increase.
I don't know how rare it is, but it depends on your perspective. If the IT departments ceases to exist all of a sudden, many companies would have to halt operations. What's the cost of that?
What's the value of building a system that will scale when the business needs it, verses one that doesn't?
What's the value of a flexible system that allows the business to perform multiple M&As without a hitch and pivot to market needs?
Companies use software systems for a reason: they are very valuable. The more companies use software for competitive advantage, the more their competitors need them to compete. We're at the point where a company can't survive without a good system.
The tech worker salaries are completely unreasonable compared to other jobs. The characters from the article could just agree to work for $60 000/year (which still is a lot) and wouldn't lose their jobs.
In San Francisco, softare developers earn at the median $117,700 a year. Keep in mind, that qualifies for subsidized housing for a a family of 4 in San Francisco.
This salary is a bit higher than the median for dental hygienists, and considerably lower than for registered nurses. I'm not complaining about that, those are important jobs that should be well compensated, but we should acknowledge that software developers aren't paid outrageously compared to other knowledge based fields. The median for lawyers and physicians is, of course much higher.
There's a higher potential upside to software development, but it is a lottery, and most don't end up making a huge amount of money. Senior dev positions at top tech companies do pay very well, over twice the median salary, but these salaries aren't remarkable compared to top professionals in other fields. The field comes with considerable age related issues, and the work environment (open offices, scrum) leave much to be desired. Honestly, I think the reason for the "shortage" is that people who have the choice (i.e., aren't bound by their visa to work in software) are rationally choosing to work in other fields.
I don't understand why there are self hating developers on HN or those who don't seem to grock the free market system - there is no god given "fair " rate for the job.
Yeah, it is a little strange. People make statements about a "shortage" of workers without mentioning pay and working conditions. Or, if they do, they'll discuss a shortage at the "market rate", without considering that the "market rate" itself is insufficient to attract talented people with freedom into the field.
No. When the value of the input exceeds its cost, then no, it's not "unreasonable."
What's unreasonable is paying someone $15 per hour for unskilled labor you could teach a teenager to do in 15 minutes. The cost of the work exceeds its value.
That unskilled labour is probably more hard and tiring than sitting in a comfortable chair before a computer. If only there were more tech workers the market would set adequate price.
In Norway, if you are on a knowledge worker visa, your salary needs to be competitive. This amount increases each year with inflation.
As an American working in Norway, I have to say that this is how it should be done in the US . My Norwegian coworkers do not resent me because I was not hired because I am any cheaper than they are. And, I get a salary that allows me to meet the high cost of living here. If companies were allowed to pay foreigners significantly below industry standard, it would be a disaster. I don't understand why this is still standard practice in the US.
Oh wait, I do understand: it allows companies to pay less for labor and pad their profit margins. But it is bogus, and this is one Trump initiative I can get behind.
I believe it is currently a minimum of $60K / year, which was established in 1989 and not updated since. Companies in the US (and the government too) tend to skirt laws justifying the misdeeds as, "we interpret the law differently."
In other words, some shops will gladly pay a senior software engineer $60K a year, claiming they are something else like tech support. There are plenty of examples of other methods some companies use.
The minimum salary is based on the Labor Department's "prevailing wage" which is informed by a survey of current salaries. It's based on a given role and geographic location.
Yes, you may find some prevailing wages are lower than what Google pays, but that shouldn't be surprising since high paying tech jobs don't represent the average wage.
The prevailing wage is based on the skill level of the position, and for some occupations in certain lower-wage geographical areas, it can be quite low and even less than $60,000 for an entry-level employee. (There’s is a lower bound to the skill level for an H-1B position, it has to at least require a bachelor’s degree.) But it can also be higher than $100,000 for higher skill levels, and better-paid occupations in high-wage areas.
The required wage is the higher of prevailing wage and “actual wage,” which is what other employees with similar duties, experience and qualifications are paid.
The separate $60,000 minimum is often misunderstood and not accurately reported in the news media. There is a rule that “H-1B dependent” employers (employers with a certain number or percentage of H-1B workers) need to make a number of attestations, including that they do not displace US workers and try to recruit US workers before hiring an H-1B worker. These are not generally required for H-1B petitions, which normally only require a specialized occupation and a certain wage.
But if an H-1B worker is paid at least $60,000 or has a master’s degree or higher, those attestations are not necessary, and the general H-1B rules apply.
If you have programmers being paid anywhere from $80K to $150K for a given skill set, the average is going to be lower than what the top companies pay.
The only way around that is to create another subset of programmers that only look at the highest wages.
It's simple: require that the employers pay the H1-B visaholder in the 95th percentile or above of the salary range for that position.
And if an employer is found to have abused the system (hired someone for a lower position and then made them do higher-level work, e.g., call them "tech support" when they're really a senior engineer), then force the company to pay the H1-B the equivalent of 100 years' salary and put any employees found to have been complicit in this in prison.
I think employers should pay a premium for H1B or any visa worker. If they truly need them and there is truly a dearth in candidates, they should be falling over each other to pay it.
It may technically require the same salary, but the actual implementation and enforcement renders these requirements meaningless. I've been in situations where I directly observed it happening.
Requirement to advertise for US workers first? No Problem, just advertise where nobody looks, like the physical local newspaper's classifieds. Advertise for a different lower-paid job title, even though the coding duties will be exactly the same. Hire via an outsourcing company whose entire operation is to game the system, and the costs are still less than a US programmer.
The worst part is the sponsorship structure -- when you hire an H1-B worker, you are "sponsoring" his or her presence in the US. they have only the right to work at your business, and nowhere else. They lose that job, and they will have to leave within days (60?). They would not only have to find a new job in that time, but a new job willing to sponsor them and capable of getting their H1-B approved in that time -- very unlikely. This means that the H1-Bs will take all kinds of abuse and lower pay without complaining, as complaining is the quick ticket home.
The simple change of allowing H1Bs to be a 2-year visa, and they are allowed to change to any job after 6 months would go a long way to clearing out the abuses, since the sponsoring company would need to treat them at their full worth to keep them.
I think it's funny that people complain that the H1B visa program are "shipping jobs abroad" when by being a visa program, the whole point is to allow people to work in the US. No one is going through all the trouble to enter a 10% lottery to "ship jobs abroad" when actually shipping jobs abroad requorws no visa, and requires no minimum 60k payment.
Now, this doesn't mean there aren't problems with the H1B program. By making workers so dependent on their employers (for example, if an H1B visa holder gets laid off or fired they have to leave the country immediately without legally having the opportunity to find a new job) it most likely drives down wages slightly, but the "sending jobs abroad" rhetoric is little more than xenophobic sloganeering which only serves to distract people from the actual problems related to the H1B (the power differential between the employers and the employees, and the ridiculousness of a lottery system which benefits those who can flood the system with applications as opposed to actual companies that need good workers).
By shipping jobs abroad, I believe most people think they are taking jobs held by US nationals and giving then to foreign nationals, regardless of where they fill a seat.
But this seat-filling is important. A person who is hired for a job shipped abroad is not living in the US, paying taxes in the US, buying groceries, spending money, etc etc. A non-American brought into the US is participating and contributing to the economy just as any American worker is.
Local employees are part of the equation. The body shops like Infosys and Tata always have onsite workers who interact with the client and then use their offshore teams to perform the work. Many clients are not capable of using offshore resources in any other model due to time zone and language barriers. The onsite typically works around two hours a night beginning at 10 PM to resolve all the questions and issues from offshore.
I have vivid memories of what 2003 was like for me, a computer science grad who entered the workforce just as management's solution to control a new, major cost center (IT) was taking hold. Many of the DevOps functions that you celebrate today were considered commoditized and consequently eligible for offshore tech consultancy. I watched middle-aged, highly skilled professionals train their low-cost, unskilled replacements after being explicitly told by HR/management that their severance packages required their complete cooperation during their "employment transition".
This is wage dumping. The article explains the problem perfectly i.e. a 130K job is replaced by a 60K job. Call this globalisation and efficient markets if you like. However, on a personal note, if Trump manages to put in place policies to make it more of a level playing field and stops some of the greed which CEOs apply when replacing jobs with outsourcing contracts then I think he may have found a policy which will carry a lot of favour with middle class workers.
Just given the timing of the business cycle, Trump is likely to face a recession or at least a stagnation by the time he's working on reelection in 2020. There's very little he can do about it now: Most economists believe it takes almost four years for fiscal policy to affect the business cycle and two years for monetary policy. And Trump won't be appointing his own Federal Reserve chairman to set monetary policy until 2018 at the earliest.
But Trump can take action that will open up jobs and raise wages for American workers even in the face of a recession. He can deport illegal aliens and cut off the H-1B and L cheap professional visa categories. That would create a lot of working class and lower-tier professional jobs for Americans fast.
There are a number of factors that make relocation harder and less common than it needs to be. One is the number of underwater mortgages – mortgages in which the remaining balance is greater than the value of the home – which make selling all but impossible.
Another is that the parts of the country with growing economies and lots of great jobs are generally cities with incredibly high rents. It's not easy to move halfway across the country to take an entry-level job and somehow live off that if you need to pay Bay Area / NY Area / DC Area / etc rents, and doubly so if you have a family.
This is one reason I think it's so critical to build a serious urbanist movement in US. The status quo of restrictive zoning, low building, and sky-high rents keeps hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the places that would enable them to build better lives. If we allowed our cities to grow and invested in the transit infrastructure to keep them livable at even moderately higher densities, it could unleash a tremendous amount of prosperity.
We heavily subsidize home ownership, which creates huge disincentives for mobility. In reality we should probably tax it and subsidize renters.
We pay people to sit around in their old location rather than moving. Our "disability insurance" program is actually a giant secret welfare program for people who refuse to leave economically depressed areas. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
We drastically restrict housing supply in economically productive areas.
Not to mention that most welfare is run through state programs - moving to another state probably entails loads of paperwork with the local welfare/medicare/medicaid office depending on what program you are on.
>Is there something that stops American workers moving to American places that have jobs?
Well, most of Middle America has high home-ownership rates, underwater mortgages, no public transit, gutted public education, and nearly zero public health-care. So yes, a whole lot is stopping people moving: they're broke, stuck with a mortgage, and would have to go further into debt to move, without a job offer.
Ohio is one of the most notorious swing states. 538 lists them as Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin
Trump won Ohio 51-43. If that swings all the way back into competitive territory, his re-election is doomed anyway. Just because a state is a swing state with a regular Republican (like Ohio or Colorado) doesn't mean it's a swing state when a very abnormal Republican like Trump is running.
I'm not sure we'll ever see a "normal" Republican or Democrat again win a presidential election. Trump has paved a path forward for modern campaigns to run off extreme rhetoric and FUD as a means to mobilize their voting base.
Why is that important? You're welcome to substitute any states you like....
The fact is that many migrants are willing to risk destitution or even death to relocate, and they will work their socks off at menial jobs for a better life (for their children in particular).
How many unemployed American workers are doing the same?
>As far as I can see, it would just create jobs that Americans won't or can't do.
I see this stated often, largely by people who have never worked these types of jobs, and for the record I'm not saying that this is the case with you, but it really doesn't match my own experiences.
I've worked as a janitor in a super market, a landscaper, a manual laborer in construction, a laborer in the Central Valley on a farm, as well as a dishwasher, all in CA, and while my coworkers were mostly Hispanic, and some were undocumented, many were white, black or Asian and born in the US. These were all minimum wage or below jobs so I'm not sure were this idea is coming from. When people are poor and desperate, they will usually take any work they can get regardless of immigration status or citizenship.
Your experiences are directly contradicted by Alabama. In 2011, the state passed HB56, a law that criminalized everything from hiring or renting to an illegal immigrant to accepting them into a state school. Before it was neutered by the courts, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants fled the state and the agricultural industry nearly collapsed when farmers couldn't find labor willing to work in crap conditions for low pay. There was a barrage of news stories for almost two years about how farmers had to watch as their crops died in the fields with no one to harvest them.
Meanwhile, unemployment fell from 9.2% to 8.7% due almost entirely to the automotive industry (which doesn't really hire illegal immigrants) with no change in construction, agriculture, etc. Afaik the agricultural industry in Alabama still hasn't recovered from the shock, even though the majority of those who left returned by 2015.
Exactly. If the cost to produce something exceeds its profit, then either the prices must rise or the business closes.
Why do you think California is so fiercely protective of illegals? Because one of their major industries is agriculture. They have a competitive advantage against states like Alabama because of their unwillingness to enforce the law. Essentially California is stealing from Alabama as they are taking advantage of below-market labor to harm competitors. A lot of the $15 minimum wage advocates are in California -- yet nary a peep about minimum wage violations by the agricultural industry there. If there were actually an enforced $15 minimum wage, Alabama would be competitive agin because they'd be on equal footing with labor costs (and more competitive because of lower regulatory costs and taxes.) Illegals working California fields aren't making anywhere near $15 per hour.
Hiring illegal aliens is quite simply a means to avoid minimum wage.
That doesn't contradict anything. All it means is there weren't enough desperately poor Americans looking for the work. Improve the working conditions and raise the pay and the number of Americans interested increases.
Unfortunately because of other American policy related to agriculture this is difficult for some companies to do.
Basically what the Alabama law proved is that companies aren't willing to provide sufficient quality working conditions and pay to entice American workers. The specific job may be a factor in that, but that isn't something this event proves anything about.
I've done those sorts of jobs, admittedly when I was a student so they were only temporary....
It remains the case that lots of Americans do not have jobs, while lots of immigrants do have jobs.
I'm sure there are many complex reasons for this, but it's still not obvious to me that unemployed Americans would do the jobs that are currently done by people who are so "poor and desperate, they will usually take any work they can get regardless of immigration status or citizenship".
H1b the way it is right now, nothing is in favor of H1b employee. He/she is basically a high tech indentured servant who has sacrificed enough to be in immigrant, and cannot work anywhere else unless an another employer is willing to transfer visa.
It's already much cheaper to pay a programmer overseas than to hire someone on an H-1B. If the jobs companies are using H-1Bs for were easy to offshore, they would already be doing it.
Obviously reducing the number of H-1Bs will change the math, so that a few jobs may move overseas, but there are many advantages to having employees in the US.
Evidently, having devs live in SV is important enough that companies pay enough so that their employees can afford the hyperinflated cost of living in the Bay Area. So I don't think it's the case that anyone would be making them hire more Americans; rather, by limiting the ability for companies to hire people from overseas who will work for less, the theory is that they will hire the people who already live in the US, presumably people who already have citizenship.
The interesting thing will be whether SV will be willing to absorb the (presumably) higher labor rates for these citizens. Their other options will be to outsource the jobs or to develop more infrastructure in less costly areas of the US.
This is the most plausible explanation of the theory, unless of course you believe the version where the motivation for H-1B hires isn't purely economic, but rather that there just aren't enough Americans available who can do the work.
A lot of US companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants including Google (Brin), Yahoo (Yang), eBay (Omidyar), PayPal (Levchin, Thiel, Nosek), WhatsApp (Koum), Tesla (Musk), Radioshack (Deutschmann), Comcast (Aaron), Nordstrom (Nordstrom), Colgate (Colgate), DuPont (DuPont), Kraft (Kraft), Pfizer (Pfizer), Procter & Gamble (Procter & Gamble) and AT&T (Bell).
Apple was co-founded by the son of a Syrian from Homs, and Intel wouldn't be the company it is today without Hungarian-born refugee Andy Grove.
Companies founded or co-founded by the children of immigrants include Walt Disney (from Canada), Oracle (Russia and Iran), IBM (Germany), Boeing (Germany), 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).
More than 40% of the Fortune 500 in 2010 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
If the US blocks immigration, it will be much worse off. If the best people go to other countries, those countries will probably end up much better off.
Right, but I don't believe any of those people came here on an H-1B visa. And it seems like many of the best and brightest are still trying to get into the US, though right now perhaps fewer than previously.
I'm not arguing against immigration. Heck, I don't even think that the current administration is against immigration. (Yes, I know this is not the popular view of the current administration here on HN.)
My point was that the H-1B program is basically built on the hypocrisy that these are jobs that cannot be filled without bringing in immigrants because no one here has the skills.
It seems pretty obvious that the reality is that the H-1B program is built to enable employers to bring in high-skilled workers at a steeply discounted rate, and to keep them steeply discounted by preventing the immigrants from looking for better jobs once they get here. If this were untrue, I wouldn't read so many comments and even articles about how people here on H-1B visas ought to have the right to find another job.
In other words, make the program declare its real intentions. But that would never fly, because politically it would be unpalatable to people in any part of the political spectrum, with the possible exception of the <1% of those who profit from H-1B employees.
In passing, tech companies only use a small proportion of H-1B visas -- less than 100,000 out of 647,852 from Oct 1 2015 to Sept 30 2016 -- and most of those are Indian outsourcing firms: Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, IBM India (75,606).
> Right, but I don't believe any of those people came here on an H-1B visa.
I looked at a couple of the tech people noted, and many of them came with their parents while they were young, a few came for college, and could possibly have stayed on an H-1B or without legal status. Often citizenship dates were reported, but other status wasn't well reported.
>Heck, I don't even think that the current administration is against immigration. (Yes, I know this is not the popular view of the current administration here on HN.)
His top advisor, Steve Bannon, is definitely against immigration.
"Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, is not illegal immigration? As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem, we’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country? When you look and there’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country, is immigrants — is that not a massive problem?"
To be fair in my POV you are all just immigrants. When someone in europe knows about his 500 year history he also usually considers himself part of his origin culture and does not claim to be 100% whatever his passport says.
Fucking 500 years. Most beers i like exist for longer.
If you go back far enough, everyone is an immigrant everywhere in the world except for a small group of sub-saharan africans. And even in that case, they probably migrated.
If you think so ok. That exact thought you explain is something i like to keep in mind it is a easy objective thought to show that we are all just humans
> the theory is that they will hire the people who already live in the US, presumably people who already have citizenship
Another option is that companies simply don't hire at all i.e. they wind back projects and reduce potential growth opportunities. I've actually seen this first hand so always a bit mindful of seemingly simple or obvious decisions.
Especially since permanent staff who are OPEX and increase headcount are very different to contract staff who are CAPEX and don't. And many H1B visas are quite willing and happy to be contractors since the US may not be their life long home. That's very different for a US citizen.
At the moment, you have American IT workers training overseas workers to replace them. That's true of IBM and Disney that I know of, and there could well be more.
The Trump administration should consider voiding all existing H1-B visas, without exception, and enforcing that all holders return to their home countries, before being eligible to re-obtain a H1-B under new, fairer rules. I know more than a handful of very qualified 40+ folk who were laid off over the last couple of years, and told quite frankly, and with no words being minced, that they were too expensive for the company, so their jobs were being "out-sourced" to cheaper/younger workers.
Most H1-B holders are from pretty desperate circumstances and put up with just about anything, at least until they obtain their GCs.
Maybe your 40+ folk are not that qualified then? Or maybe the demand for their specific skillsets is not as high as you assume it to be? The attitude itself is pretty telling already. Market sets the demand, not your hopes, wishes and wet dreams.
Either way blaming on their employment issues on legal immigrants is just another form of the immigrant xenophobia thats up for display more and more under the Trump administration.
That's the thing. Most new tech jobs are only being created in the tech hubs of the country. The rest of the country is seeing a decline in good IT jobs.
I looked into H-1B after being offered a senior technical role in the CTO office of a big networking vendor (based in the valley).
I turned down the role. I would have to enter a lottery to get a visa and then have my visa tied to my role at that company. For me as someone with two young children and an already good life in the UK, it was far to uncertain for me.
im a hb1 worker paid 150000/y. this is slightly less than some colleagues, slightly more than others (though slightly less qualified arguably)
it ist is hard to find qualified employees for that job. the last person we found works remote from canada, because that's all we could find that had the right minimum skillset and was available at all.
for the past 2y we no longer hire via h1b. why? because we cant. the chance than an applicant gets a visa is now ridiculously low.
this is because of the flooding and first come first serve system this article is mentioning: we can submit for 2 or 3 100-150k jobs a year. others submit thousands at 60k no chance. (this is because we do not fire lower skill jobs to replace em by h1b)
> it ist is hard to find qualified employees for that job
...at that salary.
$150k sounds like a lot, but adjusted for cost of living, it's fairly middle-of-the-road salary for senior engineers in, say, Texas. In fact, it would be an effective downgrade in quality of life for many. Your employer could easily poach those engineers by calling them up and offering $225k or more, offering housing vouchers, etc.
I'll note that I'm assuming SF or NYC as your location. If you're in Texas, Atlanta, etc., I withdraw all of the above.
> Your employer could easily poach those engineers by calling them up and offering $225k or more, offering housing vouchers, etc.
I'd dispute the "easily" here. IME, it's extremely hard to get senior engineers to relocate -- many of them have families, deep ties to their locations, and are way to accustomed to their way and quality of life to consider moving.
I didn't say you could get any particular engineer to relocate with only a good comp package. The point is that you could get enough to fill empty positions purely by investing more in employees.
Salaries are a simple conversation point, but we could also talk about remote work, retraining, opening sites in more affordable areas, etc. I also listed many specific benefits (housing, child care) that would make a relocation zero hassle for a senior engineer.
Or the U.S. could stop locating its biggest software shops in the most expensive zip codes in the country.
But, yes, keeping costs down is entirely about protecting business models. Changes would force business models to adjust. For example, employers might have to start retraining almost-qualified domestic workers instead of importing workers who have a too-particular list of jargon on their resumes.
> Or the U.S. could stop locating its biggest software shops in the most expensive zip codes in the country.
The U.S. isn't a person that decides to put software shops in locations.
Entrepreneurs setup shop in locations where they are more likely to succeed, and for startups, it's where they can find high quality talent and get funding. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
If they are older, and aren't white & male, they likely have a long, potentially multi-year search ahead of them to find employment. Especially if they specialized in the operations of Eversource's software, and not in software development, that is going to put them in a really crappy position when applying at other local employers.
Keep in mind that H-1B visa is almost the only legal way for skilled workers to immigrate to the United States. Unlike other visa types, H-1B requires the applicant to have at least bachelor’s degree. At the same time USCIS issues about 650,000 family-based immigration visas and 120,000 visas for refugees every year.
I'd take a softer stance against the statement, though I do disagree with it.
As a Californian, I'd have trouble signing away my right to leave the software field for the next 7 years, or granting to my employer the right to have me deported if I quit my job.
Employers may prefer employees who they know have limited legal rights to participate as free members of the work force. In fact, the US has a long (and at times, horrendously ugly) history of programs to import workers who aren't free to choose the circumstances of their own lives. Because US citizens can't give up certain rights, they may be at a disadvantage where it comes to getting jobs where employer control over a worker's residency rights have become the norm.
After all, why would you hire a free person who can threaten to leave during salary negotiations, when you can instead hire someone who depends on you for the right to live and work in the US?
Of course, I'd never, ever make that trade. I'd rather switch fields, or avoid that field altogether. This may account for some of the aversion to software development careers we observe among people who do are free as individuals to live and work in the US without corporate "sponsorship"
I agree, that there seem to be two distinct practices. I experienced the latter, where a company performed wholesale off-shoring of several thousand jobs.
I don't understand how the stewards of that program approve such visas when they're clearly being used to replace existing workers (i.e., the argument that you can't find qualified locals is demonstrably false.)
My other hard-won conclusion: the companies that do this don't recognize the long-term impacts. They're less capable, less competitive, and their outsourcing partners can become their overlords. The outsourcers gain considerable negotiating leverage, and any attempt to unseat them becomes economically impossible.
What can we do about it? Look at the policies that make American employment unappetizing. The cost of benefits (principally health care.) Regulations that make it difficult to fire poor performers.
Finally, there's a feedback mechanism here. I saw many leave technology because they perceived that the opportunities were all moving off-shore.
Irony of only focusing on tech jobs when talking about H1-B is two-fold:
1) Tech jobs (especially in software fields) are some of the easiest to do remotely. Creating higher barriers to H1-B visas will only create higher incentives to let those same workers work from their home countries instead of bringing them all the way to the US. The unintended side-effect of course is that this is actually cheaper for the employers, siphons spending outside the US economy and to the extent this is believed to be zero-sum market (it's not), you have to believe that this will depress the job market here.
2) Software is not the only field H1-B jobs are used in. There are whole categories of jobs where $130K salary is absurdly high even for top candidates (without any visa restrictions). Case in point, academic researchers and scientists.
I would love to see a New York Times or Washington Post article on H1-B that is based on interviews from those who are abused either by these consulting companies that pay low wages or the impact it has on driving down overall wages of American worker while the tech companies reap reward profits.
How about a one line regulation: You pay whatever you want to your H1B employee. For every dollar under some limit (say, $130K) you pay that dollar to Uncle Sam.
At least it would keep them honest, since any cheating would be a tax violation.
Am I the only one here who thinks that a person has a basic right to work with whoever and wherever they want regardless of their birthplace? Is discriminating against someone based on where they were born somehow less of a fallacy than discriminating based on skin color, etc. ?
You can either have open borders or a welfare state, but not both. Otherwise, what is to stop millions of poor masses from migrating to the country offering the best welfare and driving down the wages for locals (by, say, willing to work for a lower standard of living)?
A popular rebuttal is that immigrants will contribute to the growing economy and will pay taxes. But we are talking about completely open borders here (anything else is just some fiddling around current system), where anyone willing to do even minimum wage job can migrate. How can such people contribute enough in taxes, when the welfare cost needed to support them (schools, roads, sewers, hospitals...) and their families far exceeds the taxes paid by them? And while I admit that I don't have any stats to support my argument, I am just going by my gut feeling that generous welfare is usually paid for by the richest and not by the poorest.
Another offered solution is to cap welfare for new migrants until they pay enough taxes. But that just creates a two-tier society and is a separate can of worms in itself.
>You can either have open borders or a welfare state, but not both. Otherwise, what is to stop millions of poor masses from migrating to the country offering the best welfare and driving down the wages for locals (by, say, willing to work for a lower standard of living)?
What stops this from happening in the Schengen Area, where some countries participating have welfare states and some (I believe) do not? Genuine question - I've heard other people make the same argument before and it seems like we have a pretty good real-world example to either verify or refute it.
> What stops this from happening in the Schengen Area
EU countries are much more uniform than the rest of the world in their level of welfare support and social development (e.g. UK and even Portugal are much more alike than say Bangladesh and the US).
Besides, there has been a lot of movement from poorer countries to richer countries within the EU, and many people in the richer countries are angry about this. See Brexit etc.
> there has been a lot of movement from poorer countries
There has also been a lot of movement back towards such countries as soon as their wealth levels improved (or UK ones got worse), which happened in no small part thanks to remittance payments. It's the sort of movement you also observe in-country when industries in certain regions do better than others. How many people from Scotland moved to Southern England in the last 100 years?
But that is the whole point of the European Union, which is also expressed in things like the infrastructure and development funds: we promote solidarity and cooperation between neighboring countries, rather than competition that will ultimately result in war.
It's a shame how you only need a couple of generations to forget everything about their history.
Well...it IS happening in the Schengen Area and in the EU to a massive extent. Why do you think thousands of migrants choose to live in squalor and filth in 'jungle camps' on the northern border of France for months/years, rather than just living in the amazing and beautiful country that they're currently in?
Or why are migrants, against the laws of the EU, streaming through and past Hungary, Austria, Germany, Denmark, in an attempt to claim asylum in specific countries, when each country that they're literally walking through is also amazing and beautiful?
The guy that you replied to is effectively describing what's happening in the EU.
>Otherwise, what is to stop millions of poor masses from migrating to the country offering the best welfare and driving down the wages for locals (by, say, willing to work for a lower standard of living)?
Well, the math on that doesn't work if you're taxing all income rather than just labor income. Driving down wages while doing the same work will increase profits, so the same taxes ought to get paid.
And then there's the issue that adding labor to the economy should make it grow... unless for mysterious reasons like land-rents or parasitic finance systems all growth capacity is getting sucked away somehow.
What is to stop millions of poor masses from being born? (And why does our inability to stop it not inhibit a welfare state?)
The amount of a welfare state you can sustain is certainly dependent on your tax revenue, and in turn on the quality of your economy, on political willingness to set high enough taxes, etc. But I don't think there's a point at which a welfare state is flatly impossible.
And there are certainly lots of unforeseen possibilities. Perhaps an economy where employers can hire anyone without bureaucracy will grow companies that generate enough revenue, even without lots of human employees on payroll, to sustain the welfare state.
People can't choose what country to be born in. But they can choose to move to a country with better welfare.
If you're thinking of women/couples having a lot of kids to collect those kids' welfare, it depends on how the welfare for those kids compares to the cost of raising the kid. Also many people would be morally against bringing a kid into a life of potential suffering just for their own monetary gain. But for someone with no dependents, moving to a new country poses no risks to anyone except themselves.
I support open borders and this is one of the points that I've grappled with for quite some time. I'm not convinced that the decision to move from developing country to a developed one is made purely on economic grounds. Permanently relocating your life is not an easy task. You pretty much have to give up all your social capital, all your community ties (which means that you could face ostracisation back in your birthplace), learn a new language, learn new cultural norms, spend significant funds on travel and relocation costs costs and whatever savings you have left will lose a decent chunk of their value due to exchange rate conversion. You also have no networks to exercise in finding employment in your new home and finding accommodation without any kind of reference is going to be difficult.
In that sense, the risk to oneself is so great that only a privileged few in developing countries who wanted to relocate would actually have the resources to overcome them. So for many people, relocating might legally be a choice, but it would be practically impossible.
Realistically, migration is only an option for you if you (1) have a job offer from a company based in the place you intend to migrate, (2) have sufficient funds + skills to cover yourself until you can find a job, (3) have family who can support you and lend you their networks until you can find employment, (4) have sufficient funds to start your own business. Incidentally, those criteria also form categories of US visas (H1-B/TN-1/E-3/L-1, O-1, Family Reunion, EB-5), though, they impose more stringent requirements than economics would.
(Re: your first paragraph) - and yet, we see millions of folks undertaking dangerous journeys over the Middle East or Mediterranean or Central America or Indian Ocean to reach Europe/USA/Australia.... What gives? That life must be very shitty in many parts of the world??
Some of them might not, but quite a lot of them have at least one of those; some have all three. It's not uncommon for illegal immigrants from Mexico, particularly, to be people who would be eligible for family-based immigration but for the expense and decade plus backlog. It's also not unheard of for those that have connections in the immigrant community to have an (likely off-the-books because of documentation requirements) job lined up.
No. Lots of people who haven't thought about the consequences for their nation or their families or who simply don't care agree with you.
It's especially common among young people that want to display their virtuous radicalism and who haven't ever really had to pay for the bad consequences of anyone's actions.
I'm not sure I fully understand your POV right, but I hope you're not suggesting that a person born within the confinement of certain national border should have the privilege of being a bigger priority when chosen for work within the same border confinement.
That's a bit ridiculous. A Syrian Software Engineer shouldn't have to work 1000x more than an American SE to get a job at Google HQ. Let the deserving be decided by their ability for the job rather than their birthplace.
It bothers me how we neglect to work towards a borderless planet. Sure, it wouldn't make sense in terms of economy, politics, and a lot of other things in the beginning, but shouldn't we at least be talking about it and envisioning it, and we even work towards formulating the logistics involved?
If you consider individual actors as adversarial, it becomes less ridiculous quite quickly. Reframe the question as "Why would I, an American software engineer, give my Syrian competition an easier time?". If I have privilege and a family to raise, it makes sense to exploit that privilege rather than to give it up based on the assertion that my privilege is unfair. Often only the young have the privilege to give up their privilege so easily, because of their lacks of dependents.
>If you consider individual actors as adversarial, it becomes less ridiculous quite quickly. Reframe the question as "Why would I, an American software engineer, give my Syrian competition an easier time?".
Wrong framing, though. My adversary isn't some other worker. It's the guy who hires workers, works less or not at all, and takes home the profits.
Do you reject all candidates you interview because they might compete with you to avoid layoffs?
One hopes that when you hire a Syrian software engineer, both you and they will benefit. I'd certainly prefer to hire a good Syrian software engineer than a mediocre American one (and a good American one than a mediocre Syrian one, naturally), if we're hiring someone anyway.
I don't believe this was the point I was addressing in response to the grandparent. If two candidates appear where one has a much better skillset, it makes sense (in most frames) to accept the better candidate, I agree.
What I was responding to was how there may be no responsibility for the American to renounce his privilege such that the Syrian has an easier time becoming a possible candidate (Both in skill set as well as logistically). Additionally, it may even be irrational for the American to do so if we consider them as adversarial actors (In competition, unlike when recruiting co-workers).
Please understand my commentary here is simply in response to the equally extreme logic applied by the grandparent (A world of no nations/borders being optimal) and by no means constitutes my complete opinions on immigration, visas, and the like. We can hopefully elevate the discussion above, allowing immigrants only out of charity, to more rigorous reasons.
Help me understand why you see the idea of a borderless planet as an 'extreme' logic? I was merely proposing we work towards formulating legalities, economics, security, and other logistics involved such that it benefits the planet — rather than just nations — and consequently makes immigration easier.
I never mentioned about Syrian having it easier if the native candidate is more deserving, as you seem to claim I did. A lot of your comment has gone over my head due to it's convolutedness.
My apologies, I used the word extreme because it is one end of a spectrum, which is to change everything. I did not mean "extreme" as a value judgement as the word is often implicitly used as. My logic was also extreme in that it argued that nothing should be changed.
In regards to your second paragraph, I know you didn't and I hopefully didn't insinuate that you did. I'll try to clarify: Moving from the current system would be done by the American (Person of privilege) helping the Syrian compete for his job, which the American logically may not be interested in, given that it threatens his or her stability.
My apologies, again, if you believe my comment was convoluted. I can rephrase if you direct me to what specifically was difficult.
If you want to disregard economics, politics and a lot of other things (which is a big assumption, but let's continue with it), lets start with the first principles - why do you advocate borderless planet? Whats so compelling about it?
I'm not disregarding it. I'm suggesting we should be working towards formulating economics, politics and everything else which works out for a borderless planet.
In regards to why I advocate it - like I said, the way the system works today, some people have more privilege than the others, and this isn't by choice. We should be trying to bring everyone upto the same datum, not the other way around. While the current visa systems are not the texbook definition of discrimination, we are in some way still limiting people's choices based on the land they were born in.
If we're talking first principles, a human should be able to roam wherever he chooses. Of course, this isn't an ideal world, and I'm not advocating for terrorists to be able to make it through wherever they wish, but I'm sure if thought hard enough, we'll be able to come up with a system that ensures that a couple of groups of terrorist, and a few other kinds of knobheads don't pull their entire nations down. But right now, we're working in the opposite direction.
Can you clarify why a human has a right to roam to zones other humans have established for their own safety and prosperity? Couldn't one also argue that a group of humans have a right to exclude other humans from the zones they hold, which seems to be as strong of an argument as the right to traverse arbitrary zones?
From the terrorist portion of your comment, it appears you agree that certain actors can be excluded. If we can exclude people from our tribal zones, then nations have strong logical foundations, as they are simply the manifestation of the ability of tribes to exclude others.
>Couldn't one also argue that a group of humans have a right to exclude other humans from the zones they hold
They could, but they'd be dating back to the principles that were prevalent when various species of the Homo genus existed. When Sapiens were a threat to the Neanderthals, the Neanderthals a threat to the habilis etc. They were thought of as threats for similar reasons as you mentioned; one being more privileged than the other, which led to an insecurity.
A lot of factors such as the geography, and the natural resources that companions the land play a huge factor in the well-being of the society. From what you're suggesting, I get the idea that you want that to remain as a given privilege that should only be cherished by the people who were born around it. That a human born in terrible conditions is a threat to the more affluent, and it's resources and security, solely because the latter was born in a better habitat.This doesn't seem very different to me than the ideologies adopted by the tribes and the cavemen that date back to tens of thousands of years.
I hope I'm not coming off too strong with my words. The language is my barrier, and I've been known to go off on a tangent sometimes due to that. I hope you understand.
Can you clarify why, from the third person, such significant privilege that affords such significant benefits would ever so willingly given up? I'm asking you to supply the logic such that we can convince individual members of our tribal states that they should support the movement towards a borderless/nationless world. So far, the argument has been moral (When privileged, you have a moral obligation to elevate those less privileged), though I was hoping for a stronger argument than that.
Isn't it a sufficient argument that we should strive to create a world where all people have equal opportunity? Yes, there is a natural human instinct to try provide the best situation for oneself. But beyond that, you can either decide everything is arbitrary and nothing matters, or you can make decisions based on a moral framework. Equal opportunity for everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their birth beyond their control, seems like a good basis to me.
That said, I expect there are more robust philosophical arguments. I'm no philosopher, but I'll take a stab at it. Consider the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone acts solely in their own self-interest, it's worse for the whole than if people act cooperatively. Human civilization can be seen the same way. An individual might elevate themselves by acting purely out of self-interest, but on the average we're better off acting cooperatively. So I would suggest that not only is there a moral imperative to strive toward equality, doing so will also improve quality of life overall.
I actually agree that it is wholly sufficient (Based on my life situation) though not necessarily convincing in general. I've been trying to explore the frame used by people voting along protectionist lines, and I don't believe this form would convince them given that the most common narrative against globalization appears to be losing too much to others.
Thanks for this answer. It made me go back and re-read your points again, and reflect on my own viewpoint a bit more deeply. I expect that were I not personally as financially comfortable as I am, it would be less easy to think in the abstract about the merits of equality. I believe in immigration, I donate a decent amount to both domestic and international charities, etc... but it's not like I do it to the extent of materially affecting my own way of life.
And of course, that's natural; people DO value their own well-being and that of their families and friends (and especially children) more than that of strangers. It's a very rare person who's willing to completely sacrifice their own standard of living in the name of global utilitarianism. (Mother Teresa comes to mind, but that's about it...) But it's also pretty rare for a person not to feel any selfless compassion for others either; it's just harder when one feels one's own needs aren't being met.
So maybe that's the real solution to your problem: find a way to address people's needs without resorting to a zero-sum mentality. When people feel they're getting by alright, they will naturally be less begrudging of others. Easier said than done of course, but not impossible. Much more difficult when the focus is on this zero-sum game instead though.
> Isn't it a sufficient argument that we should strive to create a world where all people have equal opportunity?
It would seem not, or this conversation wouldn't have played out the way it has. I'd certainly be interested to see a defense of this claim that didn't rely on one's interlocutor sharing one's own moral precepts in order to cohere.
Can you also make a defense for racism using the same parameters as you want the aforementioned points reasoned out with? Sometimes, logic needs to be manufactured hand-in-hand with what's morally right. The transition from slavery, to equality wasn't easy, and neither was it done overnight.
I'm not saying a borderless planet would work out; at least not anytime soon. But we should at least be working towards it.
We know that AI could go bizzarlly wrong, but we still work towards achieving better results everyday.
> Sometimes, logic needs to be manufactured hand-in-hand with what's morally right.
The point I'm making is that not everyone agrees with you about what's morally right. In fact, most people in the US, at least, do not. If you want to effectively advance your cause, it is worth finding an argument for your claims which does not rely on moral precepts your interlocutor may not share.
As a side note, likening the existence of national borders to the institution of slavery is probably not such an argument.
If you take it with an open mind, you'll see that my intention is not to liken them, but to demonstrate that not every cause has an inherent, intrinsic argument.
It's not a surprise to me that it's most people in the US that are against the idea of this, because they fear that instead of the datum of other countries moving up, that of USA will go down. This insecurity always annoys me. But take everything I say with a grain of salt because I do not consider myself patriotic whatsoever, and in that sense, my thoughts are in the opposite direction as those of Americans, who, through personal observation are the most patriotic people I've come across.
I don't believe any answer to a "what ought we do..." question can cohere without agreeing to a shared moral framework. The answer to the question will always assume you want to maximize something(s) and choosing among those competing somethings will always be a values judgment.
Well what would the logical alternative be? If I argue that someone should support a policy because it serves their self interest, that presumes a moral framework. If I argue they should support it for the greater good, that assumes a moral framework. And so on. I don't think it's a question of looking really hard for the right argument, such an argument is logically precluded.
And it seems to me that most people's framework tends to fall somewhere between the two. People actually aim to maximize some function that depends on both self-interest AND the greater good. The weighting between the two varies between individuals, based on numerous other variables, but very few people are 100% one way or the other (Mother Teresa vs a sociopath). So ISTM now that the goal isn't to convince people to follow a particular moral framework, but rather to attempt to influence the variables that already steer people toward one or another. One of those is exposure. There's that Mark Twain quote, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness..." Another, as discussed above, is financial well-being. The more comfortable one is personally, the easier it is to consider the plight of others. There are certainly others.
I agree with you that while there are some appeals to self-interest that support a goal of equality, fundamentally it is an issue of morality. And I agree with you that you can't logic someone from one moral framework to another. But I would add that almost everyone does have some amount of 'maximize the greater good' built into their moral framework already, so the only logical way to work toward this is to focus on the variables that will add weight to that side of the equation.
I'm not the person you're asking but I hold similar views. An alternative argument could be that should your particular zone have a reversal of fortune - war or climate change, say - It would be good to have the ability to move freely to somewhere with better prospects. The world isn't static.
Effectively a utilitarian argument, using good-will today as a hedge against tomorrow. I believe the argument, though the strength depends on how much risk you expect tomorrow versus how much you give up today.
i don't think we have convincing evidence to maintain consensus that open borders would be better, neither do we have it about closed borders . On purely theoretical grounds, one could offer Occam's razor as a justification for doing away with borders.
Another thing is the free flow of capital. Why can money have open borders but people can't? Anyone who advocates for closed borders should also be in favor of capital flow controls.
People may prefer capital over humans purely for selfish reasons. Money coming in your region, assuming you have some degree of control over it, usually help the local economy (growth of jobs, wages, assets) unless its already inflated one like SFBA. Humans on the other hand tend to be a mixed bag. Highly talented migrants (whatever definition of talent suits you) should be a boon to your region but same cannot be said about untrained undeveloped masses.
For a politician, it would make sense to advocate for easy capital inflows, somewhat controlled capital outflows and highly selective immigration process.
>How else would one view the Social Security program that you are paying into?
I'm certainly no expert, but that sounds more like a description of an IRA or 401K, I think.
As far as I know, the social security program in the US isn't actually structured in such a way that each person's SS taxes are going into an individual investment account under their own name (despite the "how much I've earned" statements which might seem to suggest this).
In fact, the SS taxes being collected right now from you and the entire current generation of earners, are going directly to the current generation of retirees.
So rather than being a career-long savings/investment scheme where your own money comes back to you at the end, it is actually implemented as a wealth transfer scheme from the current generation of earners to the current generation of retirees.
Some years the fund might book a surplus (more taxes raised than benefits paid) and in some years a deficit.
But I agree that it seems to be a common view (or perhaps just metaphor) that people's own SS taxes are being accrued against their name for later payback as benefits. But as far as I can tell, social security has never worked that way and wasn't designed to.
> As far as I know, the social security program in the US isn't actually structured in such a way that each person's SS taxes are going into an individual investment account under their own name (despite the "how much I've earned" statements which might seem to suggest this).
It's not structured that way, but you do need to 'earn credits' to establish eligibility for benefits, and the benefits are calculated with a formula based on the amount of your wages that were subject to social security tax; and the official name is old age insurance. It certainly feels like it's retirement insurance that you pay into while you're working, and get the benefits should you live long enough.
It's interesting looking at the US Social Security system coming from a country (Australia) where the social security system doesn't have the facade of being a contributory system and is funded entirely out of general tax revenue - there's no such thing as "paying in" to the social security system. There's still a bit of an attitude of "I've paid my taxes, now I deserve my pension", but the system doesn't act as a piggy bank for you to save up over time. (For that, we have a mandatory minimum 9.5% superannuation/401k-equivalent contribution that you invest in shares/property/bonds etc.)
In my mind, this is fairer than the US system, but there is a good case to be made that keeping elements of a "contributory" system helps to maintain political support for the welfare state among people who are a bit more, um, selfish.
(An interesting piece I read a while ago that describes how the "contributory" nature of Australia's social security system in the 1940s was actually just a cover for a general tax increase: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-27/berg-chifleys-politica...)
Not certain about Australia, but here in NZ we call it "NZ Super" (or just "the pension") instead of "social security". It is a universal superannuation which kicks in at age 65, is not means-tested, and is paid in the same amount to everyone who qualifies. The money that the fund invests/disburses comes from an annual government contribution to the NZ Super Fund, determined by some legislated formula. Individual workers/earners don't "pay into" it in any way that is separately taxed or monitored.
To collect the pension you simply need to be lawfully living in the country (e.g. citizen or permanent resident status), have made NZ your primary/main country of residence (usually by living and working here), and you must have lived in New Zealand for 10 years since the age of 20, of which five of the years must have been since the aged of 50 years.
If the above applies to you, you should sign on and start getting your $792.34 per fortnight :-)
Over in Australia, "social security" is merely the technical name for all of the government welfare programs handled by the Department of Human Services, including Age Pension, Youth Allowance (study benefits), Newstart Allowance (unemployment benefits), Disability Support Pension and so on and so forth. No-one really uses the term "social security" unless you're reading the legislation. With no further qualification, "the pension" means the Age Pension.
What we call "super" you'd call KiwiSaver, except over here it's mandatory. I suspect the NZ use of the term "superannuation" is probably closer to the original/traditional use of the term.
There is a residency requirement. But no requirement that during that residency period you actually need to be working or otherwise "contributing" to the system.
I don't think any Millennial pays into Social Security under the delusion that they will ever get anything back. The program is on track to be insolvent once it's done serving the generation currently in power.
This seems like a reply with relatively little information content: lots of people who haven't thought about consequences agree with all sorts of political opinions. I could easily accuse young people who wear any candidate's or political concept's apparel of wanting to display their virtuous radicalism, but that's hardly a useful criticism of the candidate or concept.
I suppose you're attempting to imply that people who have thought about the consequences, or who do care, or who are old people who have had to pay for the bad consequences of people's actions, are unlikely to agree. Is there a reason, is there evidence, to believe that much more interesting claim? Or is this merely an accusation of "virtue signaling"?
You probably aren't the only one, but I can try to explain the other side.
When you live and work in (let's say) America, you are paying taxes and following the law. If suddenly, anyone could come to America, America would probably experience a huge population increase from Africa and Asia. While some of them may be productive people, there will definitely be a lot of them who will not necessarily follow the law or find useful jobs. In addition, if it was so easy to enter America, what's stopping them from entering, committing a huge crime, and then leaving?
Another reason to be against what you are proposing is because it is in a nation's interest to make sure that the people living there aren't poor or starving. If an American doesn't have that many skills and can only work in a specific field, by allowing anyone in the world to compete with them increases the likelihood that they will be out of a job.
Immigrants are actually more law-abiding than US citizens and they are less likely to end up in jail. [1,2]
Immigrants and the children of immigrants are also disproportionately likely to be productive citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if half the current Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants and the children of immigrants. (The figure for 2010 was 40%.) See my comment below. [3]
It's certainly possible that the majority of America's wealth is generated by relatively recent immigrants.
Of course, this is controlled immigration. No country anywhere lets just anybody in.
I don't have any stats to back this up, but could it be that immigrants are more law abiding because they have to pass the long and difficult process that verifies them? If the system were to change in such a way that more people can immigrate to the US it seems very likely that a lot of the people who would not be granted citizenship would be the type of people who Americans would not want.
If we look at France or Sweden, two countries who excepted a lot of migrants, we can see that the results are not so good. Sweden is now ranked as the country with the most reported rapes [1] and France has areas where the police are afraid to enter [2] .
Think about immigrations like drugs (medical ones). There are many drugs that can save many peoples lives but are not able to pass the FDA for whatever reason (eg. lack of money). While it is sad that people will die because of that, if most drugs were allowed to be marketed by doctors, many more people could die. Similarly with immigration, currently a lot of people who have the potential of adding a lot of value to America are not allowed in. However, if most people were allowed in, it could cause a lot more damage to America.
To become a legal immigrant in America takes a lot of effort. It's almost like saying people of new money are less likely to go to jail.
As for illegal immigrants I've got no idea as to how many bad actors there are.
However I'll give a stat that many liberals in Europe failed to realize. Their are many people in this world that do not like Western culture. E.g take Muslims around the world wanting sharia law (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...). We shouldn't block immigrants from coming to the us. But we should only allow immigrants who will "melt" and become part of the American melting pot.
> To become a legal immigrant in America takes a lot of effort.
I wish someone would explain this to Donald Trump. He is currently lying his head off about immigrants "pouring in" as though Homeland Security didn't even exist. Just visiting the USA is a huge pain for many people.
I've been hassled entering the USA on a 5-year visitor's visa (in fact, on 25 years of 5-year visitor's visas) with hotels booked, return tickets booked, and a well-paying job, house, wife and pension in my country of origin.
Many people have been handcuffed imprisoned and deported for entering on the wrong visa, including one woman who had an American husband, an American-born child, and several years of living as a permanent resident in the USA.
Both. Illegal immigrants are generally keen to avoid any contact with a legal system that might deport them.
Either way, the USA has almost no illegal immigrants who are Muslims. Almost all Mexicans are Christians (88% Catholics). Most Cubans are Catholics as well (60%).
Indeed, the USA has very few legal immigrants who are Muslim either. "According to a new estimate in 2016, there are 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States, about 1% of the total U.S. population." At least a quarter of those are US-born Americans like Mohammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaq O'Neal, Mos Def, Busta Rhymes, Yusef Lateef etc.
"According to a 2004 telephone survey of a sample of 1,846 Muslims conducted by the polling organization Zogby, the respondents were more educated and affluent than the national average, with 59% of them holding at least an undergraduate college degree."
Immigrants are less likely to get caught, not more law abiding. In my city we have persistent problems where crime victims won't report to the police because they're illegal just like the criminals.
That quickly adds up to lower crime statistics in illegal communities. It does not mean less crime in those communities.
In fact, it creates conditions for ongoing gang crime operations unchallenged in those communities.
Frederick Trump was a German American businessman. Born in Kallstadt, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 16 and started working as a barber. Several years later in 1891
Also, Donald Trump's mother was a Scottish immigrant, Mary Anne Macleod. Donald Trump's wife is a Slovenian immigrant who appears to have worked illegally (as a nude model) in the USA.
There's an old joke about immigrants doing dirty jobs that Americans won't do, and being married to Donald Trump may be one of them...
The Trump family lied about being Swedish, though more recently, Donald has aired his pride in his superior German genes.
I don't think so many people would disagree with you i.e. Hire the best person for the job irrespective of where they come from. However that's not what is happening with many of the H1B visas. Here cheaper foreign workers irrespective of skill are being recruited instead of more expensive local workers. With your global outlook how do you solve this problem? Or do you just let it be and let the cheaper workers depress the wages of the local workers, thereby making the local workers struggle financially and bringing unhappiness to many ?
>> that's not what is happening with many of the H1B visas
That looks like a speculation, and a justification that a less skillful local worker might want to use. There are all kinds of H-1B Visa holders out there. More, equally, or less skilled compared to the local workers - but they are invariably less expensive than their local counterparts with same skillset. That's why companies are using them. Low quality software has a cost associated to it as well in the long run, so we can safely assume that the companies are deciding what's financially best for them. It's equivalent to competition in any market. Same argument is used by the less developed nations when an American multinational company begins their business there and kills all small local players in the market. Then these local companies bring their fake nationalism/patriotism in picture, but with globalization it's bound to happen and whining about it is not going to help.
We can assume that companies are deciding what's financially best for them, but not what is best for the country they have a social responsibility to. Look at some of the monumental IT failures we have seen recently and will see in the future (some UK banks for example). And with globalisation it's not bound to happen anymore because people are finding a voice. Do you think trump or brexit would have happened if people thought globalisation was working for them. There's more than low income people supporting these 'movements'.
And your argument for full globalisation doesn't work for me. Should we send all manufacturing to a country in the Far East with questionable labour laws and regulations. I don't feel comfortable with that. Certainly not the level playing field you think it is.
I think I can agree with your basic premise, as human beings we have a fundamental, basic even inalienable right to any part of our planet.
The fact is humans living in a particular generation are far more connected to each other than to our ancestors.
The problem is this is classic utopianism completely divorced from the historical development of our political and economic systems, property rights and the structure of nation states and societies. Tribalism will always perpetuate the concept of the outsider and a natural suspicion, and often with good reason. That's how colonialism happened.
In any time going and being accepted in other societies is 2 different things. In other times we would need technology and resources to travel, account for disease and the reception of native populations. Now we have nation states and rule of law that governs movement of people for travel and emigration. These rules can be improved but there is no alternative that does not impose controls, even if we have post nation states there will still be controls.
What I would like is significantly less restrictions and more 'openness' and good faith policies that acknowleged every human being's right to travel and see the rest of 'their world' unhindered.
Same could be said about the minimum wage. Who am I to tell a homeless person that they can't sign a voluntary contract to work for less than $15/hr? We won't let them live on starvation wages, we will just ensure they never get a job.
It sounds like a good idea and I have considered it myself for a while. It may not seem like a great idea to have an immigration and importation process and controls at first.
However, consider the realities that are encountered. A few examples: Years ago, the European pioneers showed up 'freely' and for all intents destroyed the Native Americans' way of living (and many of their lives). There have been areas with diseases in humans and animals in certain countries that are much less common in others, that could cause disastrous scenarios for livestock, agriculture, and humans if introduced haphazardly. People also showed up 'freely' and kidnapped humans from Africa and sold them as slaves in the US.
If one argues that there should be rules in place to prevent such things from happening, then you essentially need a process by which to discriminate whether 'outsiders', and how many, should be allowed in one's physical space (edit: along with sufficient military force to repel a large group that will attempt to forcefully ignore such a process).
I don't believe this (H-1B Visa issue, not the article) is about discrimination based on birthplace. Personally, I have absolutely no problems with bringing in workers into this country. After all, that is one of the founding principles behind this country. My issue is... those that do it for the sole purpose of saving money. In other words, companies that cut "american employees" for H-1B visa holders because they'll be spending a fraction of the salary in the long term. Since I am an Indian, I also happen to know that those that come here are willing to take anything (unfair treatment) to immigrate here.
To sum up,
1) If US companies want to import employees, pay them US market rate for their skill-level and what their responsibilities are.
2) Those that exploit the H-1B visa sponsorship should not be given this leverage over their new employees simply because they were able to work in the US because they were sponsored.
I saw the text of Jimmy Carter's Voyager message recently, and I was struck by the introduction:
"This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization."
It wasn't very long ago that the idea that it was desirable for borders to one day disappear was common enough that the President could say so on behalf of Earth. I suppose this was also the era where things like the Schengen visa came into existence. I haven't heard many people on any side of the political spectrum express such an idea recently, unfortunately, and I think that's a goal that the left has conceded without entirely realizing it was conceding anything.
> I haven't heard many people on any side of the political spectrum express such an idea recently, unfortunately, and I think that's a goal that the left has conceded without entirely realizing it was conceding anything.
Because there are some really big problems in practice. The biggest is wealth inequality at a global scale, there are several billion people in poor countries who would happily move to western nations, likely causing negatives for the poor and rich countries.
The other is that the more me learn about each other the bigger the cultural divide is/seems. The religious right is often derided in the west, but imagine if it was the whole world voting on things like gay marriage and women's rights, animal rights, etc.
I'm curious to learn more, especially if there have been studies about the effects of border rule changes.
Do we expect poor people who take the initiative to move (i.e., not refugees) to remain poor? My impression is that poverty is mostly about opportunity and access to resources, not about personal desire to be poor.
I don't see how social issues would be particularly different from the status quo in the US. If you asked individual states to vote on gay marriage (which was the case until 2015), they'd vote differently. Different states still have wildly different rules on abortion, including places where abortion is effectively inaccessible. And that's not a disaster for the Union. It's even possible for people to move between states en masse and tilt voting one way or another, but that seems never to happen in practice. Even organized efforts with this explicit goal, like the Free State Project, seem to not be succeeding.
> Do we expect poor people who take the initiative to move (i.e., not refugees) to remain poor? My impression is that poverty is mostly about opportunity and access to resources, not about personal desire to be poor.
Yes, especially the ones with the most means, this risks creating a serious brain from the poorer countries. It also risks wealthy countries becoming too reliant on poor countries paying for education. We already see this to some extent today.
Also, as a species we're very migratory. Huge population movements only really ended when modern day nation states began. Even militaristic empires like Rome couldn't stop them.
> I don't see how social issues would be particularly different from the status quo in the US. If you asked individual states to vote on gay marriage (which was the case until 2015), they'd vote differently
Just how different are they? Some states may be against gay marriage, but is it 51% against or 60%? I doubt there would be states where it's much more than that, but if we took the world as a whole it would be.
No studies I know of though, if anyone has any I'd be interested too.
The outsourcing is another issue, as any tech job that can be telecomuted will be moved overseas (with the exception of security risk aversion factors, like with HIPA compliant organizations and such). What this allows is for foreign workers to come to the U.S. too work for less at jobs that require that a person be on-site. Then they have no power to negotiate, as they're here at their employer's whim. If there are going to be worker's protection laws, that I as a citizen am guaranteed, and which raise my cost, then allowing for a loop hole like this is pricing me out of decent work. Come on President Trump, raise that price cap and end this loophole!
This approach seems deliberately lazy, as though it's some kind of head-scratcher that the displaced IT support guy hates his outsourced replacement; while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.
I find it especially galling that this NYT writer can't make the distinction, given their paper did a great article about H-1B abuse by outsourcing firms: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...