I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome.
A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs.
If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, but just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1]
To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.
And if you are in SV consider that more than half of public tech companies were created by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. 1st generation founders include Sergey Brin, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Stewart Butterfield, Sebastion Thrun, and Patrick and John Collison. [2]
>just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1]
From your own cite:
>Immigrant workers can either be substitutes for native-born workers or complements to them. When immigrant workers are substitutes for native-born workers, they compete for similar jobs. Using a simple supply and demand model, an influx of substitutable workers constitutes an increase in the supply of labor, causing wages to fall for workers with similar skills. Because many immigrants are low-skilled workers, economic studies have found that an influx of immigrants depresses wages for low-skilled native-born workers in the short run.6 And, because many immigrants are also high-skilled, a similar substitution effect occurs for some high-skilled workers.
It goes on to talk about complementary workers:
>. For example, consider that immigrant workers account for 22 percent of the construction workforce. They tend to pursue jobs in the construction industry that require less training and education but are areas where the industry has its largest labor shortages—such as painters, drywall installers, and construction laborers.7 This supply of immigrant labor has decreased the cost and presumably increased the number of homes produced and sold over time. The increase in housing construction has increased the demand for higher-skilled construction workers such as contractors, electricians, and plumbers
While that's a nice thought, it isn't comforting to those that aren't contractors, electricians, or plumbers. They need those low skill positions in order to gain the experience to move into higher skilled ones. The hardest job for a programmer to get is their first one. Especially those that don't come from a traditional CS background. This is really where the H1B visa hurts American workers. Companies would much rather go for an immigrant on an H1B visa than train Americans to do the work.
At my organization we don't have any junior devs, we're all leads and they bring in H1B contractors that are less than or equal to junior devs in EXP but far cheaper, we use them for a bit until we complain loud enough, and then management ends their contract.
I like the contractors as people but not as coworkers. It's always mixed feelings when they go, part relief and part sorrow.
Occasionally we do get a good one and we beg for them to hire them but our Talent Strategies department (i.e. HR eyeroll) won't sponsor them.
That's the section where they acknowledge that, yes, people lose jobs to immigrants. They go on to say that actually more people gain jobs at higher wages because of immigrants.
There's a section on high tech jobs to read too, take a look.
Most people believe that immigrants generally lower wages and take jobs. They almost never do. Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found that immigrants create more jobs and raise wages in most cases.
Also in the paper? "... how does immigration affect the average American?...annual economic gains to the native-born population to be between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of gross domestic product". This is an astonishingly large benefit. Some estimate that switching completely to self driving cars would add .2% to gdp a year. It's that big a gain. Almost no other policy we can think of has this great an effect. Our current gdp growth is at 2%.
It's not unusual to be wrong about this, there aren't more than 5 people at any major newspaper who understand that immigrants create jobs. 95% of news stories you have ever read get this wrong.
Add to that the media always going for max outrage, and you get stories about workers being replaced. Never stories about the workers that immigrants added.
Btw, H1-B workers are not magic, an American worker is creating complementary jobs too. This is why cities have such high wages, the high density of complementary labor.
And hey, when have you ever known software to not create the need for more software :0)
>Also in the paper? "... how does immigration affect the average American?...annual economic gains to the native-born population to be between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of gross domestic product". This is an astonishingly large benefit.
That is $50-150 per year for a household with a median income. It's not an astonishingly large benefit.
And the GDP is entirely the wrong thing to look at. In the last two decades the U.S. has roughly doubled its GDP while the median household income hasn't increased at all. Nobody really doubts that bringing in immigrants skilled or otherwise will make the economy larger. It's more about who benefits. If you're the guy that runs the business using all of this immigrant labor you do great. If you're the guy competing with immigrants for jobs you don't do great.
>That's the section where they acknowledge that, yes, people lose jobs to immigrants. They go on to say that actually more people gain jobs at higher wages because of immigrants.
>There's a section on high tech jobs to read too, take a look.
All I see is a quote from Bill Gates and misleading statistics. Nothing that indicates that more Americans work in high tech fields at higher wages due to immigrants.
>And hey, when have you ever known software to not create the need for more software :0)
GDP per capita is $59,531. So .1-.3% of that is $60-179. For every man, woman, and child in the United States. $19-58 billion per year. This is value created, money from thin air, you don't have to tax anyone to give $120 to everyone in the United States every single year.
If you know something else that good, you should let us all know. Economists and policy makers scrounge around for stuff that's not a tenth as good as that. 333-1000 things this size make up every single dollar anyone in the United States has ever had. That's all the light bulbs, car makers, services and food you've ever seen.
GDP is the perfect thing to look at, it's our national income.
That's all well and good if you're the physical manifest of your country. Most people tend to think about whether it's good for themselves, though. Does an increased GDP "trickle down" to the worker?
Do you have a source on these studies you are saying talk about how immigration increases wages.
It's the general understanding that increase imigration would lower wages for those towards the bottom of the pay band for any given profession. It may result in increased pay for those at the top of the industry should increased software development induce demand for more software development, but that's not something we know to be the case over the next 40 years.
In many different marketplaces, increasing supply reduces it's cost even should there be an exact increase in demand for the given need. I.e. software development leads to there being an increased demand for more software development.
>Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found that immigrants create more jobs and raise wages in most cases.
Except of course the low skilled jobs that the immigrants are now doing. Those jobs see decreased wages. Seriously why do you think companies are hiring them if there were no economic gains and in the end they have to pay more to workers? They might not take jobs overall but claiming they increase wages even in the sectors that they are working in? Now that is what I call delusional.
Before anyone says it, if construction costs increased because laborers were paid more, it would not make housing more expensive. It would make land less expensive. This would be good for everyone except the arisotocrat.
And if you're in IT consulting like me instead of a software engineer, you absolutely should not cheer every immigrant. Many people wrongly assume that most H1B visas go to truly high-skilled individuals working at large tech companies. This is not the case. Take a look at the numbers in [1]. The top 5 companies bringing H1B workers are doing so specifically to outsource IT functions at lower cost than US workers. These H1B workers are absolutely taking away jobs and higher salaries from Americans who would like to do this work if it paid more.
What we need is to revamp the H1B system to be bid-based rather than lottery-based so it can actually fulfill its intent of bringing in workers that are truly needed rather than workers that are convenient.
My personal experience working with visa workers at multiple organizations is that many organizations do indeed use them as de-facto indentured servants. One visa worker got paid only once every 6 months. He tolerated it because complaining could get him sent back home. (It did cover his full pay, though.)
The claim H1B's are being used to "relieve labor shortages" is mostly untrue.
I disagree with a good many policies of the current administration, but they got this mostly right. I have to give them kudos.
The startups I've worked for, co created with coworkers who had H1-B visas (and green cards) created a lot of IT consulting gigs. We might even have hired you. This is as we went from 40 to 400 employees. Those H1-B visa holders created gigs for you to work. Even the consulting gigs you are competing for and losing are creating more consulting gigs later on. You are counting those right?
It's not simple, your intuition gained from media stories is not correct. You should instead read what economists say, they usually find that native wages and jobs are increased by immigrants.
Just think about how many dumb stories the media writes about stuff you actually do understand. Like - is your usual biggest project risk really hacking? Nope, it's the 50% chance a software project won't succeed at all.
Yes, I am counting those. And yes, I am looking at real data instead of media puff pieces. For example, [1]. It's important to consider 1) relative numbers (how many market rate positions are being created as a result of H1B vs. number of depressed wage positions taken away by them), and 2) The total net result on US workers. If 1,000 new jobs are created, but 10,000 others that Americans want to work now pay 15% less than they should, is it really a net positive?
Also as a rebuttal to your point, the type of economist findings you are referring to are almost always explicitly for complementary labor rather than substitute labor. In the case of H1B abuse, it tends to be the latter rather than the former. Additionally, abuse of the H1B program leads to add-on effects in the labor market that keep salaries low and discourage entry of new American workers - see for example [2].
I want to reiterate that I support the intent of the H1B program and startups using H1B workers are generally doing exactly the right thing. The problem is that the program has been hijacked by corporate interests looking to cut costs and thus it needs to be significantly revised.
Nope, you've linked to a media piece and a law journal article.
The economists did all the math, they actually thought of your 1) and 2) and other things besides. (Both the middle and high wage H1-B immigrants helped.)
They usually (not every single time) find that immigrants benefit native workers, that's low, medium, and high skill immigrants. They both increase the number of jobs AND the average wage.
The "abuse" of the H1-B program you mention is also helping even though you are correct that it is against the intent of the program. You almost certainly owe several of your gigs to H1-B immigrants, time when you would have otherwise been on the beach or working at a lower wage.
I know this goes against almost everything you've ever heard. It's counterintuitive. Like treating cancer with radiation, using a back fire to stop a wildfire, or that adding more software devs to a late project will make it later.
You want to look for something like "this poll of economists says that more immigration is bad for the US". "This poll of economics nobel prize winners say that while high skill immigration is good, medium skill immigration is bad". "This survey article of economics immigration articles finds that 70% of papers agree: middle skill immigration lowers wages". You will not find much.
For example these polls of economists say that high skill immigration is super good, but low skill immigration is only pretty good.
As patriotic American who cares for their fellow citizens and also out of self interest you should say "we should really crank up the H1-B program and let a lot more skilled immigrants in".
> The top 5 companies bringing H1B workers are doing so specifically to outsource IT functions at lower cost
And this is the part I don't quite understand. According to the rules, this shouldn't be possible.
So either (a) the rules are broken, and need to be fixed or (b) the rules are not being enforced.
And since we have the numbers, and the companies, it shouldn't be that hard to see how they are getting past either the regulations or the intent of the regulations or both.
As a former H1B visa holder who definitely did not lower wages (-g-) and whose employers were, AFAICT, meticulous about following the rules, it annoys me to no end that all H1B visa holders are tarred with the brush of the ones violating the rules.
Here's how it works. A company like Cognizant gets as many H1Bs as it can via an army of applicants and subsidiaries in India to game the lottery system. Meanwhile, companies in the US that want to pay less for IT functions create job descriptions that are tailored specifically to H1B applicants (if you've ever wondered why there are mandatory requirements for a very specific set of systems experience and education, this is often why), then post those jobs only where they are unlikely to be found and tell American applicants who do manage to find them that the position only pays [20% below real market rate]. Now you've got a US company that can legally say they just can't find any qualified domestic applicants, an H1B-focused staffing company that has tons of people it can bring in and rotate through regularly, and wages that are depressed. Net result: IT departments at large companies that are 40%+ staffed by H1B contractors.
I've seen this happen repeatedly at clients you've definitely heard of and it creates a situation where there are plenty of Americans who would work these jobs, but the salary/benefits being offered just aren't competitive.
i'm sorry but this comment reads like a puff piece. the red flag for me was when you simultaneously claimed that economics is complicated and then almost immediately... make an economic claim?
look, i get that you want to signal positive sentiment towards immigrants. that's great. but it's not at all clear what you're saying is true - one would need to factor in inflation, minimum wage growth, purchasing power, and things of that nature.
there's also the other (darker?) side of the coin, which indicates that in the US, there isn't nearly enough opportunity for US citizens to bridge the gap between where they are and to get prepared for these jobs. that's a black eye on our education system mostly, but it should be emphasized every time something like this is under discussion - given the incredible demand for these roles and the incredible amount of people not in the labor force who actually want a job, we really, really ought to be focusing on education here so as to fill these roles with US citizens.
Except it's not true that the US education system isn't producing enough educated prospective software engineers, the deficiency is entirely people at the higher levels.
The predicted job growth by the BLS over the next ten years is very close if not equal to the number of people getting bachelor's degree in computer science. This doesn't include boot camp graduates or people who are returning to get a master's, nor does it count the many people in related fields who go on to become software developers. While certainly some of these graduates are immigrants themselves, it's rather unlikely that the 10s of thousands of H1Bs that come in every year are needed for anything but to reduce labor costs (although it's known that reducing labor costs does make American industry more competitive at large).
> Except it's not true that the US education system isn't producing enough educated prospective software engineers.
Says who? The same people pushing for H1B?
We all know how this works. They tailor a job description that only could be met by a H1B. Any native interviewed is either slotted not under qualified or over qualified.
Even if you still want to argue that the solution is not more H1B, its less H1B. You force the companies to dump money into the local schooling systems to ensure they are producing the workers they need.
Allowing them to game the system and hire H1B means they have no incentive to ensure our school systems are producing the workers they will need.
My claim is "economics is complicated", so we should listen to economists. Then I put in a link to what some economists say to give the flavor.
You can go adventuring for yourself. Look for papers from the federal reserve, university economics blogs, and academic journals. You can just read the abstracts. You will find a very clear consensus.
I am also explicitly saying that the media and even high quality media like the Nytimes will leave you with very bad intuition about the effects of immigration.
It's not about signaling or positive sentiments. All human beings are equal. Being born in one place doesn't make you special or entitles you to a job.
US citizen or whatever-country citizen, all that matters is what you can do. Meritocracy, you know.
If someone else can do the job better than you or me, they should be hired. Being born in the US or gender or anything else you can think about shouldn't play a role. Only raw performance should matter, because anything else is discriminatory.
Just saying, because that's how I see the world, and I hope more people will keep seeing the world that way instead of thinking they're special and worth some unique privilege because of circumstance of their birth.
By way of a thought experiment: If all human beings are equal, is this a necessary and sufficient condition to let a homeless person stay with you for a night? Assuming this is an option for a relative or friend. Why not willingly give up your job now? Surely someone can lay claim to your job on some merit basis. If you have children, do you distribute your time and affection in proportion to merit?
I don't see why I should give up my hard won comfort -- won collectively by my ancestors, neighbors, compatriots, myself -- to strangers. It's natural to accord special status to yourself, then to some close kin, ..., then to fellow citizens, then to the rest of humanity.
> I don't see why I should give up my hard won comfort -- won collectively by my ancestors, neighbors, compatriots, myself -- to strangers. It's natural to accord special status to yourself, then to some close kin, ..., then to fellow citizens, then to the rest of humanity.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague once. Basically he was making the argument that people work hard to pass on something to their kids, and we shouldn't discourage that. Also that generations of people were working for their own nearest, why should that be wrecked in favour of a new regime?
There probably is something natural about helping your closest first. But nature is not in itself a reason for thinking something is right.
The problem for me is we are talking about excluding people from voluntary agreements. If some guy from a foreign country comes to my country and manages to agree a deal with some employer, why on earth do I have any right to stop that?
Any consequences of that agreement on my wellbeing are indirect. The arguments always go via the market, speaking to the effect of changing supply and demand. It's like when the "wrong kind of people" move into a neighbourhood, lowering house prices. What reasonable complaint does one have, other than if those people in themselves do something unreasonable like littering?
There's lots of things people can do voluntarily that might hurt me indirectly. Suppose everyone decided to speak Esperanto instead of the local language. Do I have a right to stop them? No. Would it have an enormous cost to me? Yes. Would it be convenient for me to use the law to force them? Sure.
So while I can understand that people are worried about immigration, I've yet to hear a reasonable argument to restrict it.
If they genuinely have a lower performance, they will sell their services at a price matching their performance and have no problem finding clients.
However, I dispute that premise. You are jumping to conclusions. The "disabled and English learners" I have met offer tremendous value, in different axes.
Someone who is blind is used to processing audio at several time the speed a non blind person can. So if I need someone to summarize and extra data from audio, I want someone who's blind. Because they will be more efficient than you or I.
I don't know about you, but I assume you are not blind. If you want to sell me your services, I'll pay you a fraction of what I'll pay a blind contractor because they will be more efficient than you.
Someone for which English is not their first language often uses a lower number of words, and makes simpler sentences. This is a godsent for technical documentation.
I fear you inner bias make you consider that as "intial disadvantage". It is extremely short sighted.
Feel free to call me prejudiced when I prefer blind and ESL hires.
> If someone else can do the job better than you or me, they should be hired...
OK, but that's not what is happening.
You're ignoring the fact that this is more about cheap labor than about some unreachable meritocratic ideal of finding "the best person" for the job.
The end game of this will be that these "high-skill" jobs will go the way of manufacturing, and eventually the USA will end up with huge swathes of the population unable to compete in the global economy, poorer, less educated and with a diminishing social safety net.
> Being born in one place doesn't make you special or entitles you to a job.
Um, in some continues it is. But then I have to ask why have countries at all if being born in a country gains you nothing?
While I see your point I can't help to have a hard time with it. Mostly because you fail to see how detrimental to the country it is when its citizens can't get jobs because they are competing with the res of the world, who don't follow the same rules.
We have countries for a reason. And if the vast majority of people in a country feel they should not have to compete on a world platform for a local job then that seems fair to me.
Lets also talk about numbers. Given there is ~400 million in the US, And ~7 billion people in the rest of the world. It is almost statistically given that we could replace every American citizen worker with a better skilled worker with a non-citizen worker. So I ask again, is that what we want to do? What will that mean for the notion of the US as a country? Why have a country at all?
Why have a country at all? Well right now because other countries will continue to be countries and want to be countries, and they don't all play by the same rules. It might be different if we all played by the same rules but right now it seems like the US is being gamed by everybody else.
But anyways, it matters what country you are born in, and that does grant you some rights that others in other countries were born in don't have. Otherwise we would not even be having this discussion.
Firstly, political systems must also compete. Marxism competes with free-market democracies, and in order for that competition to occur, movement must be restrained. Failing political systems explode with refugees that bring unworkable mindsets with them.
Secondly, all people are equal before the law, which is an invention of the U.S. constitution. All people are certainly not equal. This is codified in religion in various forms ("As you did unto the least of these, you did unto me," karma/samsara, kafir, etc.). It is self-evident that equality is not reflected in wealth, social standing, influence, and power. It is also patently obvious that biology presents impediments to equality. You should not confuse a U.S. legal construct of equality with a generalization of equality.
A great improvement would be to give them citizenship if they want it.
The economic impact of immigrants is not under debate, however your examples are poor choices as I don't think any of those people came to the US on an H1B visa. If anything it's an argument against H1B.
Yep, totally where I was going with that. One H1-B guy I worked with did in fact become a founder of a small successful firm, but that was after he got a green card.
I think we've lost out on a few billion dollar startups and awesome inventions by locking people to the H1-B job they got hired for.
H1B's are immigrant visas, they terminate in greencards after one renewal. The only problem is that a few countries have long lines (India, China, Philippines) on how many greencards can be granted this way per year. That should be done away with.
The term Immigrant Visa in US immigration specifically refers to a visa that would confer permanent residency (i.e. green card) upon entry to the US. H-1B is definitely not one. It is a non-immigrant visa. Immigration intent, e.g. “dual intent” that you are referring to is distinct from the fact that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa. It simply refers to whether you are eligible for the non-immigrant visa if you have a predisposed intent to immigrate permanently in the future. For example, if you are applying for a non-immigrant visa with non-immigrant intent like F-1, you are asserting that you do not intend to permanently immigrate at the time of your application. Dual intent visas do not have such restriction, thus you can apply for a green card without jeopardizing your eligibility for a dual-intent non-immigrant visa, but that does not mean the non-immigrant visa comes with the privilege or path of immigration in and of itself or confers any such benefit.
H1-B are non-immigrant visas in the sense they are temporary. However, they are dual-intent which means you can pursue permanent residency while in H1-B status.
There is nothing in the H1B that entitles you to a green card. You can only renew the H1B once, so after that you need to either somehow get a green card or leave the U.S.
Although the previous comment is very incorrect, this information is also not correct.
The greencard process is a multi step, often many year process. If you are from a country with per country limits you can be approved for a green card, which will allow your H1B to be renewed indefinitely, but you still have the alien conditions including needing to maintain the same/similar employment.
They terminate in a GC or you go home. Only one renewal, not like the work visa I had in China that could be renewed indefinitely with no path to permanent residency.
I don't think any of those people came to the US on an H1B visa
H1-B is one of the main ways people get a green card and citizenship since you can have immigrant intent on H1-B, something you can't on a lot of other visas.
H-1B visas fall under the doctrine of dual intent, though, so isn't that already the case? Having the H-1B does not preclude someone from seeking out a green card.
I’d say we reciprocate what their gov would do for our workers. Their gov makes easy for Americans, we make it easy for them. They make it hard on Americans trying to work in their country, we make it hard on them.
See your argument is short sighted, as these people provide economic benefit, it’s in your interest to allow as many as you can in while the other countries aren’t interested in taking your best and brightest. It’s why Canada’s tech sector stands to gain hugely while America squanders its lead. Canada’s letting in anyone smart and technical and the US is telling them no. What were arguing for is being unfair in America’s favor.
I don't know about what's in America's favor. I know for a fact that I would not willingly compete with all software developers in a global marketplace. I'd lose my big4 job in a split second. Canada's tech sector may stand to gain, but I'd lose half my real income if I were to relocate to a sister office across the border. So much for progressive visa policy.
Given the choice, that half the salary would still seem attractive? Isn't it. Now being in same time zone, closer to US SV, native s/w engineers would have to compete fiercely. I wonder, how would folks react over competition with Canadian tech industry.
Countries should do what makes sense for them. Canada is behind, they want to jump start their tech sector. They’re not a challenge to the US, China, Japan or even Russia. So good on them. We have a need for some specialists and we have a need for many low skills laborers. We need a system to evaluate need, address it appropriately and manage the foreign workforce to the advantage of Americans. Panama is free to invite all the high skilled labor if they want and become a tech power too. Let them. I encourage it.
Canada is just about a tenth of our pop. Worrying about them is like worrying about Japan taking over the world in 1990. It’s not possible due to population realities. Let them succeed a little.
This is the strangest anti-immigration stance I’ve ever heard: don’t let them in so the small countries can win a round or two. I mean, ok, you win this one? Maybe this is what being tired of winning looks like ;)
" ... consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages ..."
I am not sure that is true ... in fact, while I cannot provide a reference or citation, I believe I have seen well-received research and academic studies that suggest this increase in the workforce was a key component of weakening unions and depressing real, inflation adjusted earnings over just the period you cite.
In fact, I think it is Elizabeth Warren's work in a related area (the fragility of two-income households) that has been more recently discussed and overlaps this discussion.
I am genuinely interested to see how the intersection of liberal immigration policies and support of unions and workers' rights is supposed to be implemented. I note with interest that Ralph Nader believes it cannot be done.[1] I also note with interest that corporate interests, which are assumed to be "reactionary" and "conservative" are very supportive of liberal immigration policies.
I personally believe that the US is, and should continue to be a "nation of immigrants" - especially those coming from countries that we broke. Given that first world workers literally rioted in the streets over a very minor increase in fuel taxes[2], I am skeptical that any real reckoning of the costs and trade-offs involved would be acceptable to the US workforce.
I must ardently oppose this, it is completely wrong.
"If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, but just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1]"
Whether you realize it or not, the absolute position you're taking is exploitative and false. It's the equivalent of asking if one supports a soldier on the battlefield in order to pressure their position on the war i.e."support the troops".
Furthermore, your source doesn't say what you cherry picked out of it. It says immigrants can be complements OR substitutes, and proceeds to lend some supporting data while remaining inconclusive, which is typical of fed publications. Your conclusion is your own.
"To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages."
As someone else pointed out, this very simply false.
If you think that immigrants are a net-job +, by all means, do that math, but what the St. Louis FED has done is far from conclusive.
> I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome.
To counter your anecdote, I've worked with countless H1-B's over the years, and while a handful have been awesome most of them are absolutely terrible.
In Silicon Valley? I've observed that the H-1Bs in Silicon Valley are extraordinarily high skill while the Infosys bodyshoppers are out in Des Moines and Cleveland.
The difference is that software isn't such a unique get out of poverty ticket in rich countries. People in rich countries who are ambitious and no good at development and / or don't care about it can just do something else to earn a good living.
> To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.
That is not at all obvious. How would you respond to Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap"?
Thanks for bringing up this point. Anyone who has grown up in the US knows well how far down wages have gone.
My father was an accountant. He could afford a house and raised a family of 5 on his salary at age 40, earning ~60k/yr. I'm an experienced developer. I make $200k/yr. I'm raising a family of 4 on my salary and i'm 40. I cant afford a house. Heck, I cant even afford more than a 2br apt.
To me, it is completely meaningless that i earn 3x+ than my dad, the wages have not kept up with inflation. My 200k/yr doesnt buy me as much as 60k did a generation ago.
How is this "no loss in jobs or lowering of wages". If anything this demonstrates that Increasing supply lowers wages.
It's not that wages haven't kept up with general inflation, it's that wages have not kept up with asset inflation.
So your 200K/year (accounting for inflation) probably buys roughly the same amount in goods and services as your father, but it can't buy real estate, because that has been inflated in an asset bubble.
These asset bubbles (stocks, real estate) are driven by the fact that owners of capital have been able to depress taxation on capital growth, while increasing (in proportion) taxation on income. They have also been able to use the US national debt to let the Fed maintain their asset bubbles.
Not to mention that in your father's day, inflation ate away at debt, much to the chagrin of the debt holders (ie suppliers of capital). Funnily enough, low inflation has meant that lenders do much better than borrowers.
That was always one of the advantages of a mortgage that was commonly mentioned and promoted. That your monthly payment would be effectively pennies after 20 years. Sustained low inflation meant that never came to pass.
It was also one of the reasons for the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation. They started trying to inflate away some of the Versailles war reparations. Which got out of control, and then some.
Asset inflation is a part of inflation, unfortunately along with education and healthcare, our inflation indicators do an extremely poor job of measuring it.
There are plenty of places in the USA where $200k will get you very far, you just choose not to live there. You have to account for the fact that you're paying for that.
>> They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs.
We've had the H1B program for 25+yrs. We accept 65+20k workers a year. That is 8520+ workers who have entered the country on this program. Lets round down and say 2million workers. These are 2million jobs that didn't go to local graduates, but instead to overseas graduates.
Of those 2 million workers, could anyone cite any significant companies started by the H1b workers which created jobs?* I mean, not a dozen jobs here or there, but serious job creation that would offset the 2 million local workers who were displaced?
There is this myth that H1b workers create more jobs than they take, but where are these jobs?
Oh, please dont mention Google or Tesla, as those founders didnt come in on H1bs.
> Of those 2 million workers, could anyone cite any significant companies started by the H1b workers which created jobs?* I mean, not a dozen jobs here or there, but serious job creation that would offset the 2 million local workers who were displaced?
And many others like them. Go to the website of any of the top VCs in the Valley. On their list of partners, you will find many Indian names. Most of these people, before becoming VCs, were founders of successful startups. A large number of these people first came to US on H-1B.
Likewise, take a look of influential papers like, say DynamoDB one. You will find many Indian names in the list of authors, and most of them also worked on H-1B. The work of these people end up creating entire new fields of employment coast-to-coast.
Can't have been that bad then. General employment is a nightmare, I've only changed jobs once in the last 8 years because it's so many BS hoops to jump through.
The difference is person in H1B faces same issues as you but there are more issues which are frankly more complicated and time consuming due to visa related things.
> I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome.
I see your point, but you can't group all H1-B holders in the same boat. The ones you worked were awesome, but I am sure many have worked with ones that were not awesome. I will note, I have worked with a few awesome H1-B holders too, but I won't fall for ALL being the same.
> If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs.
It's hard for me to read this without thinking you are just virtue signalling. This is because across the board you can hear about skilled US engineers not getting the job, but yet find the companies that opted not to hire a US engineer has a ton of H1-B visas. You can't have a tech shortage, and at the same time have skilled workers in the same country struggling to get a good paying job in tech. This is also coupled with huge swaths of tech jobs being shipped overseas to the same places we are getting flooded with H1-B holders.
You could say -- well maybe the H1-B holders were more skilled? Maybe... But even if they were it is still a disservice to the US employees as they will not be given the opportunity to improve and hone their skills.
I also feel that people overlook the extra value a company has for hiring a H1-B over a citizen, even if they have the same skill and are paid the same. They get stickiness. There is a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stress moving from job to job. So often H1-B holders stay longer at companies when working conditions change for the worse.
> And if you are in SV consider that more than half of public tech companies were created by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. 1st generation founders include Sergey Brin, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Stewart Butterfield, Sebastion Thrun, and Patrick and John Collison.
I don't think it is a good idea to conflate immigrants to H1-B holders. While many of them do stay and become permanent residence, many of them also go back to the country they hailed from. I don't have the time right this second, but I do wonder how many of the immigrants on your list were in H1-B programs vs other routes of immigration.
It's much harder to get an H1-B anymore. The people who manage to get one are mostly top-tier talent that are either battle-tested (rose through the ranks at a consulting firm) or are very good, domain experts.
It's like saying, not every former Google developer is awesome. It might be true, but the bar to get a job there is so high that the person is very likely to be awesome.
> It's like saying, not every former Google developer is awesome. It might be true, but the bar to get a job there is so high that the person is very likely to be awesome.
It's not a high bar, but the right shape. There is a difference.
Not a single one of those are H1-B. In the Sergey Brin and Max Levchin, and myself cases, our parents were under special refugee visas that literally took an act of congress to pas (thank you Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).
At every level, high skilled, medium skilled, and low skilled, immigrants tend to increase jobs and wages for natives. This is the rough consensus of economists.
There is lots of work to make this even more true, of the flavor "ok if we are only bringing in 1 million immigrants, who does this best". H1-B and student visas a consequence of that thinking.
When H1s are used to displace American workers at a lower cost, I am not sure “cheering all immigrants” is warranted. Some, but definitely not all. The Disney firings happened. And it has happened in many other places that aren’t as famous. When Disney has H1s displacing Americans who were already doing the job, that isn’t a “shortage,” which is the single purpose for which H1B was created.
I am not disputing the value of some H1Bs, but “cheering” for all of them? No way.
Also Sergey and Elon were not H1Bs. Including them in a discussion of H1Bs is intellectually dishonest, neither one was an H1B but instead entered the US via other programs — programs that aren’t under serious debate.
I was one of those Disney employees laid off in 2015 and there were no "shortages", they just wanted to save money. A few months later they wanted to do the same at their ABC unit. They told employees they were laid off and gave them a date and then walked it back because of the bad press.
Southern California Edison (SCE) also did the same thing as Disney. Abused the H1B and L2 program fired american workers and replaced them with foreign contractors.
I am wondering how not having H1B could have helped the Disney employees though. If Disney wants to cut costs and hire cheaper labor (presumably why they hired H1Bs? I don't know), they could as well move the jobs offshore. Now the US is losing out on much more than just the jobs. What am I missing here?
the whole idea of "just moving the jobs offshore" doesn't really come out to be as simple as you have equated here. there's often time zone differences, cultural difference, a simple inability to do work (e.g. anything requiring access to physical infrastructure, any client-facing meetings, etc.)
it's not like you can flip a switch and get a fully functioning setup, even with something like development.
we've seen this charade with foxconn, amazon, etc. turns out that the whole "highest bidder competitions" turn out to be not-so-thinly veiled con jobs where basically everyone but the corp loses aside from some marginal people like property holders.
Who told you that? That was not my experience at all working there a few years back. Even for global teams like AWS engineering support, the US offices easily tripled the international ones in number of engineers.
I knew exactly one team based in Germany, but that was only because AWS acquired that product and team.
that's a pretty nice red herring you've introduced there my friend!
you haven't addressed any of the points i've brought up, but instead introduced a very tangential (possibly true) fact.
reflect for a moment on what i've said above. you are introducing a dichotomy that isn't accurate and justifying it by saying "something is better than nothing", which is the same corporate rationale for having a .000001% tax rate, states going crazy to attract huge companies, and so forth.
The options aren't immigrants or offshore. Yes, some jobs will be lost to offshore but some won't. From the perspective of American workers, even if 90% go offshore it's better than 100% going to immigrants.
> Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive,
In our case, it's pretty intuitive: more software in the world increases the demand for software engineers. You need people to maintain software; profitable software packages spurs reinvestment into new features; the improved efficiency of companies will drive competitors to also invest in software.
The downside is that easy-to-use software displaces low-end engineers. So demand may continue to grow, but so too will the educational requirements. When I started, I rarely used math beyond arithmetic in my job, but today, I'm often doing calculus.
> To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.
Is that actually true though? I remember reading / hearing in podcasts that now it takes two people working full time to get the same lifestyle we had when only one member in the household was expected to work.
I am not against H1Bs, but the minimum pay should be raised to 100k. They should be able to switch jobs after 1 year so they are not slaves to their sponsor.
And every h1B application should be posted on a easily searchable site where American applicants can review and apply for that position if they meet the job criteria.
Every H1B application (or rather, the LCA that preceeeds the H-1B petition) does appear in a government database and multiple public-facing sites that you can search. You can see the job title, company, location, wage being paid, and many many other pieces of information.
> A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs.
Josh, what's needed in US is a simple plain work visa, without any pretence of "high levelness" - something that was common in all Western countries before immigration alarmisms became a such a severe thing.
For the society to accept immigrant workforce, it needs to become more open and less xenophobic again.
The primary reason for messed up immigration systems across the Western nations has nothing to do with the labour market, but plain closet racism of unwashed masses that uses all arguments above as a cover.
> A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily
Yes, that would be great for the workers, but not great for the companies who want a cheap and captive labor force and bribe the politicians to get their H1-B slots.
How do you feel about the broader high skilled worker market? I'm not personally familiar with it, but the internet™ makes it sound pretty abysmal. Low wages for most science careers, horrible working conditions and pay for graduate positions, professorships replaced by adjunct positions, fewer and fewer tenure track positions offered. It appears as though the high skilled worker market has really taken it in the pants the past few decades.
> A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year).
Aren't their visas sponsored by a specific company? Incentives aren't structured for this to happen. One way to look at is is that the US government are letting companies serve as "scouts" to bring talent in, and the companies' commission is to retain their exclusive employment for a period of time.
It's not the jobs I'm worried about; it's the housing. Where are we going to put all these people? SF already has the median home of around $1,000,000. Pro immigration policies will just make it worse.
>To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.
You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right? Coincidentally during that same time period the income gap exploded because the wealthy had plentiful cheap labor and were able to pocket the productivity gains as pure profit because workers had no leverage to demand higher wages because there were 0 labor shortages. American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids.
I support high skilled immigration because it benefits the country but let's be real, if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Wages would drop massively because it would be a buyer's market for tech companies, they could pick and choose the most talented for pennies
By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works.
> if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what?
Guess what, we'd get a lot more overseas clients as they wrestled with the labor shortage abroad. (Although, the real problem would be the humanitarian crisis in housing 10m more in SV overnight, ha)
The h1bs salary requirements allowed large companies to import cheap workers and compete with American labor.
It's not a coincidence that the biggest numbers of applications went to some of the big Indian IT companies.
It's a good thing they will be changed so that the cost get equalized rather than allowing big companies to import cheap and skilled labour. If it's skilled it should be paid the same of course not less.
This has been known for a long time to be a problem but was mostly ignored until recently.
This hits the nail on its head. The reason why SV is so attractive to potential immigrants isn't because of its living standard of thousands of homeless people the healthcare, transportation or housing system.
It's because the scarcity of that particular labor makes it on one of the best paid tech sectors in the world. Most people go there for the money even if they may stay for other things. Well that, and the fact that other highly skilled people compete for those few spots available, which means you might be surrounded by interesting peers.
China for example has 10x as many communication network engineer graduates as the whole of Europe altogether. That's ignoring the fact that a significant number of graduates are migrants themselves. I believe China and India have the longest Green Card waiting lists.
>any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity
Isn't it? Increases in productivity, normally called automation, must reduce labour scarcity unless demand for the product is proportionately increased. There are plenty of sectors where this is exactly what happens, and some where it isn't.
Production has three components: capital, labor, and technology. Automation, as I understand it, both improves technology and lowers the cost of capital.
If I recall right, this strand of economic lit is called Total Factor Productivity.[0]
I believe the Wheel falls squarely in the technology bracket.
Why would the wheel, which allows the movement of goods with much less labor, be any different in concept than the transistor, which allows e.g. the accounting of a corporation to be done with far fewer accountants?
Or the assembly of a car with robots?
All productivity gains (expressed as production per person-hour) is a result of either (1) advancement in technology or (2) the increased use of existing technology through capital investment or (3) quality of labor (education, training, etc).
The invention of the wheel, the invention of fire, the invention of the steam engine, and the gas engine, the solar cell and the transistor all fall under (1) and the expansion of their use falls under (2).
One could argue that the invention of the wheel is actually automation. Instead of carrying goods on your back down to the river, now put it in a cart, and kick it to roll downhill...
It is possibly the most basic automation, it does free human labor with a mechanical mean.
>Guess what, we'd get a lot more overseas clients as they wrestled with the labor shortage abroad.
So exactly when is it that India is going to become a major client? You seem to think that a country with high unemployment or underemployment that exports a portion of their workforce won't quickly absorb that "shortage". That's a pretty poor assumption.
> By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works.
Yes, this logic is perfectly sound. Increase in productivity has both good and bad impacts on a system within which it happens - the whole difficulty of managing a system (like a job market) is to find ways to pocket the good, and mitigate the bad.
It is hard believe so many people still don’t “get it”. You cannot inflate the supply of labor, regardless of the means, and get a good result for the average working stiff.
Hmm...how about: inflate the supply of labor, price of goods goes down and better goods are invented, then average working stiff benefits when buying these goods?
I understand your point that the average working stiff might experience wage loss or lose their job altogether, but I'm not sure you're considering the benefits to consumers, which is another role of the average working stiff.
Wages and salaries (and, perhaps, prices) would not go down. Your argument and the parent of it, is falling for the lump of labor fallacy. By adding supply of labor, the demand for labor goes up as well. It is actually well-agreed on by economists, but I see many smart people, on the left and right, get it wrong.
I implore you both to read and listen about it (google/"lump of labor").
This is perfect, this is exactly what I'm arguing against!
Does this statement also seem true?
"It is hard to believe so many * economists * don't "get it". You cannot inflate the supply of labor, regardless of the means, and get a good result for the average working stiff."
What do we think economists are doing with all their data sets and papers and conferences and stuff?
Opinions of economists vary. But neverminding that, if swelling the labor supply was so incredibly beneficial to the economy we would not be $21 trillion in debt and 40% of the population unable to muster $400 for an emergency. Give me a break.
First, it's unclear whether the debt is actually a bad thing. Note debts for countries don't work like debts for individuals, especially if said country controls the world's reserve currency.
Second, the idea that immigrants and women getting jobs is a major factor in 40% of Americans not having significant savings is so completely ungrounded in reality or even popular thought as to make me wonder if you're being deliberately dishonest.
What is hard to believe is that the mercantilist mindset has been vanquished 200 years ago, and you still need to instruct adults into why it doesn't work over and over again.
That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now.
Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so I don't know how to tease this out.
Heath care does go up from 5% of gdp in 1960 to 18.2% today, maybe most compensation gain is going there? Plus retirement benefits.
But... from 1960 to 2000 the civilian labor force increased from 70 million to 141 million [1]. With all those new workers, by your link, compensation didn't actually shrink. That's weird huh? Also real median family income grew from $41K to $72K [2].
And sure 10 million software engineers added to SV tomorrow would lower wages. But maybe not long term? If it was 10 million countrywide? What would an economist or a careful wage survey say? Anyway we're talking about 85,000 jobs all over the country.
The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages. They usually conclude that for specific wage markets too.
Maybe we can't rely on some anecdotes in the media to refute their conclusions?
From 1974 (they don't have data before that) to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1], that's for individuals. The graph is useful to look at.
This is complex, for example there are also more single parent / single person households which tends to lower household incomes.
I generally agree with what you say, but the median family income growing seems like it would be due to most households moving from one to two workers. Looking at it that way, it makes wages look even flatter over the time period.
Yes, this is right. Large increases in the workforce have increased the supply, reducing real wage growth, household earning has grown by adding a second earner. More work is getting done to get the same economic outcome. Put one way, this is terrible for wage earners, out another it is excellent for spenders since the thing you can buy have gotten cheaper through plentiful labor.
Your third paragraph is it. This is mostly an out of control health care cost growth story. Three areas of cost growth--health care, education, and housing costs--have now eaten the gains of two entire generation of Americans and none of the three look set to stop their cancerous growth rates any time soon.
Way back in the ACA debates, when people talked about bending the cost curve, many people's eyes may have glazed over but that's exactly what we need to figure out a way to do. Not have a debate over immigration.
>Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.
>Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows... But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.
Unless you're an immigrant or high up in tech business why would you cheer more high-skill immigrants? It will depress your wages and the economic gains will not accrue to you.
I don’t believe jobs are finite. I believe skilled immigrants improve competitiveness and create jobs across broad swaths of the economy, some even start very successful businesses. Many Fortune 500 founders were immigrants, and locking them out may have cost the country many hundreds of thousands of jobs.
You don't really get to control min-wage laws, working standards or environmental regulations over the long term in a tariff free world. US trade deficits are growing and will inevitably have to be normalized. When that happens the US will have to become a lot more competitive with nations that don't have these standards in place. Stagnated wages are just the beginning and are borrowing time before labour standards and environmental standards are forced to equalize with the East.
This is why we need to start including a tariff with labor or environmental regulations. The point of those regulations is that we as a nation are accepting a decrease in economic efficiency for a (hopeful) net gain in general quality of life; if companies are allowed to just offshore their shit to some place that doesn't care without compensating in some other way than you're stuck the economic disadvantage without the accompanying benefit.
> The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages.
Economists look at the past and extrapolate into future, often with really poor results. With increasing amount of automation, software development is probably safe from paradigm change for a short while. Given that, it is always risky to claim that immigration will increase jobs and wages in the next decade, because it did so in the previous one.
The workforce grew, look at the link and table 5. Basically woman and minorities joined the workforce. Worker to population ratio went up and the total number of workers went up faster than the growth in population.
Jim Crow laws, blackballing, and redlining. You ant allowed to work in certain jobs, if you speak out (see Kapernick), no job for you! And you can’t even live within reasonable distance of work!
I did find personal income growth from 1974 on. That gets rid of the 2 income household problem. I think maybe they only surveyed households til 1974.
From 1974 to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1]. The graph is useful to look at.
I do think some of the story is that most compensation gains went to benefits, especially our crazy expensive health care (again 5% to 18.2% of gdp). So the hourly wages stayed the same, but benefits went up. I think the original point, that more workers did not lower income, still holds.
Really I can't do an Econ Phd to respond to this thread. So I'll outsource to economists, who say more workers do not lower income.
That would probably be true if all other conditions held constant.
However, Silicon Valley can pay handsome money because many companies located there run well and outperform their competitors for a fertile global market. And those companies can beat their competitors because (at least part of the reasons) they have the best talents available. If the skilled engineers from China, European, India all went back to their home countries, would the competitiveness of those SV companies be no different relative to their foreign competitors? If companies in SV were losing its advantage to another tech hub outside the united states, would they still be able to pay so well? I doubt that.
> That assumes the demand and the supply are independent variables.
When the argument is that an increase in supply causes lower wages your counter argument doesn't make any sense at all. For wages to rise the demand has to grow faster than the oversupply. The primary way to increase demand is by lowering the price of a service aka workers get paid less.
In other words it is possible that even with an extreme amount of immigration everyone still gets a decently paying job but in the end wages across the market have fallen.
Whatever pie analogy you're trying to pull doesn't matter. I don't know why people keep getting nerdsniped by that word and often even use their own hyper specific definition of it which doesn't match the definition of the other person. There is no law that says people always benefit from a growing economy and there is no law that says people can never benefit from a shrinking economy.
Software engineering isn’t most professions. Salaries have been going up more than a decade accounting for inflation.
If 10 million software engineers dropped in Silicon Valley, a lot of things would happen (for one there’s nowhere for them to live). But that’s not what’s happening.
It was hyperbole to show the effect of supply and demand
More and more I notice how similar software engineers are beginning to sound like the "Made in America" factory workers who said China could never do their job. Never take the present comfy situation for granted
By "stuff" I was actually referring to digital products, digital technology, websites, technology companies, etc. An import tax on those would be harder than for physical products.
It would not. An import tax reduces imports, but also reduces exports by a greater amount. An export tax on real estate transfers to foreign persons, cash or cash-equivalents, luxury goods, artwork, and technology--such as engineering documents and diagrams, manufacturing machinery, and firmware source code--would also not solve it, but it would bite a bigger chunk out of the problem.
Imports are paid for by exports. The US is currently paying for the manufacturing that it exported with dollars and documents. It could be paying with cars, and airplanes, and espresso machines, and in-sink garbage disposals, and novelty CNC lathes for engraving wooden pencils and chopsticks, and rapid refrigeration devices for single canned beverages, and maybe even non-imaginary 8K OLED television sets. If you make the specific exports that produce the most internal economic activity the cheapest way to pay for imports, increases in imports would encourage more exports.
If you're covering a trade deficit with cash, that impacts the same currency you use to conduct domestic trade--you're giving the trade partner leverage over your whole economy. What you really want to do is make a note spent in your own country buy far more than the same note spent elsewhere, so that the notes stay in the country, and the goods and services get exported instead. But you also want the rest of the world to have high demand for your currency, so that you can bring in a lot of imports, or go on lots of cheap tourist vacations. So devaluing your currency is not the best option.
But if you had, say, a 50% tax on foreign money transfers, if someone were to buy a $1 doodad from Elbonia, they would have to pay $2 for it in cash--$1 for the importer, and $1 for the tax. But they could also pay for it by purchasing a $1 doohickey locally and trading that for the $1 doodad, avoiding the tax, and keeping the $1 circulating in the domestic economy, and the Elbonian money circulating in Elbonia. Instead of taxing the trade itself, tax imbalanced trades and trade deficits.
Of course, any real-world implementation would be politicized to Hell and back, and chock full of loopholes, but it works just fine between imaginary countries.
As a consumer I don't corporations outsourcing manufacturing to China and then bringing back crap, charging me full price and keeping the difference.
As a patriot I'd rather pay higher price for domestically made products and know that our local workers made it.
There is a balance of course between killing imports and selling country short and flooding it with crap - but certainly China was having a party paid by north american consumers for last 3 decades.
There already are import taxes on "crap" like electronic components. Browse around digi-key for "tariff pending" or "tariff applied". All its doing is making bills of material more expensive.
Rising compared to what? Junior engineers are doubling or tripling up to live near work in metropolitan areas or face crushing commutes. It's a sign that even in software engineering, capital is crushing labor.
You're describing two different problems. Housing supply in the Bay Area and New York -- the areas I'm assuming you're talking about, because most other metropolitan cities are building to keep up with supply just fine -- is incredibly low. In addition, in the Bay Area especially, the incredibly high salaries in combination with that supply is causing skyrocketing prices.
Not really, there's cities all over the world with conditions that lead to crazy high real estate/housing costs. Most every metropolis ends up with a similar situation. Slightly different settings that all sum up to "high demand low supplies". NYC, London, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Tokyo, ...
Is this true when you are comparing similar conditions? Something along the lines of:
Large cities with significant multiculturalism, high tech jobs, significant culture (arts, media, entertainment, museums, etc.), public transportation, and openness to various ways of life
Yes. Try moving to Minneapolis, which has plenty of everything you ask for and housing prices are not out of control. If you don't need a large city, Des Moines does well too on the rest of your qualifications.
Not Compared to London though - London does have a much better transport system so living 60-70 miles away and commuting isn't as bad as it would be in SV.
Indeed. An argument could be made that given the astronomical living costs of Silicon Valley, the wages should have already been higher given how much profits the companies are making.
More and more? I recall software engineers were panicked over outsourcing just over 15 years ago. Have you watched Office Space? This is not a new phenomenon.
> You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right
This also coincides with the end of the gold standard ('68) and subsequently cheaper interest rates and (thereby) access to much more and cheaper capital for those who already have enough capital to begin with.
I reckon if standard of living improves, so does my dollar per unit of happiness ratio improves, then a flat real wage isn't a terrible thing.
Of course, this belies the fact that wealth inequality increases. This means though the median may stay stable, the tails get fatter: or, in other words, the standard of living isn't necessarily getting better for everyone.
Wealth inequality has increased mostly due to the massive expansion of the global economy, which was a large benefit to capital owners and was a detriment to US labor (whose wages were artifically very high in the post WW2 decades). Global labor competed, capital benefited. Federal Reserve policies since ~1970 have also overwhelmingly favored capital, asset holders, and not workers.
The US tax code has gotten more progressive over time, not less. The very high tax rates from the past were quite narrow in scope, they covered few taxpayers.
The top 25% are paying 85-88% of all income taxes in a given year. The top 10% are paying 70% of all income taxes.
The top 1% yield 20% of all income and pay 39% of all income taxes.
How do you qualify that very progressive tax code as "stopped taxing rich people"?
Simultaneously the US welfare state has massively expanded since 1970. Poverty and homelessness have declined by a lot, while healthcare coverage expanded dramatically. The US spends the equivalent of 20% of its GDP on social welfare programs. That's higher than Canada and Australia, just slightly behind the UK at 22%. All of that is paid for by the top 25% of income earners.
> The US tax code has gotten more progressive over time, not less. The very high tax rates from the past were quite narrow in scope, they covered few taxpayers.
That's not how that works. The U.S. has become massively more disparate in income and wealth, which alone would explain why more taxpayers fall into high tax brackets: the middle class is evaporating, leaving a somewhat larger upper class (more high-income taxpayers paying a lot!) and a massively larger lower class (also more low-income taxpayers paying very little), thus shifting the balance of how much the wealthy pay for the poor: with less of a middle class, the wealthier are the originators of a higher percentage of the tax revenue just by mathematics. That's not the tax code becoming "more progressive over time," that's the US having more inequality over time.
But it didn't happen alone. It also happened under repeated tax cuts for the wealthy. The U.S. tax code has become demonstrably less progressive over time, just as the U.S. has become demonstrably less economically equal.
> The US spends the equivalent of 20% of its GDP on social welfare programs. That's higher than Canada and Australia, just slightly behind the UK at 22%.
Right, but that's because the health care system of "no preventative care for the poor, but massive spending on medical procedures once you're already dying" is incredibly inefficient. Single-payer healthcare is cheaper than what we have, demonstrated by almost every large country with it spending less (while often getting better results). It's not because the tax system is progressive, or because the social safety net is somehow better or larger than countries with free healthcare and cheap higher education.
There's been another major shift as well. This [1] graph is critical. There were more self employed workers in the US in 1948 than there are today. The population since then has increased by more than 220%. And the trend increases the further back you go. I mention 1948 only because that's as far back as FRED's data goes! The US used to be a land largely driven by self employment.
We had large numbers of mostly independent economic centers populated with local businesses owned and operated by local individuals. In many ways it's something akin to what you can find in many parts of the developing world today. And it's awesome. But as the economy 'globalized' we've reached a point such that an urban business streetscape in California can very often look effectively identical, in terms of businesses in operation, to one all the way on the other side of the country in New York. You're never going to have anything even vaguely resembling economic equality when a handful of companies control immense amounts of the entire economy.
This also distorts governmental systems since extensive wealth means the reach of companies is practically unlimited. Civil servant versus a company sitting on billions of dollars with international connections spanning the entire globe and the best legal and public relations teams that money can buy? That's not even David vs Goliath, that's ant vs foot.
Anecdotally, whenever I post something about my business on social media, it is mostly ignored. But if someone posted something about new job they got - it is celebrated. So I see there is also social attitude supporting employment over self-employment. Not sure if it was the same in 1948.
Lack of capital investment killed small businesses. Everyone now has to pay a tax penalty to take your earned capital and invest it into local main-street businesses. This capital instead, though 401k, goes into trans-national firms.
I think that the lack of capital investment you're describing can be thought of as a particular instance of the economy of scale (at least, broadly construed): larger and/or conglomerated companies, prima facie, have to depend less on capital injections.
i cannot upvote this enough. The regulation has very little if anything to do with the closure of the vast majority of small businesses. Access to larger/more efficient companies that provide better service to cost has killed the demand for the services that small businesses provide.
> All of that is paid for by the top 25% of income earners.
How exactly is that worked out? Income taxes ($1.6t) and payroll taxes ($1.2t) are a similar level, and rich people tend not to pay payroll taxes as they aren't on a payroll.
Payroll taxes cover social security payments ($1t), so that leaves income taxes paying for things like Defence ($1.2t for military and veteran affairs), which wealthy people disproportionately benefit from.
Medicare and medicaid are the unusual ones, for the cost of those two alone ($1t, or $3000 per head) you could afford universal healthcare in other western countries.
Removing the higher-taxed brackets, and the slow creep of inflation, which has pushed lower-earners into higher brackets, and made more people subject to AMT, has made income tax less progressive over time. The introduction and removal of tax-advantaged loopholes, that are only exploitable above a certain level of income, has made the progressiveness of the tax more volatile and harder to assess.
Focusing on how much the wealthy pay, as a proportion of all taxes paid, is rolling up the progressiveness of the tax code with the income inequalities that already exist. Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Why do you tax the rich? They're the ones who can afford to pay.
I really don't see why income tax can't be defined as a polynomial equation in a single variable (for gross income) and an additional constant, equal to median income for the previous year. With a floor function to obviate negative taxes.
The tax can be zero up to the median income, ramp up quickly to an inflection point at about 30% for the dollar at 3x median income, then increase at a decreasing rate to asymptotically approach 100% for infinite income. For the purposes of argument, I'll say that the dollar at 100000x median income would be taxed at 90%.
As long as it's a continuous and increasing function--after the first "median income" amount of one's income--every additional dollar of gross income is still a positive amount of additional net income. Only the winners pay. It's always worth something to increase your gross income. It could also be a viable strategy to reduce your own taxes by spending a lesser amount on increasing median income--i.e. pay your below-median workers more money.
> The US tax code has gotten more progressive over time, not less
your math is way off because your're mixing nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio[1]
e.g. ten people in econony
9 poorest make $100/year
1 richest makes $200/year
poor tax rate: 5%
rich tax rate: 20%
rich pay 42% of taxes 40 / (40 + 45)
now, lower tax rates on the rich and at the same time his income explodes (what's actually happened since early 1980's)
1 richest person makes $1000/yr
rich man tax rate 15%
rich pay 76% of all taxes (150 / (150 + 45)), which is much higher than before (your progressive argument)
but you claim that tax rates have become more progressive, when in fact and in example above they have become more regressive.
If that were true rich people wouldn’t be paying half of the taxes.
Even when the US had high marginal tax rates for the wealthy, there were tons more loopholes so the effective tax rate was significantly less. That’s the reason people were on board with lowering the marginal rate in exchange for the elimination of lots of deductions.
If the US doesn't allow software engineers in, will they just disappear? Nope. They'll write code for foreign companies which will compete with Silicon Valley. I.e. the competition is there anyway.
> You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right?
Thank decades of union busting and neoliberalism for that one. When corporations only pay out the minimum that they can get away with instead of following the historic Ford mantra that people must be paid liveable wages, this is what results.
You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right?
That's true if you only look at wages. If you look at total compensation, it's grown quite a lot even adjusted for inflation - doubling between 1970 and 2006.[1]
> American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids.
I'm broadly sympathetic to your viewpoint, but this isn't accurate. Children are fundamentally not expensive. The problem is that couples believe they can't afford to have kids, not that they actually can't afford them.
You will notice the children who grow up to be the most productive tend to get the most support from their parents. I guess it depends on how much you want your kids to succeed vs how much you want to keep for yourself.
Extra mouth to feed, extra room (bigger house), constantly changing wardrobe, yearly expenses on school materials and books, extra phone and computer, childcare, etc...
Mine (through work) quadrupled when I got the wife even though we're childfree. The work benefit I was offered provided for either me alone or for my family with unlimited dependents.
Children are more expensive now because of societal pressure to raise kids to a higher standard because people have less of them.
Imagine all the hand wringing that would ensue if at lunch with my colleagues (which is a rough approximation of the HN demographic) I mentioned that I got a 5yo hand-me-down car seat instead of buying the latest and greatest. Generalize that pressure to pretty much every child raising related expense.
Good intentions or not that's exactly the kind of hand wringing I mean.
I know plastics become more brittle with age but a modern car seat that's expired is going to be tons safer than a car seat from 2000 (mostly because engineers now have better access to good simulation tools at lower cost). So what if little Jimmy isn't maximally safe. He's still a heck of a lot safer (from an unlikely edge case no less) than he would have been if he were born 15yr ago.
"I know plastics become more brittle with age but a modern car seat that's expired is going to be tons safer than a car seat from 2000"
How do you know this? Maybe there's technology (crumple areas) that only works when the plastic is relatively new or cushion areas that only are most effective before they degrade, thus making them less safe than good old fashion plastic. We see this with modern cars in their bumper technology - they take the first impact better, but they aren't as rugged as older models. Do you actually know the trade-off, or are you just assuming?
There's a little bit of assumption about material design in there but it's obvious from the seat designs that they've come a long way. They're actually designed to fit the form of the body now (which is a big deal for safety). Old seats were little more than booster seats with integrated seat belts. It's like the difference between a 60s bucket seat and a modern racing bucket seat.
> American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids.
This statement isn't supported by the Pew Research article you linked to. If real average earnings are constant then a household which now has two breadwinners will double its income and be better off.
Also keep in mind longitudinal effects: native-born Americans have seen their wages rise but this is offset by immigrants who generally have lower-than-average wages - but still higher than in the country they emigrated from. Both groups are better off even though average wages haven't changed.
Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids
This strikes me as ridiculous as a broad-brush, general statement. It's not that Americans can't afford to have kids, it's that they incentivize different things than they did in the past. I don't deny that real wages haven't risen because of the supply of workers and dual-income families, but c'mon. There's been an increase in professional married people that want it all, and these DINKs refuse to sacrifice anything materially to have children. They have lots of adult toys and other conveniences, but somehow can't find the money to raise a child.
Could you provide a cost breakdown of the first 10 years of raising a child in, say, SV or NY? I can't follow your thinking here at all. Childcare, from what I hear is immensely expensive, and after a certain age, you need a bigger home. Conversely, staying without kids means you don't spend on any of those things. What have I missed?
I'm sorry but you don't seem to know what kids kost.
Rent, childcare, clothing, food plus only one income are in no relation to some electronic toys or a fancy holiday.
> They have lots of adult toys and other conveniences, but somehow can't find the money to raise a child.
I'm German and affected by this. It begins with being unable to rent an apartment with enough space for a kid and ends with "how to afford a car in this city".
<tone-deaf> But Europe has good public transit everywhere. Surely you can take rail + bus + walk to get anywhere you want to go even with kids.</tone deaf>
Dragging toddler around on public transit is a massive PITA. One is doable but two is hell.
> these DINKs refuse to sacrifice anything materially
> to have children. They have lots of adult toys and
> other conveniences, but somehow can't find the
> money to raise a child.
Well, some DINK's don't want children. Not everyone has to reproduce. There's many different factors involved here than material comfort.
Also, in many American cities, public school is totally out of the question (if you actually care about having well-educated children). Families either have to send their kids to elite private schools at ~20K/per year OR they have to move to somewhere on the periphery of the city where schools are good but you have other trade-offs in time or money. These aren't selfish materialistic concerns they're real obstacles that cause people to defer having children.
Elite private schools in SF and NY are closer to 40k/yr. Catholic schools tend to be much less, with elite high schools in the 20-25k range, though it’s not an exact substitution. Catholic schools teach Catholicism, and while students are not obliged to be catholic, they must attend religious services. The catholic 20k tuition schools also tend to be larger than independent elite privates, though many of them are reasonably elite as measured by sat scores and colleges attended.
This all supports your point, other than to say it’s even more expensive than you’ve indicated.
> refuse to sacrifice anything materially to have children
There are also those that have the best motives for not having children - namely that the country is getting worse, and why inflict a negative future on them? Environmental destruction, overcrowding, pollution, insane property prices, worsening opportunities to get on in life, rampant crime and drugs with disinterested policing and lax punishment apart from against those that are legitimately defending their rights (who are punished harshly), general undermining of traditional values, etc..
Oh but of course I'm just a bigoted dinosaur for holding these thoughts.
Thank you for your comment , joshe, and for being a small light in the darkness. There's so much hatred in here. I'm on an H-1B, and I've never worked for a low-paying or shitty company, and I've been very well-paid. At my last company, I was the highest paid person in my team. And, I've on one occasion made over $200,000 in a single year. I've never met one of underpaid immigrant engineers. Every immigrant I've known in NYC makes over $140,000. Of course, the facts don't matter--as we live in a "post-truth" age.
Reading the comments here, makes one feel hated, and like a Jew in Nazi Germany. Of course, the immigrant-haters in here have zero respect or regard for the truth. Like the antisemitic canard[1], they try to draw this picture of people like me being "slaves" and being underpaid. A picture that is totally alien to me. It's useless to engage with the people here--the only thing they understand is hatred for immigrants. Sometimes, I wish their ancestors would have never been allowed to immigrate (they certainly would not have succeeded in moving here, under the law today).
Not acknowledging this country has among the worst and least-welcoming laws for skilled workers in the whole world: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8823349/immigration-system-bro... The dedicated haters on this thread want to eliminate the tiny trickle of skilled immigrants that this 330+ million country lets in. To be precise, that's about 0.02% of the population[2]. It's a joke (the quota).
I've lived here since mid-2007, have all my friends and relationships and community here, but the majority of people on this HN thread would love to see my life destroyed. They would love to see my forced out of the country by ICE at gunpoint. They're filled with nothing but vile hatred and darkness. A hatred whose consequence is real violence.
And to be clear, Americans are generally warm, welcoming, and friendly people, but the ones in this thread are among the worst specimens. They remind me of the bunch of angry men with Tiki torches at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The people here are screaming to destroy my life. Who knew many in Silicon Valley and Hacker News would hold the most repugnant alt-right views when it came to immigrants and of protecting their basic human dignity? It's a disgrace.
[2] About 65k principal EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 green cards are granted annually. (Principal here means non-derivative, ie. not spouses or children.) That's about 5% of the 1.2 million total green cards issued. The remaining 95% of greencards are granted on the basis of a family relationship or on a humanitarian claim.
Part of the problem is that the media loves writing outrage stories. Training your own replacements is a perfect story for that. A journalist will write that story. Every. Single. Time.
Take the story "this 40 person team with 3 H1-B employees, is now a 400 person team". Each of those H1-B employees created 10 jobs + some extra jobs at other companies. This (roughly) has happened to me twice, there will never be a news article about that.
The original bit was just a plea to not use the intuition we get from news stories, and look to economists instead.
This kind of thread attracts people who are very easily influenced by outrageous media stories like that. They are very confused. It seems so obvious to them that we could just stop immigration and stop bad things from happening. They are super angry that no one is doing anything to solve this obvious problem. What they don't understand is that really no one is fixing it because when you look closely it's not a problem at all.
HN can be a place were people think about real hard problems and talk about how to solve them, I hope it can be more like that. (This is a fake problem.) The world needs people who face up to reality and try to improve it.
Your coworkers, company, customers, friends, and family are all greatly improved by your work and presence. Long term I hope that wins out.
Sure, except the bill rate for my services hasn't changed since like 1998. It sucks, dude.
Reading through the comments, people already said it all, but I came back to vent. After 20 years in this shitty business I can vent if I want to.
I currently work in the US Midwest with a lot of foreign colleagues. They're pretty good people, OVERALL, but the ones that aren't are super-shitty, but that's true of the pastey-white native born Americans, too. But when the going gets tough, and when you need to be creative, the folks from, let's call it "that other place" just don't have any solutions.
Many of the people I work with wait for me to build a solution, then they literally copy and paste it into their project whether or not the design suitably fits their problem. A lot of projects here are a mess because of this "square peg in round hole" behavior. Worse, many of those guys get promoted above their mental capacity and now they're calling the shots and making horrific decisions because they networked with each other and shut out the truly competent people. This is the tippy top of the Fortune 500 here I'm talking about, btw. This is not some Mom & Pop podunk shop and the stakes are high. And so if this constitutes "best and brightest" we're in deep doodoo.
Your copy & paste comment really resonated with my experiences. Our services are a cobbled together mess of pasted solutions from other services, and members of the team often say something is impossible because they can't find an example of the exact same problem being solved somewhere else in the code base.
Amazingly, they are just as aggressive as the competent people when it comes to pursuing promotions and responsibility, despite not being able to write a function in the main language of the company after working in it for multiple years.
I don't know how things got this absurd, but here we are.
Stewart is still pretty Canadian... His primary residence is in Vancouver last I checked. I mean, the whole city would probably start crying if he permanently left.
H1-B mandates a lower than competitive wage that the recipient's get stuck in, this isn't the same situation as women / minorities gaining access to the workplace unless their access came at a mandatory much lower salary.
Do you just enjoy spewing lies incessantly? The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers. Also, the LCA often lists a lower salary than what people earn. At my last company, my base salary was close to 140k, but the H-1B LCA on file listed 95k or something. With bonuses, I've made over 200k in a single year in the past. My tax return and the H-1B LCA paint two very different pictures. Based on the public LCA records, one would think I was paid 95k. And, of course, the dedicated haters and liars here on HN will probably say the company violated immigration and labor law, and paid less than what the LCA required. They'd probably suggest I was paid 30k. Of course, the truth doesn't matter to these haters. They're filled with a disgusting hatred of immigrants, along with a repugnant and shameless love of dishonesty.
> The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers.
This is a typical bureaucrat solution. An an immigrant you dont have the power to leverage salary, so there is no chance you will get the same results as an american, adjusted for everything else. First of all, there is a legal cost of the visa, which is and will always be paid by the employee. Second, you can adjust salary in 20 ways the bureaucrat cant see: PTO, stock grants, chances of advances, bonuses, etc. And finally, if you as an employee cant go into your bosses office saying a competing company wants to pay you 20%, because you cant do that with an H1B, your long term income is also affected.
Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.
They should also work on a visa system for seasonal (low-skill) workers and enforce e-verify so that people don't skirt the system willy-nilly.
We need foreign low skilled workers and they want to work, but we need to regulate that workforce so they don't undercut our native low-skills workforce by being unregulated and overwhelming the workforce with cheap unregulated labor.
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. Why is there a shortage of low skilled workers in a country of 400m? Because you have illegal workers who’ve driven the price of that work below what the market legally supports. If the law was effectively enforced those low skilled jobs would pay enough for Americans
Vegetable and dairy farmers would go out of business, if prices can't be raised due to competition from imports. You'd need tariffs as well, and people would need to put up with significant price increases at the grocery store.
There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benefit that makes it all worth it: being able to live in the US. Without that incentive, it's going to be really tough.
Lots of countries contend with this: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Britain, etc. People adapt. Perhaps we grow to appreciate our food and throw out less waste.
Even at wages closing in on 3x minimum wage, we cannot get enough farm labor[1] - obviously low skilled American labor still doesn't want the job. What's the solution?
The ability to grow food in the country has pretty high strategic value. If you let your farmers go out of business your country loses domain knowledge in farming.
Strawberry pints from farms which do not utilize unregulated workers come in typically at about $6 to $7 pint. They’re typically smaller scale, so large scale can have them at retail for around $5. If that helps all of us, the farmer the temporary worker and consumers, I don’t see a problem with it. Strawberries and such aren’t staples like wheat and rice (highly mechanized and automated).
How do you know that they're not using undocumented people? That also says nothing of the price increase as the pool of documented farm labor dries up.
As an Australian, this is funny. Your Dept of Agriculture is one of the most socialist "redistributors of wealth" in the world.
Annual subsidies to US farmers is of the order of $25B+ per year. This includes non-tariff barriers such as price supports for sugar, import barriers and quotas such as on lamb and beef, export supports, crop insurance and other benefits.
The DoA has been doing this for 75+ years and the majority of farms are now corporate-owned. The majority of these taxpayer subsidies are directed straight into the hands of corporate shareholders.
Nah, there are plenty of countries that operate fine without cheap imported labor. They just need to...you know...pay fair wages. Which apparently has everyone up in arms I guess?
It's really just about the bottom line. Exploiting people is cheap. Paying or treating people properly is expensive. That's it. Tim Cook or your California farmer don't give a flying fuck about these people.
It's just about the $$$. Immigrants work hard for cheap.
> Nah, there are plenty of countries that operate fine without cheap imported labor.
This is not true. Farming has always relied on exploited labor in some form. Once easily exploited labor disappears with no machinery to replace them, so too does an agricultural industry. Lots of developed European nations are facing this exact problem.
Paying people proper wages will either cause food to get massively more expensive, or will migrate production to crops that are more readily harvested by machines. So grains will still be dirt cheap, but meat and vegetables will be very expensive.
If you want to provide an industry life support, the normal thing to do is to just subsidize it. Importing people desperate enough to work for low wages in poor conditions seems both odd and explotative.
I personally lack a romantic attachment to these industries, but in general people seem fairly happy to support something like the dairy industry.
Beyond that, to imagine that maintaining a medium sized farm or ranch isn't a skilled position is pure ignorance. There is a reason why a bunch of schools in the midwest were called agricultural schools.
There are young people who want to be farmers. Not many of them want to be just a farmhand - they want to own a business. But they'll still need workers.
I'm a white American who grew up harvesting tobacco on the side. It's not a gig Americans are willing to do. It sucks, it's dangerous, it doesn't pay all that well, and it's seasonal. For reference, I quit cutting tobacco in favor of cleaning out sand filters for sewage treatment plants. Which is to say, shoveling literal shit out of a hole in the ground is preferable to being a farmhand.
The American people you see doing this stuff are by-and-large the family of the land owner or teenagers whose backs are still functional (and have school duties during the off-season).
If you have a family, then you're going to need either a primary job, or an RV to move around. The only people making money farming are the land owners, and even then...
We are in agreement. We need some low skills workers, we don’t need all the unregulated low skills workers we have. Instead of 10-15mill, whatever the estimate is, we could probably use 4mill regulated foreign low skills workers to balance economic labor needs with giving and affording our own low skills workers an opportunity to make a living wage. We know it’s possible. We had it in the 70s, 80s, before our low skills workers were undercut in price.
What data supports this frequently touted conservative notion? There could be other factors. Like for e.g. tomatoes can only be sold at $2/lb before they run into competition from imported tomatoes. So the max anyone can afford to pay is really $X/hr. If they could only find someone at $2*X/hour, they would either not farm tomatoes or invest in machinery.
Punish employers with heavy fines for e-verify violations. If no one hires you, no reason to stick around. This is what Japan does, Korea, Taiwan, etc. The US is way lenient on illegal entry and accommodating to irregular workers. In many countries the only way you get around that is if you work with the local mobsters --so only highly risk taking indivs take that opportunity.
IIRC employers avoid this liability by executing the fraud themselves. There's no e-verify violation because they use legitimate SSNs from a living person, fraudulently. The workers aren't the problem, the employers are.
Legislators and govt executives look the other way in order to preserve competitive agriculture.
Some restauranteurs and other cash businesses try and pull fast ones on the IRS. So the IRS conducts audits and has agents case suspect establishments. No reason DHS/ICE, whatever cannot do the same and jail fraudsters. If they, the Feds, can jail Martha Stewart on unrelated technicalities, they can jail these fraudsters. Start at the top, target big ones and work your way down to the small ones (they'll get the news and come correct).
Could be, but they didn’t get her on anything related stock trading and instead got her for “lying”. My point is, even if they are unable to catch them red handed (you’d have to be inept), ghetto can always find alternative methods to find someone guilty.
It's my understanding that farmers avoid this by subcontracting. They don't hire migrant workers themselves. When you're desperate to get the harvest in, you don't vet your subcontractors too closely if they say they can do the job.
> "E-Verify is a web-based system that allows enrolled employers to confirm the eligibility of their employees to work in the United States. E-Verify employers verify the identity and employment eligibility of newly hired employees by electronically matching information provided by employees on the Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, against records available to the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."
> We need foreign low skilled workers and they want to work, but we need to regulate that workforce so they don't undercut our native low-skills workforce by being unregulated and overwhelming the workforce with cheap unregulated labor.
That ship sailed some time ago to China or anywhere there is a sweatshop.
Farm work, restaurant work, construction work, warehouse work cannot be "shipped off to China", yet we have our own population which has been undercut by unregulated cheap labor. We do need a number of foreign workers, but we need to regulate it so as to not flood our labor market and undercut our workers and have it where two grown adults working full time jobs can't afford to live a lower middle class lifestyle (as was possible couple of decades ago).
In 2012, there were 3.2 million farmers,[19] ranchers and other agricultural managers and an estimated 757,900 agricultural workers were legally employed in the US. Animal breeders accounted for 11,500 of those workers with the rest categorized as miscellaneous agricultural workers. The median pay was $9.12 per hour or $18,970 per year.[20]
From 1999–2009, roughly 50% of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. were noncitizens working without legal authorization.[23] Large farms rely on new immigrants (such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, and Mexican) that do not have many other options to work for extremely low wages. The legal status of the worker has been shown to impact the wage received for a job. An agricultural worker with no documentation earns an average of 15% less than one with amnesty or green card.
Farm work could be shipped off by importing food instead of growing it in the U.S. (Farmers going out of business if the cost of labor goes up too much.)
Dairy is pretty automated, farming is getting more and more automated. But, we will be helping many low skills Americans who now get undersold in the labor market. Other advanced economies manage the cost of labor in agribiz, we can too.
Look at it from the other direction: large companies have fought giving H1-B workers better protections. They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t profiting from workers with less negotiating ability.
That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.
There's some data out there but it's also hard to compare reliably since you need to account for differences in skill level when comparing salaries.
My point was that the large companies which have the best data, and whole teams of people doing the math on this issue, have consistently fought to preserve the old ways of doing it and since they're for-profit corporations it seems unlikely that they're doing this for any reason other than the econ 101 explanation that they profit from workers who can't negotiate as well.
I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim.
That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unlikely anybody can be more specific than "increased labor supply decreases wages".
And so has our pay. But, like I said, there are million other variables besides the size of the labor pool that affect salaries. In general, though, more candidates available for a position means a lower salary.
And there are more serious problems with H1B than just lowering salaries. It's very difficult for H1B workers to switch jobs once they're here, and employers (especially contracting shops) use that as leverage against them.
And don't even get me started on H2B workers, who often make minimum wage, have to live in employee housing, and have even less recourse than H1B workers because they make far less money.
We need better immigration policies, and I don't think tying immigration status to job status is the best way forward.
There's huge age discrimination at work in the tech industry, and older, very qualified workers struggle to find good jobs because tech employers prefer young and naive serfs.
You understand that the predictions for industry growth on those pages are virtually the same as the number of CS bachelor's degree graduates every year.
We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
> You understand that the predictions for industry growth on those pages are virtually the same as the number of CS bachelor's degree graduates every year.
they're not...
> We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
You're wrong, look at the data. There are 75,000+ graduates of bachelors and masters programs in the US each year, with many more in related majors and in bootcamps, where the BLS data predicts an industry growth for software developers (including standard, applications, and systems) of around 600,000 workers between 2016 and 2026.
You can make the argument that many of those with degrees aren't as skilled as companies would like, and in turn they seek employees from abroad, but it's blatently false that the US isn't graduating enough engineers to meet demand.
That's a lie that's being propagated by tech companies. The US educates more than enough engineers to keep up with demand. The argument about "structural imbalance" in the job market has been debunked over and over again. I assume that it's not lack of google coverage stopping from researching the issue so linking you a few papers won't change your mind one bit, so I won't bother wasting time doing that.
That paper discussed in Science Magazine is very interesting. Here's part of the abstract from 'The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from Visa Lotteries' (2016) - https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd...
"We compare winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on U.S. firms, and to approved U.S. patents. Winning additional H-1B visas causes at most a moderate increase in firms’ overall employment, and these H-1Bs therefore substantially crowd out firms’ employment of other workers. Additional H-1Bs generally have insignificant and at most modest effects on firms’ patenting and use of the research and experimentation tax credit. There is some evidence that additional H-1Bs lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits."
However anecdotal this claim may be, it seems fairly intuitive given the basic economic model of supply and demand. Can you explain how greatly increasing the supply of developers by importing them from overseas will not affect the demand, and therefore negatively affect the cost of labour?
Software engineers have a habit of assuming problems are more intuitive than they actually are.
Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies. BLS estimates that the number of employed software engineers will go up 24% next year, that’s insane.
Also, I’m not seeing this supposed depression in salaries. The median salary for a software engineer is 103k a year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/.... That number has been growing expontially in the last decade and a half.
So there’s data that shows that engineers are getting hired more and paid more than ever before. I can’t find any to prove that H1Bs are dragging down salaries.
>> Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies.
By "not enough engineers" I'm assuming you mean not enough engineers willing to work for so little they are forced to bunk with 3 roommates?
I know plenty of engineers. Most dont want to work as SWEs because the median salary barely affords a studio apartment, especially after California taxes.
Also, what about the 40+yr olds who are oddly purged from the workforce regularly. If there were a shortage, elderly workers would be retained, not purged in favor of cheaper, younger workers.
Tons of engineers go into consulting, real estate, finance, etc because engineers simply dont make enough, especially given the SF/SV center-of-gravity of jobs. There isnt some magical shortage of workers. There is a shortage of workers willing to work for near subsistence wages [in SF/SV prices]
>Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies.
Why is this? This sounds like a huge U.S. talent development problem. How does this visa change help to fix this issue?
>I can’t find any to prove that H1Bs are dragging down salaries.
The very fact that the number of employed software engineers is expected to go up by 24% in a single year is the evidence you're looking for that there is a massive supply distortion in the labor market.
> Why is this? This sounds like a huge U.S. talent development problem. How does this visa change help to fix this issue?
It doesn’t, I’m against it.
> The very fact that the number of employed software engineers is expected to go up by 24% in a single year is the evidence you're looking for that there is a massive supply distortion in the labor market.
Yes... because the demand for software engineers is increasing every year and can’t keep up with supply.
I feel like we can’t be reading the same thing. You’re saying that a market where there is more demand than supply is one where prices are lower? Again, I’m going to need a citation for that.
where did I say that prices are lower? I’m expressioning skepticism that a whopping 24% increase in hiring is due only to demand increases, which you heavily implied is the case. How much more would wages rise here if we weren’t artificially increasing the supply like this? We could certainly find out, if we wanted. But that would require some policy changes that are not popular to employers who are, incidentally, not interested in letting wages rise.
It makes for a good story but it's actually bullshit. There's no labor shortage in the sciences. There's just a shortage of companies willing to pay living wages.
>> Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand.
This is wrong on so many levels.
1. "Qualified" supply means experience. That means you arent hiring 22yos working at subsistence salaries shacking up with three buddies in a double-bunk apartment. It means you have to pay a "qualified person salary." I'm a qualified person, I have 18yrs experience at top firms. But guess what...175k/yr in SF/SV doesnt cut it, it gets you a 1br apt. You cant raise 2 kids in a 1br apartment. Where would the kids sleep? in the bathroom? on the dining table? Also, option compensation doesnt count, as I cant pay rent with options.
2. If you want "qualified talent" perhaps SF/SV would not age discriminate. But they do. They want young people willing to earn so little they are forced into having 3 roommates.
3. There are tons of qualified workers. Most of us dont want to move to SF/SV because the prevailing wage is too low. Pay the right wage (i.e., perhaps something that one can raise a family on) and your "shortage will magically disappear.
>> Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand.
I think what this typically means is: we're looking for talented developers willing to earn so littler they are forced to bunk with multiple roommates and/or live in roach infested apartments, something only desperate overseas workers are willing to do.
Talking about demand exceeding supply is somewhat nonsensical without reference to a price.
What you're saying is "at the price my company is willing to pay, we're unable to find qualified candidates." That means you can either pay more to attract qualified candidates, or do without.
Alternatively, we can raise the supply curve, which has the affect of lowering wages, and might allow your company to attract talent without paying more.
I don't know which market you are hiring in, but for jobs which pay well into 300K+ (many multiples of median household income across the country), where engineers are pampered with free meals and massages, there are shortages in qualified supply.
My company pays at least market rate and can afford to go higher if the candidate negotiates, so I don't think that's the issue. At least, we never had a candidate refuse a position due to money concerns. The skills we look for are not that specialized either, it's not like I'm looking for ML PhD's with a background in medicine.
Anecdotally, it just feels like almost everyone who is already good, is already happily employed. So either we need to head-hunt candidates, hope to coincidentally catch them while they're between jobs, or hire very junior candidates and train them up.
Of course, the issue might also be just that we need better recruiters to populate the candidate pool :)
That's nonsense. As an industry we have an enormous age and gender bias. I know plenty of older folks that are great software engineers and can't find work because nobody will give them a chance to interview.
This is only true for experienced professionals, and is something that will change in the next ten years given current metrics. Hiring new graduates whose qualification is that they have a computer science degree isn't difficult given that 60,000 graduate with a BS and 15,000 graduate with an MS every year.
From an economics perspective, unless the hiring of more software engineers results in an increased demand for software engineers (i.e. there being a significant latent demand), H1B absolutely then lowers the earnings potential of engineers. Especially those earning more towards the middle and bottom of the market.
I'd also add that BLS data suggests that this induced demand isn't true. As the projected employment growth for engineers between 2016 and 2026 is 600,000 where there are around 60,000 people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US and even more getting masters or doing bootcamps.
There aren't 60k people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US from any source I can find: https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/.
Any data they aren’t? We have at least one, highly publicized case at Disney that suggests that’s exactly what happens. Otherwise, why fire experienced workers and force them to train people who didn’t know the job? That makes no sense unless cost was the motivator. It certainly wasn’t about higher skill levels.
Norm Matloff at UC Davis has blogged about this for a decade. A sampling of one paper has several references about the bias toward much younger and cheaper H1-B candidates in academia and professional workforce. He also argues diversity is better.
Thanks for the link. It looks like he wrote for U of M Journal of Law Reform on this topic: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf. Until I read through it and cross check his sources I can't judge the validity of course, but after reading over the first two pages his arguments seem compelling.
There’s a huge difference between stating my personal opinion and making factual claims. My opinion is that more diversity is good and makes the world better.
Personal opinion- I think homogeneous societies cooperate much better and I personally believe that so-called forced diversity of racial backgrounds is an effort to lower the camaraderie in a team and keep the loyalty to the firm and not the team members and thus bringing down wages by competition.
I am all for diversity of ideas and background. Something which would make a companies more productive at the same wage.
I also believe that no race is superior to another- everybody has different goals. And so long as one doens't try and interfere in another's society, the world would be a very smooth place.
Homogeneity is good only if you are moving towards the optimal goal. Diversity is good to bring in new ideas which helps adjust the goal and keep the society robust against failure. Like autocracy vs democracy. If you have a benevolent godly dictator, that's perfect. But we accept that no such ideal exists, so democracy is the compromise. Diversity in the workplace exerts the same goal. It lowers efficiency, but efficiency is pointless, even counter-productive if it is towards the wrong goal.
I don't see what you added to my comment. I already said diversity of ideas and background is good- diversity purely based on color to make a star trek movie is not.
Racial diversity is a proxy to background/idea diversity since different races come from different backgrounds and have different ideas of reality. Organizations are pushing all kinds of diversity, not just one based on color. Race just happens to be easy to measure. That doesn't make it wrong, it is somewhat in the right direction though it might not be optimal.
This is the most racist thing I have read today. Different races come from different backgrounds and have different ideas of reality? I think you meant different cultures which is a VERY different thing from race.
Either way, why use a proxy and not the real thing: idea diversity. Then what you propose is laziness at best.
Also, what do you mean by right direction? Diversity of ideas means diversity of goals right?
Aren't software engineers in Silicon Valley already paid way too much money? To be honest you can hire 3 or 4 equally good engineers with that kind of money in any other part of the world.
Even if we assume your assessment of the problem ("H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley.") is correct, how is this step taking us towards a solution?
At least the people being given preference for immigration are more likely to be truly exceptional instead of the cadre of shitty engineers coming in this country with mostly counterfeit resumes. I would call that progress, not necessarily a solution yet. Disclaimer: don't @ me, I'm an immigrant too, but since I live here I would like to be able to work when I'm 50 and not being replaced by someone desperate brought in this country in state of semi-servitude.
But it's pretty much the only way to get a work visa in the US. What are the alternatives?
L-1? Not much good for US companies that want to hire at the US HQ locations.
O-1? Even the average master's degree holder doesn't qualify for this. Also, not eligible for a green card.
TN? Only really applicable to Canadians, not eligible for a green card.
Waiting for a green card outside the country? De facto discriminatory against Chinese & Indian applicants, the two biggest pools of high tech workers because the green card queue times are insanely long.
Americans don't seem to realize that it's really, really hard to get into the country legally to work and the H1-B is one of the few avenues to get a green card for a skilled worker.
That could be true for silicon valley. I don't know because I don't live there and refuse to move there due to the absurd cost of living and strange subculture.
It is not true, though, in most of the rest of the US. Visa holders make close to competitive wages at higher expenses to employers due to the costs of visa sponsorship. I personally know a senior principle engineer at one of the large .coms who has been living and working in the US for almost 15 years and has not bothered to achieve citizenship, because he is doing very well even working under a visa.
Are you sure ? Increasing the masters quota for H1B will worsen things. Here is why. A majority of Masters degree holders in the US are those students who couldn't crack the basic campus recruitment in India for software companies during their Bachelors.
So they take a stab at it once more by investing in a masters degree in US which increases their H1B lottery chances. I am not generalizing all the masters degree holders but a major chunk of them.
> A majority of Masters degree holders in the US are those students who couldn't crack the basic campus recruitment in India for software companies during their Bachelors.
The majority? How did you get that data? Sounds like proper BS to me. Campus recruitment in India is a joke. There's nothing to "crack" there. How do you explain the same majority completing their graduate studies in the US (much harder than in India) and getting jobs in the US (also much harder than in India)?
If there was no market for Master degree H1Bs who fake their experiences on their resume, how do you explain all those thriving body shops in the US ? Just how many of them are in New Jersey alone.
See the LCA filings data from DOL.
> If there was no market for Master degree H1Bs who fake their experiences on their resume
I did not say that and this was not your original assertion.
> How do you explain all those thriving body shops in the US ? Just how many of them are in New Jersey alone. See the LCA filings data from DOL.
This still does not explain your claims of:
1. Those people not being able to "crack" campus recruitment of Indian companies.
2. Those people actually being the majority who come to get a Master's degree. I saw your doc and filtered exactly like you said. I didn't see a "majority" number. Perhaps you are using that term very casually?
as an immigrant who got an MS degree in US and worked on H1b visa, what you say is quite a simplification of what it takes to move to a different country, get a master's degree and survive long enough to get a H1b visa.
A tiny chunk of them may do this, by going to so shady US universities. But that's a very small %age
What a weird world we live in though, where PhDs and Masters with a steady job still have to wait 7-10+ years for citizenship, while people can just flip over the fence in the southern border and get citizenship via asylum or birthing kids
Wow, I’m not sure what world you live in but it’s certainly not over here with the rest of us. Anyone can claim asylum even you, so long as you can demonstrate credible fear and hardship in your home country in an immigration court (a process endorsed by the United Nations) and has nothing to do with flipping over a fence. Then you get a green card and wait 5 years for citizenship.
Birthing children is no easy path to citizenship, you have to be here, birth your child for the low average price of $32,000 then your child gets citizenship — not you - and has to wait until they’re an adult so they can sponsor you for a green card which is when your 5 year clock starts, so sure, squeeze out a baby who moves to America and a mere 27 years later, problem solved. The whole interim period paying US taxes - and then for the rest of their natural lives - no matter where on earth they live. EASY.
I’m not pro jus soli for what it’s worth, but your arguments are just flat out wrong.
The PhD on my team got through in less than 7. The immigrants crossing the southern border are still going through the same process, don't know why someone wanting a better life should cause high-skilled workers much worry.
Due to the per-country-quota limits, people immigrating from populous countries are stuck in multi-decade green card backlogs. Immigrants crossing the southern border from smaller countries might be going through the same process, but the per-country-quotas ensure that most of them will get their green cards much sooner than legal immigrants from populous countries.
Not the person giving birth but the progeny. Most countries ~164 out of 194) are jus sanguinis (you inherit nationality of parent(s)) we are one of the exceptions with jus soli. We even have “birth tourism” taking advantage of our liberal policy.
Not false. How is ~164 out of 194 countries jus sanguinis not most? There are approx 30 of 194 that are jus soli. How is that “false”.
And except for Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chili and Uruguay, the rest aren’t what one would think of as “sought after”, otherwise you’d have other people trying to take advantage of their citizenship policies.
I’m not pro jus soli but to characterize birth tourism as a big problem is crazy. A conservative think tank estimated it at 40,000 births per year out of 4.3 million (0.9%) — the average delivery costs $32,000 for an economic benefit of $1.28B per year. Then those poor kids are going to have to pay US income taxes for the rest of their natural lives no matter where they live. We can expect the first 18 years to be abroad since their parents don’t get citizenship and the US has effectively zero social safety net anyways. What’s the big deal?
1 million per year, not millions, in a country of 325 million (0.3%), for comparison Canada lets in 0.33 million per year in a country of 36 million (almost 1%).
An entire continent, of the youngest countries consisting of liberal democracies being jus soli isn't something you can just wave away and pretend is irrelevant or has some particularly unusual behavior.
Said countries have even laxes immigration policies, similar proportions of immigrant populations, the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that you're spouting, and yet it's just not really the problem that it's made out to be at all.
Wanting control over who comes in and who goes out is not “anti-immigrant rhetoric”, If those countries had sudden surges, you’d see them change, just look at the Venezuela/Colombia border to see how a surge will change opinion anc behavior.
Chile is also cracking down on illegal entries now that they’re more prevalent. No country will have unrestricted immigration, otherwise why not form a union with neighbors?
It’s not false it’s just irrelevant. People are people no matter where they’re from, the US has some of the toughest immigration laws anywhere, immigrants boost the economy and the US is squandering it’s opportunity by letting countries like Canada take in the worlds best and brightest.
I sure have, and Japan believe it or not has no caps or quotas on immigration and just introduced a bunch of measures to make it easier to immigrate. Limiting immigrants is a bad thing and the US could stand to benefit hugely, economically and socially, by laxening the rules.
What does a quota matter when you have other real effective restrictions.
Also, I’m for immigration where we have proven needs. I don’t agree with flooding the market and depressing wages for average workers. PhDs, sure, rare skills, sure.
Or, let’s put it this way, would you be in favor we took Japan’s immigration system part and parcel and implemented it as they have?
Back up. You cite Japan as a strict immigration program (they have no caps, quotas and are actively recruiting foreigners and changing laws to make immigration more attractive), China (a totalitarian ethnostate actively placing a portion of the population in labor camps), South Africa (struggling with the fallout of apartheid) and Korea (I don’t know enough to comment) as your prime examples of tough immigration policy being ... what exactly? I don’t want Japan’s system for America, I want Canada’s - largely merit based, quick, efficient and open to anyone skilled, while still open to refugees and people in need. That’s how economies grow.
All of the these countries have universal healthcare and stronger better labor laws.
I have spent a lot of time in Canada. They have generous social programs and Unions there are doing very well.
The United States puts American workers at a unique disadvantage to immigrants because there isn't much of a social safety net. It ends up a race to the bottom for cheaper disposable labor.
To be fair, it is not tough at all for a "high-skilled" foreigner to work at China by getting a Z-visa - I guess most employees at Bay Area fall into this category.
Indeed - they're pretty lax as countries go and there's other ways as well. Only downside is it's virtually impossible for a foreign citizen to get permanent residency for China, so you'll be renewing that visa every two years for the rest of your life.
> No country will have unrestricted immigration, otherwise why not form a union with neighbors?
See: The European Union
Inb4 "Yeah, but they have immigration control," yes, they do but upon entering and leaving the Schengen; otherwise, it's based on agreements with other countries.
It's why you can travel to Europe for up to 90 days on only a "visitor" visa (which is, really, just an entry stamp).
...but to say that countries don't trust their neighbours have strict border control between themselves (and haven't formed a union with their neighbours) pretty much negates the realities of the Eastern hemisphere.
How so? They don’t get any special benefits, to the best of my knowledge until their adult child sponsors them. The idea of an anchor baby in the us is a complete myth.
What on earth does “got strong” mean? Is it a section of the immigration and nationality act? 18 vs 27 years is just situational, it’s a range. When someone says “leveraging their ward” they mean days/months or a dedicated process not supporting evidence in the standard two to three decade process. And sure, why read evidence I found for you when you have your gut and a single anecdote.
Clearly you have lost track of the argument you have put forth. I decided to countenance your WP article and it seems you can't get illegal immigration outta your head. A sentence in your own article reinforces my statement about H1B workers leveraging their US born kids citizenship for their own citizenship.
You even missed out on the basic fact that I am talking about legal immigration and "anchor baby" is a term used pejoratively in reference to immigrants who have dubious intentions. H1B is for highly skilled workers who have proved their mettle even before immigrating.
And for your kind information, what you call "single anecdote" is called "precedence" in legal terms and carries huge weight in future course of action
“Parents can later leverage the citizenship of their progeny to gain theirs.”
No, they can’t - not in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. The only benefit they gain is the ability to have their child sponsor them once they are adults. It takes 18 years to become an adult, 1 year to petition for a green card and 5 years to get citizenship for a bare minimum of 24 years. I said 27 because I used 21 years of age to calculate. That’s not a benefit really, taking into account the fact the children have to pay taxes for that whole period while living abroad. Then the child has to want to live in the US, move there and sponsor their parents at their sole discretion.
The idea parents get massive benefits for having a child in the US is an “anchor baby” in colloquial terms, pejorative or not. It applies colloquially to legal and illegal immigrants - and so does the family reunification visa process. The idea of an anchor baby is a myth.
Your single anecdote is not outweighed by facts, it’s not precedent unless it happened in court (the whole immigration process is almost entirely discretionary and capricious, you can be denied or delayed for any reason, and you have almost zero recourse because you as a foreigner have no right to immigrate to the US except by asylum — and no amount of “my parents got in” is going to change the mind of a consular officer or immigration judge). You didn’t read the article I sent you, you bragged about it, and you’re still wrong.
>>You didn’t read the article I sent you, you bragged about it, and you’re still wrong.
I don’t respond to people who make preposterous assumptions about others. Your entire answer is laughable at best and I won’t dignify such mediocrity with my reply.
Jus soli is a civil rights issue. Jus sanguinis has led to many cases of intergenerational oppression. Giving up jus soli would be like giving up the Civil Rights Act.
Jus soli was a hack, applied to force southern states to stop being terrible to former slaves in the wake of the Dredd Scott decision. That doesn’t make it intrinsically a civil rights issue. It makes it a tool used to solve a civil rights issue. The civil rights issue itself can and (IMO) should be solved directly, and be a separate conversation from that of what constitutes nationality.
IMO jus soli doesn’t make sense as your place of birth doesn’t make you intrinsically any more or less of a given nationality. Living somewhere does, being part of a society does, etc. I’d prefer birthright permanent residency for instance - you can claim PR any time, and if you live in the country for 3/5 years you can petition for citizenship like anyone else.
You're not wrong, I think birthright PR would be fine, but I'd be worried about the political viability of statutes. Jus soli has the advantage of being embedded in the constitution so nativist leaders can't just change it. (I don't think the current president would be in favor of what you described either.)
A person with a PhD can easily get a green card, and if there was an amnesty law that passed today I'm sure it would be just as open to H1Bs as it is to any other illegal immigrant.
It's more like a bonded job, rather than "servitude". For the visa holder, they get to work in the US, theoretically at US local wages (or more), in return the sponsoring company gets an employee that is tied to that job.
If the US Dept Of Labor and/or the local state department are incorrectly measuring a) the local wage for the position and/or b) whether or not the company has made a good faith effort to find a local employee and failed (both conditions of an H1B position), then that is a failure of regulation, not of the concept of the visa itself.
Tons, I linked a bunch of articles already, you could also Google it and find it if you were actually interested in learning something instead of making the point most ideologically aligned to your own preconceptions.
I am going to assume your comment lacks objectivity since I stated no opinion or expressed no ideology. I did find research from recent data, that links to additional supporting research, which completely dispels the false assumption that visa workers are paid peanuts:
You can look up H1B salaries online. Salaries seem pretty high to me. Now you may argue it may be even higher if they were forced to hire domestic workers only, but that's just conjecture. Like saying if Android wasn't available then cheap android users would switch to Apple devices.
No way. Fewer H1 visas means that instead of having foreign workers here on visas performing work, the functions will move elsewhere.
If the government was setting up a program to fund boot camps for ERP and other big boring tech like what is done in India and elsewhere, that would be different. But we’re not doing that.
And time and time again it's been shown that outsourcing doesn't really work that well. If it was just about the money, they wouldn't bother sponsoring H1Bs at all. They would just outsource from the start, and why wouldn't they? Unless the skills aren't there to lead a team from abroad with an 8hr time zone difference.
If the function could move overseas, it would have. Why assume companies are acting irrationally and paying higher US wages when they can hire inexpensively overseas? Companies hire locally because many jobs cant be moved overseas cost effectively.
This is discrimination, and nothing to celebrate. People without degrees deserve equal treatment. People who want to work lower-paid jobs deserve equal treatment.
Disagree, a country has the right to determine what kind of immigrants it prefers. People with in demand skills should have preference over those without. Nobody has a right (except in certain rare circumstances such as asylum) to immigrate to another country. H1s specifically are employment visas. The country shouldn’t take in for employment a bunch of people it doesn’t need should it?
> country has the right to determine what kind of immigrants it prefers
Yeah, obviously. You prefer we discriminate based on college education. Why? Don’t people without masters degrees deserve equal treatment? Equal opportunity?
> The country shouldn’t take in for employment a bunch of people it doesn’t need should it?
The country isn’t a person. If a company wants to hire someone, then obviously they do “need” them.
College education is a proxy for knowledge and skills of value, however the green card system (not sure if it applies to H1s) provides an equivalence when assigning preferences. EB3 is a bachelors degree or 5 years work experience, and an EB2 preference is a masters or a bachelors + 5 years or 10 years work experience.
I don’t necessarily believe caps are valuable on immigration but given that we’re working within a framework where they’re a thing, shouldn’t we prioritize on skill instead of using a lottery - assuming there’s more interest and companies willing to hire than slots?
> shouldn’t we prioritize on skill instead of using a lottery
Why? It's not a prioritization based on employer needs or what employers want. Obviously if one has a degree they enjoy being a protected class, and if they don't have a degree they don't like being discriminated against. At least a lottery gave equal opportunity.
I also want to point out that this policy is not what companies want. They want the removal of sponsorship requirements and quotas. They generally want to be free to hire who they want.
I think that's fair, but I also think that companies don't always want what's best for the workers, just for themselves. This kind of regulation helps ensure the system isn't abused. I can see an argument for it both ways, tbh.
From Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. Let me tell you something. America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would not be a Silicon Valley without the H1B. [...] You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. [...]"
the rest of the video is pretty good too. I recommend watching it.
Yes, we are behind a lot of countries. A lot of (VERY) small and (VERY) wealthy European countries for the most part, but also a handful of small Asian countries. But wait, we are ahead of Sweden in science? Is Sweden in the middle of some kind of crisis in their inability to educate their children? What about Norway and Denmark? What about Belgium and Austria and France? They all score about the same as the US in science, are they producing a "generation of dummy"?
If you don't just include the rich countries, Europe is doing terribly compared to the US. Of course when the US average is calculated, they don't just take the scores from the rich states separately.
> The report found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are.
> The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.
A PhD in CS is a waste of time in the vast majority of cases. If you're good you can join FAANG out of undergrad and you'll earn well over a million dollars pre-tax by the time the PhD would be finished.
H-4 holders (spouses of H-1B, for the uninitiated) should be allowed to work. That they don't is inhuman and de facto hurts women, since the overwhelming majority of H-1B holders (at least in the Valley) are men. It's forcing women into a stay-at-home role as if it were the 50s. It's especially hard for H-4s because they are newcomers to the USA who may not have local friends or family. My wife went through it for a while and it's incredibly isolating.
I was an h1b holder working in Silicon Valley. My wife not being able to work was the main reason why we left after 2 years. Kind of silly to go through that whole song and dance of getting a skilled person to move across the world only to treat the spouse as if the only purpose they have is home keeping.
It is unfortunate that the feminist movement in SV, who are very vocal about the plight of women in the tech workforce, have been silent about the current administration's attempts to revoke H4-EAD.
Fine by me but H1-B should not be allowed to use the Level 1 or Level 2 wage designation the BLS defines, especially if they are masters students now that we are prioritizing masters degrees since we've decided they provide more value.
Setting wages from level 1 and 2 is exactly what happens in a majority of these visas today and doesn't make sense that we are importing "skilled" labor, fresh out of mostly mediocre schools, at entry level wages to work on back office systems at companies that make generous profits quarter after quarter.
Edit: I just looked it up, in 2018 nearly 72% of H1B applications that used the OES wage data in their LCA were either Level 1 or Level 2...
Below are the (possibly dated?) definitions for Level 1 and 2[0]:
Level I (entry) wage rates are assigned to job offers for beginning level employees who
have only a basic understanding of the occupation. These employees perform routine
tasks that require limited, if any, exercise of judgment. The tasks provide experience
and familiarization with the employer’s methods, practices, and programs. The
employees may perform higher level work for training and developmental purposes.
These employees work under close supervision and receive specific instructions on
required tasks and results expected. Their work is closely monitored and reviewed for
accuracy. Statements that the job offer is for a research fellow, a worker in training, or
an internship are indicators that a Level I wage should be considered.
Level II (qualified) wage rates are assigned to job offers for qualified employees who
have attained, either through education or experience, a good understanding of the
occupation. They perform moderately complex tasks that require limited judgment. An
indicator that the job request warrants a wage determination at Level II would be a
requirement for years of education and/or experience that are generally required as
described in the O*NET Job Zones.
As an immigrant from India, who worked in the US on H1B, I welcome this change, because this increases the chances of weeding out the bad apples and increases the chances for the good ones to get an H1b visa.
This at least encourages genuine direct employers to hire those who have already contributed to the US economy (by paying out of state tuition which funds/subsidizes the university education of US resident/citizen students)
With this rule change, it certainly is better than what it was earlier.
How could this be made even better?
Make it such that those who studied in the US are not in the lottery. Meaning, give H1b to every applicant who has graduated in the US, and lottery with the remaining visas to those who didn't study in the US. That way, the downward trend of international student admissions will reduce, and help the universities and all the students.
> give H1b to every applicant who has graduated in the US
Agreed. I studied in the US, wasn't even applying for jobs and had job offers. But, I didn't have work authorization so I couldn't take them. I went back to Canada for years before I was able to get back again. I'm not mad, but the system could definitely be improved for those who are qualified. If we're going to compete with China, Russia, India, etc we have to do everything to attract and keep the best minds here.
True. I'm not mad with US immigration issues either.
It's more like I feel sad for the country, which has such potential, and they are missing out on having high skilled immigrants live and pay taxes in the US.
Since I'm fed up with US permanent residency process (as an India born person, there's no point in applying), I'm working remote from outside US, as a contractor with a US company and paying Canada taxes (I almost bought a house in the US, before I decided to get a Canada PR. US's loss, Canada's gain).
As an H1B holder in tech without a masters degree, I'm conflicted. On one hand this may help industries other than tech to get more foreign applicants. But it does nothing to gauge talent or prefer talented people. Getting into a US college and continuing my higher education was always a dream for me but it never came to fruition because of my family background. If this process is left to market to decide - by way of say a bidding process by employers - I'm confident I'll be able to get in the top and beat out visa stuffing companies. But it'd be absolute chaos competing with them and advanced degree holders. Reduces the chance of people like me quite a bit.
Getting a masters degree in the US is not that hard for someone with money and does not indicate talent at all in any way. I see this as just a way for upper middle class and rich people in India and China to migrate here and not based on talent.
I think the reality is that the change will negatively impact you, and smart engineers without advanced degrees. That really stinks. The change doesn’t benefit everyone, but benefits foreign workers with advanced degrees looking to work (and hopefully immigrate) in the US, companies and local workers, because wages should increase at least a minor amount. But this means non-advanced degree workers lose out.
I'm a prospective H1B applicant also without a US master's degree, and I think, while this does hurt people in our situation, the argument that the H1B must preferentially select talented people is flawed. The O1 visa category (for so-called aliens of extraordinary ability) is reserved for that purpose already, and is more stringent in terms of criteria.
The H1B is a general-purpose skilled labour visa. It's designed to meet the needs of US companies who need to bring in specialized labour that the American labour pool cannot staff - not talented, but specialized. A master's degree at the least (and I don't recall the process needing it to be a master's degree from the States, though I could be misremembering and this would undo my point) is a good proxy for specialization.
Outside of conforming to visa intent better, I think this change makes sense given the current caps on H1B issuance. If you're going to cap total H1Bs issued in an year to 85,000, why not favour the degree class that correlates better with talent (even if it's not a perfect predictor as has been pointed out)?
I also doubt that this will affect that many people - raising the limit from 20,000 reserved entries for master's students (currenr case) to 25,000 means 5,000 fewer people without a master's get their H1Bs. In any given year, the chances of getting an H1B are 33% anyway (applications dwarf yearly caps by a factor of 3). It's a barely noticeable blip in what's already a painful immigration process.
I would certainly like the US to have a progressive immigration policy. But I expect immigration policies to serve US interests, and this change does.
Get an online MS in CS from either Georgia Tech ($10k) or UIUC ($20k) and you are set. Your degree will be exactly the same as on-site ones and you can do it in 2-3 years.
I totally agree. Instead of putting the focus on degrees, the H1B program should have a wage floor. If the minimum H1B salary was, say, 150k a year (dependent on local cost-of-living), it would ensure companies would only use high quality H1Bs for high value work.
Honestly, I have a hard time with the norms around "worker visas," internationally including the US.
I can't understand the liberal (both right and left) preferance for something that seems (to me) at odds with freedom (as in speech).
On one end of the spectrum we have thingslike middle east guest workers, almost an indentured service arrangment. On the other end, we have SV tech workers and similar elswhere.
What protects the higher earning workers is their higher earnings, which gives them more options and leverage.
Regardless most are bound to an employer, one way or another. They inarguably have much less freedom. They can't make the same choices (eg. work part time, career break). Other choices require bureaucratic approval (change job, start a business, go to uni).
If citizens were subjected to these sorts of restrictions, it would be considered a liberal travesty. Since when is liberty subject to citizenship?
To be clear, I'm not against skilled migration. In practice, i think there would be almost no negatives to allowing skilled migrants (same criteria) their freedom.
Since citizenship has existed, meaning pretty much when the first legal systems arose? Providing different sets of rights and duties is the entire point of separating citizens and non-citizens. Hell, the greek polis were mostly about duties, the rights were mostly implicit and incident to being active in running the the community's affairs.
I think this is one of the unintended consequences of strong welfare states. If your government spends $xx,xxx per resident per year then someone who arrives and doesn't contribute at least $xx,xxx is a net drain on resources. At the VERY least, you need to ensure your population produces at least $xx,xxx per year in gov't revenue.
While I am strongly in support of things like free healthcare, education, etc. I can also see how adding residents who aren't net contributors threatens those systems. If Canada let any 60 year old American with health problems immigrae regardless of their ability to help pay for the health system it would reduce care for existing Canadian residents. After all, they're almost certainly going to cost more over their life than they kick in via tax.
Of course, the same argument can go dark places, like forcing people to get exit visas to leave. After all, the state put a lot of money in to your upbringing, you owe them!
Current visa regimes work pretty well to encourage this sort of behaviour. Young, educated people with lots of promise who will work hard (thus the tie to employment) or old people with millions can move. Others, well, can't.
Barring that, sometimes less-educated people can move but in ways that try to ensure they don't become a burden (you work here for a set time and then you're kicked out)
I sometimes wonder if the current system of heavy indebtedness for school and housing helps ensure people work as hard as possible and pay as much in taxes as possible as opposed to allowing them more leisure. Without having to cover a mortgage or health insurance, how many people would work part time? Or how many couples would have a stay at home parent?
There were fewer formal barriers to moving not that long ago. The US had pretty much unrestricted immigration in the 19th century, but it also spent very little per resident. Passport restrictions in Europe showed up for WWI (well, briefly for Napoleon too IIRC) and never really left, probably because WWI also roughly coincided with cheap international travel.
That's definitely an argument that comes up, with purchase, in politics.
I don't really think it has much (if any) validity. Taken as a whole, skilled migrants ar just to unlikely to be net recipients of redistributive governance. Skilled migration usually means educated, healthy, employable young (< 35-40) people. That's almost always a population in terms good tax/consumption ratios.
I'd also note that I'm more comfortable (as a liberal) with denying migrants certain positive rights (eg unemployment payments) than basic freedoms.
I think the welfarist-natuonalist argument amounts to a kind of "optimising-in our-favour." Why not get an even better tax/expenditure ratio out of migrants.
I think we agree - skilled migrants are fine. I'm a skilled migrant (I hope!) and I pay more in income tax than about 90-95% of the people in my adopted country. But they wouldn't be thrilled if I'd tried to move here when I was 70. Unless I had a giant pile of cash, of course.
I don't _like_ that it pretty much all comes down to money. I'd love to be able to say "this buddy of mine is a broke artist but he's super sound, great guy, plays the drums like nobody else and brings joy to all around him - that's the kind of person you want right?" but I don't know of a way to implement that sort of system without 1) being incredibly prone to bias and 2) being pretty expensive if you're not careful.
And you’re wrong. Population growth creates market growth. The humans that literally cannot contribute to the output directly create the broadest and often deepest demands. Babies need all sorts of things their parents wouldn’t otherwise purchase. Immigrants aren’t babies, necessarily, but they do increase market size. This is perhaps a very strong argument for UBI: empowering people with enough for the basics will ensure the contribution to market demand from population growth.
if I run an ice cream collective, where 10 people make ice cream and share the results amongst themselves in a Universal Basic Ice cream scheme, but ice cream making is hard because the tubs are 30kg and hard to carry, I'm going to have a disincentive from letting frail people in to my collective since it will mean less ice cream for the rest of us. I will, however, be OK letting in strong people, or young people with promise, because I want to keep getting ice cream when I'm old.
How is a bigger market less output per capita better?
Say your countryA has 100 people each capable of producing $100 worth of stuff in a day. You introduce a UBI of $50. People have $50 left over
The neighboring countryB has a lot of uneducated people (good folks! Just as smart. Just had less opportunity to learn) who move to your own.
If five of countryB's people move to countryA they can go to school and draw on public resources and become skilled and make a future net positive contribution without too much drain on countryA in the present. You've got 20 countryA folks for every one countryB person. A few % cut in UBI or few % raise in taxes won't hurt
If fifty of them do it it becomes a much larger burden on the present - now there are only two countryA'ers to support countryB'ers. The support systems that everyone relies on will be stretched pretty thin.
I'm very much in favour of migration and am, in fact, an immigrant (left the US). But the more a government spends on its people the more it demands back from them, in the aggregate.
I'm an immigration lawyer and completely opposed to employer sponsored temporary visas. Either let someone in independently or don't let them in at all. The power it gives the employer is ridiculous.
As an immigrant myself, I welcome this move. Please note that this change impacts issuance of fresh H1Bs and does not relate to or assist/impact existing H1B holders in any way.
Against common misconception, it's important to know that H1B also compete for an open job requisition like everyone else. Sadly, H1Bs are eligible to apply only for a small percentage of the open requisitions which often read - only W2 need apply (implying people with green cards / work authorizations or citizens) and sometimes explicitly as - 'accepting applications from green card holders and citizens only'.
H1B are also mostly 'stuck' to their current jobs / positions and do not have the flexibility to switch jobs (until they reach a certain stage in their visa). They're allowed to switch but this requires the hiring org to reprocess their green card application from scratch in majority of the cases. This is especially true from people from India and China.
It's one thing to say - you're allowed to switch, it another to be able to actually do it without getting penalized or expect your hiring org to invest into your green card process.
I could go on but i'd sum this up as there's more to h1b than meets the eye and what's out there isn't a true and complete representation of an Indian or Chinese h1b worker. It's tough to be in the shoes of an H1B who's worked and lived here and made a life for his family, yet lives in fear and uncertainty of losing his job or work authorization everyday.
Selection for a job should be based on merit and your personal / professional qualifications among other factors, and not with a bias towards your visa status. The best man for the job.
I don't think this will have that much of an impact (of course, it'll impact a good number of people).
The highest impact would be if they allowed easy H1B transfer to other companies with similar jobs. Right now, H1B is pretty much like indentured servitude (it has become better in the past few years, and it was waaay worse at one time).
The other change would be to give priority based on salary. That will encourage H1B employers to pay more; thus, attracting more USCs.
Yes. Total number of visas are not increased but people with US Masters degree will have a higher chance of winning the lottery. I am not a lawyer but based on my reading of the law USCIS is likely going to lose in court over this. Here is the relevant text of the law[1]:
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(5) The numerical limitations contained in paragraph (1)(A) shall not apply to any nonimmigrant alien … who … (C) has earned a master’s or higher degree from a United States institution of higher education (as defined in section 1001(a) of title 20), until the number of aliens who are exempted from such numerical limitation during such year exceeds 20,000. (Emphasis added)
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Based on the literal interpretation of law I think it is absolutely clear that the law clearly wants Students not to be counted against the cap until the 20,000 Masters cap is filled. I do not see any way to implement current USCIS proposal without violating this clause. It appears to me that DHS is unable to afford any competent lawyers these days and constantly proposing things that are illegal and not properly thought through.
Ignoring the legality of this move, this move does not benefit US society in any way. Implication that students with US masters degree are high skilled is pretty lame because majority of these students are from fly by night universities that do not even need GRE for admission. Most students after they are done with their masters work on OPT for around two years and seek sponsors for H1B during that time. Many of them simply approach body shoppers and consultancies which operate the low value spectrum of tech and will hire anyone. Also these are the companies at the forefront of most fraudulent activities.
Based on some of the unverified insider information, USCIS director Cissna has had a plan for a four pronged assault on H1B.
1. Simply refuse to renew H1B beyond 6 years. This impacts mostly Indians. He failed to implement this policy after the memo leaked to press.
2. Slow down entire H1B process to the extent most employers lose interest. He has successfully done this. My wife's H1B was filed in April 2018 and was approved in January 2019. No matter how kickass coder she is no employer will ever want to get into that kind of hiring process.
3. Create a system where you simply waste H1B visas each year. One way is to increase the rejection rates for new visas. If out of 65K visas say 10K visas are rejected these are never filled. Second approach which he wanted to implement this year but failed is to have this concept of "pre-registration" which everyone including immigration lawyers applauded. This is a sinister move. Under this move any company can file a lottery even without hiring an employee. After winning the lottery the company may simply refuse to proceed and that visa is wasted. Since there is no serious fee involved here any company who does not even have a hiring plan can enter the lottery and win it. This means a large number of H1B visas will not be claimed at all.
4. Rescind the H4EAD program to hurt families on H1B. Again affects only Indian citizens on H1B. I am told USCIS is unable to come up with good reasons to rescind this program and hence it is delayed for more than 2 years now.
H1B program is in a mess and current USCIS administration is acting in bad faith and making it worse, encouraging fraud and misuse.
> Implication that students with US masters degree are high skilled is pretty lame because majority of these students are from fly by night universities that do not even need GRE for admission
Are you arguing that people with less education are on average more valuable?
If you don't believe that it matters, then why do you care? It would be a purely neutral move. I don't see anything wrong with that.
If you think that this is a negative move, then that means that you believe people will less education, on average, are more valuable than people with more.
> Based on some of the unverified insider information
What is fundamentally wrong, if anything, with people with less education being more valuable? Would you rather have three engineers with an undergrad degree or one with a master's? Where do you draw the line?
In my experience advanced degrees do not equate expertise -- if anything, professionally, it's the opposite.
> Would you rather have three engineers with an undergrad degree or one with a master's? Where do you draw the line?
We are comparing 1 to 1, not 3 to 1.
In the context of this conversation, we are taking about whether it is a bad thing for someone with more education to receive priority access to the H1B visa.
And my opinion is that this is at worst a neutral thing.
The person I was responding to thinks that giving masters students priority is somehow negative.
In order for it to be negative, he would have to prove that these masters students are somehow worse, on average, than the non-masters students.
I think a high school drop out with 5 years of work experience coding can beat a masters from silicon valley university. In tech jobs degrees are in no way indicator of skill.
This is not comparing a person with 5 years if experience to a person without 5 years experience.
Instead, related to the H1B question, this is comparing the "average" person applying to the H1B program who has a bachelor's degree, and comparing that to the "average" person applying to the program with a master's degree.
It is not about perfect correlation. It is instead about imperfect correlation of the averages among these 2 groups.
Even in the worst case scenario of there being no correlation, it still benefits the US to give priority to masters students, as at the very least it means that they have spent more money on an American business (IE, the univerity).
I don't see anything wrong with priorizing more money to US businesses, all else being equal.
> s at the very least it means that they have spent more money on an American business (IE, the univerity).
I am not sure why it matters. Good chance the university is a visa mill and setup specifically for f1 to h1b transition like the recent DHS sting revealed. Such businesses needlessly muddle edu-sector and destroy capital on things that solely exist to bypass government red tape. It adds to economic inefficiency of the society.
Also, that is not the reason USCIS has given. "They spent money on USA business" is the criteria than the law should explicitly state that and everyone can then compete. My wife arrived on H4 and lost to H1B lottery twice. In that time she converted to F1 and then got her OPT is a small college. The degree was worthless and we spent $25K on her education. That enabled her to win H1B lottery in her third attempt in master's cap. Technically beneft to US society was significantly more if she had got her H1B in first attempt.
But that is not the point I am making. My central point is that USCIS policy clearly (I am not sure how much more clear it can get than that text) violates the law passed by Congress. USCIS at the very least need to provide credible evidence as to why this new system is better, why someone with US masters degree be automatically assumed to be higher skilled and based on what evidence and how it links to BAHA executive order whose pretext is being used for such changes. H1B visa is not meant for "high skilled" any ways. It is meant for specialized skill that is in short supply in USA. So there is a violation of far basic principles there too.
Yes. People with less education but few years of experience could be far more valuable than a masters degree holder from silicon valley university which is now shut down. Having a us masters degree is not correlated to higher skill in any way if we are not going to factor in university rankings.
It is very easy to validate claim. How many of the employers in bay area actually ask for masters or higher education for swe jobs ?
If it is a neutral move why waste taxpayer money and potential lawsuites for no benefit ?
My primary argument however is that the move is illegal and completely against the congressional intent.
Actually it says the 20,000 is only for Master/PhDs, so this could reduce the total number of H1Bs issued if there are fewer than 20,000 Master/PhD applicants. Otherwise the effect is more Master/PhD H1Bs and fewer others.
The 20,000 for advanced degree holders already holds in the current system, and it already over-subscribed. So this would not reduce the number of H-1Bs issued.
A large number (most?) of the H-1B visas go to students on F visas who have a job offer and want to change their status. Almost all the foreigners that I know on H-1B visas in my company came from a F visa. Some definitely were recruited from abroad, but it's simple economics. With so many people graduating from US universities, it's a lot easier to interview and subsequently apply for an H-1B for someone already here.
"accomplished a degree in a host country and obtained a relevant job offer thereafter" is a very good proxy for a lot of desirable properties in immigrants, at least in Canada (per official statistics).
Besides, foreign education credentials and work experience can be very easy to fake depending on home country, so it's understandable that it's worth less in the eyes of immigration systems.
In Canada we have lots of foreign students, and while there are some issues (nothing is perfect), they pay much more than domestic students, essentially funding the higher education institutions. Education is some of the best things you can export, if done properly.
Thing is, if you want to hire foreign, experienced, high-skilled workers, by definition they won't hold a US degree.
The current system favors immigrants that can afford a Master's degree at low-tier for-profit universities (see what happened to the Silicon Valley University). The change will take this even further.
Canada has a non-trivial but straightforward path to permanent residency that tries to be fair to both domestic students and experienced immigrants. It's not really comparable.
My now wife went through so much trouble with her H1-B, even though she graduated with a Master's from a United States university and was working in the United States. Yet she got stuck in the lottery system. Don't we want high skilled workers contributing to the economy? Even when we got married, we had to wait over a year for her green card for her and went through an interview. The immigration system is tough and cumbersome.
Why should anyone be happy when there's a chance they won't be allowed to work? Even if the chance is lower, it's still something to be concerned about. (Edited)
Note that I never suggested one should be happy. And I'm not sure what you're proposing. Let anyone who is in the US be allowed to work and just give them an automatic H-1 visa? Or do that for people who have an MS degree or higher? If the latter, realize you are providing a criterion - one which someone with just a high school degree can say the same as you said:
>Even if the chance is lower, it's still not right.
If you accept that there needs to be some criterion, then it's simply a matter of where the line is drawn - and most people draw the line that conveniently works for them. For the person who posted this, the change in rules improves the chances of someone in the situation his wife was in.
This will make getting work visas even harder for folks with only U.S. undergrad degrees. Expect growth in 4+1 and 3+1 integrated Masters programs to compensate. Prioritizing people with U.S. degrees is a pretty reasonable move. And given the existing structure, prioritizing U.S. Masters degrees is also reasonable. But a B.S. in CS is qualitatively equivalent to an M.S. The lack of nuance is not surprising but still unfortunate.
"Prioritizing people with U.S. degrees is a pretty reasonable move. And given the existing structure, prioritizing U.S. Masters degrees is also reasonable." - Why do you think so?
Roughly three parts to this. First off, these folks are already "here" . Busy learning to America. Paying tuition to their schools and taxes from their internships/OPTs. Contributing and being contributed to so that there's already a relationship between them, the country, and the country's citizens.
This is also what a lot of other countries do so it's consistent with "the way things are done".
Finally, it seems politically expedient. There are already provisions for prioritizing Masters degrees. This change is a modification of those provisions. That (crucially) doesn't have to go anywhere near the legislature.
These particular masses are not huddled. Nor are they all leading lights (though some will grow into greatness in time) . So there are also plenty of reasonable arguments against this approach.
F1 is a non immigrant visa. To get f1 visa student needs to convince visa officer that he will promptly return back to home country after completion of education and will not try to seek any immigrant intent visa.
In that sense every f1 student filing for h1b transfer of status in my opinion acting in bad faith. The case about already here makes no sense as many other visa categories loke r2 or h4 are not allowed to work despite having spent years in usa.
As an expat for the bigger part of my life I can't think of a country that would prioritize their own institutions when applying for a visa. Generally there's simply a category for advanced degree holders.
Canada's Express Entry system for skilled immigrants gives you more points if you attended college in Canada. Giving priority to people who have already integrated into the society makes perfect sense to me.
At the same time that kinda cripples the ability to hire highly-skilled foreigners, isn't it? It's artificially limiting the pool of viable candidates.
Just imagine a PhD (or even a Master's degree holder) from Europe, a leader in their field. With this system they are at a huge disadvantage and so are companies that would like to hire them.
As someone mentioned this system will just lead to straight to masters degrees. Those "body shop" outsourcing companies just need their candidates to attend any (does online count?) US-based masters degree and then business as usual.
Having a Masters from "some" university doesn't make anyone highly skilled.
Canada is points-based. These guys you have in mind lose on one category and win on another category. That's why points-based systems work. You get to say "Speaking French in my country is as valuable as if you held a Masters degree from here". There are so many bases to add up to the value that anyone with that skill would almost certainly make it.
You can give priority to people who have integrated into the society in several other, more obvious ways. In this case, they are making the explicit argument that they want "more skilled" workers, and using a US-based degree as the criteria. If they had a points system, and a Masters degree would get you X points, and every year spent in US would give you additional Y points, then this would make sense.
They should assign limits based on salary, lets say 150% of industry standard, not education level. There is no measure of skill less meaningful than a degree.
This leads to a problem where locations with generally lower wages, while also needing skilled workers, cannot compete with locations that have generally higher wages.
>There is no measure of skill less meaningful than a degree.
I really don't see how salary is better. A higher salary is simply more correlated with the profitability of a company, not with the skills one has. People doing the same jobs at different companies can have vastly differing salaries.
I should know - every time I've bumped up my salary, it's by moving to a position that required lower skills. The market does not pay high for skills. You'll get paid more if you switch from a job that requires advanced mathematics or physics skills to coding web/mobile apps.
This would weirdly exert a greater downward pressure on salaries, as companies will have a higher supply of higher skill workers rather than just workers as a whole.
Right now H1B are equally exerting downward pressure on salaries at the top, middle, and bottom of the market. Salaries then in turn are falling by a relatively equal amount for everyone. If it is only targeted at the top, that hurts the ceiling for with people in the industry can earn.
for what it is, this seems like a good change. Not a big change, but it should reduce the idiocy of letting people learn valuable things and then not letting them stay to use it.
It's truly an absurdity how many foreign people US universities have educated with the US immigration laws then making it a nightmare to stay, become a US citizen, and make a valuable contribution to the US economy that made those universities possible in the first place. All progress toward not shooting ourselves in the foot is definitely a good thing.
The discussion here is reflective of the problem that plagues immigration law. Any change to immigration system is not looked at through an incrementality lens, but through the lens of the overall system and its problems.
This change makes it more likely for graduates of US universities to get H1B visas, yet the discussion is on the overall merit of H1Bs. Exact same thing happens with solving the problem of country based caps on green cards which disadvantages people based on an attribute that they have no control over - their country of birth. Any change proposed to country based caps is looked at with whether the overall high skilled immigration system is good or not.
Its like no one wants to fix any bugs and people are only interested in a complete system rewrite. So every bug report and code review becomes a discussion platform for the problems of the overall system.
My parents are immigrants. I wish we would just let in a random sample of the global population instead of having selection factors. Or maybe not let in any immigrants at all.
The purpose of these kinds of requirements is to bring in workers for rich American CEOs. It's not because we enjoy the company of immigrants or want to learn their culture. Artificial selection for master degrees just creates stereotypes and leads to things like "the model minority". Imagine if we only let in strong physical laborers and the type of stereotypes and race dynamics that would create. The kind of cultural displacement you feel as an immigrant that is toiling away in a lab to try to serve some rich CEO while you're away from all your like-minded friends/family is depressing.
I haven't read literature on this, it's just my gut feeling.
Goodhart's Law [1] applies to this situation. I expect master's degrees to become more common and less rigorous.
The whole qualification and lottery immigration system is, at best, economically inefficient. Instead of bothering with salary bands and education requirements, the government should auction off work visas, thereby ensuring that slots go to their most economically productive use. A cap-and-trade system lets the market find its own level.
It would have been a positive change if they did not have the restriction that the Masters must be from a US university. What's wrong with non-US universities? I don't see why degree even matters. Like someone suggested in a previous similar thread, just sorting by pay and giving higher wages more priority (perhaps with some sort of normalization to compensate for cost of living and the field of work) is much better.
It's a step toward the "staple a green card" immigration policy supported by both republicans and democrats. It's essentially a reversal from the historical "tired, poor, huddled masses" policy of immigration in America to something that is more in line with the rest of the neoliberal world.
It's a gamble to come to America to get educated (cost, cultural adjustment, visa issues), and I think that we should show preference to those students who have made that extra effort to live and study in America over other people.
I just answered this elsewhere as well. This reasoning would make sense if that's what they said. But the explicit reason for the changes is to get more "skilled" workers in. Then, it should not matter if the degree was from US or Europe or China. I would have accepted this reason if they had separate weightage for "How long the person spent time in the US". This particular formulation puts a graduate from Europe at a disadvantage, for example.
I opened the article with so many expectations. Then realized it changes nothing. How does having enough money to get a masters from US make one high skilled developer? The only people who are going to benefit from this are the American Universities.
Exactly that. I know so many people with masters degree that cannot code at all. They only learned how to pass exams but have no ability to solve problems on their own. I would argue that talented people would rather avoid a place where they cannot learn anything useful and universities more and more become just that.
My view is that the US shoots themselves in a foot and that is good for other countries.
The most important thing that needs to be changed about the H1B program is how the green card is linked to your particular employer. The H1B program is almost like indentured servitude for the vast majority of workers of Indian or Chinese origin because of the delay in getting a green card. It would be impossible for any employer to exploit H1B workers if the visa was not linked to an employer but to the tax paid by the worker. As long as the worker stays in a particular (federal) tax bracket the worker should be allowed to engage in any work that they desired.
The sheer and staggering amount of hatred for immigrants in here is appalling. If people had the same hatred for immigrants a 100 years, most of the ancestors of the balls of hatred on this thread would have been excluded. The skilled immigrant limit is a joke -- approximately 0.02% of the population. Also, incredibly hard: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8823349/immigration-system-bro...
I see a lot of people complain that H1B is used to import cheap tech workers. In biotech, I haven't seem this as a problem. In fact, I just sponsored a few of my employees to get H1Bs and it worked out fine. This seems like a solution from the tech side of things, but in the biotech side of things I don't think this was a problem because everyone was already high-skilled?
This is a sad day for the USA, as we move further from the principles that made us great.
This is discrimination, and nothing to celebrate. People without degrees deserve equal treatment. People who want to work lower-paid jobs deserve equal treatment.
America should stand for liberty, personal responsibility, and equality of opportunity. Not racism and elitism.
Our immigration laws continue to be a stain on this great nation.
more school != more skilled proxy should have it's range.
A rank 100+ cs grad school is quite obvious showing a person's learning skill if anyone knows how applying for a cs master in the USA works. One could argue a UCSC graduate doesn't have a good skill set but hardly to say a SIT graduate
has a better learning skill. And a SIT graduate is also a 'master' of science in cs, which is able to participate the 'advance' degree h1b lottery slot. How absurd..
They lost an opportunity to really overhaul the system that would have drawn support from liberal groups. Like turning H1B allocation process into an auction - let the company that offers highest compensation win the visa. And associating the visa with the employee not the employer, so they are free to switch around.
Why don't we auction off H1B slots, either directly (government gets the money) or via the companies offering the highest comp getting to bring people in? You could also do some combination of the two.
Does anyone actually read the WSJ links that get posted here? It’s subscription only so linking from here only works if you already subscribe, at which point you’re not linking from hacker news...
Couldn't read this due to the Subscription/Sign-in wall. May I know how does this affect Masters(Computer Science) students in the US. I've got few friends studying there now.
Education level seems really arbitrary and exploitable. Maybe auction work visas for income tax bonds. Pay interest so that new grads can bid for them through lenders.
That would be even more exploitable and cause an uncontrollable immigration policy. You would get vast numbers of Muslim extremist immigrants who would refuse to adapt and wreak havoc, like Syrian refuge crisis in Turkey.
if you have 13 years experience and don't even have a bachelor's degree, you are not screwed, just stay where you are, unless you are as good as Linus T, just stay where you are, we have lots of talents with > 13years experience without a degree here in the US already :-)
define high-skilled workers.
Currently an steven's institute graduate cs master could get a h1b visa by lottery while a Harvard graduate might not be that lucky.
Consider this, is knowing how to use kubernetes anything harder than working in a Physics Lab? The system is flawed~~
Why do we care about a masters degree from some India degree farm? It seems like the emphasis on accreditation misses the point entirely. There's no quality control in the US immigration process. For every brilliant engineer we get someone garbage. For every innovator or entrepreneur we get someone who is just the mother's uncle's in-law.
Contrary to the rhetoric, unless you are buying your degree from shitty colleges which exist on paper, it's very difficult to get bachelor's and master's degree in India.
I'm an Indian and I know that because the entrance exams are tough.
But yes, emphasis on masters degree missed the point.
TL;DR - the cap is still at 85,000 visas/year, but this change will result in approximately 5,340 more applicants with master's degrees getting visas over those with just bachelor's.
IMO it is a pretty insignificant change overall, since this is hardly a good metric in determining skill, and the system is still lottery based.
H1B is indentured servitude, that’s why corporate America loves it. This measure will do nothing but increase masters mill programs, punishing both smart immigrants and Americans. Basically, another brutal, but expected, betrayal of campaign promises by the hapless Trump administration.
Probably not the popular opinion here but the way I see trump is he was campaigning hard against “illegal immigration”.
He didn’t explicitly say he’s against highly skilled immigration.
Trump may be an idiot but it seems people incharge of immigration have their head straight and H1Bs are in sore need of a revamp.
I hope the trend continues. America works because hard working and talented people want to come here and make beautiful things people want and build their dreams.
I thought I remember it being a campaign position, mainly stemming from it applying downward wage pressure on tech workers. It looks like it used to be but then he changed it.
> Donald Trump signaled a shift in his stance on visas for highly-skilled workers Thursday night, moving away from the position he took on his campaign website.
People upvote the content they want to see. Implicitly, whether something is paywalled or not is already included in that judgment. What's more, people keep upvoting paywalled content because non-paywalled content isn't providing the same level of content. By not tolerating paywalled content you are making an explicit call for less content of the type that HN readers say they want to see.
You could make the argument that HN readers shouldn't upvote the things they are upvoting, that HN would be a better place if people didn't upvote the things they are upvoting, or that there might be a longer term benefit to be gained from accepting short term losses by eschewing paywalled articles. Those are all things people could argue.
But the fact that they show up on the front page with regular basis is explicit evidence that, even if you feel they have no value, other people do.
>On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other
The thread is specifically about copyright information.
I am not sure why you made a comment about completely unrelated information that has nothing to do with the fundamental question regarding copyrighted information.
The term "information wants to be free", obviously is about the commericalization of information. It has nothing to do with privacy.
I don't see outline making money out of it (I can't see any ads). Plus it gives credit to the original page as a link on the top left corner (I'm viewing on mobile browser).
The preference IMO is for Advanced degrees granted by US institutions & is the same basis as was before, instead now just the priority for filling up the pool is for masters degree holders first.
Although it can be good for people from a personal point of view. However, the Trump administration is trying to create a state of elitists. This administration has time and again tried to establish this. I am not a big fan of this idea. I would rather prefer more applicants entering through the lottery system, and maybe a bit more preference for the struggling nations, or those who have been hit due to US' global politics.
Fun thought experiment is to think what would happen if you told ____s to replace ____s.
What would happen if you took programmers and told them to fill the roles of teachers?
What would happen if you took teachers and told them to replace programmers?
What would happen if you took policemen and told them to manage portfolios?
What would happen if you took nurses and told them to replace lawyers?
In some cases, everything would grind to a halt. In others, things would rattle on but perhaps in a suboptimal manner.
I suppose there's a few variables like training time, and whether a job has some sort of 'coasting' option, eg. portfolio managers could just buy the index and come out OK.
A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs.
If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, but just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1]
To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.
And if you are in SV consider that more than half of public tech companies were created by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. 1st generation founders include Sergey Brin, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Stewart Butterfield, Sebastion Thrun, and Patrick and John Collison. [2]
[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2014...
[2] https://www.recode.net/2018/5/30/17385226/kleiner-perkins-ma...