I don't know the motivation of the poster authors, but the H-1B program is BS as stated in law. I've seen it abused with my own eyes. Corporations just want cheap and/or complacent labor, and use the "shortage" lie to get it. IT may be in an up cycle now, but it's had hard times also, such after the dot-com bust on the west coast, and citizens were being replaced or skipped during the hard times.
Yep, being anti-h1b !== being anti-immigrant. Immigrants who are free to hop jobs are a key component of a vibrant, entrepreneurial, worker-friendly economy. Immigrants who are disposable, bonded labor undermine the freedoms everyone else has while also promoting inefficient labor allocation.
not sure if this organization actual feels that way though...
The only other realistic path to a green card for an Indian national, as far as I know, is L1 intracompany transfer (which has an identical effect on the local labor pool) or sponsorship from another American citizen, the latter of which the current administration and its supporters are attempting to limit.
I forgot to describe what I meant by "complacent" and you helped clear that up. Thanks! While it is technically possible for such a visa worker to hop jobs, it's not easy in practice, such that they are more or less indentured servants. They also often don't have families (yet) and so can work long hours.
By the way, "!==" (or "!=") means "not the same as" for you non-coders out there.
"For-profit companies and many nonprofits come under a nationwide cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year, plus 20,000 for an advanced degree exemption. Nonprofits are exempt from any cap if they are institutions of higher education; related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education; or a research organization."
I'm a lifelong Democrat (and socially and fiscally liberal) and I see this as an issue of social justice for American workers. Tech jobs are among the best paying jobs in the country, and if we're serious about income inequality then more (or very nearly all) of these jobs need to go to US citizens.
The US already has a generous immigration policy. H-1B is solely about access to cheap labor, and it should be ended immediately.
There's nothing wrong with being against laws that weaken labor's bargaining power. Productivity and wages decoupled a long time ago. It's about time the working class started fighting back. It's obvious corporations want cheap labor, and claiming there's a "skill shortage" is an easy way to achieve that.
<< Why not take this one step further and make it “white Murican workers”? Or how bout “white straight males of aryan descent”?
American worker doesn't mean "white Murican worker". It means American citizen. American citizen isn't a synonym for Caucasian.
You're doing that thing that people do when we talk about H1-B. You're conflating opposition to H1-B with racism and xenophobia.
It's not racist or xenophobia to say that American workers should have first crack at economic opportunities in their own country. As noted in my original remarks, this is something we have to talk about if we're serious about addressing things like income inequality and equal access to economic opportunity.
I think it's utterly wrong to give the best economic opportunities to foreign nationals when there are imminently qualified US workers.
I've spent 10 years in the US, getting my college and PhD degrees. These 10 years are the most intellectually formative period of my life, and I wholeheartedly want to contribute to the US.
As much as I abhor the H1B system, there is no other way for me to stay in the US. I'm genuinely curious -- what other options I may have in the US immigration system?
In a sense, you are correct that the US has a "generous immigration policy," e.g. babies born here get citizenship, family can easily sponsor relatives to come. However, for skilled workers, the system is very hostile.
I, too, care a lot about income inequality in the US. However, I think that solving that problem means targeting the low end of the income spectrum, i.e. giving people basic health care so they can think longer term, giving people access to education so they can learn to be productive. Giving tech jobs to Americans will help decrease inequality, but the effect will be so small.
<< what other options I may have in the US immigration system?
This discussion isn't about how to immigrate to the US.
<< However, for skilled workers, the system is very hostile.
Well I'm sorry you feel that way. You could always return to your home country and fight to make things better there. That's what I'm doing by opposing H1-B - I'm fighting to make things better here.
<< Giving tech jobs to Americans will help decrease inequality, but the effect will be so small.
Right, if the effect is so small, then why is it so important to YOU?
My understanding of your post is that you think the US doesn't need more skilled immigrant workers because those jobs should go to Americans first. That's a valid argument. Attracting skilled immigrants indeed have both cost (i.e. Americans don't get those jobs) and benefit (i.e. America get the best workers and become more productive). I think the benefit outweigh the cost, and you vice versa. That's another debate entirely, which I'm not pursuing here, but I do want to recognize the validity of your argument.
The original post I made, on the other hand, is not about whether the US should attract skilled immigrants. I just wanted to clarify that the US does NOT have a generous immigrant system for skilled workers, contrary to popular perception.
There isn't much else for you out there, which is why I certainly don't fault would-be immigrants for using the visa.
Would you have chosen to get a PhD if you already had citizenship and freedom to choose your path in life? Certainly some people who already have US citizenship choose to do so, but many opt out. Personally, I don't think studying what high tech companies tell you to study and working for them for the salary they tell you to work for should be a condition of immigrating to the US, and I don't want to see our immigration system run through their HR departments.
As for universities, well, it's great that you enjoyed your PhD program - I personally didn't and left with a MS. I feel that PhD programs are actually pretty abusive of their students, and I would oppose giving them any control over the immigration system either. I do think one of the reason they haven't experienced their "reckoning" (ie., a collapse in new students to exploit) is that they have established themselves as the gate keepers for a kind of new ellis island for skilled immigrants, and they can collect a toll in the form of many years of cheap research and teaching labor.
Again, I do agree that you personally didn't have a lot of options, and you don't have much choice but to worth within the legal boundaries our laws established. This certainly isn't your fault, at all.
It seems like the most effective strategy for H1B applicants without truly exceptional skills is to pay a consulting company to mail thousands of fake applications and simply overwhelm US immigration with junk. Many of these people are then held semi hostage, have their immigration documents taken from them illegally, and are forced to pay annual dues to get the continued support of these companies in filing renewals for their immigration status.
But, if you're one of the coding sweatshops, you're able to get away with gross abuses of labor law. You can work them to the bone, far more hours than you would a citizen.
I think most on both sides would agree that the program as-is is BS (kinda like a lot of topics these days). The disagreement is what you want to do to fix it. Do you want to give more power to the immigrants so that they are not abused by the sweatshops? Or do you want to simply get rid of the program?
That being said, I do believe that the group behind the ads is on the "ban the program and immigrants" side.
Then it seems that the most sensible way forward is not to limit immigrants ability to immigrate, but to limit corporations' power to abuse immigrants, doesn't it?
Or even limit corporations' power to abuse workers altogether, so that Disney can't just lay off its entire IT staff and replace it with cheaper labor, but hey that would be business unfriendly!
The level of cognitive dissonance on HN every time this topic comes up is pretty impressive.
I read the text of the ad without making any assumptions, and I was hard pressed to find any fault with it. The only problem appears when you factor in who's saying it and what you _think_ the ad is saying.
Edit: in case readers assume I'm being racist in some way: I'm a Sri Lankan national.
I think the name of the organization that is running the ad is also a problem. They seem to be trying to co-opt the "progressive" label for something that is completely opposite to what it is supposed to (over the last few years) stand for.
I can't tell if they are intentionally doing that for nefarious reasons. Imagine seeing a "Conservatives for repealing the 2nd amendment" ad. I would assume they have some ulterior motives there.
I think the ad is utterly genius (in a nefarious way) because it's making me want to play devil's advocate soooo badly. The authors are clearly trying to get people to conflate "H1-B abuse" with "immigration".
People can be against H1-B abuse and NOT be anti-immigration.
Yea, this is a conversation that people should be having, the "progressive" part seems to just be a straight up lie/misdirection. Hard to take it seriously.
It was really weird to me when people in the 21st century started calling themselves to differentiate themselves from other sorts of liberals. Modern progressives and the progressives of the Progressive era share many features but traditional progressives were strongly associated with moral paternalism and eugenics. Seeing people I would have called liberals start calling themselves progressive was as jarring as Trump's use of "America First". And I think that nativism isn't unknown to modern progressives. I think Bernie Sanders is commonly considered a progressive and he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages.
I hadn't known that historical perspective, thanks. I was glad when the term started to become popular because the US post-Reagan era had made "liberal" into a term used to insult and degrade without considering the actual ideas of any instance.
I was shocked at Sanders amount of success, because I had grown up believing that the US public would immediately discount any associating with the word "socialist" (even by those that actually had beliefs not far from socialist views, and even allowing that Sanders positions aren't actually 'socialist' as used in Europe).
I suspect "progressive" was embraced for such reasons, but given how much I've been wrong about most anything political on the past decade+, I'd love to have actual evidence.
> he was very down on immigrants depressing native worker's wages.
I'm not a Sanders supporter, but just wanted to point out that one can be both pro-immigrant (wanting to increase general immigrant quotas) and against programs like H1B that are designed to suppress salaries in specific industries.
Well, most Sanders supporters are way more pro-immigrant than he is so being pro-Sanders doesn't really mean that much here. There was some great reporting in I think the New York times a while ago on the beliefs of the supporters of various presidential contenders. And yes, you can certainly be against a certain policy without being anti-immigration. I'm for drastically expanding US immigration but replacing H1Bs with programs that don't tie people to a particular employer is something I would support.
liberal used to mean economically and socially liberal, that is, free market economy and let people live their lives. Now we have to call them classical liberals. What does progressive stands for? Who decides what progress is? Is increasing the quality of life of 10 by decreasing the quality of life of 100 progress?
"Liberal" isn't a terribly useful word in the US these days, given how wide the democratic party's non-existent platform is.
I agree "progressive" isn't the most useful re-use of the word, but I would emphatically call it anti-nativist (or rather, pro-globalist) these days, or just "leftist".
Political labels in general are ill-fitted to static definitions. People are always stealing terms, twisting others, for demagogic needs. "liberal", "conservative", "progressive", "leftist", and "alt-right" are all pretty terrible for anything but, uhh, cultural identification, and don't indicate much of anything about you politically.
On the contrary, their stance is more in line with the traditional view of progressivism. It's only fairly recently that free market capitalists tried to push for open borders and mass immigration under the guise of "progress". There's a simple reason why the big tech companies want more immigrants. It suppresses wages. It changes the dynamics of supply and demand of the workforce in order to take power away from workers and give it to employers.
If you're against the 1%, you should be against these neoliberal immigration policies.
What's changed is the needs of the political classes. The democrat party has been in something of a death spiral for decades (arguably since the 50s) and is critically dependant on imported voters. Without the massive immigration that has happened post-1965, the political party configuration would have almost certainly fractured and reformed along quite different lines by now. But ongoing immigration has kept the democrat party in its rather ossified form highly competitive (as they lost "American" voters, they gained immigrant votes).
This is why they were so terrified of Bernie Sanders. He got a lot of support from working class whites who have been trending Republican for decades. But a figure like Sanders would derail the agenda (immigration and all) that is keeping a never ending stream of Kennedys in power.
If you are an employee, you should protect your interests. This includes ensuring that you, your children, and your fellow citizens are hired preferentially to importing labor.
The 'better future' people many immigrate for includes higher standards of living for similar work. They are willing to work for less because they believe citizenship is worth something. That 'better future' only exists if the country maintains this inequality by ensuring that citizens are hired first where possible.
Issues of globalization, birthplace lottery, and wealth inequality aside; these policies are in your favor if you are an employee, immigrant or not. Conversely, these policies hurt the company's bottom line by preventing hiring of the most cost efficient labor.
The backlash against this message is weaponized political correctness and/or employees speaking out against their best interests.
I checked it out thinking maybe I was quick to assume the worst.
On review, it looks and sounds pretty dog-whistley to me. Worse than I expected.
As a Sri Lankan national, you may be missing some of the nativist overtones. "Undeserving" in particular is a loaded term in American public political discourse.
This is a meme that still resonates with many people in America. It still resonates with me, as an ugly example of the way misleading rhetoric get deployed to stigmatize an underrepresented political class. This term immediately evokes associations like these.
Also, the color scheme and typography: seems designed to evoke a not very enlightened response. Definitely not embracing the light and airy look-and-feel I generally associate with progressive tech community.
I believe that's a debunked stat. 30% might be native born, but that doesn't account for foreign-born U.S. citizens, even ones that grew up in the U.S.
Yeah that REALLY caught my eye; in the context I read it as "citizens and nationals of the US" (when they say "Americans"). Even is SJ is cherry picked, it is a big employment center and that number is shocking. The implication being that visa-holders are getting the majority of jobs.
If it is based on country of birth I'm way less impressed.
Where did that number even come from? Country of birth isn't something companies usually collect.
Why do you think this imbalance needs to be addressed? Silicon Valley is a meritocracy and the best workers find employment. This is obviously a pipeline problem.
Because if this is an imbalance that needs to be corrected with policy, then does SV's gender and racial imbalance also need to be addressed similarly?
The reaction to this ad is predictably absurd. The far left's constant push to draw increasingly unremarkable positions like "US jobs should go to US workers" as beyond the pale is why we're stuck with Trump.
For my part I don't even agree with the ad, and I consider myself lucky to work with my H-1B coworkers. But it can be disagreed with minus the pretense that it's equivalent to painting a swastika on the side of a bus.
>The far left's constant push to draw increasingly unremarkable positions like "US jobs should go to US workers" as beyond the pale is why we're stuck with Trump.
Well said. Just like how anti-illegal-immigration (an unremarkable position) is now synonymous with anti-Mexican.
It creates scenarios like the article where you're kneejerk labeled a racist and that's supposed to be self-evident.
One distinction I like to draw as well is being anti-immigration doesn't mean you're anti-immigrant. Wanting immigration to be limited or criteria changed or whatever doesn't mean that you don't like the people that come to your country via these means.
> Well said. Just like how anti-illegal-immigration (an unremarkable position) is now synonymous with anti-Mexican.
Have you considered this is because the some of the loudest voices on the right have wrapped up the immigration debate with some nasty rhetoric based on race, nationality and nationalistic emotion, not policy or fact?
Do any of the statements linked below, which were well reported on, seem like productive ways to discuss immigration?
He's saying the definition of the word being used is currently changing.
When racist people start talking about illegal immigrants and they refer to all people of a specific race or nationality, they effectively change the definition of the word.
I'm not sure why that isn't an argument to be considered. The fact is these statements (referring to Mexicans as rapists and murders, "shithole countries") keep being made by the president, who historically has some sway over the legislative debate, especially when their party controls both chambers of congress.
I'd like to know, do you think these are reasonable, good-faith openers for debate? I don't, especially when so few on the right seem to be able to rebuke them and move on to a real discussion.
Yes, it is, especially if you're not doing anything to make them not the loudest voices. If you don't like being associated with them, then you need to tell them off, and call them out when they say terrible things like that.
When the leader of the movement (Trump) was describing the people coming over as "rapists, murders, and drug dealers", then yeah, I'm going to see that as anti-Mexican. And those that agree with his stance are, at the very least, not bothered with that extreme racism.
You want to change that? Then start shouting Trump and his ilk down when you hear stuff like that.
> “I don’t see where innovation necessarily comes from diversity,” [the executive director at Progressives for Immigration Reform, the group that paid for the ads,] said.
I can't claim to know Lynn's exact thoughts (Lynn being the person quoted here), but this kind of rhetoric is common among racists/xenophobes.
Diversity (in some respect) is inherently good for innovation. You could have a room full of CS PhDs, and if they all come from similar enough backgrounds then they may all come up with the same solutions to certain problems. "Merit" on its own isn't always enough. Simply having a different background could give someone an edge in such a group when it comes to innovation.
I think skill-based immigration is important and useful, though I do think that there should be some sort of regulation to ensure that (1) immigrants are not exploited (they are paid fair wages equal to what a non-immigrant would be paid for the same job) and (2) some effort was put into recruiting from the US first (because I think US-based companies have a duty to the United States and its citizens, at least to some extent).
Why did you assume that all those PHDs have the same background? What is the objective measure of how interesting your life is compared to someone else? And how do you score how different two lives are? What does it mean that it "could" give an edge?
Sure, something in your past might help you solve a problem in the future, whether that is your entire career experience or a single phrase you remember from childhood. However that's just fact and so generic that it applies to every human being on the planet, which is why these vague claims of "diverse" backgrounds being helpful are dubious at best, and that's before getting into the much worse "diverse-based-on-appearance" nonsense.
The only real diversity they're looking for is diversity of wages (trending down).
If they wanted thought diversity, this is already a very diverse nation in every sense and a foreign passport is not a requirement.
These exploitative capitalists are destroying the country. There are young black children born here that need a good paying job too. Taxes need to go up on the same employers so their schools are good enough to get all the kids there.
We should reserve the benefits of having a company in the USA for those that want to invest and benefit from our labor.
Those companies who only exist to take the good and not pay in should be forced to move their operation to Vietnam or wherever they feel is what they're looking for.
I'm not going to be held hostage by them and want them and their downward, corrosive effect out of my country.
'Free traitors' beware, people are waking up from all political backgrounds.
I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.
Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation; and while your scenario makes sense, you're not providing 1) an actual example that demonstrates why he's incorrect, 2) any observation that a diverse group will generally produce that innovation.
> I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.
Right, and that's totally fair!
I don't know that Lynn is racist or xenophobic, and I'm unsure whether I believe that he is for sure. But I find his statement to be... curious, to say the least.
My point was that this kind of rhetoric — "Diversity isn't that important"; "Diversity doesn't lead to anything particularly good"; "Diversity doesn't do XYZ thing that people says it does" — is often common amongst racists/xenophobes who are attempting to hide their true opinion (that non-white people are inherently lesser or worse than white people). It's a way of phrasing their thoughts in a way that's not obviously offensive. People think "Yeah, I guess that makes sense!" and suddenly diversity is valued less than it ought to be.
You said that "Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation", and this is definitely true on a factual level — Lynn is merely stating that he hasn't seen such evidence. But I would argue that he may not have been looking for such evidence. Here's a hypothetical scenario: perhaps Lynn was a developer who worked in a company where the vast majority of developers and employees in general were straight white males. The products they produce are good stuff, and seem innovative enough. Therefore, Lynn concludes that "innovation [doesn't necessarily] come from diversity."
Lynn could very well just be another guy blinded by what is now commonly described as "white privilege" — essentially he is unable to see the positive effects that his being white has granted him compared to non-white people because the situations he exposes himself to do not exemplify anything else. Or he could be a racist/xenophobe who is relying on people like you to say "Well he probably didn't mean it that way" and give him a free pass.
The reason I lean towards the latter is because of his choice to utilize this opinion to then build a political platform. It seems unlikely that someone would both (a) feel that diversity is not really that important because of their background but also (b) choose to use that opinion to build a political platform. The people who build political platforms have strong convictions, more often than not. And what kind of person has strong convictions about diversity not being important?
---
Here's something else to think about. A common opinion of people like Lynn (based on what little I know from the article) is that all hiring decisions should be 100% merit-based.
At first glance, this seems totally reasonable, right? Why would we not want a meritocracy?
Consider the IQ test as a counter-example. The stated purpose of an IQ test is to measure a person's intellectual capabilities relative to an average baseline. The stated purpose has nothing to do with race or culture or anything like that.
And yet... IQ tests are almost all inherently prejudiced against large groups of people. If we go back to some of the earlier tests, they're really essentially racist. That's because the tests were written by smart white males to measure the capabilities of other people relative to those same smart white males. They gave English grammar tests to non-native English speakers. They gave math tests to people who had never been taught math. And then they passed off the results in a way that indicated that other people were less than they were.
I readily admit that in a field like computer science, it's a little easier to come up with more fair measures of ability. But I think that the current mentality is very similar to that of the "scientists" who gave IQ tests back in the day, and that concerns me greatly. I think we should focus more on inclusivity ...
> I can't claim to know Lynn's exact thoughts (Lynn being the person quoted here), but this kind of rhetoric is common among racists/xenophobes.
It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.
> You could have a room full of CS PhDs, and if they all come from similar enough backgrounds then they may all come up with the same solutions to certain problems. "Merit" on its own isn't always enough. Simply having a different background could give someone an edge in such a group when it comes to innovation.
I get what you are trying to say, though I do disagree. If you define diversity as different ethnic, cultural, etc. backgrounds, I think having a group of all-<insert group here> with different educational backgrounds (PhDs in CS, Engineering, Math, Physics, etc) would be more beneficial for innovation than having all CS PhDs but from different cultural backgrounds. I do not have any evidence to back up my claim, but I also haven't seen much evidence to prove that cultural diversity is more important than educational diversity. I would love to read more if you have any articles/studies
The best we have are case studies of non-diverse teams reliably making products that aren't very good for people who look different, despite being highly educated and crossfunctional. The very common example is the Google Photos image search labelling dark-skinned people as gorillas (and more broadly facial recognition and machine learning biases towards light skinned people in a variety of ways). But there are others I've seen.
It comes down to needing an advocate. Unless you have someone who advocates for making your products inclusive, you won't end up with inclusive products, and the best advocate is almost always an engineer who says "hey team this product doesn't work for me". (Edit: I should add, this is true for pretty much any feature, not just inclusive ones, but its also true for them)
There's no reason a machine learning team needs physics PhDs. There is a reason that same machine learning team needs dark skinned machine learning PhDs.
>It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.
Right, and given that most people don't want to explicitly state that they're bigoted, often people who are racist and xenophobic claim to hold their views because they care about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct. Perhaps you aren't, but its a worryingly common tactic.
Focus groups are not an advocate. Focus groups are not a developer with a vested interest in the feature doing what they want. Focus groups cannot be as effective.
you didnt address it, you proclaimed that products wont be inclusive (whatever that means) unless you have someone advocating for it, which you then describe as having someone who looks different.
its not like people cant understand other perspectives, its not that hard, and focus/user groups would catch all the of examples you cite, just like any QA testing catches bugs and edgecases
>you didnt address it, you proclaimed that products wont be inclusive (whatever that means) unless you have someone advocating for it, which you then describe as having someone who looks different.
And gave examples of that happening. Repeated, continued examples in the same context (facial processing).
>its not like people cant understand other perspectives, its not that hard, and focus/user groups would catch all the of examples you cite
But empirically they don't. Yes, they should. But they don't. This keeps happening, which would imply that the user groups aren't actually catching these examples, or maybe they are, but again without an advocate, a single complaint, or even some complaints, doesn't matter.
So let me ask you, who is more likely to advocate for changes to fix a bug: an engineer who is directly affected by that bug, or one who isn't?
> It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.
This is a common dog whistle argument. Especially because humans are terrible at properly judging people's impact post hiring.
> but I also haven't seen much evidence to prove that cultural diversity is more important than educational diversity. I would love to read more if you have any articles/studies
H-1B workers aren't immigrants - they're foreigners being exploited for cheap labor, driving wages down for everyone - including themselves.
I think your typical anti H-1B person would have no problem blanket granting all H-1Bs citizenship in order to equip them with the agency required to demand fair wages for themselves, which would level the playing field for everyone.
> I think your typical anti H-1B person would have no problem blanket granting all H-1Bs citizenship
I wouldn't, as long as we didn't continue to bring in immigrants targeting one specific profession such as continued H1B, and instead increased general immigrant quotas, perhaps half skilled (college educated) and half "low skill" (who have often become successful entrepreneurs here in the US).
I agree with the ads. I don't see them as being anti-immigrant. It is calling for reforms in the H1B system. We need to reform the visa system and the subsequent GC process. Why do the loud voices on the Left (&the Right) conflate everything with whatever agenda they are pushing. Merit based immigration might help me and thousands of immigrants. In the whole spectrum of immigration issues, there is a sliver that both the left and the right can agree on. Employers viewing H1Bs as lower cost dispensable workers is definitely not desired by both sides. FWIW, I am an immigrant on H1B with both bachelor's and masters degrees from US universities.
"Hire US Workers" doesn't strike you as anti-immigrant?
I don't see this as looking for constructive reform for, as an example, better conditions for H1B residents who have no mobility or leverage. Its saying "Stop H1B and stop foreigners from taking our jobs". If thats not their message, I don't know what is.
Absolutely not, I don't see it as protectionist either. If NYC had a problem with hiring native born New Yorkers because out-of-staters had comparable or better skillsets for lower prices than I would have no problem seeing a subway campaign saying Hire New Yorkers. I think at some level the barrier needs to be higher for out-of-towners wanting to move to a new place so that the city does not become unlivable for the people that have lived there their whole life or generations. The question is what is the right balance. If tech workers are hurting because they are being undercut by foreign labor I think it is unfair to point a finger and call them anti-immigrant when the system is set up in a way that corporations can abuse the system.
Anecdotally I have previously worked at Wall Street banks that used "Body Shops" with fixed term contracts to fill positions that otherwise Americans could fill. It's awesome working with smart people from over the planet, but the system needs to be configured in such a way that it does not undercut American wages. Companies need to be able to seek out specialized talent that they cannot find in their own local market, but it is abused so much that it cannot continue in its current form.
> I think at some level the barrier needs to be higher for out-of-towners wanting to move to a new place so that the city does not become unlivable for the people that have lived there their whole life or generations
There is such system for cities in China (Hu Kou) and it's a nightmare.
I guess the difference here is our views on tribalism? I don't see people who live outside of my community as "others" who I need protection from. I would gladly earn less money to experience greater diversity and give people outside my community and opportunity to join mine.
I think for me, the line might be around protecting against transience. IF you want to join my community, people who are looking to contribute and leave a lasting impact should get benefits over people who are there to make money and leave. But there isn't really a great way to monitor this.
This issue is a great example of a real-world “leaky abstraction”: we use this mental model of a market’s function, where prices are set by the interaction of supply and demand. And it’s a great model! It’s almost indispensable if you’re selling apples or buying a home.
But the IT job market, specifically in Silicon Valley, is an almost pathological failure case.
There have been hundreds of attempts to replicate the unique success of Silicon Valley across the world. Even within the US, where the regulatory environment, market size, and other confounding factors can be ruled out, they have all failed to varying degrees. The not-so-secret secret to SV’s success is now pretty well established to be very similar to an airport’s “meeting point”: It doesn’t actually matter that much where it is, as long as there are enough signs leading you there. And there needs to be just one meeting point, or the concept falls apart pretty quickly.
SV is the meeting point of tech. Throw the best people, some good universities, a lot of capital, and maybe a decade of experiments with LSD in one pot, stirr, wait, and watch it bloom.
Tech immigrants in the Valley are competing for jobs on the micro level. But zoom out just slightly, and they are a necessary ingredient of building the world’s most competitive innovation pressure-cooker.
It may be useful to make the analogy with capital: just like people are competing for jobs, VC firms are competing for deals. Yet you never see attempts by that industry to restrict foreign capital to flow into the Valley, even though they would have all the resources to make their case to legislators.
On a moral level, there is something not quite right about professionals with $60,000+ starting salaries to be antagonistic towards those using education and dedication to seek a better future among them. But even if you reject what some will surely call “SJW virtue signaling”, you should pragmatically choose to advocate for policies that help both you and your presumptive competitors: advocating for some of the practices that are close to indentured servitude will do just that.
But that’s difficult to do, in practice: are you actually advocating for their benefit? Or are you trying to drape so many gold chains around their neck that they’ll sink, I. e. pricing them out of the market? If you are in SV, you have all the possibilities to discuss these questions with those affected by them. Make sure you do: that ability is but one of the perks of living in the world’s best place to find smart people of any background.
You do realize that SV is not the entire American software industry, right? There are many H1Bs in the mid-sized Southern city where I'm from, where it's extremely difficult to find a software development job and where the economy is already struggling. It's just wrong.
As a non-US citizen, I've just got to say that I'm saddened by the vicious opposition of the HN crowd to H1B. Realistically, when I was thinking about coming to the US, H1B was one of the few valid options. But even that was ridiculously hard for someone with higher education and good professional experience. And people now lobby for closing down even that door.
It's kinda' hard when a crowd I look up to tries to block people like me from getting where they are my only fault being I was born on a different patch of land than they were.
I don't think the pro or anti immigration sides like the h1b as implemented. The anti immigration side obviously wants to limit immigration, but the pro side doesn't like the h1b system because it currently turns the h1b holders into a form of indentured servant.
The only ones who truly benefit from the h1b are companies using it to get cheap labor that can't leave. The h1b holders themselves might be getting a small benefit if the situation is better than at home, but they are not getting nearly the same value as if they were allowed to actually shop around
Speaking for myself I am against the H1B, not against immigration. My ideal scenario would be where H1B is repealed and replaced by a program that has a similar or greater level of immigration without tying to to employers.
"Even within the US, where the regulatory environment, market size, and other confounding factors can be ruled out, they have all failed to varying degrees."
I don't believe that's true. Regulations in California are quite different on a number of topics to the rest of the country. Specifically the prohibition of non-competes.
It's ridiculous to call this campaign 'anti-immigrant'. I'm very much for increasing our general skilled and unskilled immigration lottery quotas and our asylum allotment.
However, I'm very much against programs like H1B that are abused to suppress workers' salaries. Industries should not be permitted to bring in foreign workers (who are often not even citizenship track!) whenever the demand for a certain skill increases and salaries go up accordingly, all to bring salaries down to a level that's more "affordable" for those industries. It's wrong and it's anti-worker.
If the paragraph above sounds "racist" or "xenophobic" to you, I'd suggest examining the role you played in the election of Trump. It's not wrong, racist, or unethical for workers to protect their rights and their livelihood. I love diversity and immigrants, but H1B isn't designed for that, it's designed to suppress worker salaries, and also reduces employment opportunities.
The H1B doesn't directly allow worker exploitation. There are two classes of H1 workers: the vast majority who work for consulting firms/body shops and the better skilled minority that works for "product" companies in the Bay Area, New York, Seattle and other tech hubs.
The second type of worker typically has employer sponsorship for green cards and skills that allow them to find new jobs. Green cards are given out on a per-country-cap basis. Because India and China have large populations, H1 workers from those countries have to wait a long time to get their green cards. Whereas people from almost any other country can have an employer sponsored green card in a matter of 2-4 years.
Fix the green card system and you'll mostly not have many H1 workers in SV software companies (only those waiting for their green cards to be filed). It's hard to make the argument that tech workers making $200k/year are indentured servants or exploited in some way or a "cheaper" alternative to domestic talent.
That then just leaves workers from the first category, body shops, which draws most of the H1 ire for being cheap and low-skilled . I don't have a good solution for fixing it and agree that the numbers there probably need to be reduced. If no employer thinks you're worth the cost of sponsoring a GC then your skills probably aren't that great and it's a more fair system.
I vouched for your comment and made it visible, even though I disagree with parts of it.
I agree that there are two "tiers" of H1B workers. But statistically, the vast majority belong to the body shop tier. And many if not most of those workers end up in cities where the salary for tech workers are definitely not making $200,000/year, and where it's much harder to find a decent programming job.
I agree that there should be a visa program for companies who cannot actually find workers with certain skills. Actually, there is such a program (forgetting the visa name, it's for immigrants with outstanding contributions to a field). Perhaps it should be widened. But such a program can never cover companies looking for cheap programmers for CRUD apps, like the current H1B often does.
Actually, I think I agree with all but your very first sentence, which the rest of your comment doesn't seem to support. A more accurate statement would be "The H1B doesn't always directly allow worker exploitation".
No. Stop with the "if you call people out for saying shitty things, then you helped elect Trump!" meme. It's complete and utter bullshit, and all it does is serve to empower the racists to say whatever they want without being called out on.
And yes, the campaign is incredibly anti-immigrant; just look at the group pushing it. Yes, one can say that the H1B system needs reform, and that it leads to a lot of abuse without being anti-immigrant. But if your solution is to just scrap the whole thing, that is anti-immigrant.
I’m pretty far to the Left on the issue of immigration, but I totally agree with you. As far as I’ve seen, the H1-B system is a means for some US employers to keep wages and benefits artificially depressed, through abuse of the system.
> But if your solution is to just scrap the whole thing, that is anti-immigrant
That is utter bullshit. Advocating scraping H1B is not anti-immigrant, particularly when many of us are also pro-DACA, and for increasing our general immigration quotas. But it's wrong to target specific workers for wage suppression, whether that's programmers, construction workers, or field workers.
And yes, if you go around calling people "anti-immigrant" (like you just called me) and "racist" who normally should be your allies, you are helping elect candidates like Trump. Because most people won't stick around with you when you do that. They'll defect to the other side, the side that's attacking you. It's human nature.
Scrapping H1B altogether, without advocating for a replacement program that would still allow those people to come here is extremely anti-immigrant, because you're saying those people should not have a path to come here.
"And yes, if you go around calling people "anti-immigrant" (like you just called me) and "racist" who normally should be your allies, you are helping elect candidates like Trump."
Only if those people are so childish that they cannot take a bit of criticism. And if a bit of criticism is all it takes for you to do an about face and join Trump, then you never believed in those positions to start with.
> And if a bit of criticism is all it takes for you to do an about face and join Trump
I would never join an overt authoritarian like Trump, but many people did for this exact reason. People resent being denigrated with terms like "racist" and "anti-immigrant" when they're trying to have a reasonable debate about immigration reform, and not suggesting totally blocking immigrants from coming here. It's wrong, but experiences being called names will often push people in the arms of a powerful figure who promises to put the people calling them names into their proper place.
I'm all for calling out Nazis and racists by their proper name, but if you believe that opposing H1B makes you "anti-immigrant", then you've lost the thread.
"I would never join an overt authoritarian like Trump, but many people did for this exact reason."
And those people were never 'allies' as you put it; they never really cared about the problem.
"People resent being denigrated with terms like "racist" and "anti-immigrant" when they're trying to have a reasonable debate about immigration reform"
The only ones who are being labeled like that are the ones who are espousing racist and xenophobic views, or aligning themselves with those who are. If you don't like being called racist, then stop aligning yourself with racist positions. And saying, 'Just end the H1B program' is not having a reasonable debate.
"It's wrong, but experiences being called names will often push people in the arms of a powerful figure who promises to put the people calling them names into their proper place."
And those cowards should be shamed even more. They are truly the most deplorable of the deplorables.
"I'm all for calling out Nazis and racists by their proper name, but if you believe that opposing H1B makes you "anti-immigrant", then you've lost the thread."
Opposing H1B by saying that they deserve better working conditions and shouldn't be abused by shitty employers is not anti-immigrant. Opposing H1B by saying the program should just be ended absolutely is anti-immigrant.
> “Americans now fill only 29% of the tech jobs in San Jose, the cradle of Silicon Valley. Despite the demand for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workers, wages have been flat for years,” the website reads.
Is this true? It is a very important point to say the least.
> "It is important for our riders to know the ads contradict our values,” a transit spokesperson wrote via email.
Why is the transit system making political statements? What do "values" have to do with it? Have they disproved the claim(s) above, or not?
> San Francisco’s BART took a strong stance on immigration issues. Its board of directors passed a safe transit policy in June 2017, which banned federal agents from questioning riders, and stated its “commitment to stand together with the people of the Bay Area in opposing hate, violence, and acts of intolerance committed against our riding community and employees.”
Following immigration law equals hate/violence? Or perhaps agents were overstepping their authority? They need to get their story straight because it is hard to understand as a non-expert on the subject. Perhaps just poor reporting.
Painting immigration enforcement as WWII atrocity is not the most compelling argument I've ever read. Not to mention, it is not BART doing the enforcement according to the article.
Harassing someone because you think they might be "an illegal" is very much hate/violence. I guarantee you they're not going after suspected Norwegian illegal immigrants.
Again, if you don't have any facts or statistics that this is what has been happening in these cases on BART, then your conjecture is useless. Never said it was ok to harass individuals because of their ethnic group. Nationality was the subject, however.
It's obvious you have an axe to grind over racism in theory rather than what actually happened.
I've repeatedly argued here on HN that while I support immigration generally, and would like to see a good program for skilled immigration, I am generally opposed to the H1B and other employer sponsored visas.
The reason comes down to basic freedom. Immigrants should be free to choose their career path in response to personal interests and market signals, just as people born in the US. I don't think that tech employers should have the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live and work in the US. I think that is virtually guaranteed to be abused.
I think that this power on the part of tech companies has skewed the market, badly. If I refuse, for instance, to take google's white-board exam on data structures as part of an interview, google can say to me "ok, then we won't hire you", and that's fine. But what if they get to say "ok, then we won't bestow upon you the right to live and work in the US, or grant you a spot in the queue for permanent residency"?
I pretty much believe that if people with the freedom to choose their path in live don't want it to involve becoming a software developer in the valley at the salary offered under the conditions demanded by tech companies, that's the market's answer. I absolutely do not support giving google control over a shadow immigration system where they can coerce would-be immigrants as a condition of living and working in the US.
Beyond that, there have been some pretty horrendous black eyes for the program, such as Epson, Disney, and UCSF's decision to fire tech workers and have them train their replacements brought in on a visa marketed specifically for people with skills you can't find in your existing workforce.
This ad campaign, though, to me, is cringeworthy. Ever see that argument hat allows your opponents to see you the way they want to, attribute to you positions you don't hold, and avoid engaging with the arguments you've raised? This is pretty much it.
> would like to see a good program for skilled immigration
It's very difficult to build a case that we need any immigration at all, skilled or otherwise. All claims that we need high skill immigration come from either the immigrants themselves, or employers with an interest in wage suppression. It's plain fact that most "high skill" jobs are not seeing real wage growth. Ergo, there is no real shortage. Americans would fill these jobs as wages and working conditions improved.
> Americans would fill these jobs as wages and working conditions improved.
It's hardly backbreaking manual labor in a slaughterhouse though. These are 5-6 figure jobs with good benefits, in-demand skills, even social cachet these days. What are all these people doing right now that they're fine with passing up cushy jobs in tech?
"The campaign was paid for by Progressives for Immigration Reform, a DC-based group designated as “anti-immigrant” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (a civil rights nonprofit) in 2010."
Southern Poverty Law Center is actively demonizing the Left, and the Right, for anyone that dares an Orthodox dogma.
Ok, I've seen this statement quite often from all these worker unions. Can someone point me to a source showing:
1.what fraction of the job market H1B workers took away?
2.among these jobs taken, how many were taken by H1B workers that are brought in directly from other countries?
3.how many are people who went through college/master/PhD eduction in the US and followed the rules and got H1B?
It must not be hard for DHS to gather these stats, right? It would be a lot easier to counter arguments/come up with strategies using these statistics.
I am somewhat surprised that the US immigration system has not already been combined with the stack ranking philosophy to create the ultimate dehumanizing meat grinder.
My solution to the US immigration problem is to bypass portions of the existing system with a simpler labor law. Federal minimum wage for all workers inside the US is raised to the US Census median household income, divided by 2080 hours of full-time employment ($28.39/hour). If you pay your worker more than that, no one cares where they came from or how they got here. Anyone paid more is, by definition, adding value to the US economy. If the worker pays all applicable taxes on that level of income, about the only thing they can't do is vote.
If you can document and verify that your worker is a US citizen or permanent resident, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 2-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($7.92/hour). Instead of showing your tax receipt to receive government services, you show your government-issued ID.
If you can document and verify that your worker is a non-resident non-citizen, entered legally, with a valid visa, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 6-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($16.23/hour). Instead of showing tax receipts or ID cards for government services, you show your stamped passport.
This largely eliminates the incentives to displace domestic workers with lower-paid foreign workers, for the lower end of the income scale. At the upper end of the scale, worker mobility and competition encourages companies to pay foreign workers the same as domestic workers. Once they are on site, they can easily go to work for anyone else that pays more, so you can't use them to resolve the "labor shortage" that occurs whenever a company pays too little for the work.
To round it all out, you put an outflow duty on remittances, transfers, and cash posted or hand-carried out of the country, to encourage immigrants to bring their family with them, and stay (and spend) in the US, rather than sending their earnings back "home". To this end, a working immigrant can sponsor a number of nonworking immigrants commensurate with their income, and maybe even earn a subsidy for converting some of those sponsored individuals to workers. "Chain migration" is what we want, economically. It is better for the money to stay close, and circulate locally. Ideally, all the best and brightest in the world decide to come work in the US, they bring their closest dependents, and spend all their earnings on local businesses. In doing so, they provide jobs for domestic workers, because most low-skilled service businesses cannot afford to pay the premium for foreign low-skilled workers until those wages are bid up by an actual shortage in available workers.
And the best part is that you no longer need to police millions of people. Police only tens of thousands of businesses, and allow economic forces to take care of most deportations and illegal entries. The US could go back to its golden age of immigration, where the major motivators were whether the immigrants could support themselves, and whether they were carrying any contagious diseases. People that can support themselves by working will support their communities by spending.
I think the problem with your position is that, H1B holders do get paid decent salaries, but they get abused in other areas. They're the ones that don't get bonuses or raises, and they're the ones pushed to work insane hours, because otherwise they'll get fired and then deported. So one has to address not just pay, but working conditions as well.
My position de-links automatic deportations from the firings. The only people in danger of deportation are those with no visa of any kind, no visible means of support, and no job prospects. Most of the people currently on H1B have sufficient skills that I'd never want them to leave, even if there are significant gaps in their employment history.
Foreign workers would be fired as easily as domestics, but they would have just as much opportunity to get re-hired somewhere else, too. Just like locals, they'd only have to move back into Mom's basement when the money runs out.
Working conditions might improve with business competition, but in reality, businesses will illegally collude to avoid that, and that's what professional associations and unions are for.
It's sad how susceptible people here are to propaganda[1]. You can be completely against H-1B and still find these ads deplorable. Don't let malicious actors brainwash you.
The fix is easy. Mandate that every employee on a visa is paid twice the amount of the company's highest earner. Them they'll truly only bring people over when they have to. If you'll pay double the going rate, you can bring over as many as you want.
But it needs to be purely pushing wages up, not down under any circumstance. This guarantees that.
132 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadnot sure if this organization actual feels that way though...
By the way, "!==" (or "!=") means "not the same as" for you non-coders out there.
http://www.thenonprofittimes.com/news-articles/nonprofits-us...
"For-profit companies and many nonprofits come under a nationwide cap of 65,000 H-1B visas per year, plus 20,000 for an advanced degree exemption. Nonprofits are exempt from any cap if they are institutions of higher education; related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education; or a research organization."
I'm a lifelong Democrat (and socially and fiscally liberal) and I see this as an issue of social justice for American workers. Tech jobs are among the best paying jobs in the country, and if we're serious about income inequality then more (or very nearly all) of these jobs need to go to US citizens.
The US already has a generous immigration policy. H-1B is solely about access to cheap labor, and it should be ended immediately.
Why not take this one step further and make it “white Murican workers”? Or how bout “white straight males of aryan descent”?
American worker doesn't mean "white Murican worker". It means American citizen. American citizen isn't a synonym for Caucasian.
You're doing that thing that people do when we talk about H1-B. You're conflating opposition to H1-B with racism and xenophobia.
It's not racist or xenophobia to say that American workers should have first crack at economic opportunities in their own country. As noted in my original remarks, this is something we have to talk about if we're serious about addressing things like income inequality and equal access to economic opportunity.
I think it's utterly wrong to give the best economic opportunities to foreign nationals when there are imminently qualified US workers.
orly? so you're excluding GC holders as well?
> You're conflating opposition to H1-B with racism and xenophobia.
I'm conflating it with nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism and racism/xenophobia and other isms/phobias come hand in hand.
> I think it's utterly wrong to give the best economic opportunities to foreign nationals when there are imminently qualified US workers.
You think wrong.
As much as I abhor the H1B system, there is no other way for me to stay in the US. I'm genuinely curious -- what other options I may have in the US immigration system?
In a sense, you are correct that the US has a "generous immigration policy," e.g. babies born here get citizenship, family can easily sponsor relatives to come. However, for skilled workers, the system is very hostile.
I, too, care a lot about income inequality in the US. However, I think that solving that problem means targeting the low end of the income spectrum, i.e. giving people basic health care so they can think longer term, giving people access to education so they can learn to be productive. Giving tech jobs to Americans will help decrease inequality, but the effect will be so small.
This discussion isn't about how to immigrate to the US.
<< However, for skilled workers, the system is very hostile.
Well I'm sorry you feel that way. You could always return to your home country and fight to make things better there. That's what I'm doing by opposing H1-B - I'm fighting to make things better here.
<< Giving tech jobs to Americans will help decrease inequality, but the effect will be so small.
Right, if the effect is so small, then why is it so important to YOU?
The original post I made, on the other hand, is not about whether the US should attract skilled immigrants. I just wanted to clarify that the US does NOT have a generous immigrant system for skilled workers, contrary to popular perception.
Would you have chosen to get a PhD if you already had citizenship and freedom to choose your path in life? Certainly some people who already have US citizenship choose to do so, but many opt out. Personally, I don't think studying what high tech companies tell you to study and working for them for the salary they tell you to work for should be a condition of immigrating to the US, and I don't want to see our immigration system run through their HR departments.
As for universities, well, it's great that you enjoyed your PhD program - I personally didn't and left with a MS. I feel that PhD programs are actually pretty abusive of their students, and I would oppose giving them any control over the immigration system either. I do think one of the reason they haven't experienced their "reckoning" (ie., a collapse in new students to exploit) is that they have established themselves as the gate keepers for a kind of new ellis island for skilled immigrants, and they can collect a toll in the form of many years of cheap research and teaching labor.
Again, I do agree that you personally didn't have a lot of options, and you don't have much choice but to worth within the legal boundaries our laws established. This certainly isn't your fault, at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033111
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-egregious-examples-of-H1...
And the jobs where they're paid less, they're not much cheaper.
That being said, I do believe that the group behind the ads is on the "ban the program and immigrants" side.
The level of cognitive dissonance on HN every time this topic comes up is pretty impressive.
Edit: in case readers assume I'm being racist in some way: I'm a Sri Lankan national.
I don't know what the ideal "solution" is, though the authors of the ad seems to thinks it involves immigrants. :\",
I can't tell if they are intentionally doing that for nefarious reasons. Imagine seeing a "Conservatives for repealing the 2nd amendment" ad. I would assume they have some ulterior motives there.
People can be against H1-B abuse and NOT be anti-immigration.
I was shocked at Sanders amount of success, because I had grown up believing that the US public would immediately discount any associating with the word "socialist" (even by those that actually had beliefs not far from socialist views, and even allowing that Sanders positions aren't actually 'socialist' as used in Europe).
I suspect "progressive" was embraced for such reasons, but given how much I've been wrong about most anything political on the past decade+, I'd love to have actual evidence.
I'm not a Sanders supporter, but just wanted to point out that one can be both pro-immigrant (wanting to increase general immigrant quotas) and against programs like H1B that are designed to suppress salaries in specific industries.
I agree "progressive" isn't the most useful re-use of the word, but I would emphatically call it anti-nativist (or rather, pro-globalist) these days, or just "leftist".
Political labels in general are ill-fitted to static definitions. People are always stealing terms, twisting others, for demagogic needs. "liberal", "conservative", "progressive", "leftist", and "alt-right" are all pretty terrible for anything but, uhh, cultural identification, and don't indicate much of anything about you politically.
If you're against the 1%, you should be against these neoliberal immigration policies.
This is why they were so terrified of Bernie Sanders. He got a lot of support from working class whites who have been trending Republican for decades. But a figure like Sanders would derail the agenda (immigration and all) that is keeping a never ending stream of Kennedys in power.
The 'better future' people many immigrate for includes higher standards of living for similar work. They are willing to work for less because they believe citizenship is worth something. That 'better future' only exists if the country maintains this inequality by ensuring that citizens are hired first where possible.
Issues of globalization, birthplace lottery, and wealth inequality aside; these policies are in your favor if you are an employee, immigrant or not. Conversely, these policies hurt the company's bottom line by preventing hiring of the most cost efficient labor.
The backlash against this message is weaponized political correctness and/or employees speaking out against their best interests.
On review, it looks and sounds pretty dog-whistley to me. Worse than I expected.
As a Sri Lankan national, you may be missing some of the nativist overtones. "Undeserving" in particular is a loaded term in American public political discourse.
For an especially pernicious application, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen
This is a meme that still resonates with many people in America. It still resonates with me, as an ugly example of the way misleading rhetoric get deployed to stigmatize an underrepresented political class. This term immediately evokes associations like these.
Also, the color scheme and typography: seems designed to evoke a not very enlightened response. Definitely not embracing the light and airy look-and-feel I generally associate with progressive tech community.
I'd say it's designed to draw your attention. And boy it did.
If it is based on country of birth I'm way less impressed.
Where did that number even come from? Country of birth isn't something companies usually collect.
Because if this is an imbalance that needs to be corrected with policy, then does SV's gender and racial imbalance also need to be addressed similarly?
For my part I don't even agree with the ad, and I consider myself lucky to work with my H-1B coworkers. But it can be disagreed with minus the pretense that it's equivalent to painting a swastika on the side of a bus.
Well said. Just like how anti-illegal-immigration (an unremarkable position) is now synonymous with anti-Mexican.
It creates scenarios like the article where you're kneejerk labeled a racist and that's supposed to be self-evident.
I, and many others, fully support that. It's best for the US economy going forward, since protectionism is a good way to wreck an economy.
I hope you are ready for it.
Have you considered this is because the some of the loudest voices on the right have wrapped up the immigration debate with some nasty rhetoric based on race, nationality and nationalistic emotion, not policy or fact?
Do any of the statements linked below, which were well reported on, seem like productive ways to discuss immigration?
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/donald-trump-announces-pr...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9-outrageous-things-don...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/trump-slams-shithole-countr...
When racist people start talking about illegal immigrants and they refer to all people of a specific race or nationality, they effectively change the definition of the word.
I'd like to know, do you think these are reasonable, good-faith openers for debate? I don't, especially when so few on the right seem to be able to rebuke them and move on to a real discussion.
And still not an argument.
You want to change that? Then start shouting Trump and his ilk down when you hear stuff like that.
I can't claim to know Lynn's exact thoughts (Lynn being the person quoted here), but this kind of rhetoric is common among racists/xenophobes.
Diversity (in some respect) is inherently good for innovation. You could have a room full of CS PhDs, and if they all come from similar enough backgrounds then they may all come up with the same solutions to certain problems. "Merit" on its own isn't always enough. Simply having a different background could give someone an edge in such a group when it comes to innovation.
I think skill-based immigration is important and useful, though I do think that there should be some sort of regulation to ensure that (1) immigrants are not exploited (they are paid fair wages equal to what a non-immigrant would be paid for the same job) and (2) some effort was put into recruiting from the US first (because I think US-based companies have a duty to the United States and its citizens, at least to some extent).
Sure, something in your past might help you solve a problem in the future, whether that is your entire career experience or a single phrase you remember from childhood. However that's just fact and so generic that it applies to every human being on the planet, which is why these vague claims of "diverse" backgrounds being helpful are dubious at best, and that's before getting into the much worse "diverse-based-on-appearance" nonsense.
If they wanted thought diversity, this is already a very diverse nation in every sense and a foreign passport is not a requirement.
These exploitative capitalists are destroying the country. There are young black children born here that need a good paying job too. Taxes need to go up on the same employers so their schools are good enough to get all the kids there.
We should reserve the benefits of having a company in the USA for those that want to invest and benefit from our labor.
Those companies who only exist to take the good and not pay in should be forced to move their operation to Vietnam or wherever they feel is what they're looking for.
I'm not going to be held hostage by them and want them and their downward, corrosive effect out of my country.
'Free traitors' beware, people are waking up from all political backgrounds.
Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation; and while your scenario makes sense, you're not providing 1) an actual example that demonstrates why he's incorrect, 2) any observation that a diverse group will generally produce that innovation.
Right, and that's totally fair!
I don't know that Lynn is racist or xenophobic, and I'm unsure whether I believe that he is for sure. But I find his statement to be... curious, to say the least.
My point was that this kind of rhetoric — "Diversity isn't that important"; "Diversity doesn't lead to anything particularly good"; "Diversity doesn't do XYZ thing that people says it does" — is often common amongst racists/xenophobes who are attempting to hide their true opinion (that non-white people are inherently lesser or worse than white people). It's a way of phrasing their thoughts in a way that's not obviously offensive. People think "Yeah, I guess that makes sense!" and suddenly diversity is valued less than it ought to be.
You said that "Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation", and this is definitely true on a factual level — Lynn is merely stating that he hasn't seen such evidence. But I would argue that he may not have been looking for such evidence. Here's a hypothetical scenario: perhaps Lynn was a developer who worked in a company where the vast majority of developers and employees in general were straight white males. The products they produce are good stuff, and seem innovative enough. Therefore, Lynn concludes that "innovation [doesn't necessarily] come from diversity."
Lynn could very well just be another guy blinded by what is now commonly described as "white privilege" — essentially he is unable to see the positive effects that his being white has granted him compared to non-white people because the situations he exposes himself to do not exemplify anything else. Or he could be a racist/xenophobe who is relying on people like you to say "Well he probably didn't mean it that way" and give him a free pass.
The reason I lean towards the latter is because of his choice to utilize this opinion to then build a political platform. It seems unlikely that someone would both (a) feel that diversity is not really that important because of their background but also (b) choose to use that opinion to build a political platform. The people who build political platforms have strong convictions, more often than not. And what kind of person has strong convictions about diversity not being important?
---
Here's something else to think about. A common opinion of people like Lynn (based on what little I know from the article) is that all hiring decisions should be 100% merit-based.
At first glance, this seems totally reasonable, right? Why would we not want a meritocracy?
Consider the IQ test as a counter-example. The stated purpose of an IQ test is to measure a person's intellectual capabilities relative to an average baseline. The stated purpose has nothing to do with race or culture or anything like that.
And yet... IQ tests are almost all inherently prejudiced against large groups of people. If we go back to some of the earlier tests, they're really essentially racist. That's because the tests were written by smart white males to measure the capabilities of other people relative to those same smart white males. They gave English grammar tests to non-native English speakers. They gave math tests to people who had never been taught math. And then they passed off the results in a way that indicated that other people were less than they were.
I readily admit that in a field like computer science, it's a little easier to come up with more fair measures of ability. But I think that the current mentality is very similar to that of the "scientists" who gave IQ tests back in the day, and that concerns me greatly. I think we should focus more on inclusivity ...
It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.
> You could have a room full of CS PhDs, and if they all come from similar enough backgrounds then they may all come up with the same solutions to certain problems. "Merit" on its own isn't always enough. Simply having a different background could give someone an edge in such a group when it comes to innovation.
I get what you are trying to say, though I do disagree. If you define diversity as different ethnic, cultural, etc. backgrounds, I think having a group of all-<insert group here> with different educational backgrounds (PhDs in CS, Engineering, Math, Physics, etc) would be more beneficial for innovation than having all CS PhDs but from different cultural backgrounds. I do not have any evidence to back up my claim, but I also haven't seen much evidence to prove that cultural diversity is more important than educational diversity. I would love to read more if you have any articles/studies
It comes down to needing an advocate. Unless you have someone who advocates for making your products inclusive, you won't end up with inclusive products, and the best advocate is almost always an engineer who says "hey team this product doesn't work for me". (Edit: I should add, this is true for pretty much any feature, not just inclusive ones, but its also true for them)
There's no reason a machine learning team needs physics PhDs. There is a reason that same machine learning team needs dark skinned machine learning PhDs.
>It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.
Right, and given that most people don't want to explicitly state that they're bigoted, often people who are racist and xenophobic claim to hold their views because they care about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct. Perhaps you aren't, but its a worryingly common tactic.
I address this, but you seemed to ignore it.
its not like people cant understand other perspectives, its not that hard, and focus/user groups would catch all the of examples you cite, just like any QA testing catches bugs and edgecases
And gave examples of that happening. Repeated, continued examples in the same context (facial processing).
>its not like people cant understand other perspectives, its not that hard, and focus/user groups would catch all the of examples you cite
But empirically they don't. Yes, they should. But they don't. This keeps happening, which would imply that the user groups aren't actually catching these examples, or maybe they are, but again without an advocate, a single complaint, or even some complaints, doesn't matter.
So let me ask you, who is more likely to advocate for changes to fix a bug: an engineer who is directly affected by that bug, or one who isn't?
This is a common dog whistle argument. Especially because humans are terrible at properly judging people's impact post hiring.
> but I also haven't seen much evidence to prove that cultural diversity is more important than educational diversity. I would love to read more if you have any articles/studies
Sure. There's a lot.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1435-5957...
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJKBD.201...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1941152
https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/31795#
https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/6/1/9/1056407
http://amj.aom.org/content/47/2/255.short
There's literally hundreds of studies on this.
I think your typical anti H-1B person would have no problem blanket granting all H-1Bs citizenship in order to equip them with the agency required to demand fair wages for themselves, which would level the playing field for everyone.
I wouldn't, as long as we didn't continue to bring in immigrants targeting one specific profession such as continued H1B, and instead increased general immigrant quotas, perhaps half skilled (college educated) and half "low skill" (who have often become successful entrepreneurs here in the US).
I don't see this as looking for constructive reform for, as an example, better conditions for H1B residents who have no mobility or leverage. Its saying "Stop H1B and stop foreigners from taking our jobs". If thats not their message, I don't know what is.
Anecdotally I have previously worked at Wall Street banks that used "Body Shops" with fixed term contracts to fill positions that otherwise Americans could fill. It's awesome working with smart people from over the planet, but the system needs to be configured in such a way that it does not undercut American wages. Companies need to be able to seek out specialized talent that they cannot find in their own local market, but it is abused so much that it cannot continue in its current form.
There is such system for cities in China (Hu Kou) and it's a nightmare.
I think for me, the line might be around protecting against transience. IF you want to join my community, people who are looking to contribute and leave a lasting impact should get benefits over people who are there to make money and leave. But there isn't really a great way to monitor this.
But the IT job market, specifically in Silicon Valley, is an almost pathological failure case.
There have been hundreds of attempts to replicate the unique success of Silicon Valley across the world. Even within the US, where the regulatory environment, market size, and other confounding factors can be ruled out, they have all failed to varying degrees. The not-so-secret secret to SV’s success is now pretty well established to be very similar to an airport’s “meeting point”: It doesn’t actually matter that much where it is, as long as there are enough signs leading you there. And there needs to be just one meeting point, or the concept falls apart pretty quickly.
SV is the meeting point of tech. Throw the best people, some good universities, a lot of capital, and maybe a decade of experiments with LSD in one pot, stirr, wait, and watch it bloom.
Tech immigrants in the Valley are competing for jobs on the micro level. But zoom out just slightly, and they are a necessary ingredient of building the world’s most competitive innovation pressure-cooker.
It may be useful to make the analogy with capital: just like people are competing for jobs, VC firms are competing for deals. Yet you never see attempts by that industry to restrict foreign capital to flow into the Valley, even though they would have all the resources to make their case to legislators.
On a moral level, there is something not quite right about professionals with $60,000+ starting salaries to be antagonistic towards those using education and dedication to seek a better future among them. But even if you reject what some will surely call “SJW virtue signaling”, you should pragmatically choose to advocate for policies that help both you and your presumptive competitors: advocating for some of the practices that are close to indentured servitude will do just that.
But that’s difficult to do, in practice: are you actually advocating for their benefit? Or are you trying to drape so many gold chains around their neck that they’ll sink, I. e. pricing them out of the market? If you are in SV, you have all the possibilities to discuss these questions with those affected by them. Make sure you do: that ability is but one of the perks of living in the world’s best place to find smart people of any background.
It's kinda' hard when a crowd I look up to tries to block people like me from getting where they are my only fault being I was born on a different patch of land than they were.
The only ones who truly benefit from the h1b are companies using it to get cheap labor that can't leave. The h1b holders themselves might be getting a small benefit if the situation is better than at home, but they are not getting nearly the same value as if they were allowed to actually shop around
I don't believe that's true. Regulations in California are quite different on a number of topics to the rest of the country. Specifically the prohibition of non-competes.
However, I'm very much against programs like H1B that are abused to suppress workers' salaries. Industries should not be permitted to bring in foreign workers (who are often not even citizenship track!) whenever the demand for a certain skill increases and salaries go up accordingly, all to bring salaries down to a level that's more "affordable" for those industries. It's wrong and it's anti-worker.
If the paragraph above sounds "racist" or "xenophobic" to you, I'd suggest examining the role you played in the election of Trump. It's not wrong, racist, or unethical for workers to protect their rights and their livelihood. I love diversity and immigrants, but H1B isn't designed for that, it's designed to suppress worker salaries, and also reduces employment opportunities.
The second type of worker typically has employer sponsorship for green cards and skills that allow them to find new jobs. Green cards are given out on a per-country-cap basis. Because India and China have large populations, H1 workers from those countries have to wait a long time to get their green cards. Whereas people from almost any other country can have an employer sponsored green card in a matter of 2-4 years.
Fix the green card system and you'll mostly not have many H1 workers in SV software companies (only those waiting for their green cards to be filed). It's hard to make the argument that tech workers making $200k/year are indentured servants or exploited in some way or a "cheaper" alternative to domestic talent.
That then just leaves workers from the first category, body shops, which draws most of the H1 ire for being cheap and low-skilled . I don't have a good solution for fixing it and agree that the numbers there probably need to be reduced. If no employer thinks you're worth the cost of sponsoring a GC then your skills probably aren't that great and it's a more fair system.
I agree that there are two "tiers" of H1B workers. But statistically, the vast majority belong to the body shop tier. And many if not most of those workers end up in cities where the salary for tech workers are definitely not making $200,000/year, and where it's much harder to find a decent programming job.
I agree that there should be a visa program for companies who cannot actually find workers with certain skills. Actually, there is such a program (forgetting the visa name, it's for immigrants with outstanding contributions to a field). Perhaps it should be widened. But such a program can never cover companies looking for cheap programmers for CRUD apps, like the current H1B often does.
Actually, I think I agree with all but your very first sentence, which the rest of your comment doesn't seem to support. A more accurate statement would be "The H1B doesn't always directly allow worker exploitation".
And yes, the campaign is incredibly anti-immigrant; just look at the group pushing it. Yes, one can say that the H1B system needs reform, and that it leads to a lot of abuse without being anti-immigrant. But if your solution is to just scrap the whole thing, that is anti-immigrant.
Saying that you want to end immigration to the US, period, is anti-immigrant.
Saying that you want to end H1-B because you think these jobs should go to American citizens is not anti-immigrant.
Yes it is. You're saying that those people should not be able to immigrate to the US.
That is utter bullshit. Advocating scraping H1B is not anti-immigrant, particularly when many of us are also pro-DACA, and for increasing our general immigration quotas. But it's wrong to target specific workers for wage suppression, whether that's programmers, construction workers, or field workers.
And yes, if you go around calling people "anti-immigrant" (like you just called me) and "racist" who normally should be your allies, you are helping elect candidates like Trump. Because most people won't stick around with you when you do that. They'll defect to the other side, the side that's attacking you. It's human nature.
"And yes, if you go around calling people "anti-immigrant" (like you just called me) and "racist" who normally should be your allies, you are helping elect candidates like Trump."
Only if those people are so childish that they cannot take a bit of criticism. And if a bit of criticism is all it takes for you to do an about face and join Trump, then you never believed in those positions to start with.
I would never join an overt authoritarian like Trump, but many people did for this exact reason. People resent being denigrated with terms like "racist" and "anti-immigrant" when they're trying to have a reasonable debate about immigration reform, and not suggesting totally blocking immigrants from coming here. It's wrong, but experiences being called names will often push people in the arms of a powerful figure who promises to put the people calling them names into their proper place.
I'm all for calling out Nazis and racists by their proper name, but if you believe that opposing H1B makes you "anti-immigrant", then you've lost the thread.
And those people were never 'allies' as you put it; they never really cared about the problem.
"People resent being denigrated with terms like "racist" and "anti-immigrant" when they're trying to have a reasonable debate about immigration reform"
The only ones who are being labeled like that are the ones who are espousing racist and xenophobic views, or aligning themselves with those who are. If you don't like being called racist, then stop aligning yourself with racist positions. And saying, 'Just end the H1B program' is not having a reasonable debate.
"It's wrong, but experiences being called names will often push people in the arms of a powerful figure who promises to put the people calling them names into their proper place."
And those cowards should be shamed even more. They are truly the most deplorable of the deplorables.
"I'm all for calling out Nazis and racists by their proper name, but if you believe that opposing H1B makes you "anti-immigrant", then you've lost the thread."
Opposing H1B by saying that they deserve better working conditions and shouldn't be abused by shitty employers is not anti-immigrant. Opposing H1B by saying the program should just be ended absolutely is anti-immigrant.
Is this true? It is a very important point to say the least.
> "It is important for our riders to know the ads contradict our values,” a transit spokesperson wrote via email.
Why is the transit system making political statements? What do "values" have to do with it? Have they disproved the claim(s) above, or not?
> San Francisco’s BART took a strong stance on immigration issues. Its board of directors passed a safe transit policy in June 2017, which banned federal agents from questioning riders, and stated its “commitment to stand together with the people of the Bay Area in opposing hate, violence, and acts of intolerance committed against our riding community and employees.”
Following immigration law equals hate/violence? Or perhaps agents were overstepping their authority? They need to get their story straight because it is hard to understand as a non-expert on the subject. Perhaps just poor reporting.
It is very clear what this means.
I asked a question, was it overreach? You responded with a foregone conclusion.
It's obvious you have an axe to grind over racism in theory rather than what actually happened.
I've repeatedly argued here on HN that while I support immigration generally, and would like to see a good program for skilled immigration, I am generally opposed to the H1B and other employer sponsored visas.
The reason comes down to basic freedom. Immigrants should be free to choose their career path in response to personal interests and market signals, just as people born in the US. I don't think that tech employers should have the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live and work in the US. I think that is virtually guaranteed to be abused.
I think that this power on the part of tech companies has skewed the market, badly. If I refuse, for instance, to take google's white-board exam on data structures as part of an interview, google can say to me "ok, then we won't hire you", and that's fine. But what if they get to say "ok, then we won't bestow upon you the right to live and work in the US, or grant you a spot in the queue for permanent residency"?
I pretty much believe that if people with the freedom to choose their path in live don't want it to involve becoming a software developer in the valley at the salary offered under the conditions demanded by tech companies, that's the market's answer. I absolutely do not support giving google control over a shadow immigration system where they can coerce would-be immigrants as a condition of living and working in the US.
Beyond that, there have been some pretty horrendous black eyes for the program, such as Epson, Disney, and UCSF's decision to fire tech workers and have them train their replacements brought in on a visa marketed specifically for people with skills you can't find in your existing workforce.
This ad campaign, though, to me, is cringeworthy. Ever see that argument hat allows your opponents to see you the way they want to, attribute to you positions you don't hold, and avoid engaging with the arguments you've raised? This is pretty much it.
It's very difficult to build a case that we need any immigration at all, skilled or otherwise. All claims that we need high skill immigration come from either the immigrants themselves, or employers with an interest in wage suppression. It's plain fact that most "high skill" jobs are not seeing real wage growth. Ergo, there is no real shortage. Americans would fill these jobs as wages and working conditions improved.
It's hardly backbreaking manual labor in a slaughterhouse though. These are 5-6 figure jobs with good benefits, in-demand skills, even social cachet these days. What are all these people doing right now that they're fine with passing up cushy jobs in tech?
Southern Poverty Law Center is actively demonizing the Left, and the Right, for anyone that dares an Orthodox dogma.
1.what fraction of the job market H1B workers took away?
2.among these jobs taken, how many were taken by H1B workers that are brought in directly from other countries?
3.how many are people who went through college/master/PhD eduction in the US and followed the rules and got H1B?
It must not be hard for DHS to gather these stats, right? It would be a lot easier to counter arguments/come up with strategies using these statistics.
My solution to the US immigration problem is to bypass portions of the existing system with a simpler labor law. Federal minimum wage for all workers inside the US is raised to the US Census median household income, divided by 2080 hours of full-time employment ($28.39/hour). If you pay your worker more than that, no one cares where they came from or how they got here. Anyone paid more is, by definition, adding value to the US economy. If the worker pays all applicable taxes on that level of income, about the only thing they can't do is vote.
If you can document and verify that your worker is a US citizen or permanent resident, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 2-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($7.92/hour). Instead of showing your tax receipt to receive government services, you show your government-issued ID.
If you can document and verify that your worker is a non-resident non-citizen, entered legally, with a valid visa, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 6-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($16.23/hour). Instead of showing tax receipts or ID cards for government services, you show your stamped passport.
This largely eliminates the incentives to displace domestic workers with lower-paid foreign workers, for the lower end of the income scale. At the upper end of the scale, worker mobility and competition encourages companies to pay foreign workers the same as domestic workers. Once they are on site, they can easily go to work for anyone else that pays more, so you can't use them to resolve the "labor shortage" that occurs whenever a company pays too little for the work.
To round it all out, you put an outflow duty on remittances, transfers, and cash posted or hand-carried out of the country, to encourage immigrants to bring their family with them, and stay (and spend) in the US, rather than sending their earnings back "home". To this end, a working immigrant can sponsor a number of nonworking immigrants commensurate with their income, and maybe even earn a subsidy for converting some of those sponsored individuals to workers. "Chain migration" is what we want, economically. It is better for the money to stay close, and circulate locally. Ideally, all the best and brightest in the world decide to come work in the US, they bring their closest dependents, and spend all their earnings on local businesses. In doing so, they provide jobs for domestic workers, because most low-skilled service businesses cannot afford to pay the premium for foreign low-skilled workers until those wages are bid up by an actual shortage in available workers.
And the best part is that you no longer need to police millions of people. Police only tens of thousands of businesses, and allow economic forces to take care of most deportations and illegal entries. The US could go back to its golden age of immigration, where the major motivators were whether the immigrants could support themselves, and whether they were carrying any contagious diseases. People that can support themselves by working will support their communities by spending.
Foreign workers would be fired as easily as domestics, but they would have just as much opportunity to get re-hired somewhere else, too. Just like locals, they'd only have to move back into Mom's basement when the money runs out.
Working conditions might improve with business competition, but in reality, businesses will illegally collude to avoid that, and that's what professional associations and unions are for.
[1]: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2010/10/08/anti-immigran...
But it needs to be purely pushing wages up, not down under any circumstance. This guarantees that.