Probably a better link than the WSJ submission – even though I'm a subscriber, I want the facts, and the facts seem to be hard to find
As a matter of fact, I still haven't found the actual "interim final rule" (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one), so if anyone has a link, I'd be immensely grateful
One paragraph I was keen on knowing more about – and which seems pretty uncontroversial:
> Under this new rule, the petitioner will have the burden of demonstrating that there is a direct relationship between the required degree in a specific specialty (in other words, the degree field(s) that would qualify someone for the position) and the duties of the position. In many cases, the relationship will be clear and relatively easy to establish. For example, it should not be difficult to establish that a required medical degree is directly correlated to the duties of a physician. Similarly, a direct relationship may be established between the duties of a lawyer and a required law degree, and the duties of an architect and a required architecture degree. In other cases, the direct relationship may be less readily apparent, and the petitioner may have to explain and provide documentation to meet its burden of demonstrating the relationship. To establish a direct relationship, the petitioner would need to provide information regarding the course(s) of study associated with the required degree, or its equivalent, and the duties of the proffered position, and demonstrate the connection between the course of study and the duties and responsibilities of the position
This was already the case, they would ask for a request for evidence (RFE) how the degree was related. This is annoying if you e.g. studied maths and then started working in IT.
Right, that was my understanding as well, but the WSJ article said the rule "narrowed" the list of degrees so I was curious if they had limited to some specific list like STEM degrees + Law + Medical or something like that
I've seen this abused so badly though--our compliance person in HR was asking me to help write one a while back for a candidate that had a BS in mechanical engineering and no relevant work experience, claiming that a course the applicant had that taught MATLAB was sufficient experience for a role as an android dev.
"Qualified" by whom? By universities? Fortunately, in SE the code talks loud and clear, and discriminatory rent seekers need to invoke the violence monopoly to get their way.
LOL. You don't know what you are talking about at all.
I have a degree in physics but I have been programming since I was 10. From what I can tell, my programming skills and experience are no less than someone who graduated with a master in CS at a major university.
I totally agree on the sophistication--I did a ton of HPC work for my masters thesis.
But a class where you had to write some code to do basic finite element analysis or solve linear systems doesn't make you qualified work on a distributed software system.
That is insanely complicated. I know it would cost a lot of governmemt jobs to simplify, but, why not just a lottery for a set number? Or a set salary floor?
One thing I don’t understand is the ridiculously low “entry level” wage set at 17%. Those are the jobs we need to protect the most to get disadvantaged americans into the pipeline. 17% is the zone of broad mis-classification, like a ‘computer systems analyst’ that works at the library, or academic jobs, or sweat equity workers.
The complexity of the system acts a deterrent to applications. The point is is to force H-1B's to exist as a lever you start pulling when your business depends on it, not as labor force optimizations for capital-flush companies.
You can co-relate the RIN numbers(1205-AC00) in the PDF referenced above and this rule. Just a lot of FUD in the comment and WSJ article. I'd hope they do better research than what I did in 30 mins.
the latest update on first link links to a tweet that says the process is being gamed
"Some bad news - the H-1B rules showing up as withdrawn are very much alive and DHS is using a special waiver of a review step to speed up the roll out. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on that."
How’s it ineffective? The previous administration spent 8 years coming up with a terrible agreement that all candidates wanted to quit. Meanwhile the high tariffs have forced companies to leave, and sure, Biden has said that he’d end Trump’s China tariffs, but at least the many companies that have already setup shop elsewhere are unlikely to return.
For years countries have also been forced to waste taxpayer money to deliver cheap junk from Aliexpress/Wish/etc. because Universal Postal Union wouldn’t allow countries to increase postal rates from China. The previous administration was unable to do anything about it, but Trump succeeded where they failed.
Huawei has also been significantly hurt. Being banned from using Android and chips with US tech has effectively destroyed their mobile products (as their stock runs out), and countries are abandoning their 5G deals (either as a result of USA paying them to drop Huawei, or simply because China/Huawei’s reputation has dropped so much in the last four years). Trump also dragged other countries into it by e.g. requesting Meng Wanzhou’s arrest, which resulted in China arbitrarily arresting Canadian citizens.
He’s also the first US President to speak directly with Taiwan’s President since 1979, and has made the largest arms sale to Taiwan in the past few decades.
TAIPEI Act and Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed under his administration, and Hong Kong lost its special status.
If judges hadn’t temporarily stopped Trump’s executive orders then TikTok and WeChat would also be banned now (it’s absurd that the west for decades have put up with China blocking western companies from their markets while freely allowing them into our markets).. hopefully the bans will go through, and hopefully TikTok/WeChat will just be the first of many.
Trump is also one of the few world leaders who continuously remind the world that China are responsible for the pandemic, and China still won’t allow WHO/others to investigate the origins in Wuhan.
Trump has also been pushing for China to lose WTO developing country status, which will surely happen if he’s re-elected.
As a liberal I disagree with most of Trump’s policies, but I could really go on-and-on about his effective/positive actions towards China.. you could make a solid case that Trump in four years has done more to stand up to China than the rest of the western world combined (including the previous administration) has done in the past decade.
If your talking about the First Step Act that was a bipartisan bill that passed in the Senate unanimously. Semi props for embracing it, but this gets into a bigger issue of whether an administration can take credit for the bills passed underneath them.
There's polarizing issues, but actually a lot of issues I find myself agreeing with lately. Anti-war sentiment is a big one (I love hearing about troop draw downs in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria).
And Trump accuses the IC community of unconstitutional spying on politicians and Americans, the same thing technorati have been saying (at least until 2016, when it became cool to trust the FBI and CIA).
Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.
"Body shops" like Infosys and Tata Consulting that import thousands of H1Bs under borderline fraudulent applications, and then underpay these employees.
Just a random link, but the contours of the problem:
H1B visas are in theory intended to be awarded only when there is a shortage of some specialized labor and it is not possible to find enough qualified candidates within the country. If a person hired under that premise ends up making a “pretty normal” wage it’s a pretty clear sign that the process is being abused.
I work for a company that's about 30th in terms of H1B's. All around me, I see degreed engineers -- many with their Masters -- doing clerical work that a sharp high-school graduate could do. I'm not talking about a few. I'm talking about dozens. There's nothing about what they're doing that requires specific engineering knowledge. They only have to be conversant about what the actual engineers are doing. So the effect is 2-fold: the fact that his arrangement exists puts downward pressure on wages for the skilled jobs, but it also takes great opportunities away from people who would have gotten those jobs a few decades ago.
Sure, there are low paid H1B workers, but why is that necessarily a problem? Your link shows no evidence that they depress the wages or employment of native-born workers.
In fact, there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration:
I'm fully supportive of massively more immigration - I believe it's a net economic positive and a moral imperative.
At the same time, if a program is designed to bring in 'exceptional talent' but is really just importing mediocre drones from a single country, that's not really serving the purpose of the program.
Let's fix H1Bs and then work on more equitable ways to allow other forms of beneficial immigration.
Aside from all of the evidence that both countries benefit in these arrangements as people skill up and often move home later on, letting free citizens choose where to maximize their livelihoods is a moral imperative, yes.
>Aside from all of the evidence that both countries benefit in these arrangements as people skill up and often move home later on
Can you please provide this evidence? I want to be educated on that. I thought that returning home is really rare for these people, and it does not compensate negative effects of the "brain drain" at all.
>letting free citizens choose where to maximize their livelihoods is a moral imperative, yes
People should be free to pursue whatever they want, no questioning that. However, elites of the US create such conditions that the best career path for the people from less fortunate countries is to move out, break cultural bonds and, probably, make the countries that they moved from, even less fortunate in the end - is it really moral?
I think that the most moral option would be increasing investment and creating child companies in countries where these people move from, creating nice jobs outside of the US, so nobody would have to move anywhere.
As a data point, a consultancy I used to work for competed directly with Infosys, Tata, and other H1B shops for tech contracts (mostly BA and PM work). I can personally guarantee you that hourly rates were artificially reduced as a result at multiple companies, which negatively impacted salaries and bonuses of American workers.
Keep in mind that most economic analyses of this topic ignore the direct competition aspect of the contract labor market impacted by H1Bs and instead focus on salaried FTEs at the businesses that contractors provide services to.
H1B here myself but someone who moved here during one of the years that had surprisingly lax demand for H1B visas. I moved here for a startup as the first engineer with a pay much lower than what I could have gotten in the market. It was purely because there was no demand for H1B that year that I got in. Every year since then has been the top 3 Indian companies stuffing the applications. However, the current rule change would shift the balance from consultancies to big tech companies. Startups do need talent too and there are people like me who are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for a reasonable equity. The winners of this rule change would be big tech companies - not necessarily the US in general.
What the US needs is a point based system with automatic green card in x number of years. This would allow the government to prioritize "desirable qualities" (education, age, salary and whatever you want to optimize for) and balance them out (e.g, I could get points for my education instead of my salary and still qualify). The automatic green card option would then open up the employees to work anywhere they want instead of the company that sponsored them thereby preventing wage suppression.
H1B and immigration shouldn't be used interchangeably. I think immigration should be easier, but I highly doubt that when the company I work for uses hires junior web developers with H1B visas for low pay based on the area, that they couldn't find a single native to fill the position, especially since it's always been a fully remote position.
> there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration
I actually read through two of the "proper economic analyses" in that reddit link since I am interested in this.
One of them wasn't an economic analysis but a summary article: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/contributions-high-.... Almost all of this article is talking about all of the problems with trying to identify the net effects of immigration and how difficult it is.
It has quotes that directly refute what you are saying such as:
"Immigration has complex, sometimes ambiguous impacts on natives. The benefits to the US economy from high-skilled immigration can be accompanied by negative effects for certain groups of natives and positive effects for other groups." Which is the opening summary of the section on effect on natives. Also,
"Borjas found that a 10 percent increase of immigrants with PhDs in a certain field lowered the wages of native born graduating with doctorates in those same fields around the same time by 3 percent"
"Researchers have also examined the degree to which high inflows of foreign-born students affect the educational opportunities of native students. Borjas finds some evidence that an inflow of foreign-born students displaces native, white male students in elite institutions"
Clearly, the biggest effect of immigration is on previous immigrants (currently 30% of California): "Foreign-born workers already here sustain the largest losses in real wages, losing between 17 and 20 percent of their real wage over 14 years."
It just so happens that natives (specifically who are college educated) tend to have complimentary skill sets in the years mentioned.
"Except for workers with some college education, whose real wage gain is around 6 to 7 percent, no other group experiences real wage gains or losses larger than 4 percent. This implies that even with the moderate costs of moving, in the range of 5 to 10 percent of their yearly income, native workers would not move (out of or into California) in response to immigration."
That is the support you have that "native-born workers benefit from immigration". It helped college educated natives and the rest of the population wasn't negatively affected enough to leave California. And that's based on migration data ending in 2004 and Californians have been leaving in record droves since then.
Of course, it doesn't mention any thing about the rest of the effect on natives such as cost of living increases due to crowding, strain on institutions (do you want to send your kids to an average California school?), unwanted changes in culture and politics, decrease in social cohesion, decreases (or lack of improvement) in working conditions, increases in inequality or any of the other consequences.
The average US male wage has barely moved since the 1970s during a time of unprecedented levels of immigration. If immigration is such a net benefit to native-born worker, where did those improvements go?
One issue is that the scattershot visa applications from body shops crowd out applications from employers who want one specific, highly skilled person.
A majority of H1B visas are currently issued to relatively low paying consulting firms, who are then hired by big enterprises in place of their more expensive technical employees. This isn't supposed to be legal - you're not allowed to hire H1B employees if an equally qualified American could have filled their role - but due to the specifics of how the program is administered you can often pull it off with that kind of arms-length deal.
"Bottom" performing FTE's are let go as part of annual stack ranking, only to be hired by staffing agencies, and contracted back to large tech companies.
It's a way for tech companies to retain people who are necessary to perform the work, but at reduced wages.
You're bound to the employer that sponsors your visa. Lose your job? You're effectively deported.
Your employer has... well, a power imbalance over you, to put it nicely.
I'm not sure how the proposed changes will play out for American workers. Theoretically, treating H1B workers better could benefit American workers: there is less incentive to callously replace them with underpaid H1B workers. On the other hand, American workers will face increased competition, it seems to me.
Do you think the possibility of finding a new job makes H1B workers feel any more capable of standing up for their beliefs at work and maybe saying "No" when asked to build something evil?
It may not eliminate it, but I'm sure it improves the situation compared to not being able to change jobs at all. I originally came to the US on an H-1B, and had no trouble transferring the visa to a new employer.
If you have to go back to UK or Canada that is no big loss
If, on the other hand you have to go back to China or India
or AFrica then your entire family is #$@$#$%
Canada and the UK are nice places, but it's still a huge blow to have to pick up your family and move back to another country.
Source: I'm American, so I don't know this pain personally, but I was very close with a Canadian co-worker who was here on a work visa. He uprooted his wife and kids from Canada to come and work here. When our workplace soured, he had to do it all over again. Uproot his wife and children again, tell his children to say goodbye to their friends again, buy a house again, etc. Not easy!
> Your employer has... well, a power imbalance over you, to put it nicely.
I can't help but think of this any time I see an HN comment about some questionable surveillance-ad-tech, usually saying that engineers should just refuse to build that stuff.
You're tied to a pool of employers and have to get government permission to transfer employment. Your employer has an enormous power over you, with little recourse on your side.... as if employers didn't have enormous power over their employees as is.
Will an executive order (which I assume this is) actually make any difference?
Doesn't it take an act of congress to make any serious headway here?
Personally, I was an H1B a 4.5 years before Trump convinced it was time to leave. I was in the bay area and handsomely overpaid.
I have no personal experience of it being abused, but I'm obviously privileged, having worked at reputable tech companies and coming from reasonable wealthy european country.
(I was never as scared of loosing job or healthcare as my American co-workers, because I would just move home, and have access to healthcare if I lost my job)
But I will say, that the lottery aspect of the H1B adds a lot of uncertainty that might discourage me from living in SF again. So lifting the caps and/or stemming abuse might be a good idea.
This is a rule in the Federal Register. So it's basically like law. It's essentially how the executive is interpreting the laws that congress has passed.
There is a rule that says a new President can automatically overturn all rules made in the last 90 days of the previous administration, but we're before that deadline, so this is pretty much a done deal.
If the next admin wanted to change this, they have to go through the long and arduous rule making process again.
>If the next admin wanted to change this, they have to go through the long and arduous rule making process again.
Does that also apply to rules that didn't go through that process but were rushed through with the interim final rules process? Doesn't sound logical to me.
While such action can make a difference, such as whether to put kids in cages or not, it can't really do much. You can't use it to change quotas, set a minimum wage, or allow H1B holders to change job.
So calling it an "overhaul" is perhaps a bit much. It's more like a tweak that mitigates some of the abuse and issues with the system.
Genuine question, what type of fraudulent abuse are you referring to? I see this vaguely mentioned a lot without much to back it up, but I'm open to the idea that it happens.
From my own anecdotal experience, I'll admit I have found the rules to be a little ridiculous. Company needs to post a sign in the office advertising the role to any Americans, wait a certain amount of time, and only then can offer it to an H1-B candidate. Of course nobody was following the spirit of those rules, but I wouldn't call that fraudulent abuse. These were companies that needed hires and had a genuinely hard time finding people that would pass our interviews and then accept our offers. We really didn't discriminate at all in the hiring panels between American and H1-B candidates (I think we were probably supposed to discriminate more than we did, and supposed to explicitly prefer Americans?), and it had nothing to do with saving money on salaries.
I recognize that the Bay Area tech boom is very unusual in how competitive it is (was?), but H1-Bs are technical visas and it's often tech companies that get the blame for abusing the system.
The abuse I've seen most often is that companies hire H1B workers and then contract them out to other companies, and the H1B worker can't change employers, and gets to watch most of what their time is billed for go to the original contracting company which often misleads the people about what they'll find when they arrive.
The worker ends up with very few choices, and the companies at which the workers are working are likely overpaying for what they're getting. The only one truly happy is the "placement" company that holds the workers' contracts.
Another semi-fraudulent practice I've seen too often: find an H1B worker for a position you want to fill at a sub-US labor rate, then write a very specific job posting that perfectly fits that one H1B worker and no one else, and post the job only on the company website where no one will find it. Congratulations, you've just "proven" that you can't find an American worker to do this job, so you bring the H1B worker over as basically an indentured servant. In reality, there were plenty of American workers who could have and would have taken the role if it was represented properly and actually paid a competitive market salary.
The higher pay seems like an overall positive change to reduce the prevalence of "body shops" and so that H1-Bs aren't an easy way for companies to lower overall pay rate. I'm not sure that narrowing degree qualifications is a win; high-skill immigration is a significant boon to America's economy, and I think ability to do the work, and American company willingness to pay above-rate salaries (legally mandated now to 95th percentile for the highest-skill work) ought to be enough signal, and having a particular degree is not as useful a measure at that point. I know plenty of people who are incredibly qualified in terms of industry experience who don't have advanced degrees.
I've been pretty impressed with Taiwan's Gold Card work visa program, where you either need certain educational achievement qualifications, or need to be a highly-paid employee in specific fields — but not both. And it's not tied to a specific employer, which I think helps negotiation (and thus also helps domestic workers, by raising labor prices). I wish America's immigration program worked more like that — specific quibbles about what exactly the rate should be aside; Taiwan's is certainly too low to use for the US — since I think encouraging high-skill immigration would help much more than it would hurt: high-skill immigrants tend to generate more jobs, and also tend to pay more in taxes than the services they receive, meaning it's a win-win where immigrants can get the jobs they want in the country they want to be in and Americans end up with more jobs available and more government services per (American) tax dollar spent.
What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is the extraordinary time it takes to approve or reject a greencard petition. In many cases it takes years - or even over a decade or more. That's insane. People bring their spouses here, they have kids who are born and go to school here, and all along the way their immigration status is uncertain. And meanwhile they are tied to whatever job they're in. It's insane.
Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.
It’s insane because it’s a kludge. The US doesn’t really have a general purpose skilled immigration visa. The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.” It was never designed to be a payday to permanent residency, because the grand bargain of the law in the 1960s was that it wouldn’t increase immigration.
They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
The H1-B visa is a dual intent visa. There is no announ inc immigration intent with a wink. It's literally written into the law that it is ok to do so. I won't argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but simply saying it's a temporary work visa and leaving it at that is inaccurate at best and disingenuous at worst.
There should be both. I am German, work for an American company. It shouldn't be difficult for me to move to an US office for some time and return back home. Of course, there is some likelyhood, that if I stayed at a place for more than a coumple of months, that I want to stay at that place long term, and this should be possible without too high bareers.
Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
> The H1B visa is a temporary worker visa. There is this whole legal fiction where, when you get one, you have to announce non-immigrant intent with a wink, then once you’re here you say “I just now changed my mind and I want to stay here, can I get a green card.”
This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa.
The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
H1-B is dual intent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent so there is no winking required. H1-B can last for 6 years (can be extended beyond that too but let's not get into that) and I think 6 years should be enough for one to get the GC.
There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic:
For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence.
Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
>For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
I don't think this is right. Section 214(b) indeed says that there is a presumption of immigrant intent, but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
> but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
In practice, no, but that's not what "dual intent" legally means.
> It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
I did not say anything about "could not ever". I guess you could maybe interpret it this way, but if you actually followed the citation I gave, it would have been clear to you. What I meant was that the section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis of "dual intent" policy, explicitly amends section 214b of INA, to remove permanent residency application as acceptable evidence for the purpose of establishing immigration intent in context of section 214b.
I'm surprised how different this is from all the secondary information out there, but ok, you're right. Thanks for the info. (I said "could ever not", not "could not ever", but that's a moot point now.)
it is not only due to quotas. there is BS request for evidence as well as random changes.
for example, they added some disease to the process (I believe gonorrhea or syphilis) and then the exam I took entering the process wasn't sufficient at the time they actually looked at the exam. then it took them a long time to send that notice, then I got the new exam and the clock started again adding around 6 months from the "we need you to test for a disease that can be easily treated if you had it" to the approval.
this is with highly paid lawyer support.
EB immigrant visas take ages and then there's the archaic process of some poor schmuck sitting in an USCIS office asking the questions and checking boxes on a form that you submitted a second time...
From the p.o.v. of the person actually doing this, it takes years from the moment you apply to the moment you get the decision. This is what needs to change.
why would your comment be downvoted? do downvoters think you are lying, or do they think its a good thing that green cards take so long?
what you say is correct.
as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life.
look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check.
but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.
You mean... Like Singapore(7days), Lithuania(15days), Ireland(4 weeks), Netherlands and most other European countries - 90 day mandate.
My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document.
My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
Are you talking visa or permanent residency? Those are very different.
7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.)
Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.
For Engineers and Doctors from India, its takes more than 20 years to get Green card now. Its because of the arcane country quota system which assigns the same numerical quota for each country regardless of population, so India and Monaco get the same number of Green cards.
This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
quota alllow everyone in the us per quota. hence the name. i don't see what is racist. i'd say it is fair. the problem is that india is just too big and there the dream of any indian studying IT is sadly to emigrate to the us to work there. i wish india would be a nice place to work and live so that millions dont feel the need to leave.
Applicants from Oceania have 5% to 10% chance of winning the green card lottery in a given year. India is like 0.01 percent or something silly like that.
IIRC it's based on the number of immigrants from each country, not their race? As an example, a black person from Jamaica will have a much easier time than someone from India or China simply because there are fewer applicants from their small country.
If there were more people from New Zealand than India trying to apply, it would be harder for New Zealanders.
I've lived aboard and had residency in two other nations. The overall amount of people applying is outrageous. That's the real problem. 22,000,000 apply for 50,000 green cards.
Btw this thing is based on country of birth and not country of citizenship. So basically even a person who is a European citizen and born in India cant get a green card before 20 years. Does that change your view?
What makes the immigration process in the US truly horrific is that it is racist. When the law was passed, the grand compromise was that it would not change the racial makeup of the country. So there are country specific (which is really just race specific with a wink and a nod) quotas for different countries. This means if you are from Sweden or Ireland, it's actually pretty easy to get a green card. There is even a green card lottery where you can apply in Ireland and get a green card and get one just because you entered because there aren't enough immigrants from there to balance things out. But if you are from India, it's going to take a decade or more.
Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
But in practice, is the US supposed to track down census numbers for the countries around the globe? So many countries, dont even have much of a process
and the main point is : the govt exists for the well-bein of its current citizens, not potential ones.
The intent of the law wasn't racist, it was to prevent e.g. Indian (or some other large demographic) candidates from taking all of the available quota.
The pay level still isn’t high enough. Minimum pay of about 170k in San Jose for a software engineer? That’s not a specialist, that’s average for a small startup.
According to this[1], with 140k you're in the top 5% Americans, so you're not far off... but regulating immigrant's salaries on a regional basis seems unfeasible, as they're free to move anywhere in the country AFAIK, just like any other US resident.
Why is it unfeasible? Companies give cost of living raises - and pay cuts - depending on where someone lives in the US. If companies can figure this stuff out, why can't the government? Don't companies get their cost of living data from government agencies anyway?
As someone who lives in a different state I object to someone who is otherwise equal in ability to me earning more for the same work (I have personal reasons to not want to move to CA). I understand why companies do it (only those who have a reason they need to stay in CA - why google doesn't move doesn't make sense), but I will object to my government encouraging the situation even more. My representative needs to be sensitive to that.
This isn't something special to the US, though, and i'm pretty certain if it was changed so that folks in Indiana made the same money as California, folks in California would make worse wages.
The truth is, though, that folks getting paid well in Indiana can generally live better on the lower wage simply because things are that much cheaper. Perhaps you wish to subsidize living in the more expensive areas and increase the safety net?
Maybe you should place some pressure on companies to move headquarters into more affordable places. Lots of places have international airports, after all, so that shouldn't hinder folks much.
Do you think your representatives gives two farts about what folks in a different part of the country are paid so long as folks in his or her district are living well enough? Or should folks in the area living well be enough of a concern?
Do you have solutions for these things that are fair to the folks needing to live in the expensive areas (poor folks have little to no choice in the matter)?
This is why I don’t work for a startup. However, I suspect the average candidate doesn’t understand the equity well enough to properly value it. Therefore it would be a waste to give away a bigger chunk of the cap table to those employees if it doesn’t save the company much cash on salaries or attract a lot more talent. Only for the subset of roles where you’re trying to hire people who understand how a company runs do you have to give a serious equity stake, because those are the people who know how to value it.
It's more like, employees have lost their negotiating power, so they don't bother to negotiate it anymore, so there's no reason for them to understand how it works.
If the labor pool shrinks a bit, their negotiating power will rise and this will solve itself.
I don’t think this fully explains the dynamics of the situation. Even if you can perform well enough in the interview process to get paid extremely well by big tech, you probably can’t get a comparable amount of equity from a startup. It’s not that the labor market doesn’t value your skills - startups just don’t pay market price.
I would like to challenge the notion of "market price."
I feel that it is safe to say that in different companies, a developer produces different value for the company. For someone working at a Big Tech company, a single developer - even a low level one - can produce substantial value for the company. On the other hand, working at a small company, the entire company may not have as much revenue as the low level developer produced at the Big Tech company.
Should a developer at a small company that is... say... optimizing routes for auto parts delivery for a handful of clients be compensated at the same "market price" as someone who is working on optimizing AWS?
My point is that not every company - even in the Bay Area - can afford to pay "market rate" for everyone.
Its not that the labor market doesn't value the skills, it's that the labor produced isn't worth the same. I believe that it is foolish for a software developer who to expect the wages of someone who is working in Big Tech at all other companies (and it would be foolish for the company to pay an employee more than the value that they're creating for the company).
If you're incredibly good, you might be able to negotiate 20-40% higher offer than the initial offer, but beyond that they'll just reject you and go with another candidate who might literally be worth millions of dollars less and be a ridiculously worse deal.
Engineering management is simply not operating according to standard economics textbook definitions of rationality. It feels more like cartel economics.
I believe a startup of 50K coders also can create something of value for humanity and be commercially successful. It will just happen in another part of the world. It's up to the US where they want to draw a line.
Agreed. I'm far south and therefore nowhere near London and this is what I'm seeing. If you are in specific fields, some companies are paying £70-80k+, but you need to have proven skills in the fields they are looking for.
The other thing to take in to account with the US figures - taxation. I believe the US tax system taxes the individual directly, where as in the UK we are generally PAYE and taxed at the point we are paid our salary. Maybe someone in the US can confirm that?
>I believe the US tax system taxes the individual directly, where as in the UK we are generally PAYE and taxed at the point we are paid our salary. Maybe someone in the US can confirm that?
I've lived in the US. Your taxes are withheld from your pay. Unlike in the UK, everyone has to fill in a tax return - even if all of their income comes from a regular job. You might be due a small refund or owe a small amount at the end of each tax year, but fundamentally you're taxed as you go throughout the year.
Gross. In general you couldn't really quote net salaries in the US as your taxes partly depend on which state you live in. So for example, if you work in DC, you could plausibly be living in either DC, Maryland or Virginia, and your taxes would differ accordingly. You'll also most likely have a choice of different health and pension plans at different costs.
Almost always gross. When you hear "I make $150,000" in 99.9% of cases that will be the number that are hired at. For that exact number I would expect the actual annual cash in hand to be close to $80,000.
Note that is VERY individual circumstances specific. The largest chunk of that missing $70,000 went to taxes at the local, state, and federal level. Easily $45,000 of it is gone in taxes. There is also a common game of moving pre tax dollars around that benefit you, but not exactly the same way a dollar in hand would.
The two most common are 401ks (typically 4-8% of gross depending on employee matching) which is money that goes into a retirement account for you and you can't touch it until you are old (55 or 65 or something, not up to date on the numbers there) without incurring both a significant penalty of 10% but also having to pay tax on it the year you withdrawal it. There are a few hardship exclusions like medical, first time home buying etc, where you can dip into this untaxed pool of money but for the most part can't touch it until retirement.
The other common pre tax exclusion is an HSA where you get to put pre taxed dollars into an account that can only be used to pay for medical expenses. Essentially every high dollar professional in America takes full advantage of this offering as we all expect to have out of pocket medical expenses and it makes no sense to pay them with taxed dollars instead of pre taxed dollars.
> Essentially every high dollar professional in America takes full advantage of this offering as we all expect to have out of pocket medical expenses and it makes no sense to pay them with taxed dollars instead of pre taxed dollars.
Not really. HSAs are common for sure, but people with high incomes often can afford lower deductible policies. You can't open an HSA unless you have a high-deductible health insurance policy.
I've done it both ways, and I personally prefer paying more for a better insurance policy and not having to bother with HSA paperwork.
It's not the US as a whole, it's specifically Silicon Valley and San Francisco where you have this ridiculous concentration of huge software companies (all of FAANG except Amazon have their headquarter there) and venture capital firms (and thus startups), generating an extreme demand for developers.
But of course, that demand drives up salaries across the entire USA to some degree.
Product managers are making 80-100% of what a software engineer makes. So 150-200k even at startups, and upwards from there at FANG.
Graphic designers are making 70-100%.
Even roles like "Human Resources Manager" are making 150k, because they're automatically "management", even though it's just a Bachelor's degree in Business and not a highly competitive role.
"Business analysts" (Excel and specialty tool power users) are making 100k+. No hard STEM degree or brutal interviews required.
However, it really is just in a handful of major US tech hubs that the pay is this high in tech. Outside the major tech hubs the high paying professions are the traditional ones... doctor, dentist, lawyer, etc.
The 'hard STEM degrees' and 'brutal interviews' are irrelevant if the industry is functioning: are the people in these roles are able to perform them and are the companies profitable whilst able to pay high salaries.
If they are, there's nothing wrong with this situation.
Most businesses like lawyers, finance etc that are largely human based not capital based pay out almost everything to the workers. Often they were structured as partnerships. Even Goldman Sachs was a partnership for a long time until capital requirements increased.
this is partially offset by the cost of living. for example you would pay roughly double for things such as rent and childcare in San Jose compared to Auckland (which is already much more expensive than the rest of NZ)
Right, while I don't live in that area, I do live in an area with a similar cost of living (Key West), rent on a decent home running near or above 3K and an apartment / townhome in the Key West Oldtown area can run up to 4K. Average dine out meal runs around $30 a plate and fine dining in the area of $50 a plate and up. Don't get me wrong at SV salaries they are not living hand to mouth but when you see those rates from a different cost of living area it can seem like ridiculous numbers but the reality is $150-$170K in that high of a COL area gives you enough to get a decent apartment in a reasonable commute distance, some pocket money for entertainment, healthcare, the ability to put away for a rainy day and it you live modest enough to pack away some retirement. The reality is that should be the base standard for a job. People should earn enough to provide for themselves, and secure their future. To me the fact that, that is no longer the norm in the US is what is shocking. An honest days labor, should command and honest wage, and to me those are the minimum things that should be secured in an honest wage. I see people down here in the FL keys working 2 jobs as the norm to make rent and to pay for the here and now, they cannot even fathom healthcare, rainy-day fund and retirement is not even on their radar. These are not people working restaurant or construction jobs, I see many "professional" jobs moonlight as bartenders, etc.
I did the math though and I would likely be clearing 100k in the bank even with the high cost of living there.
Auckland is pretty expensive, and senior engineers here make a lot more than regular 9-5 jobs but I'm not remotely close to clearing that much money in a given year.
Relatively speaking you'd be having the same free cash flow proportionally. It's just that 10% of NZ$100k and US$400 is 4x the difference in absolute terms.
You could go to Uber's Pittsburgh office and have a lot of money.... but you'd be in Pittsburgh...
If you don't care about quality of life - there are great options world wide to make a lot of money. I would suggest getting into corruption, as an easy way of making millions fast.
>Relatively speaking you'd be having the same free cash flow proportionally. It's just that 10% of NZ$100k and US$400 is 4x the difference in absolute terms
I just don't think that's true. For two reasons:
1) I earn the equivalent of just under the median household income on my own, and 100% of my income is eaten by our expenses. It's really my wife's income that's left over after all that has been paid for, so none of mine is spare.
2) There must be hundreds of thousands of people who live in the bay area that don't work at FAANG and don't make anywhere near that, but still manage to live on the city somehow. It's not like if you make $360k you're barely scaping by, right!? Else basically everyone else would be homeless there.
I ran the numbers and I'd be able to save a lot more.
If you think that "crunching the numbers" is an appropriate way of comparing the cost of living in two completely different environments - you must be insane.
If you have the fiscal responsibility and live a completely ascetic lifestyle - you can easily save most of your free cash flow. But that is an extraordinary person.
If you are a reasonable person and are going to actually live in SF - you have to adjust your expenses accordingly. Your rent/mortgage, your shopping trips, your recreational activities, etc... and you realise that your social outing costs you $200, instead of $30... and you don't have the ability to host it at home, because all of your friends live 2-4 hours away or you have a $5000 p/m home in a convenient location.
The reason why I say this - I lived in Helsinki, Dublin, London, NYC, San Francisco, Palo Alto and back to NYC. Me and my husband are both SWE, well paid. I literally went through the change of attitudes towards "living a life".
>If you think that "crunching the numbers" is an appropriate way of comparing the cost of living in two completely different environments - you must be insane
I'm under no impression the lifestyle would be the same. Just that it ought to be possible from what I can tell. Where I live in my home country I'm optimizing for a reasonable level of comfort / quality of life. If I'm dragging myself halfway across the world for the top salaries in the industry, I'm not optimizing for comfort or quality of life, I'm optimizing for as much savings as possible over a short duration.
Unfortunately the value of going to Bay Area is long term, not "short duration". It's not just - I'm going to SF for a project and a payout. If you're moving there - it's going to be for a few years.
Also - if you're "dragging myself halfway across the world", it limits your ability to optimise efficiently. You don't have an easy fallback. (I'm from Lithuania and live in NYC. Optimising my living arrangements was not a possibility for a long time, because there's no family or LPR status)
Basically. Check levels.fyi and see for yourself. It's only silicon valley "FAANG" companies that pay $400k total compensation for senior engineers, but principal / staff engineers at the big firms make up to a million.
AWS is spinning up a dev team in Auckland though teaming up with Vector on some IOT stuff in the energy space apparently though. I would hope the comp for those positions would be at least $140k NZD, but still that's nowhere near what the fellas over at Google HQ are making for writing protobufs all day.
It's not "US", it's particular regions. San Francisco Bay Area pays a lot, while Cleaveland(OH) pays a third of that.
Globally it's the hotspots that pay a lot - London, Dublin, Moscow, Amsterdam, etc.
But then the reason why the salaries have skyrocketed - is just lack of supply.
I'm planning on leaving the field at 36 already. Moving to doing gardening work and running an olive grove... and there's no one that can replace me in NYC at a snap of their fingers. I bet there are people globally, but getting to work in US is a PITA.
Cost of living is radically different in some places. That and software engineers are significantly underpaid in NZ (and Australia) relative to their economic output.
It's crazy how average pay differs from even expensive, technology and knowledge heavy parts of Europe. Where I live, Stockholm Sweden, this would be a very well paid person. Even more so for families, considering it's one income and not two for the household.
In 99% of the US by area, $170k would be a very good salary for a software engineer too.
Silicon Valley is a statistical outlier compared to the US as a whole for salaries and for cost-of-living.
Most of the software engineers in the US don’t work in a place with $170k salaries and $1m+ homes. For most of the US, salaries are 1/2 of that and homes are 1/4 of that.
I remember slightly earlier on in my career as an intermediate level engineer earning $70k living in an area (not in US) where the median house price is $1m+
That's a large reason of why I've stayed in the Phoenix area, though I think about leaving every single summer. The engineering pay is about 2/3 of SF area, give or take, but cost of houses are around 1/4 or so. It's rough thinking of a lateral move in salary, or not enough of a boost to overcome cost of living differences.
Of course housing costs have gone up significantly relative to pay in the past decade, so who knows.
I know a guy who outsourced some stuff to a dev in Nepal. The guy was making 3x the average for his area.
SWE is highly paid throughout the world, but I have noticed there are some geographic areas where it actually doesn't seem to command a higher salary than average.
Salaries are driven by a lot of supply side dynamics, it's less about the overall economic output of the employee and more about the cost of replacing them.
"…to lower overall pay rate."
What's with this nationalism and view human value?
Just because a person was or wasn't born in a certain place, something they had no ability to affect, they have more or less right to a certain job with a certain salary in a certain place?
Looking at it from the other perspective of the individual who can get a job, they are probably not lowering their salaries, but rather significantly increasing it.
And looking at this from an historical context for the USA makes it even more absurd. Most people with these high paying jobs in the US are direct descendants of people who immigrated to the US with the sole purpose of getting a higher salary – because of poverty and lack of economic opportunities in their home countries.
The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that - they have their own government to represent their interests, which can and should enact policies that benefit them, and negotiate in international agreements policies that will help their citizens. If it's a win-win situation (which is the expected situation for skilled immigration visas) then sure, we should look at how the incentives are aligned; but when it's a tradeoff between the interests of your citizens and foreigners, then the government is elected to ensure that the interests of their citizens are facilitated - if need be, at the expense of others, to whom the government has no inherent duty whatsoever except the voluntarily undertaken commitments to certain international treaties. And if the government is implementing some policies that hurt their citizens to benefit others (which it may well do for all kinds of reasons - e.g. governments do humanitarian aid, which costs your citizens and benefits others, but presumably with support from the voters/taxpayers), then that has to happen due to the choice and consent of these citizens, otherwise they have all right to replace the government with something that will act as the citizens desire.
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
According to who? I understand that this is a kind of framing used here often, but the federal government has been concerned primarily with itself for a long time now at least to my eyes.
According to ground realities. In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
So if you want to be the one politician that values non-citizens’ rights over citizens’ rights, good luck getting re-elected.
Or you could set up an autocracy and try to manage this anyway. For further reading, I recommend the book The Dictator’s Handbook or CGP Greg’s 20 minute summary of it.
Obviously the Flint water crisis is a tragedy and an embarrassment, and I can understand how the issue might cause you to question the competence of the local leadership, but in what way is it an indictment of the functionality of America's representative democracy?
Sanctioned government violence against its citizens by the police comes to mind. Weak environmental policies that are leading to things like wildfires on the west coast. The president* making his Dex fueled escape from Walter Reed and immediately taking off his mask telling people to not worry about COVID. The same president* profiteering off the presidency and 40% of the country unquestioningly supporting it. The same 40% refusing to wear masks in public because somehow being a spoiled brat is patriotic.
This is what I imagine the Roman Empire felt like right before it collapsed on itself. The US has grown too big and too spoiled and is ripping at the seams.
40% is a high estimate. Because voter turnout in 2016 was about 60%, only 27% of eligible voters voted for Trump. And probably a significant portion of those are not unquestioning supporters.
Can you give me an example of the kind of “weak environmental policy” you are talking about? One which would lead to more wildfires on the west coast? Because the only policy I know of that leads to more wildfires, is the 20th century mistake of putting them out, which led to runaway undergrowth leading to hotter fires, such that trees were destroyed that would normally survive. The policy that best protects the environment long term is to let the fires burn. So again, what is the strong environmental policy you are envisioning that would prevent wildfires?
Several. Pulling out of the Paris climate accords is one such policy. Prohibition on further nuclear power plant building. Policy of subsidies for coal power plants. Current policies regarding vehicle efficiency requirements that amongst other things let you classify your 8 mpg SUV or pickup that you drive all by yourself as a light truck instead of a commuter vehicle that it actually is which lets it legally be on the road with its dismal emissions rating. Keystone pipeline. Rolling back environmental regulations. Removing the words “climate change” and “science” from the EPA website because this administration finds science inconvenient. Prohibition on studying climate change by NASA as well as putting gag orders on any other agency from NASA to EPA to CDC on talking about it. Public policy of denying climate change (see last night’s debate as a prime example). Want me to keep going?
Fires are burning not because we have too much forest (though of course finding better forest management instead of Wall Street would be a much better investment). They are burning because global warming (climate change was a conservative TV talking about because they used the fact that global warming could include local cooling to confuse the matter) means longer dry seasons, draughts, lots of dry underbrush. Wildfires have always been a thing. Wildfires that span such areas and can’t be put out like this have not existed on this scale in recorded human history. Those who pretend that this isn’t happening should put a plastic bag with a large zip tie over their heads and tell us how they can breathe just fine in there. It will be just as effective at not suffocating as continuing down this path for another 10-20 years.
>in what way is it an indictment of the functionality of America's representative democracy?
To a certain extent, I can see it as a case study against the functionality of representative democracy.
One one hand, elected leaders were fiscally irresponsible enough to enact policies that bankrupted the administration leading to a change to the water supply to save money. If I were playing devil's advocate, this could be seen as representative democracy incentivizing short-term political thinking leading to this outcome. E.g., it's easier to get elected on promises that benefit voters while ignoring harsh realities of how those promises will be paid for.
On the other hand, the decisions that led directly to the water crises were made by emergency managers appointed by the governor. This means non-elected officials overruled elected officials. Playing devil's advocate here can lead one to believe the displacement of elected officials is an indictment of the functionality of the system to truly be able to select those who govern the constituency.
it's just one example of many of huge swaths of people in this country not being treated in the way they they would be treated if they were in a well functioning representative democracy.
see if:
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
and "half of this country is a very small bill from crisis for their entire lives, people do things like describing the insurance agent as the most traumatizing part of the bear attack they survived" are both true, in what way can it be considered well functioning?
Can you put a finer point on what you mean by "their interests"? Is this relegated to just economic interests?
If it extends beyond economics, I see no reason why those two statements can't coexist. For example, I can vote against my own economic interest if I vote for higher taxes that I don't directly benefit from on the grounds that I want to support a more equitable society. Or I can vote against government run healthcare that I may also benefit from if I don't think that is the role of government. Both can be examples of voting against my economic interests to reflect my moral interests.
food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests. it's fine for you to believe the government shouldn't have a hand in them, but then in my view you are simply not in favor of what has been defined in this thread as a "healthy representative democracy"
you could argue that it's not your fault if lots of people don't vote so they get what they get, but you would be oversimplifying things for a HUGE section of the populace who don't vote because they have no one to represent their interests, where their interests are not starving or getting thrown on the street or being in debt for years and years because they slipped on the ice. these people not only do not have a meaningful way to vote, they also often do not have the time or energy to engage in local politics or trying to massage the system. they are currently risking their lives at metaphorical gunpoint every day to deliver "essential" services. minus the pandemic, it's been this way for a long time.
This:
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
and this
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
do not describe this country, even if you assert that only those who vote are represented. There's zero accountability to the people, the gaps are too large for people who do represent our interests to get through the door (and when they come close the rules tend to change suddenly) Something being against the rules has never stopped someone from doing it if they really wanted to when they are the enforcers or writers of the rules.
if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you. i have no intention on acting in your interests. politics is a crooked game, and ours is a particularly easy one to fix.
and what of the rest of the citizens who didn't vote because they risk losing their job or because of a million other reasons? are they not still citizens? most of them didn't choose to be, and regardless of whether that gives them some sort of moral obligation to participate to their best in the politics of their situation it does not remove their need for food, water, shelter, and healthcare which has been an increasingly difficult need to meet with essentially zero assistance from the system that is supposed to represent them.
to me it seems a lot like the conclusion is either that they are simply lesser for whatever reason and too bad for them or that the institution is just insisting on itself the way that institutions tend to do when they've been around long enough, and maybe a lot of people are actually very out of touch with what it is like to live in america for about half of our populace.
There's a lot here, so I'll try to summarize your point and you can tell me if I'm off.
>food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests.
I'm assuming you mean this is in the governments purview as part of promoting the general welfare clause. While I would agree, I can also understand those who do not because they take a more Jeffersonian view that the point of the government is to protect individual rights. At times, I can see where promoting general welfare and protecting individual rights can be at odds. I didn't see that specific definition of "healthy representative democracy" so it's may be too broad a reach (or I may have just missed it within the thread).
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that "voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.". Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility. I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons. In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true. If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
part of what i'm saying is that if these statements are true, then we are not in a functioning representative democracy.
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
>This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that
correct. it is an argument against it.
> Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility.
regardless of whether or not i agree that in "the way its supposed to work" this is the case, it's been a lot more than once and for a lot longer than a little bit of time. longer than i've been alive.
with what time, resources, or authority are you suggesting the populace hold them accountable with? don't answer that just yet.
> I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons.
We don't disagree in the sense you are talking about, technically. Zero accountability that the accountable will accept as valid though.
If i am born into a life with zero political agency and a constant threat of not having food or shelter in a populace that is largely entirely alienated not only from their peers but from also what they produce and consume how is that me getting what i deserve? In what way do you expect the hypothetical me to be organized or able to organize? How successful do you think someone like that could be at doing what you are suggesting when they don't have more than a $400 buffer and no supply chain?
> In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true.
I don't think the adage you're referring to is true at all; on the contrary I think that the responses you are speaking of simply take a long time to bubble up into enough of the populace to make them inevitable. Once that threshold is crossed you may as well swap the adage around. The structures and superstructures of societal organization are things that exist prior to you, it's natural for them to be baked into assumptions of "just how things are".
> If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
I don't think that inaction in face of miserable conditions that have been part of your experience of reality since day one makes someone "deserve" those conditions. It just makes them someone living in the reality they've been presented with. Engagement however, of all sorts, has been rising
>If i am born into a life with zero political agency
Genuinely curious, what would you cite as evidence of "zero political agency"? If it's the de facto sense of it being prohibitively hard for one person/group than another as you allude to in your previous posts, this is a very different thing than zero agency. Again, I think it's dangerous to conflate hard with impossible.
The $400 buffer hurdle is a loaded topic that would be difficult to get into without being drawn into more walls of text, but I think this is often an artifact of poorly aligned priorities and choices. I actually tend think the counter is true; lower economic strata tend to have more free time than higher strata, etc. But I'm afraid this would turn into a long digression to get into.
I can agree that a government deserves it's constituency. However, I think can be true without negating the previous statement about a populace deserving it's government as well. It's hard to be both an advocate for empowerment while also absolving oneself of responsibility.
I do appreciate you taking the time to elaborate, but a common thread seems to be an almost infantilizing of a constituency. While I can empathize with the marginalized, I don't think it does any pragmatic good if it just stops at hand-wringing. If we resign ourselves to a lack of agency, ironically it's a good way to guarantee not to get it. It's a personal viewpoint, but I think those who will take ownership of these problems are in a much better position to affect change than those who constantly say it's out of their control.
I spent a decade homeless in appalachia and the general midwest for a decade, and another largely below the poverty line. I'm fine with citing my life and the lives of everyone I knew for the amount of political agency that was present in our lives.
I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.
I agree with you in spirit in some ways here and I do not believe in absolution of responsibility. Material conditions, however, often skew the will in ways rather extreme, possibility is not probability and it's a fool that eats shit after watching 20 people take a bite of a cake and realize it's shit.
>I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.
It’s more than just perception. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but The Meritocracy Trap gives the actual stats. Obviously, the higher strata have an abundance of other resources (chiefly money, by definition) but not free time because of the competitive nature of maintaining within that economic level.
I do think that the middle class is attainable for most as long as they do a few essentially things, like graduating high school, avoiding massive debt, avoiding addictions, and avoiding becoming a parent before financially secure. I also believe we should, as a society, help those who are disadvantaged by things outside their control. However, there will always be consequences for life choices and some of those can’t be completed mitigated.
I didn’t grow up with money but I also eventually learned comparison is the thief of joy
Imagine that you are a politician in that area and you have a crisis with the water supply, you aren't going to win votes by promising to first fix the water supply problems somewhere else that's not in your electorate. Even if things are broken there's always pressure to campaign on addressing local needs first in order to get (re)elected, hence the phrase "all politics is local".
The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens even if a particular government fails at this duty. When a government does not properly fulfil their role, that is the direction towards which we push them, to better represent the interest, desires and choices of their citizens - not to act for the benefit of everyone else in the world.
What a ridiculous statement. If anything, reforming the h1-b program is a good thing for the incoming workers. There were tons of H1-B workers who did not get visas because some 'IT sweatshop' flooded the program with cheap, relatively low skill applicants. Now? Better applicants have a higher chance to be approved!
The only reason why H1B is a problem is that there's a limit and requirement for being employed.
That disrupts the free market approach with sunk cost fallacies and fear of being "sent home".
I saw a study somewhere that if USA opened its borders, roughly 1 billion people would move in there in a short order. Obviously, no country can handle that, hence the need to have limits.
GP is suggesting removing the 85k H-1Bs annual cap but keeping all other requirements in place (with or without new wage standards).
EDIT: GP is also suggesting removal of the immediate deportation proceedings should someone lose their job in H-1B status. The status should follow the employee, not the employee/employer pair.
This wouldn't necessarily lead to a lot more immigration. It would lead to fewer people leaving who are already working for US companies on F-1 student visas in OPT status (they attended US institutions)
Romania is a first world country with a PPP per capita GDP of $33K, compared to $48K in the UK. Their murder rate is 1.28/million, effectively the same rate as in the UK is 1.2/m.
Romanians didn't move en mass because the difference isn't all that great. They would gain 1.45X more income and no change in personal safety.
The average South American country has a PPP GDP of 16K and a regional murder rate of 16/m.
South Americans who migrate to the USA gain 4X more income (8X the economic gains of an emigrating Romanian) and enjoy a murder rate 1/4 of the South American average.
The incentives to flee Romania for the UK are trivial compared to the incentives for South Americans to move to the US.
It's not. Broad studies and broad claims don't work like that.
There is a lot of correlation between immigrant populations across the board, though.
As for income difference... 1.45 times? How about 4-6 times? Unless you seem to think that they would be going to the mythical average UK income area. And let's not forget that there's plenty of EU countries with high income levels. You can get an apartment in Berlin for roughly 2x the rent of an apartment in Bucharest... and get 4x the income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Here are some things that can be straight up disproven:
* Violent criminals don't migrate en masse with completely open borders
* Economic migration doesn't happen, without severe hardships(drought, famine, etc)
* Asylum seekers aren't invading armies, that seek to expand war to other countries
> economic migration doesn't happen, without severe hardships(drought, famine, etc)
I'm suspecting that that billion in large part included people at severe hardships. Although to be fair a lot of them would have super hard time affording a one way plane ticket to the US, as they live on roughly dollar a day.
Which xenophobe put up a wall, and why is it that the US is the only country not allowed to have borders all of a sudden?
Many Mexicans worked seasonally in the US and then returned to Mexico "back in the day". I'm not sure at what point that became a problem though. Although still to this day many people are here in the US undocumented. The extent of that being a problem I'm sure we could debate. It's certainly not fair for those who attempt to play by the rules though.
Is Canada xenophobic? They won't allow just anybody in. I'm not allowed to move to New Zealand without some legal work visa thing they made up. What about France? Can I move to Japan? Why do I have to sign papers to move to any of these countries?
I'm fine if you want to advocate for open boarders (and I think it actually would be great, but we need far fewer people on the planet to make it work) but I think you really should be consistent about it.
Go read your own comment again. Saying that a nation acting in the best interests of its citizens is ethically wrong is laughable. Saying it's as ethically wrong as slavery is absurd. On net, this is a good thing for highly skilled H1B applicants (which is whom we were attempting to bring over in the first place, right?)
Slaves (from a different country) are in the best interest of the people of that country. Thus acting in the best interests of your people can in fact be ethically wrong.
Are they? They're useful to individual slaveowners with enough capital they can have the slaves work. But what about for the working class? People in the U.S. today remark that immigrants willing to work for lower wages than locals drives down wages. A population forced to work at zero wage (or rather, at the cost to the slaveowner of keeping them alive and captive) would surely do the same.
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that, if I were the spirit of democracy/the hypothetical purely benevolent
(to specifically the people I consider of my country/nation/tribe, to the possible detriment of all others)
emperor of wherever, that on balance introducing slavery and slaves into my country would be a net boon on average.
Even ignoring the material aspects, it seems like americans had to contort their worldviews quite a bit to justify slavery to themselves, given their otherwise stated moral beliefs (that were useful to maintaining society). Something would have to give a pretty decisive advantage to justify that required cognitive dissonance, and I don't think 'enriching some already-rich landowners a bit more' is useful enough.
I mean, look at america. Are the descendants of the ethnic groups in the us at the time of slavery on average better off for slavery having existed? Now?
Plus it's wrong to inflict such horror on your fellow man etc etc, and there's a pretty huge difference between not letting people in and abducting them into your country and whipping them.
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
Truism. The point of contention is around what constitutes "best interest."
> The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that
If this is so simple, why did it require an additional 500ish words to qualify it?
Your point seems to boil down to this:
In cases where there is a conflict between the perceived "best interest" of citizens and those of non-citizens, if the citizens haven't specifically directed the government to do otherwise, the government should act in the perceived "best interest" of its own citizens.
But it's reductive and short-sighted to say that humanitarian aid "hurts" one side and "helps" the other. For instance, the marginal impact of a U.S. dollar on a U.S. citizen's productivity is effectively nil. But that same dollar spent in a third-world country would have much higher marginal impact. The productivity of that other citizen allows them to specialize and trade, and then everyone benefits in the long term.
The hyper-nationalism perspective that your country should take whatever it can at the expense of other countries is exactly what led to both of the world wars.
The duty and role of government is to act in the interests of those with power and influence. If a vote has more power and influence than money or connections due to how the government is structured or elected then the government can represent the interests of the people.
However, even voters are not equal in the US with those in Wyoming holding almost 3x the voting power for president compared to California due to the electoral college. Senate votes are an entirely different ballgame where small population states are equal to large states in theory but the vote count behind the senator may be millions vs tens of thousands. Also, the less populated but more numerous red states have led to a tyranny of the minority in the US Senate since 2010. If you are curious about that look at the number of justices Trump has appointed vs Obama, and Obama had 2 full terms: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-c...
There's been an admin change in that time plus the Citizens United decision. Remember there are many questions around where PPP loans went, including millions to the newly appointed USPS leadership plus Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Majority leader, and his wife, Elaine Chao, Secretary of transportation: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lawmakers-and-transportati...
Trump himself won with a 2.8 million popular vote deficit, similar to Bush in 2000. There are 3 other examples in the mid 1800's. In 2016 the GOP won a minority of votes in the US house yet held a 10% seat majority alongside a lopsided Senate. These are not symbols of a functional republic or election process, or at lest one that reflects the will of the people. From the 2016 election results alone your first statement on the duty and role of government is failed by the US. We are at risk of becoming a failed democracy for similar reasons.
Lobbying and campaign finance operations are destroying the value of voter preference and need to be reigned in through massive overhaul of the campaign and election processes. I'm all for setting a window for campaigning like the ...
> What's with this nationalism and view human value?
Honestly it is probably just run-of-the-mill xenophobia, but looking at US Federal Tax revenue [0] I would like to point out that prior to ~1930 everyone was basically on their own and after that the government started really becoming a big chunk of the economic pie. In 1920, I expect it was a lot more practical to target an open-border policy. Economically, the failure of a migrant means nothing to a local. In 2020, if a migrant does not succeed then there is a risk that the locals will be paying for it. I argue that that would reasonably change someone's opinions.
The idea that a person's location should have no impact is great, but sits in conflict with the US welfare system.
'Welfare' on a federal level now means a combination of Social Security disability and redeemable income tax credits- basically they have no income, but Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Credit, means they get money back on their taxes anyway. And of course if they have children there are a number of federal and local programs that ostensibly help feed the child, but are easily worked around to turn into money- in the old days you'd spend all day buying individual kool aid packets (pay with a dollar voucher, get 75 cents real money in exchange), now you're more like to buy high end food items and sell them on, or else some sort of item return fraud.
Oddly the same could be said for Argentina, Mexico or Venezuela, but people aren’t knocking to get into their economies. Why does the US owe the world any more than other countries?
At some point people have to be responsible for their own self determination —as leftists used to clamor for a couple of decades ago. Now they want a shortcut instead of doing the hard work to build viable economies. It took us a few hundred years to get where we are. It didn’t happen overnight. People still have no problem vilifying pioneers, but they’re the first to want the fruits of that hard labor centuries ago. Get to fixing your economies it takes time, but fortunately with the technology today and with the foundations today, we know it’s possible to turn things around in a few decades (China, S Korea, Panama, etc). Even Japan was extremely feudal up until the end of WWII.
Open borders isn't a leftist idea. It's literally the opposite of control over private interactions.
US gets huge financial benefits from being the world hegemon. Then there's the Northern Triangle that US messed up and Americans pretend that they have nothing to do with it.
I really don’t care who is for it. Migration has to be regulated, else we will return to the mean. Every other state exercises that right but when the US does it then it’s «bad» and «selfish», etc.
We could do it the Canadian or Australian way. Remember all those Americans who thought they could simply slip across the Canadian border and be good? Even they don’t just let anyone in.
I’ll believe the rhetoric when countries where it makes sense to federate federate (Caribbean, South America, Caucasus, etc).
This is a very odd argument in the USA context. People showed self determination by emigrating from poverty and lack of economic opportunity in Europe – they didn't stay "…doing the hard work to build viable economies."
Now the US people are denying other people the same opportunities their not-to-distant grandparents had. I guess it's an insiders market.
I find your concept of US "owing" anyone anything strange. Depending on your political opinions you might think that humans "owe" each other equal opportunity.
The leftist motto was “Self determination of Nations”. The US was supposedly corrupt and capitalistic and the people’s of the world should avoid our model.
We’ve let more people in than any other country (including other countries that started out as colonies, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) We have a right to regulate who we think will contribute and be a good citizen.
We now want to exercise our self determination as a nation like everyone else does.
You managed to toss out more strawmen while not addressing the content of what you're replying to.
Can you answer why it's OK for earlier generations of (now) Americans to leave their origins in search of a better life, but modern immigrants should stay and fix these issues instead?
It seems you’re arguing for “consistency”. That doesn’t make sense. In that view if only colonialists had been allowed the US policy would be consistent because it never let immigrants in (noting that as a colonizer you’d be a subject of the crown which in name ruled whatever lands they had dominion over).
They said, a nation with self determination can decide what it wants according to its laws. It’s that simple.
What's with that simplistic view of nationalism and reality?
(caveat: I am an immigrant that came to Canada)
Nationalism is more about culture than birth, albeit there is an expectation of both. Pride in your culture and love for your community which you call nation. As things are, you get more exposed to a culture by physical proximity to the source. Therefore being born within a culture makes you knowledgeable of that culture. More likely to be proud of it. (Note, as an immigrant, I do not partake in nationalism in either my current country or origin country. Albeit, I like their cultures.)
Your idealism albeit commendable is far from reality. The world is unfair get over it.
Everyone wants better for themselves. And like the latest hacktoberfest showed, not everyone has the same culture (1). Therefore not everyone should live in close proximity. It would lead to a disruption of social harmony. Take for example those from a honor/shame culture. They will literally beat you up for joking about their mother. Violence in the name of honor. In the West, that kind of violence is seen as outrageous. "Be stoic about it". People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
I define human value as infinite. Also I am not responsible for the right treatment of those outside my sphere of control/influence. I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
I agree. It is unfair that descendants of immigrants refuse to receive immigrants. As an immigrant that came to Canada, I am grateful for this opportunity. Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
This kind of line of thought is the issue. Why should it be unfair? Or at least, why can't we make it fairer?
>People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
Those willing to adapt are usually those that are immigrating. Your argument does not make sense in this context, as we are talking about people that are, by definition, willing to move and be part of another country. Will there be a clash of cultures in some instances? Of course, but that will last at most for one generation.
> I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
No one is asking you to take responsibility for anyone. But why should you support policies that exclude those that are willing to come on their own volition and contribute to society? What makes you think that they are 'ungrateful'? Again, why should we not strive to make things fairer for everyone?
>Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
Culture is such a meaningless thing. Immigrants assimilate to the culture, willing or not, after a generation. Sure, some of the people that actually immigrate might not be want to change their ways, but their children will. Studies have shown that this is a moot point, used by those that are just scared of different things, when in reality those that immigrate do assimilate the culture of the place they are living.
This mentality makes absolute no sense, specially coming from a child of immigrants. And I see you come from Canada. As someone who is about to immigrate there, it saddens me to see such display of hatred for those who are different. I spent a year studying in Canada a few years ago, and from my experience people there are very welcoming to immigrants. I had the pleasure to meet Chinese, Muslims, Indians and people from lots of different places and cultures while in Toronto, and guess what? Everyone got along very well. I don't understand where this fear and hatred comes from, but most people are good people, willing to work hard to earn their own if given the chance.
And if this is naive idealism, well, then I am a naive idealist.
First please into take consideration that my comment was a response to the previous comment. My points were to defend nationalism as a valid stance to hold and to justify the different treatments of humans.
Now...
> ... I am naive idealist.
The problem with naive idealism is that it is ineffective.
First, what is justice, fairness? Okay, let's say you arrive to a satisfying (to us) definition. Is it true to everyone all the time? Or simply true to everyone? I think you agree that it is not.
Why? Why does that guy over there think differently? Nurture and nature. Let us say that his inherited traits set him as neutral on the issue, why does he think differently still? Because, of nurture. What is nurture? Culture in its diverse forms. Family culture. Community culture. Etc. Do you still think culture is meaningless?
I am not against immigration. I believe in voting with your feet (going to where you think is best). I am a first generation immigrant by the way. Not a child of immigrants.
I have no hate for people of different backgrounds. You misunderstood me. I am currently taking online classes on the Chinese language and on Chinese culture. One of my best friends is Muslim. Another close friend of mine is Indian.
As citizen of a DEMOcratic country (demo comes from the greek for "the people"), I play a part in the government. Albeit in a minor way, I am part of the government. I am partly responsible for what it does. In counterpart, the government exists for me, the citizen. I take the personality and privilege to be citizen of a democratic country more and more seriously.
I did not aim to say that all immigrants are ungrateful, only that with a porous border, I end up allowing ungrateful immigrants.
> Why should it be unfair?
I did not make the world. I came to this conclusion regretfully. You do need not to sell to me the beauty of a fair world. Everyone is born to different circumstances, therefore everyone is unequal. Not only birth but culture. Last century, China once tried to eliminate the advantage of the upper class. They took their possession and gave them a status "to receive lesser treatment". It was an inherited status. After roughly 40 years, they removed that status. Then later there was a study on the descendants of the persecuted class. They were in average in a better position than the descendants of those who had receive a "to receive a better treatment" status. I leave it up to you to make your own conclusion.
There is a nation's culture, a family's culture, a religion's culture, etc. As many as there are groups you can identify with.
>Or at least, why can't we make it fairer?
You can. I intend to do it, to the extent that it is not deleterious to me.
I emigrated to Hong Kong from France and I love the system here. It mandated a "high" salary of 2000USD that is low enough to allow noobs like me to join and try while high enough not to bring people who would just try to survive no better than at home.
They also mandate a master degree and low effort from the company, which can be negociated if really strong guy (bachelor with some effory, expert reputation with high effort).
Then they give a permanent residency after 7 years of taxes but no path to nationality so the only way to persist is to make children locally, another interesting point: you ll never be Chinese but your kids can, which makes also the immigration problem drama free.
I quite wish France tried that because we feel (might not be rational) we have so many issues with our immigration.
Thousands of people have made it down the path to nationality in Honk Kong. Acquiring Chinese nationality -- whether mainland or not -- is possible. It's just that the standards are very, very, very exclusive.
In mainland China, the only examples I've heard of were leading academics. The standard is "outstanding contributions" to China. That's what I mean by "very high bar." Next to impossible is not a bad way to describe it, but next to impossible isn't the same as impossible. Thousands have done it. That's not a lot. I don't think it's even tens of thousands.
On paper, there is also path by which you can marry into Chinese citizenship, but it's exceptionally rare in practice.
"Renounce other citizenships" is complex. Many nations don't provide a citizens with a means to stop being citizen. Which is to say, if you take a Chinese (or any other) citizenship, and renounce your old citizenship, you may still end up with both citizenships.
I don't know specifics about Honk Kong, but I do know the standards are laxer than mainland China.
I don't know why you're being downvoted for wanting a more sane immigration system for France.
Whenever limits to US H1Bs a are mentioned that gets full support on HN because it waters down local salaries but when similar systems are proposed for Europe it gets downvoted.
India has become seemingly fascist overnight under Mr Modi. Just like Trump, he favours immigration and citizenship policies designed to demonise minority groups
Are you referring to CAA? Then you mistaking my friend. CAA is targeted to prevent illeagle immigration. It also, eases citizenship for people of minority religion.
Moreover that law is targeted only towards neighboring countries, specifically towards Pak., Ban., and Afgh.
And 'No' We do not expect red carpets anywhere on the world. Its totally a individual's choice to move abroad or stay. Due to huge population, the figures look high too.
It would be simpler to award the limited pool of H1-Bs in order of descending wages, and cross-check with the IRS afterwards to verify those salaries are actually paid. That would kill all the bottom-feeding body shops.
That has the added benefit of removing the unpredictability of the current system. Companies would very quickly figure out roughly where the line is and could pay a premium to guarantee their employee gets one of the spots.
If you are in a low wage area and feel that your workers are as productive as workers in high wage areas then you can pay them a high enough wage that they get a visa.
If you don't feel that way then obviously the visa should go to a more productive worker and it doesn't matter that they happen to be in a high wage area.
If you believe immigrants are good for the economy and make everyone richer, strengthening existing companies with their unique talent and expertise and founding many successful new companies, why let rich costal cities get all the benefit when poor cities have a much greater need for an economic boost?
That's just like your belief, the actual economics do not support this. The only thing that might change is the distribution of economic surplus (as in capital gets a larger share of the economic surplus versus labor). You might argue there will be more surplus, but that's likely not the case, and not for the body shops being discussed.
Most people don't believe this statement is true (or, at least as true as you do) because if they did, we probably wouldn't be talking about any of this on HN.
And you need to make sure the salary is not just paid back to the company / its owners. This is a common form of abuse in other countries with a minimum wage requirement for foreigners.
If skilled foreigners accept lower wages because the right to come to the US is worth something to them, then the price of the visa would settle at around the difference in wages. So overseas workers wouldn't undercut US residents. And the perceived monetary value of living in the US would accrue to the government, not to body shops.
If we had a functional immigration system, green cards would be granted in a reasonable time frame (6 to 12 months). H1-Bs are an imperfect substitute, that can be and are abused. Any of the proposed measures would help curb "body shops" that are indeed stealing jobs from Americans, and keep those legit H1-Bs that are plugging holes in the native labor supply.
H1-Bs are transferrable, so calling it "indentured servitude" is incorrect, the real reason why H1-Bs usually stick with an employer is the green card sponsorship by the employer, which is not transferrable.
I remember the first time I walked into the "residence" for a major contractor's H1B visas. They were packing a dozen people in a 3 bedroom apartment in a bad area of town. You then see how they are treated by their companies at work, and it disgusts me.
This is why you can't have second-class citizens like this. They are terrified to go for help if they even know how. It's even worse for undocumented workers. At least they can quit though. H1B workers are tied to their sponsors, which has to stop.
Almost all of those people you saw there are now living in pretty enviable situations for most Americans.
Calling these 'guest houses' as people living in second class of the society is as incorrect as calling the residents of Pied Piper house in 'Silicon Valley' as 'living like second class citizens'.
As a person who used to live like that in the US when I worked there. Its just how it is. US work opportunity is very expensive/valuable for us third world people(in my case India). Its like 70 rupees for a single dollar!!!. Time and opportunities are 70 times more expensive. Every minute, and every purchase matters. You have to make a dent every time you hit.
Its like the most important period of your life. There is little time for non-serious stuff.
You likely won't get a chance again. Even if you do office politics and get visas, you still need to beat the lottery and visa interview. Given how precious the opportunity and what you get out of it. You have to do all that.
Yeah, but take it from American point of view: you're purposely accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly. So you're lowering their living standards and probably their average pay, because your negotiating power is really weak.
More than that, if you consider that the third world probably has 4-5 billion people, many of which would want to live in the US (~350 million people), this creates a scaling issue.
I'm not even American, but I can understand why they consider this a problem.
I understand. Apart from sharing a apartment with 9 - 12 other people.
But you have to understand, this doesn't necessarily mean we don't have fun. When I was in Bay Area, I knew a dozen ways to save up money while having fun. I didn't own a car, because the company gave me a VTA pass. I knew how to cheaply explore places around Sunnyvale, CA. I knew how to reach SFO, and explore places there for cheap. Where you could eat cheap. This also means, investing in quality and frugal stuff. A good $14 for jeans pants at costco(bought from a friend's costco card of course), buy a pair, and buy a pair of t-shirts. Then may be timberland shoes. Invest in a good jacket. Now your clothing is covered for years. A bag of basmati rice costs $15, and lasts at least 2 - 3 months, invest in a good rice cooker and making curry with veggies easy by buying produce at local farmers market. Meat is kind of cheap in US too. Sometimes you just skip meals(think of intermittent fasting as a side effect). Also you can buy a room heater for around the same price at Target. There are lots Chinese/Mexican barber shops around Sunnyvale/Santa Clara that give $8-$10 haircuts. I knew to scavenge through mail boxes, to pick up coupons. Then of course one kid gave me a whole coupon bunch for lyft, and uber eats and eat for free for long. etc etc.
I took good care of my health, so only once did I have to go to the doctor, and I didn't even pay a single dollar, they just asked me to continue taking TUMS.
Is it hard, yes. I mean I was once caught in a thunderstorm and it was too cold to tolerate, and I once missed the last bus back home. Could have taken Uber but decided to save $3 and walked 4 miles in dark and cold, missed because I had to pick up free food at office so the my back pack was heavy. I even at a point could hear my own footsteps which freaked me out real bad, it felt numb walking in the cold. Then of course you have to wake up at 5 in the morning, because you want to take the 7:15 bus as the breakfast is free at office. Its cold that early in the morning, I had tons of janitorial staff as friends because I would travel with them in the VTA and again meet them at office. I remember it almost feels like the cold seeping into your very bones. One day I relocated to a new place and I was sleeping in the hall, the room heater broke down- It felt like my toes would fall off. It was really really cold.
Then there's tons of time and self reflection you get in that much minimalism, loneliness and it kind of touches your soul to its core.
Then you also save a lot of money you can send back home, that in the hopes when you run out of visa time and eventually return, you will have some money to invest and make something out of it. Did it take a toll yes. I'd be barking mad to try all this again. But I don't regret it for a minute. I got a chance which only one in millions get, and I made most out of it. I learned tons from smart people, worked and pushed my self to the extremes I gave everything I had in me. I would always make it a point to visit universities and companies to get a idea of the scale and ambition of the US civilization. I have immense admiration and respect for the American people, and I am always thankful for the opportunity.
I'm a European, white male but a lot of what you write resonates with me because of my background:
I specifically remember walking well over 10kms in biting cold on a particular new years day early morning to get back to the farm to take care of my responsibilities, having pasta and corn (with grated cheese sometimes) for as a typical dinner etc, stretching pizzas out to last 2-3 days etc. To the annoyance of my family some of these habits stick hard even today :-)
Oh, and pretend it didn't matter when someone lost my my "new" (at that time) 3310 cell phone that I had got second hand from a another friend (who again had assembled it from broken ones that he had gitten hold of :-)
>>To the annoyance of my family some of these habits stick hard even today :-)
At the risk of sounding like a Meninist. I have to say one of the big reasons why Indian men leave behind families at home back in India, is because some of these struggles just can't be expected to be shared by their families. It just gets too much after a while, and after that you just have to keep up with it on sheer will power.
It takes a toll both on your body and mind.
I realize that in order to undergo some struggle analogous to this the American citizens have to undergo Navy Seals training or something. Or they run Ultramarathons just to create the human yearning for struggle and story :) And the attrition rate there is quite high.
Well part of the reasons for all this is my salary was low, and I set myself fairly ambitious savings goals. But in Bay Area, rents are brutal and eat into most of your savings. In some cases even with sharing accommodation with people you end up paying like 15% - 25% of your paycheck(added utilities, general toiletries, home utilities, starting furniture, utensils and other expenses). Then of course internet expenses, phone bills, and coins for the washing machine. Add food and transit. I lived fairly minimal, like I didn't even have a mattress/comforter(sleeping on home carpet, with a pillow), given I was changing residence every 8 months. Only real things I owned was phone, laptop, clothes and a harmonica.
Its not constant, because during yearly bonus time you make a little extra. And when you visit home, you carry some gifts for people back there. I also made sure family back home was taken care off really really well.
But I was able to save a lot. Like able to go close and sometimes above 60% of the net paycheck most months. Keep in my I arrived to us with $200, a job and a suitcase with clothes.
I understand that this was an amazing opportunity for you, but your every response in this sub-thread has just cemented the argument that someone like yourself going to the States reinforced the idea that "accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly. So you're lowering their living standards and probably their average pay".
This not meant as a personal dig at you, I'm glad that it worked out well for you.
>>reinforced the idea that "accepting life (and probably work) conditions that few Americans would accept willingly.
You are either incredible naive or just blind to the plight of your own country men. Do you know how many homeless people there are in the Bay Area? Have you ever seen black people working at Target or Walmart? Have you bothered talking to janitors at your office. Try talking to these people and see how life is going on for them. Sure its not comparable to what I did, but they have their own struggles and life is quite hard for them. Try talking to them and see what they think about those 'rich guys'(programmers).
The living standards you talk about are really for white people hailing from upper middle to rich class white families. Not every one has a $1.5 million home in San Ramon, Cupertino or Morgan Hill. Not everyone has a Tesla and a minivan for kids.
I'm not lowering the standards for anybody, If Im living that way, then there are already people for whom the VTA pass, coupons and timberland shoes were made. I'm just fitting in. You also can't fault me for not spending money like the way others do. If things in your society came at minimal standard of living acceptable to everyone, then everyone would be already living at those standards.
So tomorrow if people waiting tables at Starbucks or janitors took up programming jobs and lived like me, what would you do? Ban programming jobs for them, and reserve only for people who live the way you like?
Also what will you do about things like 'ramen profitability', or people like Elon Musk who at many times have stared at personal bankruptcy and have slept on their office floor.
The existence of a system that allows for companies to pay foreign labor well below market puts a downward pressure on compensation for everyone in industries that take advantage of it.
You mention that there are Americans who also struggle but I fail to see how that’s an argument in favor of systematic underpaying of foreign workers who are bound to a single employer (modern day indentured servitude). It’s the job of the government to improve the lives of its citizens and to protect their jobs, not to help foreign nationals improve their lives or to help businesses boost their profits at the expense of American salaries.
I’m all for immigration and fair pay. I’ve done it myself. But I don’t want to have to live as you described if at all possible. And I prefer that if you are talented enough to make it to the USA then you should be able to profit equally like Americans.
If forcing companies to pay equal salaries for foreign nationals stops the inflow of H1Bs, then this means that there are Americans capable of filling the job market. It there’s still unmet need for talent, then foreign nationals will be brought in at fair salaries
Well of course. As American citizens, its up to you to decide whom you wish have in your country. Its entirely acceptable even if you say one no should be allowed. I definitely won't make point on the lines of 'immigrants built America', its your decision. Nor am I saying that its the job of the US government to improve the lives of people over the globe. Though I believe even without others asking for it, or their consent, Americans are more than happy 'spreading democracy all over the world'.
But you can't stop any one living the way they want. There will always be people who will run/swim the extra miles, lift the extra weights, study the extra hours, eat ramen, do more than one job, walk/sleep in the cold, do the side gigs, moonlight their companies in garages. This is not slavery or anything. Slavery is stripping away people's rights without their consent, under the threat of violence. This just people wanting an edge over other humans. And regardless how you wish to live your life, there will always be people looking for that edge.
Lastly, I don't thing anyone living their life any way effects your standard of living. Your wages and compensation are decided based on how much effort your willing to put to get into a FANG. People who are willing to do that already make lots of money in a place like Bay Area.
The best thing about America, is the society goes lots of distance and makes it easy for people to do anything they want. So that at the end of the you are left with your own choice to make whatever life you want to. No immigrant is coming in your way of 'pursuit of happiness'
If you want to earn more money and want to know what's preventing you from getting it, you only have to look at the mirror.
The point the others are making isn’t about your standard of living, but your compensation.
If you hadn’t been tied to a single employer, maybe you would have gotten a job with an employer who paid more. You would have been able to reach your savings goal without living so frugally. Your employer at the time was comfortable paying you a relatively small amount because you couldn’t go anywhere else.
They’re not asking immigrants to live more lavishly. They’re asking for immigrants to be paid more so there’s less downward pressure on wages.
I am an H1B at a FAANG with top paying TC but I just fail to understand why Americans have to live this lifestyle. I get surprised when my fellow colleagues tell me than even with their high TC they don't get to save and live paycheck to paycheck. It's not a better lifestyle but just lack of financial education. American Capitalism and peer pressure is what it is.
I agree that h1b abusing employers have to be stopped and we need to raise the bar for h1b's but lets not make this a discussion about forcing a unhealthy lifestyle on immigrants.
>they don't get to save and live paycheck to paycheck. It's not a better lifestyle but just lack of financial education.
Expense will expand to cover whatever income you have. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you are not careful you can spend your entire income and have nothing left. There are some very poor people in the world saving surprising amounts of money (for their income - when you make a dollar a week saving a few pennies is amazing)
> It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you are not careful you can spend your entire income and have nothing left.
Really? I mean, I hear people (especially SV people) say this all the time but I make a fraction of what they claim to and I rarely even have to think about money.
You are a minority from what I can tell. Most people spend whatever cash they get. Which is why automatic savings plans are commonly recommended - if the money is never seen you don't spend it.
I'm not sure the above is entirely bad - when you die the money is gone. (this is a religious question - not all agree) You need some savings for unexpected, retirement, planted larger expenses, and other situations. Beyond that, if you have money left over that you didn't spend you wasted your time at work: get a life.
Born here in the US. Grew up in California. I would have loved to have it as good as our visa friend above (while in the US). Growing up poor can be rough. I can spin a sob story that literally has had folks from across the world reach out and say that they teared up.
When I finally broke into programming as a career at nearly 30, my life changed. A couple years into it, I found out I was making 80% of a new hire QA dev on visa where their salary had to be posted in the break room or something. As a back end engineer who was part of a team of 4 writing code that was earning our company over $50M a year, I was surprised that she was making substantially more than me. Turned out minimum salary visa stuff protected her from my salary.
I’m now doing better than most, but I’d expect that there are many like me who would just were/are unaware they could make it comfortably as a software developer.
Not sure where I was going. Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them. Those conditions are just “life” for many of us.
>>Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them.
I feel you.
Inertia can be hard to overcome, and if you are coming from a context and are used to your current social conditioning, breaking out of a self defeating loop can be hard. And you deserve credit for making it despite all the problems.
But poverty is subject to social conditions where you live, and poverty in the US != poverty in India. In fact the definitions of poverty are not even remotely same.
I would wager that an employer would just shift their office overseas, rather than be forced to increase wages. See what happened to manufacturing around the world.
By and large, I think its a quid-pro-quo between the US wanting foreign markets to sell into, and other countries wanting to sell their products, as well as human-resource-services into the US market. But, the US is a saturated market, and so the only growth is in emerging markets. Which also translates indirectly to 401(k) growth...
Thanks for sharing your story. It reminds me of my father who experienced similar things in the 1960's: arriving to America with basically nothing, a network of friends, some skills and the ability and willpower to do demanding work. He immigrated, but there's a lot of similarity to what you experienced.
If I may ask, what has been your career path since your H1B days?
I was on L1-B. I had to return to India due to a combination of several problems including the Visa issues. Some people just get filtered out of the race. As an Indian it takes more than just a Visa to settle in the US. You have to be in the good books of your bosses if you want to move up in the GC category chain, which involves making it into inner power circles of office politics where the plum budgets get allocated. Its a complex equation of age+politics+luck+health+family situations etc. The equation becomes less favorable to you as you enter the 30s.
People like me, just do our time and return to India. The company was happy to let me continue working from Bangalore office.
Working in the Bay Area was a net positive for me. You learn so much from working with the smartest in the world. Everything changes, your motivation, drive, ambition, your imagination gets re-modelled as to what's possible and how far you can go. I have learned tons due to access to a awesome peer group. I used to visit Stanford and just walk there so many times just to be in the company and see the specialness of the place. My imagination itself has evolved. I learn to take failure less fatally, and take more chances these days.
For this reason alone, I advice young people at work and friends circle to try and work in Bay Area, even if its a short stint. Its a net positive to one's career.
In terms of concrete steps, I've been promoted at work. I learned to swim(Thanks to the hiking I did around Bay Area, all those people who were so focussed on fitness had a good effect on me).I had good savings for a head start in my peer/age group. I also made decent real estate investments in India. I had a start up in Bangalore before moving to Bay Area, now I want to start up sometime again. I have read dozens of books, and have developed appetite for taking on hard projects at work. My eventual plan is to be financially independent, so that I can have mental space to take time off and do things and projects I like. So I'm working on it.
Who knows what's next for all for us due to COVID and what else is to follow. But my experience in the past failing and getting up so many times tells me, as long as one is interested in doing work, learning and have immunity to handle tough times, general direction is always a upwards trajectory.
But I'd like to come back and again work in the Bay Area. This time around not that much for money but just for working with smart people.
Sometimes I really wonder. What stops people in US in other states to buy a ticket and relocate to Bay Area.
Immigrants don't take jobs for less, when no government is breathing down their necks. If you have a competitive market - there's no need for government to create artificial monopolies.
It's complete bullshit that billions want to live in US. Billions want a safe and prosperous life... and would stay home, if that's possible to achieve. US isn't some land of honey rivers or gold mountains.
If you want a case study on how unrestricted migration occurs - look at EU.
On one side we have Ireland and on the other side we have Romania. There's complete freedom of migration for Romanians to Ireland. Just buy a one way ticket for 50Eur, basically.
EU is proof that you don't need quotas or restrictions to control migration at all. And immigrants have only a small impact on incomes.
This is a nice use case to study how human behavior works when there's no quotas/limits.
I often say that unlimited calls means people talk less, not more. On the similar lines offering unlimited learning and self improvement budgets to your employees means people will likely spend them less, but more relevant training and development would happen.
A very similar argument can be made about unlimited sick leaves too.
When something is free people don't feel the need to rush and fill the quotas/limits. They use/spend per relevant needs and scenarios now that they know they always have an option to use the thing when they need it.
They say that you have unlimited - then you don't rush to use up. (But unlimited, needs to be actually unlimited)
And for example of migration - if your cost of moving to a new place and working there is reasonable, you're less likely to stay there if it becomes a bad place. Many cases demonstrate this, last being, massive wave of repatriation of people from Eastern Europe during the financial crisis.(And numerous internal migration waves in large countries)
- by reasonable cost I mean that you don't need to spend X thousands of dollars and wait 6-36 months for a permit
I'm Romanian. There are 20 million Romanians and ~300 million people in the rich Western countries. And I don't know if you noticed, but the EU is very restrictive about adding new members. It took Romania 10 years to become a EU member.
Plus Romania is average by world standards (GDP per capita per country), which means that half the world's countries (and probably 80% of the world's population) are poorer or much poorer.
Well, if you ask many people in Western Europe, they shouldn't have even been accepted. The average salary, even in PPP terms, was about 30% of the Western European ones back in 2007. In absolute terms, salaries were even worse (probably 10% in 2007, something like 25% now), and absolute terms matter because many things are imported.
After huge growth, the average salary in PPP terms is now about 50% of the Western ones. Romanian workers in the West have definitely depressed the average salaries in several fields.
And that's with somewhat controlled migration.
My point is: controlled migration is there for a reason. Building a working state is extremely difficult and takes a lot of time. It's a very fragile and delicate thing. Once you've managed to build it... you really don't want to upset the balance.
"Should not have been accepted" - is typical xenophobia. It's not an argument at all.
What sectors have seen a depression of salaries as a direct result of Romanians entering the market? And you have the huge hurdle of proving that those salaries are depressed specifically because of the Romanian labor, and not because Asian products or other global trends.
Also - restricted migration fails to attract the right labor, driving up the cost of labor unnecessarily. Sometimes it gets ridiculously stupid... to the point that local consumers(also local labor) cannot afford to consume products, because local labor(also local consumers) refuses to work for less. It gets to a point where local businesses cannot pay their local labor and invest into productivity gains(required to keep the pay high enough).
It's a complex clusterfuck... and blaming Romanians or Mexicans is just an easy "solution".
I have heard stories (that don't seem too uncommon) of unscrupulous companies doing a variety of things - including charging the hopeful visa recipient payments to secure a job, paying the required salary only for the months leading up to the H1B interview and then lowering the salary immediately after, etc.
Not sure what fraud these new rules will prevent, if they are implemented.
However the best solution would be the replace h1b with just citizenship - if you have rare skills why shouldn't we offer immediate citizenship to the talented?
Not really; If you have an in-demand skill set you get extra 'points' on the PR scoring chart, but you need to demonstrate many other things to reach the threshold required to get status. I went through that process and was denied because my work experience was through contracting (which for whatever reason didn't count). This was 10 years ago though, so things may have changed (also after three applications I finally got PR and then citizenship as of last year).
It used to be if you are a graduate or have experience working in a Canadian company you would score points. Which was much less prone to abuse.
Now they still have point based system, but the above don't get any extra point, and if you have those said qualifications anywhere, as long as you can prove (through documentations) you get the same points.
Result is rampant abuse with overseas companies that "vet" candidates' degrees and experience providing certificates and such things. And it takes longer for graduates from Canadian universities or someone with experience working at a company here since they compete in the same lottery pool.
It is still far better than US, but it could take you a while before your points start closer to the draw.
I went through the thing in Australia just 3 years ago. We have the same problem with people from certain country having a lot of experience and inflate the point system. The exp points in Australia acummulate twice as fast as exp overseas so those who worked in Australia like myself still have the advantage. However I am now not a fan of the point system as it's just another standard test to be hijacked by multiple attack vectors. I'd much prefer the european way where work visa is given out easily with fair wage and better mobility, (in Australia you have 4 - 6 weeks to find a new employer, not impossible for software but a bit tight). From what I've heard there is no real incentive to acquire citizenship/PR in many european countries b/c temporary residents enjoy the same stability.
It's not totally true that you don't need PR in European countries. For example you would get very different treatments and interest rates for loans when you want to buy real estate or apply for credit cards (many banks flatout turn down your application). You're probably not that much of a "second class citizen" compared to somebody working in the US, but some subtle restrictions still do exist. Though of course I can easily imagine the situation being much worse in the US.
No, it really isn't. If you have your masters you can immediately be granted PR. This is the case for all Indian nationals - however it is still lottery based. The point system you're talking about is for unskilled labour, and that still has the 5 year in the country+ language requirements.
Canada discriminates against those with disabilities that they deem would impose an 'excess burden', regardless of whether you have a good paying job or not. They are not perfect.
That's what folks pretend it means. IF you give citizenship to folks born there - or even born there to citizens, etc - then it isn't at all about loyalty.
Same with granting asylum seekers citizenship and so on. Same with allowing dual citizenship - are you loyal to two countries? Citizenship is never about loyalty.
Citizenship has a lot more to do with the ways you contribute to the country. Folks born in a country are likely to live there for life and contribute by speaking the local language, participating in local customs, being educated in and working in the country, and most importantly, paying taxes. This is why some categories are seen as "less important": Because folks think that some categories won't integrate enough (and it is impossible for an immigrant to ever do this, regardless of background), some won't learn enough language, or won't contribute as much. The truth of this is thrown out the window, of course, and there is no real objective test to test these sorts of things. Time in country might be one of the better tests, though it isn't perfect.
Citizenship has been diluted in recent decades, but it's not just pretense. And while the US has a rather puzzling loophole around birth and citizenship, that doesn't apply AFAIK in the EU: a child born to foreign parents will have to apply for citizenship just like anyone else. Asylum seekers likewise.
Dual citizenship's typically only allowed in the EU when the other country is also an EU country. Some countries do not even allow that. There's even a citizenship test which is administrated.
It is in the US: "Throughout our nation's history, foreign-born men and women have come to the United States, taken the Oath of Allegiance to become naturalized citizens, and contributed greatly to their new communities and country. The Oath of Allegiance has led to American citizenship for more than 220 years."
Now I haven't looked into many other countries, but at least in the EU I know that there's many proxies for loyalty when applying for citizenship. And many countries do not accept dual citizenship, which should make things clear for you hopefully.
Why is this on the top of the hacker news? The article talks about nothing that will stop the abuse. There are indeed a lot of RFEs that are being given out if you don't have a CS degree and apply for a Software Developer position already.
The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid.
How is hiring folks with a CS degree for an SWE position a solution to H1b abuse?
The rule published here specifically talks about three things(Yes, I read it line by line just so that I can do my due diligence before I comment here)[2]:
1/ Change the meaning of "Speciality Occupation" and tie this to the College degree that the person has.
2/ If you are part of these "body shops" and you are working as a contractor, your visa will only be extended for 1 year.
3/ Some general statements about Site Visits.
4/ No comment on increasing the wage.
The first child comment that we see below is an anecdotal evidence about seeing a house with dozen(?) folks in a 3 BHK flat? What does it do with H1B visa abuse? How is sending money home AFTER taxes H1B abuse?
Still debating how we went from thoroughly researched and thought provoking comments to these.
I don't debate that there is H1B abuse.
- Programmers are paid very less when compared to prevailing wage.
- Programmers cannot leave their employers so employers hold them by their balls and get work done overtime.
- Programmers stay away from their family, contribute to taxes AND to social security. KNOWING that they may never see a day to collect Social security.
All of this is H1B Abuse. There is no evidence that folks on H1B visa compete with a US Citizen's job. (I'm taking about H1B, not offshoring).
Literally NONE of the changes that this administration is doing is addressing ANY of these concerns for both the US Economy and the H1B individual. Comments like these are dangerous since they give an illusion that the administration is doing something to improve the economy, but they are just party tricks.
There were companies hiring people under H1B then finding them contract work. Something they are specifically limiting now because they were abusing the system by under paying them as well as hiring them after they get the visa instead of before.
No. It just means that the contractor should establish themselves with employer-employee relationship before finding work, from the rule PDF:
> First, striking “contractor” will avoid potential confusion as the term “contractor” in the
definition is misleading. The inclusion of “contractors” in the regulatory language could be read
to suggest that contractors should generally qualify under the definition of a “United States
employer.” While a contractor is certainly not excluded from qualifying as a “United States
employer” for purposes of an H-1B petition, the contractor, like any petitioner, must establish the
requisite “employer-employee relationship” with the H-1B beneficiary.
You’re talking about H1B abuse that primarily affects non-US citizens. I can sympathize (and I’m not a US citizen), but you can hardly expect the US press or hacker news to have that perspective or use that terminology... right?
Correct. It should prevent abuse both ways (for both US citizens and non US citizens). By making the system fairer, both US citizens and the world ends up benefiting, in addition to likely further helping the US economy.
Well... It still could, if “fair and honest dealings” is a political ideal you want to promote in the world. But sure, it’s not an administrations top priority, for understandable reasons.
Goal of my comment wasn't sympathy; but to get the facts out there that the current changes do nothing but to worsen the situation.(...not solving the H1B crisis)
I would expect people working alongside these visa recipients, and even the public at large, to have some idea of the system and the problems they face. (Although, for the general public, farm labor should probably figure larger).
And, yes, I do usually expect people to have the capacity to sympathise with others. I would even assert that everyone will instinctively want to help when they see others suffering. It's called empathy and is among the basic human emotions.
There is an ideological stream in the US that has seen the success of the market mechanisms based on competition and selfishness and is now misinterpreting it to mean than any form of altruism is bad.
Closely related is the glorification of competition to a degree where people are entire oblivious to the fact that a market economy is first and foremost a mechanism of cooperation. This has gone so far as to make even the notionally educated and self-styled rational tech community grasp around for speculative theories trying to frame this issue in terms of zero-sum competition. They somehow prefer to believe this against all evidence, i. e. the number of high-profile startups founded by first- or second-gen immigrants. And thereby give themselves license to do what it is they either actually want all by itself, or what they consider a proxy for good things happening to them: hurting others.
It's kinda fascinating and scary how easy it sometimes is in this country to grab a certain liberal group by the...whatever and even make them preachers of your political agenda.
Additional competition on the job market might be great for companies and maybe even a country in general, but it's bad for job seekers by definition - they have to compete with more people for jobs.
This has nothing to do with the US, it applies just as well to e.g. Europe.
Ability to control other people's lives - is a drug.
And as usual the decades of "Americans jobs" crap. There are no American Jobs, as much as there are no NYC jobs or LA jobs. The employer doesn't own the job, only the power to be an intermediary.
Jobs are a function of market demand for products and services.
If tomorrow all of US territory became miraculously healthy and had no need for drugs - pharmacists' jobs would just disappear. No market - no jobs.
> There is no evidence that folks on H1B visa compete with a US Citizen's job.
If an IT department puts out a req and fills it with an H1-B worker, a US worker is out of a job. It's really that simple. People like to respond to this and cite sources funded by H1-B consultancies about how H1-B create more economic opportunities which translates into more jobs for all but this doesn't make sense because companies will A) pocket the savings and B) continue to hire H1-Bs to keep on saving per headcount. The reality is that jobs are a zero-sum game. I welcome your response if you have a counter-point.
Agreed... been saying for a long time, there should be a pay floor of 8-10x minimum wage for H1B workers. These are supposed to be for positions we cannot fill locally, there's no reason they shouldn't be 6-figure jobs at a minimum.
I really don't like his personality, but really do appreciate a lot of the things Trump does in practice.
Some of the changes I can see a logic behind it. But making electrical engineers not qualify for H1B for a SWE job is just silly and doesn't match reality. Just ask the SWEs in any 1000+ software company how many of them are electrical engineers.
True for the most part. But there are unexpected consequences for this. Startups will be ill afforded to hire foreign talent now. All the immigrants will look for jobs at BigCo. because they are the ones who can pay those high salaries.
It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1].
For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 1M. This means Canada brings in ~5X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. [2]
[edit] This rate has been consistent since 1992.
[edit] I originally stated the US brings in 140,000 immigrants per year, this was a mistake, my cursory search led me to the cap on employment based green cards, not total. Factoring in family members of US citizens, it's ~1M. By Immigrants I include green cards per year, as everyone else is by definition a non-immigrant. It is my understanding the Canadian number is the same category.
Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation. As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow and steady pace of quality over quantity before liberals came into power.
It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1]
The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure.
Right, in the long term it would be beneficial, but the infrastructure takes time to build up. Most immigrants understandably crowd in either Vancouver, Toronto or a couple of other big cities because that's where the opportunities are. Not sure where you live, but the food and rent have gone up dramatically in these cities. Forget about being able to afford buying a house or an apartment even if you've been responsibly saving up. The commute before covid was killer. I don't understand this off-hand dismissal of concerns because I don't have citations.
>The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over.
In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration
>> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
>This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
If you look at the chart, you'll see there is a substantial global negative correlation between income and fertility. High income countries have low fertility. Everywhere.
The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
Applying pressure through substantial incentives is probably the better way of expressing it. I guess incentivizing someone enough is the same as forcing them but I digress. Why substantially incentivize locals to have children, when there's strong worldwide negative correlation between income/development and child birth? Why are local children inherently better than immigrants? To the extent that the society functions well and immigrants integrate into the broader country, what difference does it make?
I would further argue that "bringing in immigrants" isn't the "easy way out" or even likely the "cheap way out" but rather probably more challenging. Creating a society that deals well with the gaijin isn't easy.
I see no evidence that free daycare or longer parental leave actually incentivize adults to have children. The birth rate in Finland is 1.49 and falling rapidly, Sweden and Norway are 1.8ish. Iceland is 1.75. Germany is 1.57. Spain is 1.34. These places have incredibly generous programs and are well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Finland's mat leave is 4.2 months and pat leave is 2.2 months and offers public daycare centers. If that's not long enough or free enough to boost their brith rate over 1.49 I'm not sure what you'd suggest.
Yes, mat/pat leave is great, and should exist. So should free daycare. However, I don't see any evidence that'll move the needle. If anything, it appears that pushes the birth rate further down being correlated broadly with increased development.
eh... sounds typical right wing comment. Japan has low immigration rates, yet they are not having any more babies. So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants), Italy (lax about immigration), or even Albania (has outflow of people).
It is a world wide issue in all western countries, and it is independent of net 'in or out' immigration. The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
Even if you stopped immigration, people would not be making more babies, as countries that don't have net immigration still don't make more babies. Baby making seems independent with net immigration rates.
>So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants)
Hungary incentivizes its native population to have larger families, a policy of Victor Orban's, and has seen consistent growth in its fertility rate since ~2010. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the way it should be tackled.
> The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
America and the UK's birth rates nose-dived in the mid-60's and hasn't recovered since. I'm failing to draw a connection to these countries being drastically more developed by the end of the 60s than they were at the start of them.
It's about _carrying capacity_, not "infrastructure". We can only absorb people at some maximum rate and still have a chance of bringing them on board with hard-fought Canadian cultural values, getting them up to speed with our official languages, and integrating them into local communities. Past that rate, the tendency is for newcomers to seek out people who are from their home country and speak their language. This creates insular bubbles of culture and damages any effort to actually create a cohesive whole.
Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.
Well, there are certainly areas of Vancouver and Toronto and their outlying suburbs that are on the verge of this; but it's more of an issue with recognizing the potential issues by looking at other countries that are further down the demographic path than Canada is. Or do you think it's necessary to have a problem in order to understand it?
Thank you for explaining it so well. Like I said I am not against immigration as I myself am one. I would just like our government to be mindful about the challenges it poses as well and adjust the rate based on how much we are able to take in at any given point without stressing out the system and making life worse for people already here.
There's a lot to be said for a slow steady pace. Society's relationship with politics tends to be oscillatory. If you push too hard in one direction (liberal or conservative), things swing back the other way and you end up with two steps forward, one step back and a loss of power for your team.
A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage.
The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.
Immigration to Canada has stayed very consistent over the last 20 years, check the wiki article [1] for details. It's not political (well, the rhetoric is political. The actual policies and statistics are not.)
If you're expecting HN, in all its "rational glory", to be anything but extremely pro-migration to the West when most of the users' are likely either 1st or 2nd generation migrants to the West themselves, then you're very naive.
Startups in the 1980s had the same challenge because the H1B minimum salary was a really good salary then, average salaries just rose, lets do that part again.
The thing to remember about US immigration is that most immigrants simply over stay their visa. The US may bring less immigrants over but there is a reason you can press 2 for Spanish on nearly every single companies help line.
> there is a reason you can press 2 for Spanish on nearly every single companies help line
1. If you're trying to imply that the majority of people who speak spanish in the US are illegal immigrants from Mexico, I suspect that you're highly wrong on that.
2. I'm sure there are many people on tourist visa's who over stay. I'm sure there are many less people who came over on H1B's who overstay. H1B has a path forward (no matter how bad that path is), which allows you to still work at your career. You can't group every type of visa together to make broad claims like that.
> This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
> This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
You assert this as though it's just automatically a good thing with no actual analysis as to the impact on Canadians. What happens to the cultural cohesion, wages, and living standards of Canadians when immigration is at such a rapid pace? Is this not a factor? Or is the sheer availability of cheap, undercutting labour just a natural capitalist good that we should accept regardless of the hard to measure, intangible impacts?
Canada is selective about immigrants (they have a points system), so all the things you call out are accounted for in their model - they bring in those their country needs. And from what I see from down south, they benefit a lot from it.
With housing prices in Canada now it’s terrible to be young. As a landlord it is working great for me when I can get $2000 a month for an apartment in Hamilton.
Demand for housing in Canada has in part been driven by foreign non-residents real estate speculators who are looking to park their money in Canada, and other places. New Zealand banned all non-resident foreigners from buying property there [1,2].
I would assume that if a population remains stable as a result of migration, that as many people are leaving houses as entering them, and there shouldn't be substantial pressure on housing prices. I don't have specific data for this.
Yes, this is correct, and is largely responsible for how Canada has been able to do so well despite high numbers. However, there is no guarantee of that program continuing perpetually, considering the criticism of such ideas pouring out of the USA.
(Though we'd have to be really mad to replace it with a lottery...)
The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
The standard of living in Canada is just as high as the US. Canada's Human Development Index is .922, 13th globally. The US HDI is .920, so a hair lower. 45% of the Canadian population lives in 6 of the 35 most livable cities in the world.
"Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.
> "Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.
Again, asserted, no evidence, no argument. Social cohesion is absolutely an issue. We feel it when we have no community organizations, don't know our neighbours, and have nothing gluing us to where we live. The famous Putnam study on social capital is a fine piece of evidence here.
I believe we can surmount Putnam's identified problems, but only if we have a rate of influx that is sustainable. That means each newcomer has a chance to get proper language training, recertification, and actually integrate into a local community, which I'll somewhat arbitrarily define as having made some real friends out of the group of local or fully-assimilated people. This is the core requirement of being able to fully participate in social life.
> The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
Putnam's study cover the US not Canada, if I'm not mistaken. Do you have any evidence that the rate of immigration is "too high" to sustain social cohesion in Canada? I would suggest that as you're the one that introduced it the burden of proof is on you.
> Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
The immigration rate of 1% per year has been the same since 1992 and I see no evidence of inequality increasing in conjunction with immigration. Do you have evidence? And once again, dramatically increasing wages by cutting off immigration increases income inequality. The GINI has remained a consistent .33 from the late 1990s through the present day, in spite of 1% per annum immigration.
You're going to need to back your case if you want to sway my mind.
FWIW I am an immigrant myself (in Australia) and I am in favour of strict regulation. Skilled migration schemes should bring in skilled people, I've seen many people migrating on a skilled visa only to end up making a living as taxi drivers.
Some people ending up as taxi drivers actually have skills; their skilled visa isn't based on lies. They are just not able to continue in their field in the new country for whatever reason. Their accreditation is not recognized, or they don't interview well or whatever. Meanwhile, there are bills to pay and food to put on the table.
Of course, I didn't mean to deny that, actually I was out of my field for some time at one point, and I was working as a waiter to just to pay the bills. On the other hand, I've seen people on skilled visa who never actually worked a day in their nominated occupation.
My previous comment is more related to the fact that some migrants that follow the rules, may suffer from the fact that other migrants don't - for example at first my wife could not join me in Australia, because she comes from a country which had a high number of irregular applications in the past and for this reason that country is now considered "higher risk".
For this reason, many migrants are actually in favour of stricter regulations.
This fact is often not evident if you're not a migrant yourself, that's why I wanted to bring it up.
If so, then maybe they shouldn't have been issued "skilled worker" visa in the first place. Part of the visa process should be verification that a person really has the credentials to work in the profession they declare on their application.
Of course there also could be a process to get that accreditation without coming to the country. Something like bar exams for lawyers could be held in US embassies around the world, or online.
First of all, I'm pretty sure the US accepts way, way more immigrants than that. Also, how is it anti immigration to ask employers to pay H1Bs a competitive wage? Yes the process is expensive, but so what?
If you really needed H1Bs, you'd be willing to foot the bill. The program shouldn't be used to get access to cheap labor & it shouldn't be used to save money.
Immigration quotas have remained constant at about 1% of the population per year since 1992.
Low wages in software compared to the US for sure, but that's in part because Canada has very low income and wealth inequality compared to the US. Most people make a living wage, and there's not a huge spread.
The US ranks near the bottom of the world in income inequality [1]. Canada's GINI coefficient was 33.8 in 2018 vs the US of 43.4. This puts America at 51st in the world (lower being worse) vs Canada's 107th.
The issues of income inequality, most people making a living wage are non-sequiturs to the argument that says if you have an ample supply of cheap labour, the wage goes down.
I guess the argument I was making is that you can't at the same time have "low income inequality" and a short supply of a particular skillset which drives them to receive disproportionate compensation. To the extent that software engineers aren't paid drastically more or drastically less than people in comparably skilled professions, I would argue that's the system working. Not everyone would agree with that to be sure.
Mind sharing some numbers? This is a patently false statement. Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.
>Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.
Not really. They (and most other developed countries) simply pay less of their GDP towards healthcare.
I'm not implying that Canada (or other developed countries) are cheaping out on healthcare. I'm only pointing out that your initial claim (that the differences in pay can be accounted for because of the various taxes paid) isn't true, or at least isn't telling the whole story.
But gross wages are also lower here. If anything almost everyone I've came across here in Canada talks about their salary using the gross amount. So not only are wages employers advertise pretty low already, they are usually pretax too.
Unless there's something more that is taken from wages that isn't shown on paychecks. Which would be weird considering that paycheck stubs usually have a full breakdown of where your money went and how much taxes were taken.
For Software Engineering pretty much all jobs will have great health coverage included, on top of a higher salary. So when you add the value of the coverage, the wages looks ever lower in comparison.
I think you'll find the "low" wages in software here are lowish in comparison to wages in the Bay Area but are comparable to other professional salaries.
But also, the cost of living in the GTA has gotten completely out of control so that's part of it.
My wife and I bought a house in a "bad" neighbourhood of Toronto back in 2005. It was $280,000 CAD and that was the cheapest we could find in the GTA for a 3 bedroom detached home still on decent public transit.
At the time both of us were both employed in tech, and we still had to struggle a bit to scrape together a down payment. We didn't perceive $280,000 as a trivial or cheap amount. And even back then we wondered how families that didn't have our (pretty decent) income level could possibly be buying homes.
That same home would be now be worth over a million. I just can't grasp how that's conceivable at all. I make really good money as a Google employee, but I'd still find it frustrating to scrape together money for that. I don't understand how my kids will ever own a home.
So I think it's less that people are under-compensated in our industry as much as costs of living have just become stupid due to housing price inflation.
EDIT: wife went to go check the mailbox and it was stuffed full of real estate flyers only, including one from an agent who will give you a free lottery ticket if you come to his open house. I smell doom on the horizon, but I've been saying that for a decade, so don't listen to me.
Do you have a reference? The numbers I'm familiar with have the US adding over a million new permanent residents each year (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra...). (Good numbers for "immigration" are hard to find because programs such as H1B aren't legally considered immigration.)
> Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation.
That's fine by me. For the vast majority of startups, the equity compensation should be considered worthless anyways.
> As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The average American doesn't work in a job for which an H-1B would even be permitted, so I'm not sure what this point means? I'd expect everyone in an H-1B position to be making more than the average American.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
It's expensive, yes, but it's still a very small amount compared to their overall compensation and benefits. If your entire staff is on visas maybe you'd have a bad time, sure, but otherwise it's usually a drop in the bucket.
The real joke is that H-1B is still a lottery, and in the time it takes people to get theirs, they might reconsider living somewhere else, like Canada.
Refugees != immigrants. The US admits over 1M immigrants per year. [1] We have the largest immigrant population of any nation in the world and it isn't even close (our immigrant population is larger than the total population of most countries) at over 50 million immigrants (current population not born in the US). [2]
The rest of your comment is incorrect because of this misunderstanding, so I'll give you a break. And I'll also give you a break for accepting current Trump policies as standard American policies.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
Actually, "more than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000)."
Those are non-immigrants, guest workers or temporary workers. Immigrants are defined, in US law, a green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards to be issued at 366,000 (140,000 for employment based green cards) per year. [edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens.
This is incorrect. A green card holder is a “permanent resident”. But that’s not where the line is for being considered an “immigrant”. Someone on an H1B without a green card is still an immigrant. As are temporary workers (for example on an agricultural visa).
"The term is often used generally to refer to aliens residing in the United States, but its specific legal meaning is any legal alien in the United States other than those in the specified class of nonimmigrant aliens such as temporary visitors for pleasure or students. Immigrant is also used synonymously with lawful permanent resident."
As this article was about US immigration, I was using the US immigration definition of an immigrant, which is roughly speaking, a green card holder.
H-1Bs are considered non-immigrant visitors, although it is a dual-intent class meaning they are allowed to possess immigrant intent for immigration purposes.
> The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
> More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year.
What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
The US has changed since the 19th century, when we needed endless amounts of unskilled labor. Things are much different today, and the H1-B Visa has been abused for decades.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
Good. It sounds like it's somewhat serving it's purpose. Hopefully these changes will improve it more.
> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
Well, "generous" is a big word. There's not much handed to you when you move to the US, you'll have to work hard for your money, like everyone else. If you want to know what generous looks like, try talking with an immigrant in Europe.
Immigrants are defined in US law as lawful permanent residents, i.e. green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards issued at 366,000 per year. Therefore, the number of new immigrants to the US each year is 366,000. The 140,000 number I initially used incorrectly was the number of employment based green cards as compared to family based. I've updated the math. [edit] It's 1M once you factor in family of citizens.
Everyone else is a non-immigrant visitor, and not relevant to my numbers.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.
> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
Canada brings in 25X per capita the number of refugees and 10X per capita the number of new lawful permanent resident.
I likely excluded the number of US citizen direct family members, which means Canada brings in 5X per capita not 10X - or even the 20X from before. That's still a startlingly large delta.
> Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.
Well then why are you replying to me?
> You are the one who is mistaken.
I'm wrong about lots of things, and my goal is always to get it right, and I've edited my responses for clarity, with a statement of why. However, the fact remains, 25X more refugees per capita and 5X more immigrants per capita is a lot.
Thank you for your help in figuring out where the delta was! I didn't mean to come off smug though, I saw other folks had varying definitions of what an "immigrant" was.
Where are you getting the 140k new immigrants each year number from? Wikipedia says: "According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016"
And refugees are only one type of immigrant. Should illegal immigrants count as refugees, since many frequently claim to be fleeing violence, even if they don't get officially declared as a refugee by the US? If so, that means the US admits closer to 500,000 refugees per year.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000.
I don't know what definition of "brings in" you are using, but around 1.1 million people obtain permanent legal resident status per year in the US. By this metric your Canada numbers are about right (a bit low, around 340,000 in 2019).
Perhaps you're looking at purely comparing Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program with just H-1Bs? If so those numbers are still a bit off -- there were around 190,000 H-1Bs issued in 2019 -- but also that's only a small sliver of all temporary foreign work visas issued in the US (there are again over a million per year).
Canada does admit many more immigrants per capita and generally has a much better immigration system but the numerical difference is not quite as huge as you say.
I believe the cap on the number of green cards issued per year is 366,000 -- 140,000 of which are employment based. [1] Is mistook the latter for the former and have updated my post to reflect.
[edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens. Updated.
Similarly Canada's 300,000-ish per year number is also the number of new permanent residents admitted per year. [2]
My goal was to track immigration, i.e. becoming permanent residents, not temporary migrant workers, including those under H-1B.
The US has set a target cap of 18,000 refugees next year [1] vs Canada's now world-leading (per capita) 28-33,000 [2]
You are correct that I was off re: 140,000 (that's the quota for employment based green cards), the number is ~1M total and I have edited my post to reflect. This is based on the total number of green cards available, as they are the only "immigrant" visa. Every other class is considered to be non-immigrants -- temporary workers, or visitors.
However, the fact 20% of the world's immigrants reside in America doesn't mean nearly as much on a per capita basis.
> However, the fact 20% of the world's immigrants reside in America doesn't mean nearly as much on a per capita basis.
What? We have 5% of the world's population and 20% of its immigrants, 4 times second place, but that's not enough for you? Wild moving of the goalposts.
I have not moved the goalposts. I never mentioned the total number of immigrants already in the country. That number is pretty close to 98.4% of course, since the number of First Nations or Native Americans is 5 million. Everything in my post is focused on the rate of new immigrants per year.
The UN classifies a migrant as a person that has moved across an international border [1]. If you are born and live in America, you are not a migrant by definition. So I am not sure where you are getting your 98.4% number.
While immigration policies can always be improved, your initial statement was that America is "anti-immigrant." This is hard to reconcile with the actual immigration numbers.
From the UN [2]: "The United States of America has been the main country of destination for international migrants since
1970.15 Since then, the number of foreign-born people residing in the country has more than quadrupled –
from less than 12 million in 1970, to close to 51 million in 2019."
We can debate whether the number should be increased or decreased. But it is unfair to classify a country as "anti-immigrant" when it is leading the world in immigration. Even on a per-capita basis, America is way up there (look at the map on page 23 [2])
I'm not sure you're using the term 'per capita' in the way it's intended or normally understood. If Canada allowed 28-33000 refugees per capita, that would effectively mean every person in the world could move to Canada.
My multipliers were per capita. Canada brings in 2X the US refugee count per year in absolute numbers, but is 1/10th the size, so ~20X per capita migration rate of refugees. Napkin numbers of course.
My parenthetical section indicated that Canada's numbers are world-leading per capita, not in absolute numbers.
>The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
You might not be, but there are certainly companies where H-1Bs are their bread and butter[1]. Taking Cognizant as an example:
* their wikipedia page says "The company has 281,200[2] employees globally, of which over 150,000 are in India", which means there are at most 131,200 US employees
* in the year 2017 they brought in 28,908 H-1B workers. This works out to 22% of the US workforce. If we include 2016 as well that works out to 38% of the US workforce.
* the figures above are conservative estimates. We probably overestimated their US workforce and underestimated their H-1B population (we've only looked at 2 years of visas, but H1-B visas are good for up to 6 years).
For most of America's history, immigration meant indigenous genocide and the slave trade. Maybe there was some small window when immigration was a net positive, but that window has been closing for while now.
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
The US had 1.8 million new immigrants (legal and otherwise) in 2016 and ~13% of the population is foreign born. Canada exceeds that (~21%) but nothing like the 20X rate you're claiming.
~1.2 million green cards were issued in 2016, with the rest of the 1.8 million immigrants being undocumented. I'm not sure what data you're looking at?
And also, 2017 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Table 6, “Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status by Type and Major Class of Admission,” Department of Homeland Security.
There's the problem, you're comparing the overall immigration numbers for Canada to just the capped employment portion for the US. In addition, Canada isn't as accepting of illegal immigration (estimates of 35-120k in total there now), while the US adds 600k+ yearly.
> Immediate family of U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens can sponsor their spouses, unmarried children under age 21, and parents for a green card. This category does not have annual numerical limits.
> Family-sponsored preference visas. There are 226,000 green cards reserved each year for other categories of relatives. U.S. citizens can sponsor adult children and siblings, while green-card holders can sponsor their spouses and unmarried minor or adult children.
> The Employment Route. There are 140,000 green cards available each year for immigrants in five employment-based categories (formally known as “preferences”).
The Canadian numbers are number of new permanent residents, so the equivalent of new green card holders in the US, in all classes.
The US number is also the number of new permanent residents, however if my mistake was in fact that I excluded immediate family of citizens, then the number is 5X, not 10X. However, still, dramatic. I'll have to dig in more to make sure that's what I did.
[edit] Thanks for your help in figuring out my mistake!
I am all for immigration, but not at the expense of suppressing wages for anyone. That money that was suppressed (indirectly) goes to the pockets of the C suite and contributes to income equality. What is wrong in addressing one of the reasons contributing to income equality?
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 366,000. This means Canada brings in ~10X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
I love Canada, would move there in a heartbeat, but the he IT salaries in Canada are pitiful compared to the US. Maybe one of the reasons?
> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile.
Looks like there's going to be a lot of new entry level guest workers as existing visa holders get shuffled around. It'll be interesting to see if the wage distribution stays lopsided once the situation stabilizes. If the program is fulfilling its intended goals, they should match their domestic coworkers in the same age brackets.
>The Trump administration announced an overhaul of the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers that will require employers to pay H-1B workers significantly higher wages, narrow the types of degrees that could qualify an applicant, and shorten the length of visas for certain contract workers.
This seems like a great move. It corrects the incentives to hire foreign workers over domestic workers, and also ensures that foreign workers aren't abused with lower wages due to their immigration status.
Well it seems as if all parties will be better off in the long term if this gets implemented correctly. It certainly would reduce many of the bad incentives in the immigration system.
This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all.
If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup
or
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop
my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
Why do you care whether or not it's cost effective to hire a foreign UI tester? That has zero correlation with whether or not its cost effective to hire someone with experience at CERN. Your hypothetical lists 2 different profiles that would be hired for vastly different jobs, and it seems like you only care that one of them is fucked over - is it just a strawman for racism? Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
> Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
They both compete for the same H1B visas so it has happened a lot of times. The H1B at Tata getting 70k a year took a spot from a software engineer at Google earning more than twice that. That is how lotteries work. Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. And yes, a lot of Googles new engineers comes from India, that is a good thing, the bad thing is companies like Tata abusing the system to get low paid labor into US.
Lets simplify and say we have 1 spot and 2 applicants.
Mediocre engineer with a sponsored job for 70k.
Great engineer with a sponsored job for 140k.
With no salary requirement both has equal chance to get in, meaning the great engineer has 50% chance to get lose the position. With salary requirement at 100k the mediocre engineer will no longer get sponsored leaving the great engineer as the only applicant left and thus guaranteeing that he get in.
Edit: With the old requirements bringing in mediocre engineers was still profitable, with the new requirements it wont be since the salary cap is set at a very high percentile.
There is one H1B lottery, so the two DO compete in the same lottery. And yes, I've absolutely seen excellent colleagues making north of $200K leave the country because they didn't get an H1B visa.
That’s the point, and the intended effect. They don’t want you to look overseas for the manual UI tester or whatever, they’re saying “that’s not skilled enough to warrant granting a visa based on a claim you can’t find someone in the US to do this job.”
That's not true at all. The engineer from India will simply be re-classified to L1 with a reduced wage requirement. While the grad student will require a much higher wage requirement. In the end it will actually turn out worse for someone trying to hire the engineer from Switzerland
The person re-classified as L1 will no longer be competing in the lottery with the hypothetical CERN engineer, and the odds of an application to hire that engineer succeeding will increase.
What about an Indian student who did a masters from ETH/EPFL, interned at CERN, and _then_ applied for an H1B visa? Will it mean that the said student is from a "rich family background"?
Sorta, everyone draws in the lottery from the same pool of available slots, but no more than 7%/year can go to applicants from each country. This will have the largest impact for high-salary applications from India and China, but it still increases the likelihood that any high-salary application will be accepted.
There are two issues here. American companies need workers with multiple skillsets. Your one app startup that thrives on user unwittingly selecting location on might need a highly qualified European graduate with experience at CERN. But the average utility company needs help maintaining their database and make sure they are billing users correctly. They would need a QA tester from India. There's a real shortage of those jobs too in America. You could argue against work visas and wait for 400K Wall Street exceutives switching to testing jobs. You could imagine a market where software engineers are paid Google salaries at utilities. But overall poor people would suffer at the expense of few highly paid developers.
All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost.
Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.
The US Visa system sounds completely broken, but this doesn't sound like a good fix. I suspect the way forward is a skills-based immigration system (combined with a robust refugee and compassionate family reunification system) like in other western countries, but that is likely not going to be politically possible from either party down there.
> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.
I'm virtually certain that Canada will not have a single tech company with the market cap as large as the tenth largest US tech company within in the next 25 years.
If anything Canada is actively losing ground against the US tech industry. In the past it used to have RIM, Nortel, Bell North and Corel. Today the largest Canadian tech company is "Constellation Software".
And the reason for the decline is simple. Canada's best and brightest don't go into tech. They go into real estate and property development to extract value out of the insanely overheated housing market.
And ironically this ties back to the immigration discussion. One of the major contributing factors to the housing shortage is because of Canada's aggressive pursuit of wealthy emigres. The housing market in places like Vancouver has turned into a slush fund to launder the money of CCP party members and other third world kleptocrats.
Canada is not competing with the US on how many Canadian-started companies exist. All the FAANGs have offices in Canada, which they will probably expand more. Immigrants that used to head to the US will now go to Canada instead, enriching the labor market further. If the US immigration system remains broken, Canadian offices of US companies will just get bigger.
And this has already been the case and escalating for some time.
Anecdotally, my wife worked for Apple Canada a decade ago in marketing, and at that point there was no engineering happened / allowed to happen in Canada, really. It was kept in Cupertino pretty strictly. But I've noticed in the last 5 years this is no longer the case and Apple -- who was probably most reluctant to do engineering outside of the valley -- is doing way more of it and a plenty of it in Canada it seems.
I work at Google Waterloo, and though I can't get into specifics about office sizes etc, I can definitely say two things: lots of growth, plenty of it from new Canadians but also a lot from Canadian Googlers returning from the US back to Canada in many cases because they couldn't tolerate the situation there anymore.
Happens all the time. I personally work with 3 people on my team alone who have done it. I believe at Google a transfer between countries involves a new offer, based on local cost of living etc, and it is basically indexed against what you would be making with the same experience, perf, etc. in the new locale, and Google compensation is really good for the region. Only complications are with retirement funds (IRAs vs RRSPs), and tax filing. I believe Google provides the services of an accountant for a couple years after the transfer.
Last couple of years it feels like every week I see an email from somebody asking for advice etc. for relocation.
For two of my immediate coworkers/friends, both did it a bit after they had kids, and began to contemplate having kids in the American school system[s], and away from grandparents, etc.
It certainly makes it easier transferring within the same company. I think many Canadian SWEs coming back to work after being in SV would find the job market to be rather frustrating/annoying if they had to hunt for a new job. Transferring within the same company takes the edge off.
> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones
Positioning the country as a cheap offshoring destination for lower-skilled dev doesn't sound like a good long term bet for the local population.
O-1 visas are an incredible pain to apply for, and you need to prove at extension requests how you've "remained extraordinary" during the time you've actually been working. As far as I'm aware, no graduate would be eligible unless they've produced some kind of world renowned thesis.
Let's say you join Google as a SWE on an O-1. If you just perform your duties for the duration of the visa, you won't be able to extend. You'll have to, during the visa, continue to do something "above and beyond" (in SWE, maybe tech talks/events, host conferences, etc.) and show proof of all of this, plus obtain written documentation from employers about how amazing you are. It's not for everyone.
The O-1 works for internationally regarded film directors who want to move to the US and produce work here, but it doesn't work really well for software development.
For "exceptional" people, there's the O-1 visa category. But candidate no. 1 likely would not qualify.
You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2.
Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose you are hiring candidate 1 to write an app that will help you single men find hot women to date in a 5 mile radius in your 4-billion dollar, VC-backed startup.
The second candidate is being hired into the body shop that has been contracted to develop a UI for a CAT scan machine produced by a major healthcare company.
Now tell me who should be preferred.
It's possible to make many value judgments like you and I have done, but at the end of the day they can't all be incorporated into the immigration law. Making the market the arbiter of what's valuable appears to me to be the least bad option, and strengthening that is the best, given the constraints. It still won't make the law conform to everyone's tastes, though.
The scenarios you’ve posed doesn’t make candidate 2 any less replaceable. Maybe candidate 1 is needed for whatever advanced AI the dating app uses, but there’s many non-foreign options for the function candidate 2 is performing at ImportantCorp.
Yes, I think what the parent comment intended to say was that the UI for the CT scan machine is more valuable for the society (and hence candidate 2 should be given preference) than the fancy AI algorithm that goes into the dating app, even if it would actually take an ETH grad to come up with it.
Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
> You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2.
The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop).
So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.
Its weird that people always link the "low skilled" worker to India and the highly skilled one is always someone from US or EU. Lets keep in mind that some of the most skilled engineers in the tech industry are also Indians and it might just be that the one comitting code to the Linux kernel ks also a skilled graduate from one of the top institutes in India and doesnt get a visa because of the H1B rules. Just because you're European or not Indian doesnt mean this system will benefit you.
Truth is, a lot of the current spots in the quotas are awarded to outsourcing firms from a single country. I didn't want to specifically name the firms. Naming countries in my comment was insensitive.
If you had a job that could be done by both types of people you describe, why would you pay 4x extra for the former?
Why should the guy who can write operating systems spend their time doing work that's below their skill and training experience? And if this person is ready to do this, why is the latter person held responsible for this?
>>They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
Yes, because they are being hired to do the same job. Hiring Captain America as a guard at ToysRUs doesn't change the job description of a security guard. It just means Captain America make a bad decision to work the wrong job.
Are you even a serious programmer? Throughout my whole career I've never a had phase where I've done fixed set of things. Nor has my academic training proved to be enough to provide me for all the skill sets I needed to do those jobs.
Continuous learning is how our field works. Its not just ML or any thing, tomorrow if some thing new comes up, we need to learn and work on that as well.
We don't exactly toss out our workforce and re hire kids every time Kubernetes makes a release.
Fair trade policy has consistently been the one thing on which I agree with the Trump presidency.
It hasn't been enough to outweigh all the other absolutely horrible stuff, but it is one thing.
I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade that allows corporations to import totalitarianism via near-slave or even actual slave (see Uyghur prisoners and forced labor) wage arbitrage to crush domestic wages and liquidate the middle class. This isn't even getting into the export of environmental destruction ("out of sight out of mind") or the export of American technological expertise to unfriendly totalitarian states.
H1B programs can be shady this way too. It's not as shady as actual slave labor or near-slave sweatshops, but there is certainly a serious power imbalance when your employer can pay you sub-standard wages and threaten to cause you to be deported if you don't keep your head down.
The three worst are: normalization of racism after 50 years of steadily decreasing racism in America, terrible COVID response responsible for 100,000+ deaths in excess of what average countries have achieved, and vast corruption that has destroyed hundreds-of-years-old norms on presidential conduct (Secret Service forced to buy rooms at Mar A Lago, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs participating in a political stunt in uniform, political campaign letter included in food boxes, etc).
The election is basically that of a homeowner deciding whether he wants the guy who is spraying a flamethrower into every corner of his house, or an empty cardboard box. If you loathe your house and want it destroyed, the flamethrower guy is who you want. Just be careful, there’s no insurance check when the house burns to the ground.
* Separated families at the border fleeing violence
* Installs government officials with conflicts of interest or intentions of undermining their goals (EPA, Post Office, Dept Education)
* Asks foreign nations to dig up dirt on his opponents
* Cosies up to authoritarians while insulting our allies (NATO anyone?)
* Undermined the free press by calling everything he doesn't like fake news regardless of its validity
* literally trying to call the next election into question so he can bring it to the supreme court by not agreeing to a peaceful transition of power and stoking fears about mail-in ballots o__0
But his trade policies are ineffective and scattershot. Literally nothing he's done on trade has improved anyone in the US's wages, net profits, or way of life, nor has any of it set up the conditions for that to happen in the future.
I see posturing as an improvement over the wholesale selloff and export of the entire economic and industrial basis of the US middle class to totalitarian regimes.
That being said, I agree that Trump has only been marginally effective here and generally has no coherent plan... for this or much of anything else. Donald doesn't plan. He blusters and postures.
I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
This is right. The answer that's best for the economy is to allow more immigration, not less (especially skilled immigration). This move will just make it more dificult for the average company to sponsor H1B workers
Because educating underprivileged kids takes up to 20 years(school, college, potential post-grad studies), whereas the H1B worker can start immediately. H1B workers also typically have several years experience in the specific position where they're being considered. You need both.
Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?
Start a company and see how much it costs to sponsor some uneducated kid.
You have good intentions towards the kids, but some communist intentions towards business owners. Let them decide how to spend their money. It's their money.
It’s not the responsibility of the US govt, companies or people to underwrite other countries’ underprivileged people when we have our own we fail to care for well enough.
We had a revolution and a civil war and unrest to fix our own failures. They can work to improve their own self determination. Look, Panama 25 years ago was a basket case. But now they are one of the better economies of the southern cone.
> we have our own we fail to care for well enough.
Tell me more of this “our own”. 25% of the current US population is either 1st or 2nd gen immigrants arrived after immigration reform of 1965. They include the innovators, laborers, entrepreneurs, researchers that pay a lot for your “our own”. Can’t eat the cake and have it too.
Yes first or second generation Americans (or long established Americans) don’t owe anyone else any responsibility. They only owe their descendants and fellow Americans here. They don’t owe non descendants elsewhere anything. It’s not like they can go back to their grandparents country and say hey, remember my grandparents, they were from here, I need help, help me out over here!
> It’s not like they can go back to their grandparents country and say hey, remember my grandparents, they were from here, I need help, help me out over here!
That's not entirely true everywhere though. For example, I was born in the US, as were my parents and grandparents. My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy, and if I can gather the proper documentation, I'm eligible for Italian citizenship. If I ever get this done, then yes, I could indeed go back to my great-grandparents' country and do what you suggest is silly. I believe quite a few other countries also have policies like this.
Importing the most educated, most entrepreneurial people is the most sane immigration policy.
It's infinitely better than importing huge numbers of uneducated fundamentalists whose culture is incompatible with the western values and includes throwing gays off of roofs.
It's better to have a few shining examples of truly great countries in the world, rather than mediocre mush everywhere. So citizens of other countries can point to such countries and tell their politicians and their friends - see, we can do better, much better.
I'm not an American, but I fully understand your point.
Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies.
The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please".
It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at.
At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high.
After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October.
It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone.
It is not _easy_ to get an H1B.
If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
> then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
You're right. My initial comment that spawned this thread addressed exactly this. I'm copying it here for reference, because it is pretty high up the thread at this point:
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I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
If that is the case isn't the simple solution to eliminate the mechanisms that allow employers to threaten the employees instead of increasing the burden on the employee and therefore the power the employer has on them?
Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
It is. But people will make the (disingenuous) argument that you can transfer the H-1B to another employer...
The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending.
But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special.
It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.
Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules.
I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.
For the kinds of jobs being moved, their merit-based points system grants permanent residency immediately and citizenship in 3 years. In the US, if you are from India, you can find yourself waiting for up to 20 years of indentured labor to get your green card.
> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans?
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
I think this is true when we're talking about a large number of immigrants in general, where a significant percentage of them don't have advanced skills (akin to any large sample-size of humans). The dynamic changes entirely when the sample size is comprised mostly of immigrants with advanced skills.
If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument.
2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1.
3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens.
Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.
Like... software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Architects? I don't see any of these professions seeing an overwhelming number of would-be immigrants to the point that it would destroy the local demand market for them.
And regardless, the point the parent was making is that even if it did, this would be ok, because the broader influx of immigrants would create more demand for all of these professions to the point where it'd be a wash.
Bad analogy and I believe you misunderstood what the parent comment said. They didn't say that an equal number of jobs were created. Just that the wage didn't drop due to the increase in average productivity & new economic activity.
In parent's example, the overall wages didn't drop because the immigrants bought stuff in a small geographic area, so more shops opened to sell stuff, and more warehouses were needed to store stuff, etc...and those new jobs were filled by the immigrants. I'm not disagreeing with that. My point is that this isn't how it works when the pool of people is all highly skilled individuals scattered around the country. They end up just working for cheaper than an equally qualified American citizen, driving wages down and competition up.
We have allowed 100s of thousands of Software Engineer immigrants. Are the hiring prospects of American software engineers impacted? This should be provable with at least a couple of decades of software engineer immigrants coming in.
> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries
How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.
+1 I was never asked about my immigration status before me accepting the offer. I had interviewer training afterwards and there was no mention of immigration status in interviewer guidelines as well. This was 20000+ employee company. It doesn’t seem logical from company’s perspective to hire a direct employee who’s gonna be with them for many years, just on basis of their immigration status.
And they didn’t get them because companies are paying H1B workers lower wages? It seems to me that you are advocating for hiring less qualified candidates here.
Most people in STEM outside of CS (including regular engineering) get a degree, never get a good first job (or any job at all in their field), and switch field entirely.
> How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition?
It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.
I don't see how this is a matter of compensation. Companies want to hire the best engineers. Your friends seem to not fit that bill. If there is no pool of good engineers, companies will look elsewhere. I don't see the scenario where less competition is helping anybody here. Your friends should work on their skills.
Seems none of the responses to your question was a true enough scotsman.
Hiring isn't a competition to find the smartest candidate, silly Google interviews notwithstanding. Companies want the "good enough" candidate they can get for the least pay. Otherwise all job ads would express a preference for principal engineers with doctorates, instead of the opposite which is far more common. So yes competition drives down pay, it doesn't drive up everyone's skills.
This is actually an insightful question (or at least has the potential to be one), and it's a shame it's being downvoted.
Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs".
There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region.
Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
It's because you want the people who already live here and are your neighbours, your co-taxpayers, your co-voters to thrive. The alternative (lots of miserable and frustrated Americans) can lead to a shitty living environment even for those who are doing fine. Also, as the history has shown, such situation in extreme can lead to end of democracy.
It’s only an insightful comment if you just discard the entire notion of a state and citizenship which most of the world has been structured around for the past several hundred years.
Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
The whole purpose of the H1B visa program, according to the economists who designed it, is to stifle wages of American workers. All the other stuff you hear about it is revisionist history.
Not at all. If you import workers, they might fill a slot for one job, but they are also consumers. They need food, and mattresses and haircuts and everything else it takes to live in America. Immigration helps fill the demand for talented workers, and bringing in those talented workers increases the demand for every other type of good and service.
Low skill immigration hurts the poor. When economists talk about it having a neutral impact they are referring to 4-5 year time scales which is different from having zero consequences. Most poor people are not in a comfortable enough position for it to be ethical to tell them "just deal with it" without offering some kind of support.
The right solution would be, to require high wages for H1B visas - if you're hiring a developer, the minimum wage for the H1B worker should be (eg.) 1.5x average developer wage in that area/state. This would solve companies firing local workers and replacing then with H1B workers, and still solve the problem of a company 'really needing' that one worker.
Maybe this comes off as too negative: but that "America is built on the hard work of immigrants" meme is an absolutely tone-deaf talking point. Many people hear hear that phrase, and immediately assume you are not arguing in good faith.
Yes, immigrants built America. But so did enslaved people. So did natives. So did rebellious colonists of the British empire. Most of those people did not consider themselves immigrants - and nor do their descendants.
Many immigrants have contributed amazing things to our nation, and they still do. But immigrants as a group are not a monolith. Many of the "highly skilled workers" that come over on H1Bs, are frankly - not highly skilled workers. Many are semi-skilled workers who are preferred over qualified Americans because they work for low wages and nearly never quit when abused.
Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us. If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants. But it's absurd to say to reduce this to "immigrants = good = America". Not when we know the current system is abusive to both immigrants, and to the Americans who are part of the toxic workplaces that the H1B visa-mill paradigm has created.
> Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us.
Agreed!
> If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants.
This is really just not a hard problem at all to solve from a policy perspective. Political will has been a big problem; both parties have campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has materialized. Corporations with political influence love the status quo as it allows them to import workers for similar or lower wages who can't quit or do anything that would risk them losing their job without being sent home.
Are Colonists treated as bad as immigrants in this country at the moment? The post is about immigrants so that's why I'm talking about immigrants. People who are immigrants are still in the transition phase and this is a clear sign that they are less welcome.
Not many people are capable of traveling from distance places away, learning a new language, and then starting from scratch, with no family or friends. I'd give them a bit of credit, especially since their contributions are still being uncovered after being purposely devalued.
To your point, there are of course other hard working demographics in the US, but limiting the number of H1Bs that can come over is slamming the door on people who rightly deserve to be in the US.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who openly declared themselves a colonizer for some overseas empire would not be welcomed today.
My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today.
The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).
An important dynamic very little talked about is the fact that in the majority of industrialized countries within a very short time populations will be decreasing. The battle of the future will be who can bring in a continual stream of people to keep the economy growing. So various countries will likely be battling for highly skilled workers in the future. So the challenge with more immigration is that you have to have some robust level of job creation and growth for the existing people in the country because otherwise you will have a combination of a broken system (people come to the country and get a job, but then their kids never get jobs, or they lose their job and cant get another one), or people will resent the people who are getting jobs, or people will come to the country and then end up leaving. So lots of bad outcomes if you don't actually set things up in a good way. Countries like Germany have a really strong system of vocational jobs, apprenticeships, career ladders, etc so there is a sense that the local people have some career trajectory, so somebody else having some level of success after arriving in their country is not bothering them. Of course that's not universally true, but definitely people will be resentful in a particular area if tons of new people show up and have tons of success while they struggle to get off square one..
The best thing to do would be to treat them like local workers -- increased pay AND increased flexibility. This will help retain the best overseas workers in the US.
Even better would be a salary auction where US companies get to auction (higher and higher salaries for the best overseas workers.) The highest auction rates would fill the quota first. Overseas workers win bigtime. Companies seeking talent also win. Local workers win as well. Companies trying to underpay lose.
The problem with this is that H1Bs are not just for software engineering jobs. Other professions that qualify are things like accountants, or health care workers.
If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.
The H1B system is supposed to be for shortages. In a real economic shortage, prices are supposed to go up. If salaries are not going up, it is not a real shortage.
I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a suitable rate.) Their business model should not be to underpay workers, it should be to pay workers high enough to attract them and charge customers appropriately.
> Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants
Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.
I think GP's point is that that's the way it's supposed to be. The shortage of accountants could be due to some combination of:
1. There are not enough people with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants in the US
2. People with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants are choosing other jobs; perhaps because they pay better, or are more fun, or have better work/life balance, or whatever.
#1 is a reason to steal^W import capable people from other countries; but I doubt very much that's the source of accounting's problems. It's almost certainly #2. In which case, if accounting firms want more accountants, they should make the job more attractive: pay more, have better hours, etc.
Correct, this was exactly my point. The last thing is -- if the Accounting Firm business model doesnt work w/ fair wages, then the firms need to re-think how much they charge ("lets abuse desperate foreign workers" isn't really a good business model.)
Entirely possible, but that's not what was suggested.
I think there would also be debate around how the quota is split between categories. I highly suspect that are much few Foreign Law advisors or Psychologists attempting to get H1Bs than there are "IT/Computer Professionals" (and many less positions available for them); giving each category an equal split wouldn't be fair either.
I'm not saying there isn't a way, but it would have issues too.
When you're trying to hire someone, "right now" is important. If I want to hire a nurse, and there are no nurses available, I can't afford to wait 4 years for someone to train as a nurse to be available for me to hire.
If I just keep offering to pay more, then yes, I will eventually be able to hire a nurse that was previously employed somewhere else, but now _that_ person needs to hire a nurse. No matter how many times you go around this circle, there are not enough nurses for everyone to hire.
That is a shortage. A shortage doesn't typically come with the asterisk of "but if I wait long enough then maybe there won't be".
Do you mean, cap the amount of money a company is allowed to pay someone on an H1B? The entire change of rules here is because companies were not paying market rate. Requiring them to not pay market rate defeats the purpose here entirely.
If you mean require that companies pay _at least_ the 75th percentile, then yes, I believe that is what the action that this entire thread is about is going.
I would also disagree that H1B destroys the feedback loop of jobs being needed. I don't believe the number of H1Bs issued is any where near large enough to disrupt an entire industry.
We already have a system for that -- taxes. Why would you underpay H1B workers? It seems punitive w/o cause.
1. It is unfair to the workers
2. The H1B Programme is for top talent, for talent you cannot find locally. If anything you should overpay for such valuable talent.
3. High H1B salaries also come back to the country in the form of taxes just like for all workers, which should improve schools.
Schooling is a shared problem for communities and our country, and should be paid for with taxes -- why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers?
Finally, if despite taxes, we cannot fix our school system, perhaps instead of blaming/punishing immigrants we should be looking at our municipal and state governments.
K-12 schooling in America is paid through property taxes, so unless they are living in a area with high property taxes you most likely wont be helping much.
College level school funding (state/federal) has basically dried up in the past few decades with budget cuts. The idea is affordable public college education is not realistic for most people. I believe this is what the commenter is talking about needing more funding.
> K-12 schooling in America is paid through property taxes.
That’s probably not true exclusively anywhere in America, and it's not true predominantly in a number of parts of America.
For instance, in California less than 1/4 comes of K-12 funding comes from local property taxes, and the absolute majority comes from State funds which are derived primarily from state income taxes.
> The combination of state, local, and federal school funding makes it so that the districts attended by poor students are funded 2.5% more than non-poor students. And even within districts, “schools with less advantaged students spend at least as much (and often significantly more).”
...
> Property based funding of schools is not likely to be a very effective target for school reform since our current system does not actually have large differences in the funding of poor students. I think that it is more likely that the dysfunction in the schools is best explained by a lack of continuity and efficiency within the schools that serve poor students.
The property tax debate is mostly just an easy but misguided target for explaining the achievement gap. On top of the pure fact that property based taxes have actually still allowed for the progressive funding of schools, we already have examples of states that fund students without a total reliance on local property taxes.
Take Michigan. Michigan has a centralized funding source for their students. The state takes an overall tax and then breaks it up evenly across students within the state (there are extra complexities to this that are addressed in this article). Even with these changes in school funding, it does not appear that the reformed funding strategy had any impact on student outcomes.
In general, funding is not a good proxy for educational quality.
Employers pay as little as they can. If it's possible to hire someone for minimum wage, you hire for minimum wage.
If it's possible to import and indenture a guy for whom a crowded shared house with an actual bathroom looks like a palace, you'll do that. If you don't, your competitor will.
>why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers
You don't put it on immigrant workers, you put it on industries whose demand exceeds supply.
Also remember that immigrant workers don't come out of nowhere. You imported 100 nurses, India and Pakistan have 100 nurses less. Vacuuming up the brightest people from everywhere doesn't help global development.
Seems like you assume a finite number of nurses. If the pay keeps going up, then new candidate will appear, not immediately but, pretty soon. Market forces and all that.
> I can't afford to wait 4 years for someone to train as a nurse to be available for me to hire
From my comment. Nurses require training. I did not assume a finite number of nurses. If I am sick and need a nurse, I need one _right now_. There not being enough of them is a shortage. It may not be a shortage in the future, but right now, it is.
What profession doesn't require training or experience to do well? I wouldn't hire someone who had never built a house before even if I wanted one built right now.
You're right, you would look outside of your country's talent pool to try to find someone qualified to do it for you.
Or are you suggesting that you would wait around and be homeless for 4 years until someone local built up enough training and experience in order to build your house? If you're going to suggest that you would wait and "live somewhere else", I would point out that people who are trying to hire, for example, nurses, often don't have that luxury. If they wait 4 years, they'll be dead.
No one is suggesting that high skill work status are used for people with no training or experience; they explicitly require training and/or experience in order to qualify. If think you're proving my point; if you need to hire someone right now, and there is no one available locally to do it right now, then there is a shortage, and you need to look outside of your local market.
Is my "local market" the entire rest of the United States? Or just my state/county/city? This still doesn't seem like you're describing a real problem.
It doesn't matter. You can define your market as whatever you want.
The point is that if someone you need to hire is not available, you're going to try to find them elsewhere. You're not going to wait 4 (or whatever number of) years for someone to go to school, train, gain experience, and be available for you to hire.
It looks like you're assuming there's no salary elasticity in the job market, which is probably not accurate.
There are always trained nurses that maybe decided to retire early, considered the stress not worth the pay and switched jobs, or something else like that. Higher pay can get them back on deck.
Demand for nurses doesn't change abruptly and before importing people became a fad it was largely followed by supply.
This is so true. In fact we've seen this happen already. Once big-tech started paying market salaries, their applicant:position ratio has exploded to 100:1. In a prior era, those same workers might have gone to Wall St or Strategy Consulting.
The Market works. Pay fair wages and your personnel problems go away.
And you just cut services that customers want but aren't willing to pay for. Which will likely happen with a lot of the gig economy as-a-service things currently being subsidized.
Or stay more pedestrian. Grocery baggers in the US basically went away for a while. I assuume they came back based in part on what grocery stores had to pay for them to work.
I'm not the commenter, but I'd argue that people who want a service but don't want to pay the cost are irrational and perhaps we should not worry about pleasing them?
Suppose I want a new BMW and I want to pay no more than $300 for it. This doesn't mean that we should force BMW workers to work for free -- it means that my expectations are not rational.
Similiar, if I want a 10km Uber ride for $1, which costs less than even gas, the desire is irrational. Why should workers have to work for free to satisfy this consumer's irrational desire?
Same thing for grocery baggers "disappearing" -- of course they disappeared, there was a pandemic. They werent being paid for the risks of bagging groceries.
I'm talking about in the 80s or so when a lot of things started switching to more self-service. My local supermarkets have baggers today and you're literally not allowed to bag yourself.
I don't see there being anything irrational about not wanting to pay the price for certain services. And I don't expect either individuals or companies to sell me things on terms that aren't attractive to them. But that doesn't mean I don't want those things even if I accept that I can't have them on terms acceptable to both myself and the person providing them.
Nurses require licensure in the state that they are employed in. To hire a nurse in... say Illinois, you need to have someone licensed as a nurse in Illinois first.
Submit an application to take the next state licensing examination.
There are some states that have a compact and getting a multi-state license for those compact states will let you switch practice in multiple states - https://www.ncsbn.org/nurse-licensure-compact.htm
However, Illinois isn't part of that compact so its a new exam for anyone licensed elsewhere.
Aside from all of this... (as related to H1Bs) - nursing isn't a specialized occupation and doesn't qualify for the H1B. A specialist nurse, however, may. https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h-1b-nurses/ ... and that is a different license (in addition to) the RN.
The higher price makes the economics around that job different. It makes it valuable to utilize the existing individuals' time better, it makes employers give them secondary resources to help them perform their job better/faster, and it will punish employers that don't use their highly-paid time properly and to full efficiency. Also, the requirements for said position would be under pressure to be reduced to increase the available labor pool that can perform that job. Not to mention that it'll act as a price-signal for more people to train in that field.
It's not a binary "oh no not enough people" type of deal. It's a sliding scale and the closer you get to each side, the higher the incentives are to revert to some sort of equilibrium.
It really is quite one-sided (and potentially suspicious) to just try figure out "how can we get more of these people from other countries" instead of looking at all the other locally-available solutions. The same "circle" you speak of will happen regardless, even with plenty of immigration, with the double-whammy being that it'll affect the poorer countries that can't afford to keep those skilled immigrants.
So what? If there is not enough workers, they'll have to raise wages. What's wrong with healthcare workers getting 80k? (in reality, they'd poach someone elses workers, they'd have to raise their wages, and so on, then slowly there would be more workers due to more people going into field due to high wages, and if not, then get a H1B worker for 80k+).
So you have an auction, and you're capping the number of people.
A hybrid monster that takes the worst of both a private market (heavily benefiting the richest incumbents) and government regulations (broad and non targeted rules).
There is already a cap on the law, i'm not proposing that. The government regulations are also already there, i'm not proposing that either.
I'm just proposing we auction to increasingly higher salaries so all those people get nice high wages. The H1b system is to get the best and brightest for talent we cannot find locally, so paying these immigrants handsomely seems like the right thing to do. Its also good business, because high end R&D facilities should not be crossing their fingers for luck in hiring, they should be able to purchase talent by bidding for it.
I'm not sure how this benefits the richest incumbents -- the pool of workers continues to be the same. It benefits companies who desperately need the most talented workers by making them pay fairly for that top talent.
Frankly, if some company thinks they need the best-of-the-best and cant pay fairly for it, do they really need the best of the best?
Why should the overseas workers capture that gain? Seems like a tax which can be used to train US citizens for these extremely in demand jobs would be a better use of that money than sending it overseas.
This will elevate the income of low paying H1B workers, but also decrease the income of average paid American workers. If the market has an abundance of low paying workers, the market overall will pay workers lower.
That is the opposite of what is likely. The elevation of wages for a H1B will mean the average wage in that category of work will increase, for everyone in that segment. What you suggest only makes sense if there is a fixed pot of money in the economy for all wages, which isn’t the case.
> under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate
Then the employer would go back to the H1B well, underpay another worker for 6 months until the worker bailed, go back to the well, lather, rinse, repeat.
A couple thousand dollars per H1B hire-attempt is nothing to a big business, especially if they're eventually able to pay each H1B worker a fraction of what they'd need to pay an equally qualified American worker.
Worst case scenario for the business: they lose a couple thousand dollars and a few months of employee development time, then still have the option to immediately hire the qualified American worker (or try the H1B route again).
Best case scenario for the business: they get an overqualified employee at an extreme discount, since that employee is willing to accept less just to be in America. Since that employee knows it's hard to get H1B status, they're probably willing to work for a discount for many years. (therefore the business makes its money back from other failed H1B attempts, and they retain the employee at a discount)
Six months of development is barely useful for most companies. It can take 3 months before a developer is reasonably efficient. Learning the codebase, culture, and business logic takes time in most cases.
H1B employee's can work at any employer for the term of their status. The employee only has to transfer the visa to the new employer. I have done this for multiple employee's on H1B's its nothing like getting a new H1B for someone on OPT or getting a new H1B for an oversea's employee
They can, but it's still a process and not as easy as saying to a prospective employer "I have an H1B that is valid until October 2025, you don't have to do anything". Further, even though it's rarer, I believe that the transfer can still be denied if USCIS decides the new position doesn't qualify.
I vaguely recall that the "indentured" h1b workers (as oppose to the "proper" h1b like I had) owe money back to home, and that debt becomes instantly due if they bail out.
If they were super-stars they would be able to cover it from the Amazon signup bonus (and become indentured to Amazon - your signup bonus is due back if you bail out early). However superstars rarely end up in those jobs. We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life.
Liberating the indentured h1b workers is not just flipping a legal switch, it's a cultural integration project.
> We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life.
I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.
What makes you say that? From what I've seen, there's an entire cottage industry of cheap, expendably treated labor which forms the WITCH acronym which exists to abuse the H1B visa. I believe that is who they target.
Wow. That's a mean acronym (whoever came up with it).
FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US and yes, they do that by paying lower wages to folks flying in from India (compared to American counterparts), but it's still a upgrade for these engineers (plus a chance to experience America).
I understand the whole "but they are circumventing the spirit of the Visa" angle, but they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations.
I don't see a big ethical difference between 'I will pay millions to lobby and get laws written in my favor' and 'I will exploit loopholes in the system to better my business'
> FWIW - these companies add tremendous value to enterprises in the US
The 1619 project made waves domestically for questioning and highlighting the speciousness of such arguments. It is because these companies are able to pay labor below market rate (by restricting mobility and creating indentured servitude conditions) that they are able to add "tremendous value" to enterprises in the first place. But of course, I question even that.
To those who have ever been in the unfortunate position of the counterparty in either inheriting a codebase or making the argument against them internally, the code produced by these kinds of body shops is frequently ROI negative -- they're the "high interest credit card" of engineering orgs. That is baked into the profit structure internally of these consulting companies. Your loss is their gain. They will promise whatever they need to secure the contract upfront, and fail to deliver results. They are incentivized to do so, because they are incentivized to think short term rather than long term as owners.
You pay less upfront, but the hidden risks and maintenance burdens continue to stack over time. And so from a discounted cash flow analysis, there is a strong argument to be made that they contribute negative enterprise value and serve only to extract cashflow through a sleight of hand. Of course, on a quarter to quarter basis, they provide an easy way for an enterprising management consultant (or corporate financier) to cut costs and increase apparent profit to expenses. But if it was so easy to achieve technical outcomes this way, why wouldn't everyone do it?
> they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations
There are certainly myriad issues with how FAANGs operate. One only needs to look at their previous settlements with the DoJ for wage collusion to see they are no angels; far from it, they often behave in an anticompetitive manner reminiscent of Gilded Age robber barons. With that said, they are still able to create some kind of a long term incentive alignment by generally setting the market price for top talent quite high -- we need look no further than levels.fyi to see evidence of that. And the proof is in the pudding -- FAANGs have continued to capture a larger and larger percentage of the SP500, managing to create growth in market cap at scales that are scarcely possible in other sectors. Their P/E ratios reflect this, and it derives from their ability to turn technology into leverage over the market and a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects. That is a far cry from consulting body shops where technology is viewed as a cost center to be minimized rather than profit center to be fully exploited.
Wait, are you in good faith comparing H1B workers to slavery? I am not an expert on American history, but if you did, that escalated quickly :). The only rebuttal I have is, that no employee on Infosys is forced on a Lufthansa economy class seat to Newark airport. They do it by choice.
The whole "their code is horrible" is shifting of a goalpost. If that's true (and it might well be), then stop hiring them. If businesses see the point you are making, they'll stop hiring them.
On FAANGs adding value - I 100% agree. FAANGs add way more value than any Indian consulting company and that's reflected in the market cap of these companies. But surely,one can appreciate that FAANGs add value and that they lobby to have laws created in their favor. My limited point is that I don't think these American companies (which benefit from the new H1B rule) have any higher moral ground to claim with respect to their stance on immigration laws.
Also, A higher wage is an odd way to restrict hiring. A FAANG company can pay much higher wages for low-end coding job than Indian consulting companies ever can. So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
So, even when thousands of employees of these companies could not travel to the US, their profits soared. Anecdotally, it appears (need more data) that if these companies cannot send someone on an H1B, the job does not always go to an American national, it probably goes back offshore to Bangalore (good for us, we get those tax Rupees).
> Wait, are you in good faith comparing H1B workers to slavery?
Yes. Now I will pre-emptively call out that there is a wide step function gap between slavery and indentured servitude, and indentured servitude and H1B workers. H1B workers can always leave and return back to their country of origin. In this sense they are neither slaves nor bonded serfs. You are well within your rights to question the comparison.
But the question is if we have a binary classification, should it be between slave and non-slave, or should be between free and not free? The historical context of this country post abolitionism implies through the civil rights movement that it should be the latter. And that is why I made the comparison, clumsily hyperbolic or not. When some residents are not free, there is a chilling effect for citizens nationwide. Wages are depressed for all workers. The space is made for a culture of "I'd rather hire an H1B than not because they'll be more loyal because they have no choice." This culture corrodes national freedom.
> So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
The difference is the incentive structure. The consulting company is based on essentially ripping off the customer by selling a high interest loan to them. It runs on services with razor thin margins which are predominantly returned to the owners rather than reinvested in the firm. Fundamentally, the firm owns no proprietary IP, and is not structured to accrete nor reward the long-term strategic thinking that FAANGs do.
The FAANG may pay that same kid 120k a year but that share grant could easily result in 300k a year with appreciation over the long-term. Because they are giving the employee long term incentivization, they are going to want to see long term results or else that employee will get PIPped. Beyond that, if that employee can hack it at 1 FAANG and is underpaid, they'll just go to another one which pays them market. But the gulf between WITCH body shops and FAANG is wide because the employee gains the skills which give them mobility at the latter and not the former.
All of which is a long way to say that body shops dilute the labor pool by exploiting an externality and creating a market for lemons by flooding it with low quality product. I think they create a situation where no one wins but the proprietors of the body shop, at the expense of the rest of society.
You make many of leaps of faiths to get to your conclusion. Let's for a second assume that's all accurate, are you in favour of government solving this problem by an executive decision?
Note that the same State refuses to regulate FAANGs which have stood by as their platforms were exploited to influence elections.
The double standards are staggering
> You make many of leaps of faiths to get to your conclusion.
Not really. It's just the history of the equal rights amendment.
> Let's for a second assume that's all accurate, are you in favour of government solving this problem by an executive decision? Note that the same State refuses to regulate FAANGs which have stood by as their platforms were exploited to influence elections. The double standards are staggering
I am neither in favor of it nor against it. I think it is a PR tactic that will not hold up to the scrutiny of the court. True, lasting change will obviously have to originate from the legislature -- I'd love to see something comprehensive come from there. But these PR "tactics", while not truly standalone policies, nonetheless spark, influence and shape public discourse. In this case, I think that vigorous discourse (and sunlight on the corruption of H1B abuse) is a good thing for everyone.
That may be true, but the ratio of salary to petitions is lowest for those firms and others like it -- consulting body shops which do not in and of themselves innovate.
Oh boy I know a lot of H1B holders. They're far from "super talented" but boy were they cheaper than their competitors. They're not bad people but they're not "super talented" nor were their particular skills that difficult to acquire.
It depends. There are lots of brilliant engineers and programmers on H1B visas, but there are also job shops, like Infosys, that grabs lots of H1B's for contract jobs. They aren't going for stars, they are going for competent people that they can underpay.
Am on O-1 visa, would consider myself closer to super talented than internationally recognised. It’s very achievable if you put the right kind of work in.
I don’t think it’s fair to say H1B holders are super-talented. For example most WITCH consultants are on H1-b and... not super-talented. I’ve worked with some brilliant people on H1-b too but the H1-b system as is does not filter for “super-talented”
I work at a Bay Area tech company with a lot of H1Bs. I consider myself to be an average coder, no formal education, and yet it behooves me why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing.
Not anything original, not anything H1B worthy, just building front-end UIs and basic BE stuff. There's of course H1Bs working on the more complex things too like machine learning (complex to me) but I'm just astounded by the number of "brilliant" H1Bs that I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with when doing my average (at best?) coding.
>>why I'm sitting next to Stanford and Harvard grads at work doing the same grunt-work coding that I'm doing.
As some one who has had the same experience. One of the things I note is many of these people undervalue themselves and their training doing that kind of work for ad companies. They could be writing code for the robotic arm that could mine asteroids, but they write code to show ads to people.
Well people have their own priorities. But the lesson I learn is just because they work with us it doesn't mean the definition of smart gets blurred. It just means they downgraded their aim and are likely hitting it more easily compared to us.
The question one must ask is. How can we learn from these smart people?
Liberating them is probably pretty complicated, and I would love to see that happen, but preventing more becoming indentured (at a cost to the local labor market) probably is a legal switch.
We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty. Certainly the government should not be incentivizing this, which seems to have been the case for a while.
"We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty"
Can I nominate you for understatement of the week? The American civil war was indeed some "difficulty".
Protection against exploitative debt collection practices extends to non-citizen residents with US bank accounts and employers. Granted, it's effective coercion if the visa-holders think it's effective, so there's definitely some cultural integration and teaching stuff there, but it can definitely be done.
Granted, if family in the mother country are effectively held hostage to the debt payments, that's a different story, but there can be enough protection for US law to protect h1b workers against exploitation by law-abiding employers and creditors.
*Edit : Apparently I misinterpreted the parent post. Please disregard.
Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.
My read was that OP was saying “kinda average” are typically in “indentured servitude” jobs.
Superstars can pay back money owed back home from an Amazon bonus... not sure if OP meant “from the start” or “if they bailed from indentured servitude job”.
This is just pure xenophobic drivel. There are people of different levels of talent in a large population set. Your characterization speaks more to your attitude than the millions of people that you malign.
As a serial immigrant myself - hit the nail on the head there. There is the “pay debt back” (relo, visa/lawyer costs) issue in some companies but this is a very good start.
IIRC having an employee pay for costs associated with H1B and/or employer-sponsored Permanent Residency applications was flat-out prohibited. Is that wrong?
There are ways around it, like “returning a signing bonus” or “reimbursing relocation costs”. Those are usually subjective and super-vague as well, e.g. “approx. $$$” or “minimum of $$$” and they never give you an actual number so it’s extra scary for someone coming from a country where their current monthly wage could sustain them for a year.
Temporary working visas like H1B(US) or 457(Australia) or L(Swiss) are all terrible in their own little ways, sigh.
The main issue is if you make a wrong career move your situation could quickly turn into an absolute nightmare, e.g. consistent abuse at work which you cannot escape.
This suggests the market rate for an H1B employee isn't just, in general, lower than a comparable American employee. If everyone's underpaying H1Bs, we need to counter that.
While I'm in favor of the move, wages are just a band-aid fix. The core of the problem is that the premise of the H1B visa itself – extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US – is complete bullshit. Everyone participating in the program (including the government) knows this, and yet they have to do the entire song and dance of years long approval processes, fake job listings, RFEs and whatnot.
Fix the real problem, and salaries will take care of themselves.
Another problem with simply raising the salary bar is that there are actually professions (especially in healthcare) that genuinely have a talent/supply gap. A small hospital in the midwest, however, isn't going to be able to compete with a hotshot SF startup with unlimited venture funding to throw at foreign hires.
It's not "extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US" though, it's for skills for which there is a shortage in your market, similar to the subclass 189 visa here in Australia.
When you say "extraordinary skill" you are probably thinking about the O-1 visa (which is similar to the Australian subclass 124).
What are you paying and do you post that information on your job description? I am a software engineer with 5 years of experience in Chicago IL and am open to new opportunities. What would you offer me?
The H1-B program prevents the tech industry from developing its own domestic supply of skilled engineers by shutting out domestic applicants for entry level positions. Remove H1-B's from the equation and the labor market will move back to equilibrium.
Most companies I see using H1-Bs are startups looking for people to get technical work done as cheaply as possible. These are the same people who give employees 0.1% of a series A company and whine about how there's a "skill shortage".
When in truth, there is no "shortage" -- it's just that software engineering is one of the only (somewhat) high-end careers subject to absolutely no credentialing whatsoever, meaning, if you can get someone here (to the US) and they can do the work, great, they're hired.
Contrast this to the absurd coddling present in other professions. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, etc. have massive barriers keeping people out, competition down, and in the end, prices of their services up.
It blows my mind what middling lawyers can charge: $300/hr or more for mediocre law work for my California HOA. These people have zero side projects, don't study a minute out of work, and work strict 8-hour days, with the expectation of earning $250k/yr or more mid-career. This is what the cream of the crop in our field earns (Google SWEs making 350k or so). The cream of the crop for layers make millions/year at places like Cravath or Orrick billing $1000/hr or more. Even my wife, an architect, is now billing out at $250/hr.
It blows my mind how underpaid software developers are, given how difficult the work, and the working conditions are, compared to other similarly demanding fields in terms of professional education, and raw intellectual horsepower required to do the job. A typical H1-B can be productive a few months after a good software education anywhere in the world, assuming they speak passable English. My best friend's sister-in-law, an Indian dentist, had to retake the last year of dental school before she could touch a single tooth in the US.
The biggest winners from the H1-B regime are high-skilled professionals in the US. Low-end labor doesn't care about any of this. They work for cash, and still pay sales and property tax (through rent) just like the rest of us, and all for absolutely zero government benefits.
As someone who worked in Architecture first, you’re way wrong about at least that profession. SWEs make a LOT more than Architects. My first job as an entry level SWE was 2x more than I ever made as an architect.
Really? What if you need a bunch of translation/localization work done. America has a shortage of people who are bilingually fluent and have the engineering skill, in many of the needed cultures and languages.
Do you think companies are going to go to war bidding up salaries for a tiny number of qualified American candidates who can do this work, or are they going to outsource to overseas firms that can do the work?
So then the question is, do you want this work being done here, in America, paying taxes here, or do you want some consulting company in Asia or Eastern Europe to get the money?
I think this can potentially affect startups who may want to hire H1bs at a lower than prevailing wage for their area(even if they are paying their American colleagues the same amount).
Other than that, the biggest issue might be to IT consulting companies (mostly based in India) that tend to have their employees work at a lower rate than tech companies.
I mean they will pay H1bs higher but still doesn’t make a company pay a us citizen higher. Maybe it will open up space for lawsuits based equivalent responsibilities and help the equal pay for equal movement. Even excluding H1bs we know there are people doing the exact same work for vastly different
It is true - as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first, which becomes a part of the documentation you submit to USCIS. I went through that as a part of my own visa process.
EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)
> as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first
No, this is only part of employment-based greencard (LC) process. For H-1Bs, as part of the LCA process, the employer needs to advertise that a candidate is going to be hired.
"The employer needs to demonstrate that the worker is being paid at least the prevailing wage for that region and occupation, and comparable to native workers in the firm, and that employing the worker will not adversely affect current workers. The employer does not need to demonstrate that there is no qualified native U.S. worker for the job."
Compare that to:
Employment-based visa (such as EB-2 visa, or EB-3 visa) that provides a path to permanent residency (a Green Card)
"The employer needs to demonstrate that there is no qualified U.S. worker willing to do the job at a comparable wage, and needs to have made a good-faith effort to recruit a native U.S. worker."
You only need to demonstrate an effort to recruit someone when applying for a green card.
I finally agree with something this administration is doing.
This is a solid move.
H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
I just hope the new administration don't role back these changes. Typically when a new administration comes in they have a "throwing the baby with the bath water" mentality. I hope they realize the things that the previous administration did which makes sense and keeps them
exactly. although there's more than one way to fix this. one controversial idea, but in line with capitalism is to just give (highly) skilled immigrants permanent residency (other countries do this already, and the H-1B process is also pretty rigorous). why? because right now with e.g. the H-1B, your employer has to petition for a green card. as you've said, it costs a lot of money to sponsor an H-1B. a reason some bad-faith companies do this is because they know the H-1B employee is tied to them (although an H-1B transfer is not too difficult). imagine if it was easier for visa holders to switch employees? i'm not holding my breath though.
in any case, having H-1B be a lottery was always weird. i just hope this doesn't impact any existing H-1B holders :(
> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small)
I don't see this exactly.
I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders. Many of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Presumably paying a huge amount in taxes for the privilege.
Most software developers I know are not making what I would deem suppressed wages, especially in the current conditions (and I don't have an SV job). Most firms I know would hire more people, but instead are contracting with firms and individuals outside of the US.
> I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders.
I don’t disagree one bit. I think immigrants contributed and continue to contribute tremendously to the US economy. But at the same time policies should not be used to suppress wages by the “C” suite class. By paying low salaries it increases profits for the companies and contributes to income inequality
I have worked with brilliant H1B holders and also with manifestly mediocre ones. And even a couple "net negative" employees.
To the best of my knowledge all of them played the game diligently and got their green cards, and many of them got their citizenship. Good for them, and in many cases good for us.
But I absolutely did not see any greater level of talent among the H1B's than any other cohort in SF/SV.
While I'm very happy to work with people from all over the world, I do think that H1B has been used to get a lot of people in who aren't any better than your local City College grads. In addition to that being radically against the national interest, it's also really unfair to the "brilliant visa holders" you have had the good fortune to work with.
The problem in the US, as I understood it, is that there is shortage of workers in IT [1]. To me, it sounds like turning off the stream of potential workers, without fixing the underlying issue. With the current rules (85k H-1Bs a year), it would take 10 years for immigrants to fill all the spots. There may be a lot of untapped talent left in the US (based on under-representation of women, that's a discussion for another time), but somehow, the vacancies are not getting filled - what gives?
In addition, it seems that even currently, H-1B program has rules to make sure the wages paid are fair [2] - if they are not, it sounds like a problem with enforcement, or with how prevailing wages are calculated. To me, based on [3], it does not look like calculating the prevailing wage is the problem.
You have to realize that there really isn't a "shortage" of workers in the computer science field. Companies like to pretend like there is, but really it's just about pressing salaries in the long run. I have a friend here where I live who is a well-qualified java backend dev, not completely socially inept but who couldn't find a job in two months now after his previous company didn't renew his contract. This is not an outlier, I have spoken with lots of software engineers who had trouble finding work even in the next big city here, despite 50+ "open" positions. In reality, most of those spots are either a) nonexistend, the company just wants a stream of new applicants in case they can get their hands on a cs master for like 2k/month or b) pro forma because they're required by some policy to open the position to outsiders to fulfill a quota. In my experience the lack of IT workers is bullshit and anyone perpetuating it is either unknowing of the real world or acting in malice.
Isn't that nearly always the case, in every field? I know guys on landscaping who say the same about senior workers who know how to deal with more exotic plants. In education this phenomenon is a huge part of why poorer schools suck, experienced teachers move to the suburbs as soon as possible.
The problem is that it is anecdotal. I have been frequently approached by my skip level manager and asked if I know anyone that we could hire since we have headcount that's open for months (this was MSFT) and we won't be able to work on everything we wanted to. This is also something I heard from other people (managers) as well. So now how do we measure if the shortage is real or not? Your gut feeling?
They can already get geniuses for paltry wages, it's called "outsourcing". I feel that a lot of people operate with the assumption that a person needs to be in the USA to "steal someone's job" - that's not the case, and hasn't been for a while.
But, we don't have to argue about what we think is happening - there's data available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. It should be possible to see how wage growth in tech compares w/ other sectors. My hypothesis is that without shortage, wage growth would not outpace other industries.
This isn’t going to have any impact on the number of H1B visas that are awarded. There’s a cap at 85k/year, and most applications get rejected. This is just going to result in the available 85k/year slots being awarded to the intended pool of high-skilled industry specialists, rather than those people being swamped out by a mass of applications from companies that see this as an opportunity to hire cheap labor. I have had a colleague who was probably making $200,000+/year sent back to his native country because all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and all the king’s immigration lawyers too...) couldn’t secure them a continuation of their work visa.
I don't think we disagree with it, it just isn't very significant. A couple of city states agreeing to recognize Israel? Ok, a nice step forward, but it doesn't seem very substantial or that a real solution is in the works.
"Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict."
How low is your bar for peace medal worthy efforts? If not starting wars is an achievement there’s a bloody long line of heads of state ready to receive one. And yes I do realize the bar was set low by the previous president.
Sorry the discussion is about the commenter not agreeing with any previous policies of the president. If you don't think this quote marks an important shift in American policy I'm not sure you follow American policy.
How familiar would you rate yourself with Middle East politics? From people I know who are quite deep into it, it’s actually a very significant change to the geopolitical balance of the region that will likely have a lot of ramifications going forward.
Answers vary with whether someone is a Trump supporter or not, but again, these are city states, not Iran, not even "almost Israel ally at this point" Saudi Arabia. He also has made no progress with the Palestinians, and has gone plenty backwards on the front (forcing Serbia to move their embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, huh?).
All valid points, but at least the perspective I've heard is it's breaking up the "pro-Palestinian block" somewhat, so definitely changing the power dynamics, and impacting the Palestinian situation as they are losing potential allies. And as for Iran, it's pulling countries away from their sphere of influence.
Who knows whether it will be a positive push in the right direction, but it's certainly changing the dynamics of the region.
Probably harder, actually. Google and other high-paying tech companies have been lobbying for this change for years. There are only 85k/year slots for H1B visas and they are awarded by lottery. High-paying tech companies generally have a high hiring bar and don’t find all that many candidates, so they don’t submit all that many applications to the lottery, and as a result their candidates get swamped out by the hordes of applications from body shops like Tata. This change will drive a lot of applications from low-paying companies out of the pool, and high-paying companies will be able to hire a larger share of the candidates they submit applications for each year.
Most people don't get this obvious fact. Blocking low paid neurosurgeons from coming into your country, never translates to allowing barbers to operate on your head.
It probably means you either go into a wait queue to get your operation done, or you fly to a different country where those doctors are present. Either way the operation will be more expensive, and your country will have less know-how at the end. You also have to now deal with the consequences of having awesome things getting done outside your country, which means the next generation of neurosurgeons won't be coming out of your country. At least not all of them.
Now Google or any other company isn't going lower the bar for hiring, they'll just happily open offices outside US to get the cream of the those countries. The fact that it could hurt your feelings is just irrelevant here.
Its very much like getting hired to Navy SEALs or some into some other elite unit. They have their criteria, they really don't mind rejecting you if you don't measure up.
The new administration will absolutely roll back these changes to kowtow to pro immigration groups and wage sensitive Silicon Valley. Obama administration expanded the coverage of H1B to their spouses (H4 dependents) who previously were ineligible to work.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Obama administration allowed Employment Authorization for dependents of H-1B visa holders who applied and were chosen for permanent residency and were stuck in the backlogs. Many of these people - women, mostly - have been unable to participate meaningfully in the economy of many years. What is the problem with allowing them to work while they wait for their turn to be permanent residents?
The original idea of the H1-B Visa was these were high paying jobs where the spouse wouldn't need to work. It appears the pay rate has not kept with with inflation and/or cost of living.
They are not denied the right to work, but they are not given the right by default. The spouse can still apply to work via other means, but should not be given a work Visa by default. These restrictions on spouses are the same of every other country I have heard of, the US is the only one that had a special Visa just for spouses.
Nothing is preventing spouses from applying for H1B or other Visas, they key debate with the H-4 Visa is the spouses needed to work to afford to live in the areas. This just highlights the absurdity of the income levels in the H1B program. H1B is a temporary work Visa, everyone that has applied should understand there might be restrictions for yourself or your dependents until your family has a green card.
< What is the problem with allowing them to work while they wait for their turn to be permanent residents?
Why have immigration quotas. Why do you have to stand in line at Starbucks? You can go straight to the counter and holler. Happens all the time in India right ? Why stand in line at all.
+1 on this. I have a CS masters degree from top UK university and was hired as Software Engineer, but company registered me as a Computer technician. When my H1b required renewal, DoL found out that I was a Software Engineer and company was forced to give a 20k yearly increase, not retroactive. This was Cisco. This is a.great move for people like me that I had no idea about salary ranges and US laws
I fail to see how your points are correlated to the changes. (As far as I grasped them, because wsj is paywalled...)
If a company lowered your wages by wrongfully registering you for a lower paid position, they could still do so, because the crux is comparing the salary to a different demographic. The problem wasn't with the law, but with them screwing you and you not carefully reviewing the visa laws of the country you immigrated to.
It actually sounds like the new visa regulations will make immigration for entry level positions much harder. So your alternative would've likely been not getting a job in the US to begin with.
Well, let me explain you that when you migrate to a new country, apart from dealing with your work Visa you need to deal with driving license, SSN registration, bank accounts, rental, car, new language, new work culture, new life...so yeah I should have known back in 2007 when there was no glassdoor, blind that I was underpaid by that much and company registering me as X when my company title was different.
I'm very well aware of what you have to do as I immigrated to two countries myself.
My point was not that it's not understandable that you were not aware of that, but that this change in law has nothing todo with being unaware of the law.
Your underpayment happened in violation of the previous law and with the new regulation you might not have gotten the job to begin with.
As a former H1B holder who walked away from a Green Card because being a bonded laborer for 10+ years to a large tech company wasn't my cup of tea
I agree 1000% with you on this -> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
*
It's bonded labor of people desperate to get into the western world and/or get into Silicon Valley/US tech scene
It only benefits large tech companies
A) US citizens have lower salaries (lucky ones) or don't get jobs (unlucky ones)
B) H1B workers are paid less and are bonded labor
C) US itself loses out because many of those people would have started companies
Do you want people starting PinDuoDuo, FlipKart, Meituan Dianping, Shopify type companies in US or in other countries?
Then why instead of letting these 'brightest people from around the world' become entrpreneurs in US
are you asking them to spend 22 to 35 being bonded labor for data surveillance companies like FB and GOOG???
Shopify is canadian, Meituan Dianping and PinDuoDuo play in the chinese ecosystem and Flipkart is an indigenous solution for a global south country (it isn't that unique, there are ons of them and they dont bring value to the american economy except spotify). Also there is a huge moral assumption being made by many on HN: non-citizens have the right and a moral imperative to participate in the american economy. It's almost as if america's value as codify by their laws doesnt matter and these folks basically view the issue really not about respecting those laws but about the task of influence.
(A) The fact that silicon valley gets access to global talent which make sthe companies much more successful and massively increases the number of jobs available providing far more jobs for US citizens than if the visa program didn't exist
(B) The H1B visa holders are earning far more than they would get by remaining in their home country, and whilst they're bonded labour in the US they can always return to their home country leaving them at a minimum with a choice between a better job in the US or the same situation they had in their home country anyway.
(C) The US gains a bunch of highly intelligent, highly taxable employees who will likely eventually become citizens and can then create startups as well as providing a larger labour pool for the people who are starting companies.
All of your critiques are comparing H1B visas against some imaginary system where people can come to work in the US with no restriction, and let's remind ourselves these changes are from a thoroughly anti-immigration administratrion. The alternative to the H1B system is no H1B system, which is why it's been so difficult to reform. There is no law getting out of congress that reduces the restrictions on immigration.
If the alternative is no H1B that would be very bad for the US.
But I think there’s a middle ground where you can say let’s the keep H1B program but tweak it in a way that benefits the H1B visa holder and American citizens so corporations don’t take advantage of the talent shortage in tech
The only way to make it better - do away with H1B and government restrictions on labor of migrants. (Show your passport, geta job and pay taxes - done)
But that’s not what’s happening... every H1B holder I’ve personally worked with, while being incredibly nice people, required immense oversight to get any useful output from. 1 U.S. developer/manager to 5+ H1B hires seems to be common.
Point C is like a slap in the face of entrepreneurship by making it seem that only after X years of 'bonded labour' will these people be worthy of starting up.
All companies started off by students who came for an MS/PhD & happened to be successful were borderline of the grey-area w.r.t. laws.
Point b, "if you don't like it go back to your country"... they might be earning more, but the cost of living is WAY more than in their home country, I agree that they might be able to save some to no go back empty handed or to send back to their family, but why should they suffer in the meantime?
I do think it’s strange that HN has a supposed stance against political discussion, but allows discussion of the one popular policy from a very unpopular administration. Seems like a double standard leaning to the right.
Then there are plenty of equally-or-more pertinent policies that should also be discussed. Immigration is the 6th most important topic to American voters this election [0,1]. Trump has unpopular stances on the top 5 topics [2] but headlines related to that are not allowed on HN because they are political. This is the double standard.
Finally, Trump’s legal immigration policy is very anti-immigration [3]. This is a stunt to get an uptick in votes. The reality is that this policy sounds nice on paper but will make it even harder for people to immigrate to the US.
How are changes to H1B's a political issue in the same vein as say the president going to the hospital? H1B's are huge in the tech industry and so of course of huge interest to the tech community directly.
Exactly this. It has been frustrating watching basically any other news about this administration get flagged to death (or at least shoved off the front page) because "politics isn't allowed on HN." Then, we get an article like this and are expected to pretend that it isn't politics when it's happening in the context of the election being weeks away and while people are literally at the polls casting their votes as we speak.
There's loads of interesting news coming from the administration each day, but when only the items that least offend people's sensibilities make it through the flagging brigade, it acts as a politically biased filter.
If someone is keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing, they already don’t have an incentive to bring someone in and pay benefits. This is a false narrative.
it possible that someone keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing but didn't do it because it still affordable enough to bring someone in but now with the higher cost to bring someone in, they will chose to outsource instead.
How can you, an american, with a family, mortgage, car payments etc., compete financially with someone from a "shithole country", who's willing to work for very little money and live on a bunk bed with 7 roommates in a two bedroom living container? (literal situation currently in my company)
Life is about trade off, if the American want to be paid more in order to have all that then they better provide more value for their employer compared to someone from "shithole country"
The new rule is that H1B workers need to earn higher salaries relative to the distribution of salaries in their profession. The worker must make the 45th percentile wage, where previously it was 17th. Won't this primarily hurt people early in their career, or does it also take into account experience level?
I think this is by design. You don't want to issue visas to "people early in their career" - those jobs should go to Americans first. You only hire from abroad if there really is a shortage of specialists in some profession, and you want those professionals to prove their worth in their home country first, before allowing them to the US.
Well, it's possible for there to be a shortage of early-career specialists. Even now, with CS majors stuffed to the brim across the country, entry-level software engineering salaries keep rising and the big companies hire as fast as they can.
I see your point broadly, but I think it's possible for that to be true and to also take university-grad H1-B employees.
But still, you want that shortage to stay there for a while, because that provides the incentive to US universities to create more spots in CS programs for US teenagers. If you go straight to hiring foreigners you are leaving US kids behind.
Exactly. The H-1B program is intended to be for highly skilled workers. Most folks early in their career (GP is probably thinking straight out of school) can hardly be considered highly skilled. And surely there are plenty of American recent graduates from similar programs as the recent graduate H-1B applicant.
> Umm no. Everyone but Indian/Chinese H1b holder, get their green card in 1-2 years.
That's false. Maybe this was true in the past.
First, they cannot self-sponsor. Which means that the hypothetical company would have to apply as soon as they step foot on US soil. There are no incentives to do so and incentives against it. So they generally won't.
Expect the process to start a couple of years before the H1B visa is set to expire.
Even if started immediately, just for processing time alone you are looking at around 2 years. 2 to 6 months for the PERM process. I-140, similar. The AOS stage can take 10 (or more!) months to process. The last two can be filed concurrently. It's still one year on the absolute best case with no RFEs or audits whatsoever, counting from the moment the application was filed, assuming all documentation is instantly available (like employment verification letters from past workers, translations etc) and assuming lawyer time is zero (which obviously is not the case).
Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.
If you work at FAANG, they file immediately(and many more do, it's not a big deal). Are you aware for rest of world i-485 and i-140 can be filed concurrently.
> Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.
My understanding (I have always been a citizen of the US) is that the processing time to get a green card if you are Indian is so long it might as well not be an option.
The H1B system is so unkind. We invite people into our country, only to trap them with a particular employer with the constant threat of losing work authorization. Then we don’t even lay down specific rules on how one can get out of this situation.
Ahh, I see. There's a logic to it, but I really don't agree with this zero-sum mindset. The tech sector is one of the few where the US is (arguably) a leader, and it seems like we will all benefit in the long run if the most talented people in the world build their careers here. It seems like there must be a better way to ensure that native workers are not harmed by it, such as collective bargaining.
Typically younger working age people are a net benefit to the system. They pay taxes, but their kids dont go to schools, they dont require as much healthcare (which can be publicly funded in some countries).
It's not gonna take a long time before, most of the tech jobs move to Canada/rest of world. Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in usa, if they can hire at same price much senior engineer in same time zone? After successful taste of work from home, things have changed a lot. Unfortunately, now USA have not much to offer (rising healthcare cost, continuous degradation/humiliation of non white immigrants, rising intolerance of society, high cost of education etc). Let's see how it works out!
In your scenario, American workers will eventually just accept lower pay (we're overpaid already anyways). Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in Canada, if they can hire at same price the same level engineer in the same city?
Look at the work force in other business sectors. What do you see? Do you see competition? I think tech world have changed quite a bit post Covid (I might be wrong),health care cost is rising(irrespective of where one lives in USA, ), college education cost. There is no competition. The general consensus in American civil society after Bernie's defeat is, there is no need to keep majority of Americans healthy and educated. Sorry.
Good point. Why hire an American at all, for anything, ever, if you can just hire someone for less money in China or India? According to economics, America can't even exist! Impressive.
I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas.
But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.
It depends. Short term and long term there's a lot of shuffling that would happen until it settled into an equilibrium (Maybe. On the other hand maybe it would be extremely sensitive to global issues). Those people all need food and housing and need to buy goods and services, so it's not like you're obsoleting an existing person's job, you're adding demand as you add supply. Whether one eventually outweighs the other is dependent on many factors.
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
The problem beyond simple policy choices is infrastructure takes time to build. If hypothetically 100,000 people show up in NYC tomorrow there is some slack that might accommodate them. But, how do you scale the transportation network to handle even just 1 million extra people in NYC? Now extend that to every other part of the country.
Sure that seems unlikely, but when millions of people are willing to become undocumented immigrants, it’s likely a more open policy would see dramatically larger influxes. Especially in response to local events like civil wars. Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
> Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was writing the above, but didn't want to get too into the weeds on what I wanted to be a short answer to the original question (I have a habit of going on...).
Like many things, an immediate large change has repercussions that are detrimental and can possibly be alleviated with a measured change over time.
That's how you acclimate fish to the temperature in a new aquarium. That said, it's also how they tell you to boil a frog...
Just as an aside, the original boil the frog experiment first gave them a lobotomy. Without that they just out of the pot even with very slow temperature increases. On the other hand dump a frog in boiling water and they just die.
Ha, nice to know, thanks. All the best idioms seem to be completely broken when you look into basis for them, so I'm not surprised. Not that it matters too much (although it would be better if they were more accurate), they do still let us express somewhat complex ideas concisely. :)
Manhattan's peak density was in the early 1900s. There are cities on the planet denser then NYC. The transportation networks in Asia blow the MTA out of the water. We can do it here. All we need is the political will.
The only real change you would need is to eliminate birthright citizenship to avoid birth tourism. The rest is a CoL problem which is mostly a blue state problem because they like pretty policies over effective policies. Housing's cheap to build, oil is cheap, and farming is easy if you don't hate industry. The only thing that would need help to prevent scarcity initially is probably internet availability. After that just use some of the increased tax revenue to provide support for struggling citizens.
Maybe, but I find it hard to square the idea that someone capable of and willing to do my job for less money shouldn't have the opportunity to better their prospects at the expense of mine.
At the same time, the people in a given geography should have a say about what the companies in the area are doing. If a company decides to be anti-social with the people already in the community, I see no reason why the people in the area shouldn't object to it. It's clearly a balance, and both sides should be willing to play ball.
There are studies showing a slight decrease in wages, studies showing a slight increase in wages, and studies showing nothing conclusive. There's basically not enough scientific consensus to use for decision making, which means it's more a moral choice than an economic one.
Basically, the UK fruit industry was worried that it might not get "enough workers" because of COVID restrictions.
Which of course is brazen corporate double-speak. There are workers in the UK, like tens of millions of them. It's just that they're not willing to work for miserly wages. So there's only two options: (1) increase local wages, or (2) import cheap foreigners. Business obviously prefer the latter. ("But but but strawberry prices would increase" isn't a good argument - agriculture is heavily subsidized anyways.)
Somehow businesses forget how supply and demand works when it comes to labor, and "journalists" aren't, so much as they just transcribe whatever falls out of rich peoples' mouths and call it 'balance'.
We'll be back to feudalism in a couple generations.
Are you really dismissing research on the basis of anecdotal news articles? It makes total sense to question the value of the types of studies I linked to, but "the real world disagrees with research" is kind of a bonkers take.
We can dismiss it because one example is academic and the other one is anecdotal and patently obvious. If it was cheaper for farmers to use local labor they certainly wouldn’t go through the trouble of using a migrant work force.
What has happened in other countries that has similar systems, like the UK and Australia (to name two I have experience with)? I don’t think that happened there.
Our current system is kind of strange when you stop and think about it. We're OK with foreigners doing much of the labor for lower wages - as long as they do it overseas, and then ship the products here. However, if you think about it, there would be benefits to having the work be done domestically rather than requiring it be done in other countries. We could lower transportation costs of goods (and the environmental impact on transportation), we could have more flexibility in production, we could keep higher wage jobs associated with the work (management, machinists, R&D), etc. We could also have a more equitable balance of globalization - for instance, right now it's easy for a U.S. doctor to benefit from overseas manufacturing workers, but it's hard for a U.S. factory worker to benefit from overseas doctors.
People have a choice of where they want to go for work. If you tax them so hard that anywhere else is better then you may as well have simply not bothered pretending like you wanted it to be easier for them to come at all.
I guess the idea would be that the employers are taxed, not the employee. Also, H1Bs are already taxed all the regular taxes even if they return to their country before they could use Medicare or gather enough SS credits.
We actually already tax immigrants more than citizens. They pay the same taxes we do but don't qualify for all the deductions, and pay into social security and medicare even though they can't get those benefits.
As an American I do not qualify for either of those things but have to pay into it, you need to pay into the system for 40 quarters (10 years), and meet other requirements. It is currently underfunded and most likely wont have much money left by the time I could withdraw. If you have a higher income and/or a spouse that works you generally pay in more than you will get back in benefits as well because it is a progressive safety net system. I've seen many people see the high salaries and the good quality of living in the US, but many of these things take high taxes to pay for.
Well could it be dependent on employment and housing availability? Are there 500m jobs that need filling? If not then they would not be able to apply. If there was a flood of people coming the housing market would see a shortage so again these people would need somewhere to stay before being granted a VISA. I don’t think unlimited necessarily mean without restrictions.
The real bottleneck in most American metros is more people than not loath density and want a garage and a yard. Without changing that, or finding a way to make it work, it's hard for the States to absorb people.
I think that's just a coastal problem - granted that is where a bunch of folks want to live but if you shift to some of the middle-america tech markets then housing becomes a lot more reasonable.
I really do think that Americans need to figure their crap out though - either you live in the middle of a city or you get your yard. I hate cars so I'm pretty happy in the city but that isn't the opinion of everyone.
You would still have to have a job lined up to get a work visa. So there would need to be 500M new jobs.
If our economy grew by 500M new jobs, that would be unequivocally good. Those 500M people would be paying taxes, buying goods and services, paying for housing, etc.
Ok that was missing from your original statement as a condition. Some work visas dont need a prior employment offer as precondition.
I still think that it would drag salaries down significantly. I know employment and salaries are not a zero sum game, but the offer/supply ratio is a parameter.
The general idea is that once you are here you can stay. But since you're not a citizen, you can't "live on the dole" since you wouldn't qualify for any benefits.
So you'd either have to live off of your savings or get another job or go back to your home country.
You can do that today. Set up shell companies and apply for H1B visas. But at the end of the day those people still need an actual job or they won't have any money to live.
In the US, over 3 million Puerto Ricans are now allowed to migrate to the mainland US (say to DC). The borders are completely open to them. In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t.
Just because people are allowed to migrate, it doesn’t mean they will. And in the case of an overwhelming majority, they won’t.
> In the US, over 3 million Puerto Ricans are now allowed to migrate to the mainland US (say to DC). The borders are completely open to them. In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t
According to Wikipedia, as of 2018 there were 5.8 million Puerto Ricans living stateside. The population of Puerto Rico is around 2.8 million. There are more than twice as many Puerto Ricans living on the mainland as there are in Puerto Rico.
This only makes my point against the GP stronger. So half the population of Puerto Rico has already migrated to the mainland US, without anything terrible happening to the mainland US as a result.
The myths about the negative consequences of open border policy have no basis in reality.
Most people don’t migrate away from their home country/state. But even if they did, it would be of no negative consequence for the place they migrate to.
This number includes people with Puerto Ricans ancestry (therefore not born in Puerto Rico). Some of them might have migrated out of Puerto Rico 100 years ago, I don't think looking at number is relevant at all to this discussion.
> In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t.
Supposedly allowed and not at all welcome. Like most affluent countries, Sweden doesn't actually want poor people immigrating into their country. So they make things very difficult for those people. It's also why they shut down the big immigration flood, their society was highly intolerant to it.
Americans - commonly ignorant to the details of rest of the world - would be shocked to learn how regressive Scandinavia can be. From very strict immigration to virtually bulldozing minority neighborhoods in Denmark [1][2], to attacks on immigrants in Sweden and burning immigrant camps, to large political parties derived from former neo-nazi groups.
From Reuters in 2015 (the Romanians got the message):
"A series of attacks in Sweden on beggars, many Roma, has highlighted a dark side to a country considered a bastion of tolerance but where the far right has been gaining support by claiming society is under threat from waves of immigrants."
"An influx of thousands of mainly Roma migrants has shocked affluent Swedes, with beggars now a common sight outside supermarkets, IKEA stores and subways in the capital."
"There were around 300 reported attacks on Roma in 2014, up 23 percent on the year before, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. Police say the figures underestimate the scale of the problem."
"The government reckons around 5,000 migrants, some of whom also come from Hungary, are in Sweden begging. Many live on the street or in squalid camps. In recent months, attackers have thrown acid at beggars and burned tents and caravans."
"Many migrants in Sweden say they want to work, but lack of education and language skills make it impossible for most, leaving begging as the only alternative."
"When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six."
Agreed. Thanks for pointing this out. As a Scandinavian my self I am aware of this. And I raised a nibling comment pointing out that bad policies (like racially biased policing, lack of labor laws, lack of – or unenforced discrimination laws, etc.) cause issues in immigrant communities, not open borders.
Sweden and Denmark are easy to point out as they have very racist and discriminatory policies on a national and local level. But Iceland and Norway also have terrible refugee policies and rampant xenophobia (especially in more rural setting).
I do empathize with putting a priority of intention on setting up formative values and influences in their society rather than doing nothing about culture and relying reformative government programs - which clearly have their limits. Not in favor of the violence but the need for cultural integration is a real thing unless you want the planet sinking to the LCD.
Personally I think there's a middle ground that's very important, which is that I think anyone who received a university degree in the US and passes the background check should be able to get an unrestricted work visa.
The US should want to keep the talent it selects and trains. These are people who build the economy, generate IP, and create jobs in the long run. Not only that, but these people who have spent 4+ years in the US university education system are extremely well-adapted to life in the US and will thrive at making the US a better place.
(Yes there's OPT, but it's not long enough and doesn't provide a path to permanent residency.)
No. No. No. That would mean that anyone from the University of Oxford would be out until he got himself a masters degree from the Christian College of Lost Hope, AR. There are far too many paid masters degrees around already that serve exactly that purpose and that are good for no one except the useless college.
> masters degree from the Christian College of Lost Hope, AR
Yeah no, screw that crap. I don't know the exact regulation framework that would accomplish my intent but you understand what I mean.
I'm talking about all the people with bonafide degrees and skillsets. 4-year bachelor degrees, PhDs, MDs, and the like. These people should be treated as assets to the country. (Maybe just excluding masters' degrees is the answer, but I'm not sure.) It's dumbfoundingly stupid as a national policy to invest so much in resources to train a person and then send them back to another country instead of giving them every incentive to stay.
Singapore and Australia (and maybe others I don't know about) allow international students to apply for permanent residency if they meet certain very reasonable qualifications and it works out very much in their favor for retaining talent.
The issue is that America is allergic to sensible regulation so never would you find a way to craft a law that allowed those 4-year bachelor degrees to be counted without pulling in all the for-profit unis and if you attempted that you'd be buried in lawsuits and public outcry.
Talking with friends that were international students, who also knew about the abuses of the current system, we came to the conclusion that to avoid abuse and get actual world class talent you would want to tier the system. Master's and PhD holders already benefit in the current system so better to expand the idea.
Undergraduate degree holders would only be rewarded for completing degrees in in the US in emerging and vital fields (mostly STEM). Awarding permanent residency to someone completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US is simply inviting abuse. Master's holders would get permanent residency in an expanding set of fields and ideally PhDs in every field. There may be some cases of abuse, but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country because they didn't win a lottery.
You'd be surprised there. The degree that gives best odds in law school is actually philosophy. If you want to keep the tradition of Latin alive you need kids who have taken decent Latin in school. Chemistry and the life sciences, on the other hand, there is a terrifying oversupply of graduates. I agree with the need for quality control.
GP:> completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US
I think the key here should be "worst college in the US" and not the Bachelors in communication. If you got a communication degree from Mizzou or Columbia that's a totally different bar than a communication degree from a community college. The institutions and programs should be accredited, and demonstrate some standard of selectivity.
You want talented people in every field to stay in your country and create value and jobs, and selectivity for university admission is often a good proxy for that. The bar doesn't need to be insanely higher either; anyone who creates value and by doing so either directly or indirectly creates more jobs is worthwhile to keep.
If this is true regarding the philosophy degree then the student would continue on to the law degree to secure their residency. Regarding the saturated science fields they would then not be considered emerging nor vital.
> Master's holders would get permanent residency in an expanding set of fields and ideally PhDs in every field.
Unfortunately, this is ripe for abuse. You're basically allowing educational institutions to sell green cards. If you thought almost-unlimited-student-loans inflated education prices, you don't even want to see what selling green cards would do.
> but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country
I agree with the premise, but this is kind of like "It is better than 1000 guilty men go free, than 1 innocent man be wrongly convicted". It sounds great in premise, but in practice can't reasonably happen. Again, I agree with your premise, but I think it needs to be approached in a different way.
> Unfortunately, this is ripe for abuse. You're basically allowing educational institutions to sell green cards. If you thought almost-unlimited-student-loans inflated education prices, you don't even want to see what selling green cards would do
That's pretty much how it's done in Australia. It props up a massive industry (education was the fourth largest export in 2018-2019) whilst ensuring a supply of qualified applicants for residency.
Prices for locals are still set by the government. So, whilst there is inflation, disadvantage to locals is limited to there being fewer places available to them. Whether it's morally okay is another question but the economics seem to work out pretty well.
Australia does /kind of/ do this with the skilled occupation list, but it's not like getting a Bachelor of Accounting means you are guaranteed a path to permanent residency (thanks to many of the recent visa pathway changes). Graduates from an Australian university can get a Temporary Graduate (485) Visa which lasts 2-4 years, but the pathway from then on usually requires getting an employer to sponsor your permanent residency (186/187) after 3 years of work experience, unless you get explicitly invited to some of the other programs (189/190)[+]. If you live in a regional area there are more options (887 for instance) but most people don't and might find it difficult to live in regional towns and cities.
As an immigrant to (and citizen of) Australia myself, I find it pretty appalling how hard it has become to become a permanent resident in Australia even if you are reasonably skilled (and the fact that permanent residency requires nomination by an employer -- which is unlike most other countries, where permanent residency is based on your own residence and skills). The work-based streams are becoming more and more narrow and it's longer the case that studying in Australia gives you any guaranteed pathway to residency (and I would argue it hasn't been the case for a fairly long time now).
The universities, yes, but at least for 4-year bachelors' programs, the country should be viewing it as an investment considering how selective they tend to be for mid- to higher-tier instutions. From a national government standpoint, they bring in some revenue to the economy, but it's miniscule compared to the GDP value they will create, directly and indirectly, with their newfound skills in a lifetime.
I'd even argue in favor of government financial aid for international students that meet certain bars of merit or talent. Give them a free ride if they are that talented. Then let them build the next company and hire a bunch of Americans. Hand them a US passport as well if they get there.
Also, PhDs are another story -- they are not revenue sources for the university, but they are a means to quality research, and very much an investment.
> Singapore and Australia (and maybe others I don't know about) allow international students to apply for permanent residency if they meet certain very reasonable qualifications and it works out very much in their favor for retaining talent.
I don't know about Singapore but this definitely isn't true for Australia these days -- visa programs in Australia are far more strict than they used to be (in fact, my parents and I probably couldn't have migrated here under the current visa system -- we came to Australia in 1999).
The Temporary Graduate visa (485) is -- as the name suggests -- temporary, and only lasts between 2-4 years if you graduated from an Australian university. If you want to go for permanent residency you (generally speaking) need to be endorsed by your employer through the Employer Nomination Scheme visa (186) which requires 3 years work experience in your field -- the practical upshot is that you would need to have been granted a visa that lasts longer than 3 years (no guarantee of this), get a job in your field immediately after you graduate (seriously no guarantee of this since many employers in fields like engineering illegally discriminate against people who hold temporary working visas), and find an employer (within the last few months of your visa) who is willing to nominate you for permanent residency and has an existing labour agreement with the government.
It's not impossible to do, but it's hardly a simple procedure and it's definitely not true that graduates have a guaranteed roadmap to apply for permanent residency. There are some visa programs which in theory would allow you to apply for permanent residency earlier, but they are invitation-only and usually have pretty high requirements which most people wouldn't fulfil.
I actually think that anyone—regardless of criminal background; as long as they’ve paid for their past crimes—should be allowed to live and work wherever they want, no quotas, no visas, no restrictions.
But barring that pipe dream, yours seems like an acceptable interim step.
I want to believe the prosperity gospel because it would mean that my moral-interest and my self-interest coincide, but it seems much more likely that it's just hustle from the owner-class. The American middle class has gotten absolutely wrecked over the last few decades while eerily similar promises about globalization have failed to deliver -- except to the owner class. I think this is just another instance of that, and I think many of us are in denial because it's much easier than acknowledging that we're next on the chopping block.
> I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans
A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats. Think of all the services that would need to expand -- markets, restaurants, hair salons, etc.
Furthermore, immigrants contribute more to the tax base than citizens because they pay the same income taxes without getting all the deductions, they pay sales taxes and other taxes, and do not get the same benefits.
It's well established that an immigrant with a job is a net contributor to both the economy and the tax base.
Do this thought experiment -- so many immigrants come to the US and contribute so much to the tax base that there is enough to pay every US citizen $75,000 a year in UBI and provide universal healthcare for citizens. Now you can do whatever you want, work or not, it doesn't matter.
You are both correct. Immigration does increase GDP, and wages are also stagnant. The problem is that the GDP gains created by both immigrants and native born workers have concentrated in the holdings of the capitalist class (to which even many upper middle class Americans belong in varying degrees), because of low taxes and asset price inflation.
As a result, public investment funded via taxes has moved to deficit spending and sporadic and selective philanthropy, exacerbating both the inequality of wealth and opportunity.
You are proposing a huge, non-citizen working class, who's labor is taxed to support citizens? That is not what I was expecting. Yes, that may be good for citizens.
So a thought experiment for you. Can you find any historical precedence where these two-tier systems were implemented. And how did that work out?
The largest example would be undocumented immigrants and it seems fairly mediocre. A large portion of the country resents them, there's large demographic/cultural changes, another portion of country/political class wants to provide citizenship/welfare(voiding the GP's calculus), racial/cultural tensions are still issue.
Well heeled thinktanks can continue to try and bamboozle people but after watching every contracting crew in my area become 99% low paid latino immigrant I have no reason to want the same thing to happen to software development when it's one of the few remaining paths to a nice middle class life. I guess I'm supposed to retrain as an attorney or something right?
> A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats.
Funny, most Americans who aren't working for FAANG would absolutely disagree with you here. It's almost as cliche as the "wealth trickles down" or supply side economics.
Maybe that's just cause I'm old enough to have seen these bullshit statements evolve.
The "rising tides" lie started in the 80's and 90's and was constantly used by our leaders and the media to ensure the blue collar workers who were being devastated by offshoring and the beginning of a huge surge in immigration. Don't worry guys - even though all your factories are being dismantled and reassembled in S. China and Mexico, the gains will be spread around for everyone. And, something something retraining...
By the 2000's, enough blue collar workers, especially in the Rust Belt, had never seen any improvements, so the lie changed. It was now, "You need to get an education". I think if you're old enough here, you should remember that during GW Bush and into Obama's presidencies, that was combined with "Some of these jobs just aren't coming back..." which was appended because our leaders knew that wages weren't rising enough in the third world to ever bring the manufacturing back - not when the system now depended on a permanent devalued Chinese Yuan, Mexican Peso, etc.
So now we get to somewhere around Obama's times, during the Great Recession, when tens of millions were already unemployed and now almost NO college grads were getting offers. That was when the game was upped: "Did you idiots think we were talking about any degree? You need to get one of those STEM degrees. Haha, underwater basket weaving ain't gonna help you", cried the Boomers at the WSJ and Cato Institute. That was after college costs had been rising exponentially for a decade, so now those non-STEM majors were fked. Oh well.
But the truth is that most STEM majors aren't even having an easy time in most areas outside SV and during bubbles. Do you think the average EE or Chemistry major is getting a dozen offers in the labs when they're also filled up with hundreds of thousands of foreign students on Opt visas and who don't have to pay payroll taxes (neither their employer)? CS isn't any better: Go on to https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/ and you'll find post after post with decent CS grads giving up after applying for 12 months without getting a single call back. We have recruiters here that tell us they get 1000 applications for every job, so this isn't surprising.
The whole H1B system should be shut down, all those who are not being paid minimum $250K given 1 month to leave for each year they've been here. Those who are get a Green Card. That $250K is tied to housing costs in each city, too. They go up, so does the minimum.
Shut off the L1 and Student OPT programs completely, too, and give our burdened students a chance at a decent job. Better than them joining Antifa and burning down shit.
Let's dare these billionaire executives to either start spreading the wealth around to the whole country which gave them their opportunity, or they move themselves, their families, and their companies to the third world where they seem to find most of their workforce nowadays.
Then Silicon Valley might be actually forced to hire "diverse" black, hispanic, etc. Americans instead of giving it lip service while employing 70% non-diverse Brahmins from India.
I don't know if there would still be 350,000,000 interested after the first 350,000,000 arrive. Interesting to think about how that number would change based on America's changes.
Is it only me, or does this sound pretty empty? Except for narrowing of the `specialty occupation` moniker, all the rest seem like things that are already part of the H1-B program?
I'm not anti-immigrant in any way, but I'm wondering if things like H1-B have just run their course. Why would I pay to essentially import a worker to the US instead of just hiring staff in another country? Currently, my teammates could be 5 blocks away or on another continent and it makes no difference.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 453 ms ] threadProbably a better link than the WSJ submission – even though I'm a subscriber, I want the facts, and the facts seem to be hard to find
As a matter of fact, I still haven't found the actual "interim final rule" (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one), so if anyone has a link, I'd be immensely grateful
EDIT: Here's the unpublished ruling in PDF: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.pdf
One paragraph I was keen on knowing more about – and which seems pretty uncontroversial:
> Under this new rule, the petitioner will have the burden of demonstrating that there is a direct relationship between the required degree in a specific specialty (in other words, the degree field(s) that would qualify someone for the position) and the duties of the position. In many cases, the relationship will be clear and relatively easy to establish. For example, it should not be difficult to establish that a required medical degree is directly correlated to the duties of a physician. Similarly, a direct relationship may be established between the duties of a lawyer and a required law degree, and the duties of an architect and a required architecture degree. In other cases, the direct relationship may be less readily apparent, and the petitioner may have to explain and provide documentation to meet its burden of demonstrating the relationship. To establish a direct relationship, the petitioner would need to provide information regarding the course(s) of study associated with the required degree, or its equivalent, and the duties of the proffered position, and demonstrate the connection between the course of study and the duties and responsibilities of the position
This looks like a rule that will block all the self thought developers, which are plenty and some are among the best.
The US has a jobs training program for foreign workers/grads. It's called OPT.
That's abuse.
LOL. You don't know what you are talking about at all.
I have a degree in physics but I have been programming since I was 10. From what I can tell, my programming skills and experience are no less than someone who graduated with a master in CS at a major university.
This is called -- prejudice.
But a class where you had to write some code to do basic finite element analysis or solve linear systems doesn't make you qualified work on a distributed software system.
And if your working on big clusters you will using a distributed software system MPI Map Reduce Hadoop etc
One thing I don’t understand is the ridiculously low “entry level” wage set at 17%. Those are the jobs we need to protect the most to get disadvantaged americans into the pipeline. 17% is the zone of broad mis-classification, like a ‘computer systems analyst’ that works at the library, or academic jobs, or sweat equity workers.
Not true. I know this was "withdrawn" yesterday.(see my comment below).
https://redbus2us.com/h1b-perm-wage-levels-rule/
You can co-relate the RIN numbers(1205-AC00) in the PDF referenced above and this rule. Just a lot of FUD in the comment and WSJ article. I'd hope they do better research than what I did in 30 mins.
"Some bad news - the H-1B rules showing up as withdrawn are very much alive and DHS is using a special waiver of a review step to speed up the roll out. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on that."
https://twitter.com/gsiskind/status/1311766795217514499?ref_...
https://twitter.com/gsiskind/status/1311766795217514499?ref_...
Oh yeah. It's the _one_ thing I can agree with them on.
For years countries have also been forced to waste taxpayer money to deliver cheap junk from Aliexpress/Wish/etc. because Universal Postal Union wouldn’t allow countries to increase postal rates from China. The previous administration was unable to do anything about it, but Trump succeeded where they failed.
Huawei has also been significantly hurt. Being banned from using Android and chips with US tech has effectively destroyed their mobile products (as their stock runs out), and countries are abandoning their 5G deals (either as a result of USA paying them to drop Huawei, or simply because China/Huawei’s reputation has dropped so much in the last four years). Trump also dragged other countries into it by e.g. requesting Meng Wanzhou’s arrest, which resulted in China arbitrarily arresting Canadian citizens.
He’s also the first US President to speak directly with Taiwan’s President since 1979, and has made the largest arms sale to Taiwan in the past few decades.
TAIPEI Act and Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed under his administration, and Hong Kong lost its special status.
If judges hadn’t temporarily stopped Trump’s executive orders then TikTok and WeChat would also be banned now (it’s absurd that the west for decades have put up with China blocking western companies from their markets while freely allowing them into our markets).. hopefully the bans will go through, and hopefully TikTok/WeChat will just be the first of many.
Trump is also one of the few world leaders who continuously remind the world that China are responsible for the pandemic, and China still won’t allow WHO/others to investigate the origins in Wuhan.
Trump has also been pushing for China to lose WTO developing country status, which will surely happen if he’s re-elected.
As a liberal I disagree with most of Trump’s policies, but I could really go on-and-on about his effective/positive actions towards China.. you could make a solid case that Trump in four years has done more to stand up to China than the rest of the western world combined (including the previous administration) has done in the past decade.
And Trump accuses the IC community of unconstitutional spying on politicians and Americans, the same thing technorati have been saying (at least until 2016, when it became cool to trust the FBI and CIA).
What's the abuse?
Just a random link, but the contours of the problem:
https://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-pr...
In fact, there are many proper economic analyses that show that native-born workers benefit from immigration:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/3pi8vo/highsk...
At the same time, if a program is designed to bring in 'exceptional talent' but is really just importing mediocre drones from a single country, that's not really serving the purpose of the program.
Let's fix H1Bs and then work on more equitable ways to allow other forms of beneficial immigration.
There's no "if" here.
Can you please provide this evidence? I want to be educated on that. I thought that returning home is really rare for these people, and it does not compensate negative effects of the "brain drain" at all.
>letting free citizens choose where to maximize their livelihoods is a moral imperative, yes
People should be free to pursue whatever they want, no questioning that. However, elites of the US create such conditions that the best career path for the people from less fortunate countries is to move out, break cultural bonds and, probably, make the countries that they moved from, even less fortunate in the end - is it really moral?
I think that the most moral option would be increasing investment and creating child companies in countries where these people move from, creating nice jobs outside of the US, so nobody would have to move anywhere.
Keep in mind that most economic analyses of this topic ignore the direct competition aspect of the contract labor market impacted by H1Bs and instead focus on salaried FTEs at the businesses that contractors provide services to.
What the US needs is a point based system with automatic green card in x number of years. This would allow the government to prioritize "desirable qualities" (education, age, salary and whatever you want to optimize for) and balance them out (e.g, I could get points for my education instead of my salary and still qualify). The automatic green card option would then open up the employees to work anywhere they want instead of the company that sponsored them thereby preventing wage suppression.
I actually read through two of the "proper economic analyses" in that reddit link since I am interested in this.
One of them wasn't an economic analysis but a summary article: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/contributions-high-.... Almost all of this article is talking about all of the problems with trying to identify the net effects of immigration and how difficult it is.
It has quotes that directly refute what you are saying such as:
"Immigration has complex, sometimes ambiguous impacts on natives. The benefits to the US economy from high-skilled immigration can be accompanied by negative effects for certain groups of natives and positive effects for other groups." Which is the opening summary of the section on effect on natives. Also,
"Borjas found that a 10 percent increase of immigrants with PhDs in a certain field lowered the wages of native born graduating with doctorates in those same fields around the same time by 3 percent"
"Researchers have also examined the degree to which high inflows of foreign-born students affect the educational opportunities of native students. Borjas finds some evidence that an inflow of foreign-born students displaces native, white male students in elite institutions"
The other main article https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf is more positive but there is no way you can call it a rosey picture.
Clearly, the biggest effect of immigration is on previous immigrants (currently 30% of California): "Foreign-born workers already here sustain the largest losses in real wages, losing between 17 and 20 percent of their real wage over 14 years."
It just so happens that natives (specifically who are college educated) tend to have complimentary skill sets in the years mentioned.
"Except for workers with some college education, whose real wage gain is around 6 to 7 percent, no other group experiences real wage gains or losses larger than 4 percent. This implies that even with the moderate costs of moving, in the range of 5 to 10 percent of their yearly income, native workers would not move (out of or into California) in response to immigration."
That is the support you have that "native-born workers benefit from immigration". It helped college educated natives and the rest of the population wasn't negatively affected enough to leave California. And that's based on migration data ending in 2004 and Californians have been leaving in record droves since then.
Of course, it doesn't mention any thing about the rest of the effect on natives such as cost of living increases due to crowding, strain on institutions (do you want to send your kids to an average California school?), unwanted changes in culture and politics, decrease in social cohesion, decreases (or lack of improvement) in working conditions, increases in inequality or any of the other consequences.
The average US male wage has barely moved since the 1970s during a time of unprecedented levels of immigration. If immigration is such a net benefit to native-born worker, where did those improvements go?
Contrast that with the previous year: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/Appr...
You can see that the outsourcing firms have fewer and fewer approvals. Of course with this latest change it will decline more.
"Bottom" performing FTE's are let go as part of annual stack ranking, only to be hired by staffing agencies, and contracted back to large tech companies.
It's a way for tech companies to retain people who are necessary to perform the work, but at reduced wages.
Your employer has... well, a power imbalance over you, to put it nicely.
I'm not sure how the proposed changes will play out for American workers. Theoretically, treating H1B workers better could benefit American workers: there is less incentive to callously replace them with underpaid H1B workers. On the other hand, American workers will face increased competition, it seems to me.
find a job
get/consult a lawyer to make sure everything was good
do the whole change
and end up in the exact same situation
Situation: You are tied to ONE employer and if something goes wrong they can just end your job and kick you out
I've done the change so let's not pretend it is some super easy, doesn't matter thing
Also, if you have to leave US where do you have to go?
If you have to go back to UK or Canada that is no big loss
If, on the other hand you have to go back to China or India or AFrica then your entire family is #$@$#$%
Source: I'm American, so I don't know this pain personally, but I was very close with a Canadian co-worker who was here on a work visa. He uprooted his wife and kids from Canada to come and work here. When our workplace soured, he had to do it all over again. Uproot his wife and children again, tell his children to say goodbye to their friends again, buy a house again, etc. Not easy!
I can't help but think of this any time I see an HN comment about some questionable surveillance-ad-tech, usually saying that engineers should just refuse to build that stuff.
H1B is just your regular temp.
That's probably about the handful of consulting companies doing shady stuff. Not the overall program as a whole.
You're tied to a pool of employers and have to get government permission to transfer employment. Your employer has an enormous power over you, with little recourse on your side.... as if employers didn't have enormous power over their employees as is.
Doesn't it take an act of congress to make any serious headway here?
Personally, I was an H1B a 4.5 years before Trump convinced it was time to leave. I was in the bay area and handsomely overpaid. I have no personal experience of it being abused, but I'm obviously privileged, having worked at reputable tech companies and coming from reasonable wealthy european country. (I was never as scared of loosing job or healthcare as my American co-workers, because I would just move home, and have access to healthcare if I lost my job)
But I will say, that the lottery aspect of the H1B adds a lot of uncertainty that might discourage me from living in SF again. So lifting the caps and/or stemming abuse might be a good idea.
There is a rule that says a new President can automatically overturn all rules made in the last 90 days of the previous administration, but we're before that deadline, so this is pretty much a done deal.
If the next admin wanted to change this, they have to go through the long and arduous rule making process again.
Does that also apply to rules that didn't go through that process but were rushed through with the interim final rules process? Doesn't sound logical to me.
So calling it an "overhaul" is perhaps a bit much. It's more like a tweak that mitigates some of the abuse and issues with the system.
From my own anecdotal experience, I'll admit I have found the rules to be a little ridiculous. Company needs to post a sign in the office advertising the role to any Americans, wait a certain amount of time, and only then can offer it to an H1-B candidate. Of course nobody was following the spirit of those rules, but I wouldn't call that fraudulent abuse. These were companies that needed hires and had a genuinely hard time finding people that would pass our interviews and then accept our offers. We really didn't discriminate at all in the hiring panels between American and H1-B candidates (I think we were probably supposed to discriminate more than we did, and supposed to explicitly prefer Americans?), and it had nothing to do with saving money on salaries.
I recognize that the Bay Area tech boom is very unusual in how competitive it is (was?), but H1-Bs are technical visas and it's often tech companies that get the blame for abusing the system.
The worker ends up with very few choices, and the companies at which the workers are working are likely overpaying for what they're getting. The only one truly happy is the "placement" company that holds the workers' contracts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
It's horrible. Govt is not even remotely interested in fixing this
It's literally telling someone that wants to hire a particular person to not hire that person, because you think that that person is wrong.
Would you like me to advocate for the government telling who you hire as your barber? Advocating employment restrictions - is just that.
Adding "benevolent coercion" to the mix, doesn't negate the coercion.
I've been pretty impressed with Taiwan's Gold Card work visa program, where you either need certain educational achievement qualifications, or need to be a highly-paid employee in specific fields — but not both. And it's not tied to a specific employer, which I think helps negotiation (and thus also helps domestic workers, by raising labor prices). I wish America's immigration program worked more like that — specific quibbles about what exactly the rate should be aside; Taiwan's is certainly too low to use for the US — since I think encouraging high-skill immigration would help much more than it would hurt: high-skill immigrants tend to generate more jobs, and also tend to pay more in taxes than the services they receive, meaning it's a win-win where immigrants can get the jobs they want in the country they want to be in and Americans end up with more jobs available and more government services per (American) tax dollar spent.
Make that process faster. Give people a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like 10x faster. Months not years.
They should just repeal the law and design a real point-based permanent immigration system from scratch.
Here in Germany, you basically need a job offer which matches certain criteria, to be get a temporary residency. This can be prolonged as long as you stay employed in Germany. Similar rules exist for students. I have an Indian colleague who studied in Germany and now is working here. If you stay in the country for 5 years, it is pretty much just a formality to apply for unlimited residency and it is also reasonably straight-forward to even get German nationality, though this is less common.
This is not true. Your description is accurate for the F1 student visa and TN work visa for Canadians - applicants for those visas are not allowed to have immigration intent. There is no such requirement for the H1B visa.
The poster you replied to is spot-on about the ridiculous wait times for green cards, and this delay has nothing to do with the H1B program itself. The government really needs to speed this up, so that immigrants and their families aren't living in fear of the next arbitrary Trump executive order.
(Not sure why doingmyting's comment saying the same thing is flagged. Virtually all of this user's comments seem to be flagged for some reason.)
But otherwise I agree with rest of your points.
I’m guessing you don’t know very many Indians?
There is. It doesn't matter in practice, because it's a legal fiction anyway, but here's the legal logic:
For all visa applicants, including H1B, there is a presumption that the person is an immigrant, and they cannot obtain non-immigrant visas until they convince the admission officer of their non-immigrant intent, see section 214(b) of INA. Crucially, you need to argue that you have no intention to abandon your foreign residence. Dual intent have nothing to do with it, this is true for all kinds of visas.
The immigration law says that, as a rule, applying for permanent residency in the US (a green card) constitutes evidence of your intent to abandon foreign residence. Where dual intent policy enters the picture is that the above does not apply to holders of dual intent visas. For them, applying for green card "does not constitute evidence" of their intent to abandon foreign residence: this is the exact language used in section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis for "dual intent" policy. Note that they do not say that the rule of abandoning foreign does not apply to dual-intent visa holders, only that applying for green card no longer constitutes evidence of their intent to abandon foreign residence.
Of course, none of it matters in practice, since it's all legal fiction, and in practice things works exactly as you believe they are. The point here is that the practice is based on the legal fiction, on the wink which requires immigration officials to pretend you do not intend to abandon your foreign residence, when everyone knows that this is exactly your goal.
I don't think this is right. Section 214(b) indeed says that there is a presumption of immigrant intent, but for dual intent visas, such as the H1-B, it's not necessary to demonstrate that you don't have immigrant intent.
It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
In practice, no, but that's not what "dual intent" legally means.
> It also seems wrong that applying for a green card could ever not constitute evidence of immigrant intent. Do you have a citation for that?
I did not say anything about "could not ever". I guess you could maybe interpret it this way, but if you actually followed the citation I gave, it would have been clear to you. What I meant was that the section 205b of Immigration Act of 1990, which is the legal basis of "dual intent" policy, explicitly amends section 214b of INA, to remove permanent residency application as acceptable evidence for the purpose of establishing immigration intent in context of section 214b.
The secondary information is more useful in practice, because it represents the actual practice, not legal theory.
> I said "could ever not", not "could not ever", but that's a moot point now.
Ah, sorry, I misread, it's my bad.
https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/historic-pt
I believe the I-140 is for employment-based green cards.
The long wait times are due to annual quotas by country, not slow handling of paperwork.
what you say is correct.
as a green card holder myself i can attest to both my initial approval period (3.5 years) and also the renewal period (2 years) being onerously long, and at times, having a particularly deleterious effect on my life.
look, i can understand the initial approval taking a long time. they have a lot of stuff to check.
but i applied for the renewal a full 18 months before my GC's expiration date (because i knew they took a looong time) and i received the card a full 2 years after my renewal + bio was accepted in the system, i.e. six months after my GC expired.
Or they don’t want other people to see what a comment is saying.
The tall nail gets the hammer.
The inconvenient facts get the gray text.
The backlog is due to: 1) the limited number of immigrant visa defined in the law and 2) country based diversity quotas.
Pretty quick would be a month.
My first work authorization in US was the simplest L1b internal company transfer. That took from mid October 2016 to issue of the visa on 21 Feb 2017. That's considerably longer for the simple document.
My blanket work authorization took 2.5 years... and 4 years for the LPR.
7 days for PR in Singapore? That's not the experience I've hear from friends. In fact, you're at the mercy of the gov't as it's entirely discretional for PR. You often have to apply multiple times if you don't have the "right" profile.
An equivalent of what you get in Singapore in 7 days is H1. H1B takes at absolute best - 6 months at 33% success rate.(If you miraculously get to file on March 31st and get to start October 1st.)
Permanent residency in US takes years. Even Diversity Lottery takes at least 18 months.
This is the remnant of the pre-1965 racist immigration country quota system which allowed only European whites into US.
India, China, Mexico, Philippines etc have backlogs because more people try to get in from these.
If there were more people from New Zealand than India trying to apply, it would be harder for New Zealanders.
I've lived aboard and had residency in two other nations. The overall amount of people applying is outrageous. That's the real problem. 22,000,000 apply for 50,000 green cards.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/23/application...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
when the basis is country-specific, and all countries are treated equally, it is purely supply/demand.
No one applies from Afghanistan, so it is easier to get a GC -- so is US biased towards Afghanistan?
Not adjusting for population when the brunt of this policy is not borne by a country but a person, suggests malicious intent. All countries are treated equal, but all immigrants are not.
But in practice, is the US supposed to track down census numbers for the countries around the globe? So many countries, dont even have much of a process
and the main point is : the govt exists for the well-bein of its current citizens, not potential ones.
Maybe something like upper 2% of salaries in the county.
A fixed number will never be appropriate for all the areas in the US, and a fixed number will always need to be adapted.
[1] https://wallethacks.com/average-median-income-in-america/
The truth is, though, that folks getting paid well in Indiana can generally live better on the lower wage simply because things are that much cheaper. Perhaps you wish to subsidize living in the more expensive areas and increase the safety net?
Maybe you should place some pressure on companies to move headquarters into more affordable places. Lots of places have international airports, after all, so that shouldn't hinder folks much.
Do you think your representatives gives two farts about what folks in a different part of the country are paid so long as folks in his or her district are living well enough? Or should folks in the area living well be enough of a concern?
Do you have solutions for these things that are fair to the folks needing to live in the expensive areas (poor folks have little to no choice in the matter)?
If the labor pool shrinks a bit, their negotiating power will rise and this will solve itself.
I feel that it is safe to say that in different companies, a developer produces different value for the company. For someone working at a Big Tech company, a single developer - even a low level one - can produce substantial value for the company. On the other hand, working at a small company, the entire company may not have as much revenue as the low level developer produced at the Big Tech company.
Should a developer at a small company that is... say... optimizing routes for auto parts delivery for a handful of clients be compensated at the same "market price" as someone who is working on optimizing AWS?
My point is that not every company - even in the Bay Area - can afford to pay "market rate" for everyone.
Its not that the labor market doesn't value the skills, it's that the labor produced isn't worth the same. I believe that it is foolish for a software developer who to expect the wages of someone who is working in Big Tech at all other companies (and it would be foolish for the company to pay an employee more than the value that they're creating for the company).
If you're incredibly good, you might be able to negotiate 20-40% higher offer than the initial offer, but beyond that they'll just reject you and go with another candidate who might literally be worth millions of dollars less and be a ridiculously worse deal.
Engineering management is simply not operating according to standard economics textbook definitions of rationality. It feels more like cartel economics.
So your assuming that being a good little Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist" is a good idea, and we should touch our caps to the software mill owner.
Graduate salaries are starting to push high 30's!
The other thing to take in to account with the US figures - taxation. I believe the US tax system taxes the individual directly, where as in the UK we are generally PAYE and taxed at the point we are paid our salary. Maybe someone in the US can confirm that?
I've lived in the US. Your taxes are withheld from your pay. Unlike in the UK, everyone has to fill in a tax return - even if all of their income comes from a regular job. You might be due a small refund or owe a small amount at the end of each tax year, but fundamentally you're taxed as you go throughout the year.
Note that is VERY individual circumstances specific. The largest chunk of that missing $70,000 went to taxes at the local, state, and federal level. Easily $45,000 of it is gone in taxes. There is also a common game of moving pre tax dollars around that benefit you, but not exactly the same way a dollar in hand would.
The two most common are 401ks (typically 4-8% of gross depending on employee matching) which is money that goes into a retirement account for you and you can't touch it until you are old (55 or 65 or something, not up to date on the numbers there) without incurring both a significant penalty of 10% but also having to pay tax on it the year you withdrawal it. There are a few hardship exclusions like medical, first time home buying etc, where you can dip into this untaxed pool of money but for the most part can't touch it until retirement.
The other common pre tax exclusion is an HSA where you get to put pre taxed dollars into an account that can only be used to pay for medical expenses. Essentially every high dollar professional in America takes full advantage of this offering as we all expect to have out of pocket medical expenses and it makes no sense to pay them with taxed dollars instead of pre taxed dollars.
Not really. HSAs are common for sure, but people with high incomes often can afford lower deductible policies. You can't open an HSA unless you have a high-deductible health insurance policy.
I've done it both ways, and I personally prefer paying more for a better insurance policy and not having to bother with HSA paperwork.
It's the same in the US, so salary figures are directly comparable (after currency conversion).
Taxes are lower in the US, but healthcare costs are much higher and it roughly balances out.
But of course, that demand drives up salaries across the entire USA to some degree.
Boston, Seattle, and New York would instantly qualify.
Some might say Denver and LA as well as many others would have plenty of well paid developers.
Product managers are making 80-100% of what a software engineer makes. So 150-200k even at startups, and upwards from there at FANG.
Graphic designers are making 70-100%.
Even roles like "Human Resources Manager" are making 150k, because they're automatically "management", even though it's just a Bachelor's degree in Business and not a highly competitive role.
"Business analysts" (Excel and specialty tool power users) are making 100k+. No hard STEM degree or brutal interviews required.
However, it really is just in a handful of major US tech hubs that the pay is this high in tech. Outside the major tech hubs the high paying professions are the traditional ones... doctor, dentist, lawyer, etc.
If they are, there's nothing wrong with this situation.
Auckland is pretty expensive, and senior engineers here make a lot more than regular 9-5 jobs but I'm not remotely close to clearing that much money in a given year.
You could go to Uber's Pittsburgh office and have a lot of money.... but you'd be in Pittsburgh...
If you don't care about quality of life - there are great options world wide to make a lot of money. I would suggest getting into corruption, as an easy way of making millions fast.
I just don't think that's true. For two reasons:
1) I earn the equivalent of just under the median household income on my own, and 100% of my income is eaten by our expenses. It's really my wife's income that's left over after all that has been paid for, so none of mine is spare.
2) There must be hundreds of thousands of people who live in the bay area that don't work at FAANG and don't make anywhere near that, but still manage to live on the city somehow. It's not like if you make $360k you're barely scaping by, right!? Else basically everyone else would be homeless there.
I ran the numbers and I'd be able to save a lot more.
If you have the fiscal responsibility and live a completely ascetic lifestyle - you can easily save most of your free cash flow. But that is an extraordinary person.
If you are a reasonable person and are going to actually live in SF - you have to adjust your expenses accordingly. Your rent/mortgage, your shopping trips, your recreational activities, etc... and you realise that your social outing costs you $200, instead of $30... and you don't have the ability to host it at home, because all of your friends live 2-4 hours away or you have a $5000 p/m home in a convenient location.
The reason why I say this - I lived in Helsinki, Dublin, London, NYC, San Francisco, Palo Alto and back to NYC. Me and my husband are both SWE, well paid. I literally went through the change of attitudes towards "living a life".
I'm under no impression the lifestyle would be the same. Just that it ought to be possible from what I can tell. Where I live in my home country I'm optimizing for a reasonable level of comfort / quality of life. If I'm dragging myself halfway across the world for the top salaries in the industry, I'm not optimizing for comfort or quality of life, I'm optimizing for as much savings as possible over a short duration.
Also - if you're "dragging myself halfway across the world", it limits your ability to optimise efficiently. You don't have an easy fallback. (I'm from Lithuania and live in NYC. Optimising my living arrangements was not a possibility for a long time, because there's no family or LPR status)
AWS is spinning up a dev team in Auckland though teaming up with Vector on some IOT stuff in the energy space apparently though. I would hope the comp for those positions would be at least $140k NZD, but still that's nowhere near what the fellas over at Google HQ are making for writing protobufs all day.
Globally it's the hotspots that pay a lot - London, Dublin, Moscow, Amsterdam, etc.
But then the reason why the salaries have skyrocketed - is just lack of supply.
I'm planning on leaving the field at 36 already. Moving to doing gardening work and running an olive grove... and there's no one that can replace me in NYC at a snap of their fingers. I bet there are people globally, but getting to work in US is a PITA.
What country would be number two? I bet there would be a spirited argument.
Silicon Valley is a statistical outlier compared to the US as a whole for salaries and for cost-of-living.
Most of the software engineers in the US don’t work in a place with $170k salaries and $1m+ homes. For most of the US, salaries are 1/2 of that and homes are 1/4 of that.
An extra $100k would have been really nice.
Of course housing costs have gone up significantly relative to pay in the past decade, so who knows.
Point is, by international standards, USD $170k is a very high salary for software engineers too, even for a specialist.
SWE is highly paid throughout the world, but I have noticed there are some geographic areas where it actually doesn't seem to command a higher salary than average.
Yep this is a problem, some (many) H1B people do not have a relevant degree in CS, not sure how this will work out for them.
I am not the person you are replying to, but a bachelor degree in one of the engineering disciplines is very common.
Looking at it from the other perspective of the individual who can get a job, they are probably not lowering their salaries, but rather significantly increasing it.
And looking at this from an historical context for the USA makes it even more absurd. Most people with these high paying jobs in the US are direct descendants of people who immigrated to the US with the sole purpose of getting a higher salary – because of poverty and lack of economic opportunities in their home countries.
The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that - they have their own government to represent their interests, which can and should enact policies that benefit them, and negotiate in international agreements policies that will help their citizens. If it's a win-win situation (which is the expected situation for skilled immigration visas) then sure, we should look at how the incentives are aligned; but when it's a tradeoff between the interests of your citizens and foreigners, then the government is elected to ensure that the interests of their citizens are facilitated - if need be, at the expense of others, to whom the government has no inherent duty whatsoever except the voluntarily undertaken commitments to certain international treaties. And if the government is implementing some policies that hurt their citizens to benefit others (which it may well do for all kinds of reasons - e.g. governments do humanitarian aid, which costs your citizens and benefits others, but presumably with support from the voters/taxpayers), then that has to happen due to the choice and consent of these citizens, otherwise they have all right to replace the government with something that will act as the citizens desire.
According to who? I understand that this is a kind of framing used here often, but the federal government has been concerned primarily with itself for a long time now at least to my eyes.
So if you want to be the one politician that values non-citizens’ rights over citizens’ rights, good luck getting re-elected.
Or you could set up an autocracy and try to manage this anyway. For further reading, I recommend the book The Dictator’s Handbook or CGP Greg’s 20 minute summary of it.
if you are claiming the usa is not a well functioning representative democracy, i agree.
A claim on the intent of a government can be made without making a claim whether that intent is being fulfilled
if Flint isn't an indictment of US democracy, what would be?
This is what I imagine the Roman Empire felt like right before it collapsed on itself. The US has grown too big and too spoiled and is ripping at the seams.
Fires are burning not because we have too much forest (though of course finding better forest management instead of Wall Street would be a much better investment). They are burning because global warming (climate change was a conservative TV talking about because they used the fact that global warming could include local cooling to confuse the matter) means longer dry seasons, draughts, lots of dry underbrush. Wildfires have always been a thing. Wildfires that span such areas and can’t be put out like this have not existed on this scale in recorded human history. Those who pretend that this isn’t happening should put a plastic bag with a large zip tie over their heads and tell us how they can breathe just fine in there. It will be just as effective at not suffocating as continuing down this path for another 10-20 years.
To a certain extent, I can see it as a case study against the functionality of representative democracy.
One one hand, elected leaders were fiscally irresponsible enough to enact policies that bankrupted the administration leading to a change to the water supply to save money. If I were playing devil's advocate, this could be seen as representative democracy incentivizing short-term political thinking leading to this outcome. E.g., it's easier to get elected on promises that benefit voters while ignoring harsh realities of how those promises will be paid for.
On the other hand, the decisions that led directly to the water crises were made by emergency managers appointed by the governor. This means non-elected officials overruled elected officials. Playing devil's advocate here can lead one to believe the displacement of elected officials is an indictment of the functionality of the system to truly be able to select those who govern the constituency.
see if:
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
and "half of this country is a very small bill from crisis for their entire lives, people do things like describing the insurance agent as the most traumatizing part of the bear attack they survived" are both true, in what way can it be considered well functioning?
Can you put a finer point on what you mean by "their interests"? Is this relegated to just economic interests?
If it extends beyond economics, I see no reason why those two statements can't coexist. For example, I can vote against my own economic interest if I vote for higher taxes that I don't directly benefit from on the grounds that I want to support a more equitable society. Or I can vote against government run healthcare that I may also benefit from if I don't think that is the role of government. Both can be examples of voting against my economic interests to reflect my moral interests.
you could argue that it's not your fault if lots of people don't vote so they get what they get, but you would be oversimplifying things for a HUGE section of the populace who don't vote because they have no one to represent their interests, where their interests are not starving or getting thrown on the street or being in debt for years and years because they slipped on the ice. these people not only do not have a meaningful way to vote, they also often do not have the time or energy to engage in local politics or trying to massage the system. they are currently risking their lives at metaphorical gunpoint every day to deliver "essential" services. minus the pandemic, it's been this way for a long time.
This:
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
and this
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
do not describe this country, even if you assert that only those who vote are represented. There's zero accountability to the people, the gaps are too large for people who do represent our interests to get through the door (and when they come close the rules tend to change suddenly) Something being against the rules has never stopped someone from doing it if they really wanted to when they are the enforcers or writers of the rules.
if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you. i have no intention on acting in your interests. politics is a crooked game, and ours is a particularly easy one to fix.
and what of the rest of the citizens who didn't vote because they risk losing their job or because of a million other reasons? are they not still citizens? most of them didn't choose to be, and regardless of whether that gives them some sort of moral obligation to participate to their best in the politics of their situation it does not remove their need for food, water, shelter, and healthcare which has been an increasingly difficult need to meet with essentially zero assistance from the system that is supposed to represent them.
to me it seems a lot like the conclusion is either that they are simply lesser for whatever reason and too bad for them or that the institution is just insisting on itself the way that institutions tend to do when they've been around long enough, and maybe a lot of people are actually very out of touch with what it is like to live in america for about half of our populace.
>food, water, shelter, and healthcare are universal human interests.
I'm assuming you mean this is in the governments purview as part of promoting the general welfare clause. While I would agree, I can also understand those who do not because they take a more Jeffersonian view that the point of the government is to protect individual rights. At times, I can see where promoting general welfare and protecting individual rights can be at odds. I didn't see that specific definition of "healthy representative democracy" so it's may be too broad a reach (or I may have just missed it within the thread).
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that "voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.". Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility. I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons. In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true. If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
> In a well functioning representative democracy, voters will kick out politicians/administrations that don’t represent their interests well.
part of what i'm saying is that if these statements are true, then we are not in a functioning representative democracy.
>if i lie to you a bunch and you vote me in, i'm not representing you.
>This feels like a contradiction to the previous point that
correct. it is an argument against it.
> Maybe a lying politician gets to do this once, but after that it's the populace's job to hold them accountable. The people have a responsibility in a democracy as well. I agree it's not easy and opportunists will try to rig the system. Being difficult doesn't absolve us of the responsibility.
regardless of whether or not i agree that in "the way its supposed to work" this is the case, it's been a lot more than once and for a lot longer than a little bit of time. longer than i've been alive.
with what time, resources, or authority are you suggesting the populace hold them accountable with? don't answer that just yet.
> I get the impression we fundamentally disagree that there's "zero accountability to the people". I think there is, but people may just not have the fortitude to do it for a variety of reasons.
We don't disagree in the sense you are talking about, technically. Zero accountability that the accountable will accept as valid though.
If i am born into a life with zero political agency and a constant threat of not having food or shelter in a populace that is largely entirely alienated not only from their peers but from also what they produce and consume how is that me getting what i deserve? In what way do you expect the hypothetical me to be organized or able to organize? How successful do you think someone like that could be at doing what you are suggesting when they don't have more than a $400 buffer and no supply chain?
> In many ways, I think the adage of "People get the government they deserve" is true.
I don't think the adage you're referring to is true at all; on the contrary I think that the responses you are speaking of simply take a long time to bubble up into enough of the populace to make them inevitable. Once that threshold is crossed you may as well swap the adage around. The structures and superstructures of societal organization are things that exist prior to you, it's natural for them to be baked into assumptions of "just how things are".
> If you want to tolerate rigged systems or lying politicians, or don't want to get actively engaged, what kind of system do you think you deserve?
I don't think that inaction in face of miserable conditions that have been part of your experience of reality since day one makes someone "deserve" those conditions. It just makes them someone living in the reality they've been presented with. Engagement however, of all sorts, has been rising
Genuinely curious, what would you cite as evidence of "zero political agency"? If it's the de facto sense of it being prohibitively hard for one person/group than another as you allude to in your previous posts, this is a very different thing than zero agency. Again, I think it's dangerous to conflate hard with impossible.
The $400 buffer hurdle is a loaded topic that would be difficult to get into without being drawn into more walls of text, but I think this is often an artifact of poorly aligned priorities and choices. I actually tend think the counter is true; lower economic strata tend to have more free time than higher strata, etc. But I'm afraid this would turn into a long digression to get into.
I can agree that a government deserves it's constituency. However, I think can be true without negating the previous statement about a populace deserving it's government as well. It's hard to be both an advocate for empowerment while also absolving oneself of responsibility.
I do appreciate you taking the time to elaborate, but a common thread seems to be an almost infantilizing of a constituency. While I can empathize with the marginalized, I don't think it does any pragmatic good if it just stops at hand-wringing. If we resign ourselves to a lack of agency, ironically it's a good way to guarantee not to get it. It's a personal viewpoint, but I think those who will take ownership of these problems are in a much better position to affect change than those who constantly say it's out of their control.
I would not describe that period of my life as having more "free time" but I can understand how that may look the case.
I agree with you in spirit in some ways here and I do not believe in absolution of responsibility. Material conditions, however, often skew the will in ways rather extreme, possibility is not probability and it's a fool that eats shit after watching 20 people take a bite of a cake and realize it's shit.
It’s more than just perception. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but The Meritocracy Trap gives the actual stats. Obviously, the higher strata have an abundance of other resources (chiefly money, by definition) but not free time because of the competitive nature of maintaining within that economic level.
I do think that the middle class is attainable for most as long as they do a few essentially things, like graduating high school, avoiding massive debt, avoiding addictions, and avoiding becoming a parent before financially secure. I also believe we should, as a society, help those who are disadvantaged by things outside their control. However, there will always be consequences for life choices and some of those can’t be completed mitigated.
I didn’t grow up with money but I also eventually learned comparison is the thief of joy
This is the same argument that is used to justify slavery. You don't want to go there.
This wouldn't necessarily lead to a lot more immigration. It would lead to fewer people leaving who are already working for US companies on F-1 student visas in OPT status (they attended US institutions)
Romanians(with GDP of 8k per person) didn't just get up and move to UK once they were completely free to do so in 2012.
US also had mostly free migration between Mexico and US, till some xenophobe decided to put up a legal wall.
Romania is a first world country with a PPP per capita GDP of $33K, compared to $48K in the UK. Their murder rate is 1.28/million, effectively the same rate as in the UK is 1.2/m.
Romanians didn't move en mass because the difference isn't all that great. They would gain 1.45X more income and no change in personal safety.
The average South American country has a PPP GDP of 16K and a regional murder rate of 16/m.
South Americans who migrate to the USA gain 4X more income (8X the economic gains of an emigrating Romanian) and enjoy a murder rate 1/4 of the South American average.
The incentives to flee Romania for the UK are trivial compared to the incentives for South Americans to move to the US.
PPP GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
Murder Rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
There is a lot of correlation between immigrant populations across the board, though.
As for income difference... 1.45 times? How about 4-6 times? Unless you seem to think that they would be going to the mythical average UK income area. And let's not forget that there's plenty of EU countries with high income levels. You can get an apartment in Berlin for roughly 2x the rent of an apartment in Bucharest... and get 4x the income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Here are some things that can be straight up disproven: * Violent criminals don't migrate en masse with completely open borders * Economic migration doesn't happen, without severe hardships(drought, famine, etc) * Asylum seekers aren't invading armies, that seek to expand war to other countries
I'm suspecting that that billion in large part included people at severe hardships. Although to be fair a lot of them would have super hard time affording a one way plane ticket to the US, as they live on roughly dollar a day.
Many Mexicans worked seasonally in the US and then returned to Mexico "back in the day". I'm not sure at what point that became a problem though. Although still to this day many people are here in the US undocumented. The extent of that being a problem I'm sure we could debate. It's certainly not fair for those who attempt to play by the rules though.
Is Canada xenophobic? They won't allow just anybody in. I'm not allowed to move to New Zealand without some legal work visa thing they made up. What about France? Can I move to Japan? Why do I have to sign papers to move to any of these countries?
I'm fine if you want to advocate for open boarders (and I think it actually would be great, but we need far fewer people on the planet to make it work) but I think you really should be consistent about it.
It doesn't seem clear to me at all that, if I were the spirit of democracy/the hypothetical purely benevolent (to specifically the people I consider of my country/nation/tribe, to the possible detriment of all others) emperor of wherever, that on balance introducing slavery and slaves into my country would be a net boon on average.
Even ignoring the material aspects, it seems like americans had to contort their worldviews quite a bit to justify slavery to themselves, given their otherwise stated moral beliefs (that were useful to maintaining society). Something would have to give a pretty decisive advantage to justify that required cognitive dissonance, and I don't think 'enriching some already-rich landowners a bit more' is useful enough.
I mean, look at america. Are the descendants of the ethnic groups in the us at the time of slavery on average better off for slavery having existed? Now?
Plus it's wrong to inflict such horror on your fellow man etc etc, and there's a pretty huge difference between not letting people in and abducting them into your country and whipping them.
> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.
Truism. The point of contention is around what constitutes "best interest."
> The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that
If this is so simple, why did it require an additional 500ish words to qualify it?
Your point seems to boil down to this:
In cases where there is a conflict between the perceived "best interest" of citizens and those of non-citizens, if the citizens haven't specifically directed the government to do otherwise, the government should act in the perceived "best interest" of its own citizens.
But it's reductive and short-sighted to say that humanitarian aid "hurts" one side and "helps" the other. For instance, the marginal impact of a U.S. dollar on a U.S. citizen's productivity is effectively nil. But that same dollar spent in a third-world country would have much higher marginal impact. The productivity of that other citizen allows them to specialize and trade, and then everyone benefits in the long term.
The hyper-nationalism perspective that your country should take whatever it can at the expense of other countries is exactly what led to both of the world wars.
However, even voters are not equal in the US with those in Wyoming holding almost 3x the voting power for president compared to California due to the electoral college. Senate votes are an entirely different ballgame where small population states are equal to large states in theory but the vote count behind the senator may be millions vs tens of thousands. Also, the less populated but more numerous red states have led to a tyranny of the minority in the US Senate since 2010. If you are curious about that look at the number of justices Trump has appointed vs Obama, and Obama had 2 full terms: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-c...
The US is not really a functional democracy or represenatative republic at this point. Money and power run most policy: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-cor... (from 2015).
Lobbying dollars hugely outweigh voter preference in policy: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014...
And if you are a company looking to make a profit lobbying may be the best investment to make over capital or other useful growth moves: https://medium.com/numbers-that-matter/return-on-investment-...
That's right, ROI on lobbying is about 200,000% though 10 years it ago it was closer to 20,000%: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/04/09/return-on-lobbying...
There's been an admin change in that time plus the Citizens United decision. Remember there are many questions around where PPP loans went, including millions to the newly appointed USPS leadership plus Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Majority leader, and his wife, Elaine Chao, Secretary of transportation: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lawmakers-and-transportati...
Trump himself won with a 2.8 million popular vote deficit, similar to Bush in 2000. There are 3 other examples in the mid 1800's. In 2016 the GOP won a minority of votes in the US house yet held a 10% seat majority alongside a lopsided Senate. These are not symbols of a functional republic or election process, or at lest one that reflects the will of the people. From the 2016 election results alone your first statement on the duty and role of government is failed by the US. We are at risk of becoming a failed democracy for similar reasons.
Lobbying and campaign finance operations are destroying the value of voter preference and need to be reigned in through massive overhaul of the campaign and election processes. I'm all for setting a window for campaigning like the ...
Honestly it is probably just run-of-the-mill xenophobia, but looking at US Federal Tax revenue [0] I would like to point out that prior to ~1930 everyone was basically on their own and after that the government started really becoming a big chunk of the economic pie. In 1920, I expect it was a lot more practical to target an open-border policy. Economically, the failure of a migrant means nothing to a local. In 2020, if a migrant does not succeed then there is a risk that the locals will be paying for it. I argue that that would reasonably change someone's opinions.
The idea that a person's location should have no impact is great, but sits in conflict with the US welfare system.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...
If the answer is no, how does this apply?
This is typical American ignorance and xenophobia.
- take it from an immigrant, that is not staying long term
But if the US is so terrible and xenophobic, why don't you go somewhere else? (Hint: other countries are even worse.)
But thank's for being that stereotype I was referring to.
At some point people have to be responsible for their own self determination —as leftists used to clamor for a couple of decades ago. Now they want a shortcut instead of doing the hard work to build viable economies. It took us a few hundred years to get where we are. It didn’t happen overnight. People still have no problem vilifying pioneers, but they’re the first to want the fruits of that hard labor centuries ago. Get to fixing your economies it takes time, but fortunately with the technology today and with the foundations today, we know it’s possible to turn things around in a few decades (China, S Korea, Panama, etc). Even Japan was extremely feudal up until the end of WWII.
US gets huge financial benefits from being the world hegemon. Then there's the Northern Triangle that US messed up and Americans pretend that they have nothing to do with it.
We could do it the Canadian or Australian way. Remember all those Americans who thought they could simply slip across the Canadian border and be good? Even they don’t just let anyone in.
I’ll believe the rhetoric when countries where it makes sense to federate federate (Caribbean, South America, Caucasus, etc).
So if you want to regulate who I have in my home, then maybe I should regulate who your barber is.... and I would choose Sweeney Todd.
Now the US people are denying other people the same opportunities their not-to-distant grandparents had. I guess it's an insiders market.
I find your concept of US "owing" anyone anything strange. Depending on your political opinions you might think that humans "owe" each other equal opportunity.
We’ve let more people in than any other country (including other countries that started out as colonies, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) We have a right to regulate who we think will contribute and be a good citizen.
We now want to exercise our self determination as a nation like everyone else does.
Can you answer why it's OK for earlier generations of (now) Americans to leave their origins in search of a better life, but modern immigrants should stay and fix these issues instead?
Your views are fascinating.
They said, a nation with self determination can decide what it wants according to its laws. It’s that simple.
(caveat: I am an immigrant that came to Canada)
Nationalism is more about culture than birth, albeit there is an expectation of both. Pride in your culture and love for your community which you call nation. As things are, you get more exposed to a culture by physical proximity to the source. Therefore being born within a culture makes you knowledgeable of that culture. More likely to be proud of it. (Note, as an immigrant, I do not partake in nationalism in either my current country or origin country. Albeit, I like their cultures.)
Your idealism albeit commendable is far from reality. The world is unfair get over it.
Everyone wants better for themselves. And like the latest hacktoberfest showed, not everyone has the same culture (1). Therefore not everyone should live in close proximity. It would lead to a disruption of social harmony. Take for example those from a honor/shame culture. They will literally beat you up for joking about their mother. Violence in the name of honor. In the West, that kind of violence is seen as outrageous. "Be stoic about it". People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
I define human value as infinite. Also I am not responsible for the right treatment of those outside my sphere of control/influence. I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
I agree. It is unfair that descendants of immigrants refuse to receive immigrants. As an immigrant that came to Canada, I am grateful for this opportunity. Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
This kind of line of thought is the issue. Why should it be unfair? Or at least, why can't we make it fairer?
>People from both cultures do not mix well unless they are willing to adapt.
Those willing to adapt are usually those that are immigrating. Your argument does not make sense in this context, as we are talking about people that are, by definition, willing to move and be part of another country. Will there be a clash of cultures in some instances? Of course, but that will last at most for one generation.
> I refuse to take responsibility for everyone. It is not up to me to give a better wage to an ungrateful immigrant. Life is unfair, get over it.
No one is asking you to take responsibility for anyone. But why should you support policies that exclude those that are willing to come on their own volition and contribute to society? What makes you think that they are 'ungrateful'? Again, why should we not strive to make things fairer for everyone?
>Also, I am grateful that those that would have not adapted to the Canadian mosaic of cultures were not allowed to come. I think another term is culture fit. If you do not fit the culture, you should not be allowed in.
Culture is such a meaningless thing. Immigrants assimilate to the culture, willing or not, after a generation. Sure, some of the people that actually immigrate might not be want to change their ways, but their children will. Studies have shown that this is a moot point, used by those that are just scared of different things, when in reality those that immigrate do assimilate the culture of the place they are living.
This mentality makes absolute no sense, specially coming from a child of immigrants. And I see you come from Canada. As someone who is about to immigrate there, it saddens me to see such display of hatred for those who are different. I spent a year studying in Canada a few years ago, and from my experience people there are very welcoming to immigrants. I had the pleasure to meet Chinese, Muslims, Indians and people from lots of different places and cultures while in Toronto, and guess what? Everyone got along very well. I don't understand where this fear and hatred comes from, but most people are good people, willing to work hard to earn their own if given the chance.
And if this is naive idealism, well, then I am a naive idealist.
Now...
> ... I am naive idealist.
The problem with naive idealism is that it is ineffective.
First, what is justice, fairness? Okay, let's say you arrive to a satisfying (to us) definition. Is it true to everyone all the time? Or simply true to everyone? I think you agree that it is not.
Why? Why does that guy over there think differently? Nurture and nature. Let us say that his inherited traits set him as neutral on the issue, why does he think differently still? Because, of nurture. What is nurture? Culture in its diverse forms. Family culture. Community culture. Etc. Do you still think culture is meaningless?
I am not against immigration. I believe in voting with your feet (going to where you think is best). I am a first generation immigrant by the way. Not a child of immigrants.
I have no hate for people of different backgrounds. You misunderstood me. I am currently taking online classes on the Chinese language and on Chinese culture. One of my best friends is Muslim. Another close friend of mine is Indian.
As citizen of a DEMOcratic country (demo comes from the greek for "the people"), I play a part in the government. Albeit in a minor way, I am part of the government. I am partly responsible for what it does. In counterpart, the government exists for me, the citizen. I take the personality and privilege to be citizen of a democratic country more and more seriously.
I did not aim to say that all immigrants are ungrateful, only that with a porous border, I end up allowing ungrateful immigrants.
> Why should it be unfair? I did not make the world. I came to this conclusion regretfully. You do need not to sell to me the beauty of a fair world. Everyone is born to different circumstances, therefore everyone is unequal. Not only birth but culture. Last century, China once tried to eliminate the advantage of the upper class. They took their possession and gave them a status "to receive lesser treatment". It was an inherited status. After roughly 40 years, they removed that status. Then later there was a study on the descendants of the persecuted class. They were in average in a better position than the descendants of those who had receive a "to receive a better treatment" status. I leave it up to you to make your own conclusion.
There is a nation's culture, a family's culture, a religion's culture, etc. As many as there are groups you can identify with.
>Or at least, why can't we make it fairer? You can. I intend to do it, to the extent that it is not deleterious to me.
They also mandate a master degree and low effort from the company, which can be negociated if really strong guy (bachelor with some effory, expert reputation with high effort).
Then they give a permanent residency after 7 years of taxes but no path to nationality so the only way to persist is to make children locally, another interesting point: you ll never be Chinese but your kids can, which makes also the immigration problem drama free.
I quite wish France tried that because we feel (might not be rational) we have so many issues with our immigration.
On paper, there is also path by which you can marry into Chinese citizenship, but it's exceptionally rare in practice.
"Renounce other citizenships" is complex. Many nations don't provide a citizens with a means to stop being citizen. Which is to say, if you take a Chinese (or any other) citizenship, and renounce your old citizenship, you may still end up with both citizenships.
I don't know specifics about Honk Kong, but I do know the standards are laxer than mainland China.
Whenever limits to US H1Bs a are mentioned that gets full support on HN because it waters down local salaries but when similar systems are proposed for Europe it gets downvoted.
Seems pretty double standard.
Its the classic 'Do as I say, not as I do'.
And 'No' We do not expect red carpets anywhere on the world. Its totally a individual's choice to move abroad or stay. Due to huge population, the figures look high too.
India isn't one person that holds all these opinions.
But I do find myself feeling sorry for the fact that they basically discriminate against those whom are not rich and/or are lesser educated.
In many cases they're the people that would benefit the most from being allowed to walk away from a system thats failed them.
I don't really have a solution, just a thought.
If you are in a low wage area and feel that your workers are as productive as workers in high wage areas then you can pay them a high enough wage that they get a visa.
If you don't feel that way then obviously the visa should go to a more productive worker and it doesn't matter that they happen to be in a high wage area.
If you believe immigrants are good for the economy and make everyone richer, strengthening existing companies with their unique talent and expertise and founding many successful new companies, why let rich costal cities get all the benefit when poor cities have a much greater need for an economic boost?
Most people don't believe this statement is true (or, at least as true as you do) because if they did, we probably wouldn't be talking about any of this on HN.
Doing something like that at scale seems like an easy way to get caught and go to jail.
If skilled foreigners accept lower wages because the right to come to the US is worth something to them, then the price of the visa would settle at around the difference in wages. So overseas workers wouldn't undercut US residents. And the perceived monetary value of living in the US would accrue to the government, not to body shops.
Do you believe that H1B is not inherently abusive?
Do you believe that if US agrees that someone is useful, they shouldn't get residency immediately?
Do you think that indentured servitude is a reasonable tool?
H1-Bs are transferrable, so calling it "indentured servitude" is incorrect, the real reason why H1-Bs usually stick with an employer is the green card sponsorship by the employer, which is not transferrable.
This is why you can't have second-class citizens like this. They are terrified to go for help if they even know how. It's even worse for undocumented workers. At least they can quit though. H1B workers are tied to their sponsors, which has to stop.
Calling these 'guest houses' as people living in second class of the society is as incorrect as calling the residents of Pied Piper house in 'Silicon Valley' as 'living like second class citizens'.
I'm just genuinely curious
They were sending their money home to India as well.
Its like the most important period of your life. There is little time for non-serious stuff.
You likely won't get a chance again. Even if you do office politics and get visas, you still need to beat the lottery and visa interview. Given how precious the opportunity and what you get out of it. You have to do all that.
More than that, if you consider that the third world probably has 4-5 billion people, many of which would want to live in the US (~350 million people), this creates a scaling issue.
I'm not even American, but I can understand why they consider this a problem.
But you have to understand, this doesn't necessarily mean we don't have fun. When I was in Bay Area, I knew a dozen ways to save up money while having fun. I didn't own a car, because the company gave me a VTA pass. I knew how to cheaply explore places around Sunnyvale, CA. I knew how to reach SFO, and explore places there for cheap. Where you could eat cheap. This also means, investing in quality and frugal stuff. A good $14 for jeans pants at costco(bought from a friend's costco card of course), buy a pair, and buy a pair of t-shirts. Then may be timberland shoes. Invest in a good jacket. Now your clothing is covered for years. A bag of basmati rice costs $15, and lasts at least 2 - 3 months, invest in a good rice cooker and making curry with veggies easy by buying produce at local farmers market. Meat is kind of cheap in US too. Sometimes you just skip meals(think of intermittent fasting as a side effect). Also you can buy a room heater for around the same price at Target. There are lots Chinese/Mexican barber shops around Sunnyvale/Santa Clara that give $8-$10 haircuts. I knew to scavenge through mail boxes, to pick up coupons. Then of course one kid gave me a whole coupon bunch for lyft, and uber eats and eat for free for long. etc etc.
I took good care of my health, so only once did I have to go to the doctor, and I didn't even pay a single dollar, they just asked me to continue taking TUMS.
Is it hard, yes. I mean I was once caught in a thunderstorm and it was too cold to tolerate, and I once missed the last bus back home. Could have taken Uber but decided to save $3 and walked 4 miles in dark and cold, missed because I had to pick up free food at office so the my back pack was heavy. I even at a point could hear my own footsteps which freaked me out real bad, it felt numb walking in the cold. Then of course you have to wake up at 5 in the morning, because you want to take the 7:15 bus as the breakfast is free at office. Its cold that early in the morning, I had tons of janitorial staff as friends because I would travel with them in the VTA and again meet them at office. I remember it almost feels like the cold seeping into your very bones. One day I relocated to a new place and I was sleeping in the hall, the room heater broke down- It felt like my toes would fall off. It was really really cold.
Then there's tons of time and self reflection you get in that much minimalism, loneliness and it kind of touches your soul to its core.
Then you also save a lot of money you can send back home, that in the hopes when you run out of visa time and eventually return, you will have some money to invest and make something out of it. Did it take a toll yes. I'd be barking mad to try all this again. But I don't regret it for a minute. I got a chance which only one in millions get, and I made most out of it. I learned tons from smart people, worked and pushed my self to the extremes I gave everything I had in me. I would always make it a point to visit universities and companies to get a idea of the scale and ambition of the US civilization. I have immense admiration and respect for the American people, and I am always thankful for the opportunity.
I specifically remember walking well over 10kms in biting cold on a particular new years day early morning to get back to the farm to take care of my responsibilities, having pasta and corn (with grated cheese sometimes) for as a typical dinner etc, stretching pizzas out to last 2-3 days etc. To the annoyance of my family some of these habits stick hard even today :-)
Oh, and pretend it didn't matter when someone lost my my "new" (at that time) 3310 cell phone that I had got second hand from a another friend (who again had assembled it from broken ones that he had gitten hold of :-)
At the risk of sounding like a Meninist. I have to say one of the big reasons why Indian men leave behind families at home back in India, is because some of these struggles just can't be expected to be shared by their families. It just gets too much after a while, and after that you just have to keep up with it on sheer will power.
It takes a toll both on your body and mind.
I realize that in order to undergo some struggle analogous to this the American citizens have to undergo Navy Seals training or something. Or they run Ultramarathons just to create the human yearning for struggle and story :) And the attrition rate there is quite high.
Its not constant, because during yearly bonus time you make a little extra. And when you visit home, you carry some gifts for people back there. I also made sure family back home was taken care off really really well.
But I was able to save a lot. Like able to go close and sometimes above 60% of the net paycheck most months. Keep in my I arrived to us with $200, a job and a suitcase with clothes.
This not meant as a personal dig at you, I'm glad that it worked out well for you.
You are either incredible naive or just blind to the plight of your own country men. Do you know how many homeless people there are in the Bay Area? Have you ever seen black people working at Target or Walmart? Have you bothered talking to janitors at your office. Try talking to these people and see how life is going on for them. Sure its not comparable to what I did, but they have their own struggles and life is quite hard for them. Try talking to them and see what they think about those 'rich guys'(programmers).
The living standards you talk about are really for white people hailing from upper middle to rich class white families. Not every one has a $1.5 million home in San Ramon, Cupertino or Morgan Hill. Not everyone has a Tesla and a minivan for kids.
I'm not lowering the standards for anybody, If Im living that way, then there are already people for whom the VTA pass, coupons and timberland shoes were made. I'm just fitting in. You also can't fault me for not spending money like the way others do. If things in your society came at minimal standard of living acceptable to everyone, then everyone would be already living at those standards.
So tomorrow if people waiting tables at Starbucks or janitors took up programming jobs and lived like me, what would you do? Ban programming jobs for them, and reserve only for people who live the way you like?
Also what will you do about things like 'ramen profitability', or people like Elon Musk who at many times have stared at personal bankruptcy and have slept on their office floor.
You mention that there are Americans who also struggle but I fail to see how that’s an argument in favor of systematic underpaying of foreign workers who are bound to a single employer (modern day indentured servitude). It’s the job of the government to improve the lives of its citizens and to protect their jobs, not to help foreign nationals improve their lives or to help businesses boost their profits at the expense of American salaries.
I’m all for immigration and fair pay. I’ve done it myself. But I don’t want to have to live as you described if at all possible. And I prefer that if you are talented enough to make it to the USA then you should be able to profit equally like Americans.
If forcing companies to pay equal salaries for foreign nationals stops the inflow of H1Bs, then this means that there are Americans capable of filling the job market. It there’s still unmet need for talent, then foreign nationals will be brought in at fair salaries
But you can't stop any one living the way they want. There will always be people who will run/swim the extra miles, lift the extra weights, study the extra hours, eat ramen, do more than one job, walk/sleep in the cold, do the side gigs, moonlight their companies in garages. This is not slavery or anything. Slavery is stripping away people's rights without their consent, under the threat of violence. This just people wanting an edge over other humans. And regardless how you wish to live your life, there will always be people looking for that edge.
Lastly, I don't thing anyone living their life any way effects your standard of living. Your wages and compensation are decided based on how much effort your willing to put to get into a FANG. People who are willing to do that already make lots of money in a place like Bay Area.
The best thing about America, is the society goes lots of distance and makes it easy for people to do anything they want. So that at the end of the you are left with your own choice to make whatever life you want to. No immigrant is coming in your way of 'pursuit of happiness'
If you want to earn more money and want to know what's preventing you from getting it, you only have to look at the mirror.
If you hadn’t been tied to a single employer, maybe you would have gotten a job with an employer who paid more. You would have been able to reach your savings goal without living so frugally. Your employer at the time was comfortable paying you a relatively small amount because you couldn’t go anywhere else.
They’re not asking immigrants to live more lavishly. They’re asking for immigrants to be paid more so there’s less downward pressure on wages.
I agree that h1b abusing employers have to be stopped and we need to raise the bar for h1b's but lets not make this a discussion about forcing a unhealthy lifestyle on immigrants.
Expense will expand to cover whatever income you have. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you are not careful you can spend your entire income and have nothing left. There are some very poor people in the world saving surprising amounts of money (for their income - when you make a dollar a week saving a few pennies is amazing)
Really? I mean, I hear people (especially SV people) say this all the time but I make a fraction of what they claim to and I rarely even have to think about money.
I'm not sure the above is entirely bad - when you die the money is gone. (this is a religious question - not all agree) You need some savings for unexpected, retirement, planted larger expenses, and other situations. Beyond that, if you have money left over that you didn't spend you wasted your time at work: get a life.
When I finally broke into programming as a career at nearly 30, my life changed. A couple years into it, I found out I was making 80% of a new hire QA dev on visa where their salary had to be posted in the break room or something. As a back end engineer who was part of a team of 4 writing code that was earning our company over $50M a year, I was surprised that she was making substantially more than me. Turned out minimum salary visa stuff protected her from my salary.
I’m now doing better than most, but I’d expect that there are many like me who would just were/are unaware they could make it comfortably as a software developer.
Not sure where I was going. Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them. Those conditions are just “life” for many of us.
I feel you.
Inertia can be hard to overcome, and if you are coming from a context and are used to your current social conditioning, breaking out of a self defeating loop can be hard. And you deserve credit for making it despite all the problems.
But poverty is subject to social conditions where you live, and poverty in the US != poverty in India. In fact the definitions of poverty are not even remotely same.
By and large, I think its a quid-pro-quo between the US wanting foreign markets to sell into, and other countries wanting to sell their products, as well as human-resource-services into the US market. But, the US is a saturated market, and so the only growth is in emerging markets. Which also translates indirectly to 401(k) growth...
If I may ask, what has been your career path since your H1B days?
People like me, just do our time and return to India. The company was happy to let me continue working from Bangalore office.
Working in the Bay Area was a net positive for me. You learn so much from working with the smartest in the world. Everything changes, your motivation, drive, ambition, your imagination gets re-modelled as to what's possible and how far you can go. I have learned tons due to access to a awesome peer group. I used to visit Stanford and just walk there so many times just to be in the company and see the specialness of the place. My imagination itself has evolved. I learn to take failure less fatally, and take more chances these days.
For this reason alone, I advice young people at work and friends circle to try and work in Bay Area, even if its a short stint. Its a net positive to one's career.
In terms of concrete steps, I've been promoted at work. I learned to swim(Thanks to the hiking I did around Bay Area, all those people who were so focussed on fitness had a good effect on me).I had good savings for a head start in my peer/age group. I also made decent real estate investments in India. I had a start up in Bangalore before moving to Bay Area, now I want to start up sometime again. I have read dozens of books, and have developed appetite for taking on hard projects at work. My eventual plan is to be financially independent, so that I can have mental space to take time off and do things and projects I like. So I'm working on it.
Who knows what's next for all for us due to COVID and what else is to follow. But my experience in the past failing and getting up so many times tells me, as long as one is interested in doing work, learning and have immunity to handle tough times, general direction is always a upwards trajectory.
But I'd like to come back and again work in the Bay Area. This time around not that much for money but just for working with smart people.
Sometimes I really wonder. What stops people in US in other states to buy a ticket and relocate to Bay Area.
Immigrants don't take jobs for less, when no government is breathing down their necks. If you have a competitive market - there's no need for government to create artificial monopolies.
It's complete bullshit that billions want to live in US. Billions want a safe and prosperous life... and would stay home, if that's possible to achieve. US isn't some land of honey rivers or gold mountains.
If you want a case study on how unrestricted migration occurs - look at EU.
On one side we have Ireland and on the other side we have Romania. There's complete freedom of migration for Romanians to Ireland. Just buy a one way ticket for 50Eur, basically.
EU is proof that you don't need quotas or restrictions to control migration at all. And immigrants have only a small impact on incomes.
I often say that unlimited calls means people talk less, not more. On the similar lines offering unlimited learning and self improvement budgets to your employees means people will likely spend them less, but more relevant training and development would happen.
A very similar argument can be made about unlimited sick leaves too.
When something is free people don't feel the need to rush and fill the quotas/limits. They use/spend per relevant needs and scenarios now that they know they always have an option to use the thing when they need it.
They say that you have unlimited - then you don't rush to use up. (But unlimited, needs to be actually unlimited)
And for example of migration - if your cost of moving to a new place and working there is reasonable, you're less likely to stay there if it becomes a bad place. Many cases demonstrate this, last being, massive wave of repatriation of people from Eastern Europe during the financial crisis.(And numerous internal migration waves in large countries)
- by reasonable cost I mean that you don't need to spend X thousands of dollars and wait 6-36 months for a permit
Plus Romania is average by world standards (GDP per capita per country), which means that half the world's countries (and probably 80% of the world's population) are poorer or much poorer.
That Romanians should be kicked out of EU because they are stealing "R jerbs"?
After huge growth, the average salary in PPP terms is now about 50% of the Western ones. Romanian workers in the West have definitely depressed the average salaries in several fields.
And that's with somewhat controlled migration.
My point is: controlled migration is there for a reason. Building a working state is extremely difficult and takes a lot of time. It's a very fragile and delicate thing. Once you've managed to build it... you really don't want to upset the balance.
What sectors have seen a depression of salaries as a direct result of Romanians entering the market? And you have the huge hurdle of proving that those salaries are depressed specifically because of the Romanian labor, and not because Asian products or other global trends.
Also - restricted migration fails to attract the right labor, driving up the cost of labor unnecessarily. Sometimes it gets ridiculously stupid... to the point that local consumers(also local labor) cannot afford to consume products, because local labor(also local consumers) refuses to work for less. It gets to a point where local businesses cannot pay their local labor and invest into productivity gains(required to keep the pay high enough).
It's a complex clusterfuck... and blaming Romanians or Mexicans is just an easy "solution".
Not sure what fraud these new rules will prevent, if they are implemented.
It used to be if you are a graduate or have experience working in a Canadian company you would score points. Which was much less prone to abuse.
Now they still have point based system, but the above don't get any extra point, and if you have those said qualifications anywhere, as long as you can prove (through documentations) you get the same points.
Result is rampant abuse with overseas companies that "vet" candidates' degrees and experience providing certificates and such things. And it takes longer for graduates from Canadian universities or someone with experience working at a company here since they compete in the same lottery pool. It is still far better than US, but it could take you a while before your points start closer to the draw.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
And those points matter towards getting a Permanent Residence Status.
There's no fast track for masters. It's entirely points based.
Source: I work at Google Canada and submitted my PR application last year.
Same with granting asylum seekers citizenship and so on. Same with allowing dual citizenship - are you loyal to two countries? Citizenship is never about loyalty.
Citizenship has a lot more to do with the ways you contribute to the country. Folks born in a country are likely to live there for life and contribute by speaking the local language, participating in local customs, being educated in and working in the country, and most importantly, paying taxes. This is why some categories are seen as "less important": Because folks think that some categories won't integrate enough (and it is impossible for an immigrant to ever do this, regardless of background), some won't learn enough language, or won't contribute as much. The truth of this is thrown out the window, of course, and there is no real objective test to test these sorts of things. Time in country might be one of the better tests, though it isn't perfect.
Dual citizenship's typically only allowed in the EU when the other country is also an EU country. Some countries do not even allow that. There's even a citizenship test which is administrated.
https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/th...
Now I haven't looked into many other countries, but at least in the EU I know that there's many proxies for loyalty when applying for citizenship. And many countries do not accept dual citizenship, which should make things clear for you hopefully.
The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid.
How is hiring folks with a CS degree for an SWE position a solution to H1b abuse?
The rule published here specifically talks about three things(Yes, I read it line by line just so that I can do my due diligence before I comment here)[2]:
1/ Change the meaning of "Speciality Occupation" and tie this to the College degree that the person has.
2/ If you are part of these "body shops" and you are working as a contractor, your visa will only be extended for 1 year.
3/ Some general statements about Site Visits.
4/ No comment on increasing the wage.
The first child comment that we see below is an anecdotal evidence about seeing a house with dozen(?) folks in a 3 BHK flat? What does it do with H1B visa abuse? How is sending money home AFTER taxes H1B abuse?
Still debating how we went from thoroughly researched and thought provoking comments to these.
I don't debate that there is H1B abuse.
- Programmers are paid very less when compared to prevailing wage.
- Programmers cannot leave their employers so employers hold them by their balls and get work done overtime.
- Programmers stay away from their family, contribute to taxes AND to social security. KNOWING that they may never see a day to collect Social security.
All of this is H1B Abuse. There is no evidence that folks on H1B visa compete with a US Citizen's job. (I'm taking about H1B, not offshoring).
Literally NONE of the changes that this administration is doing is addressing ANY of these concerns for both the US Economy and the H1B individual. Comments like these are dangerous since they give an illusion that the administration is doing something to improve the economy, but they are just party tricks.
[1]https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eoDetails?rrid=131148
[2]https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.pdf
> First, striking “contractor” will avoid potential confusion as the term “contractor” in the definition is misleading. The inclusion of “contractors” in the regulatory language could be read to suggest that contractors should generally qualify under the definition of a “United States employer.” While a contractor is certainly not excluded from qualifying as a “United States employer” for purposes of an H-1B petition, the contractor, like any petitioner, must establish the requisite “employer-employee relationship” with the H-1B beneficiary.
And, yes, I do usually expect people to have the capacity to sympathise with others. I would even assert that everyone will instinctively want to help when they see others suffering. It's called empathy and is among the basic human emotions.
There is an ideological stream in the US that has seen the success of the market mechanisms based on competition and selfishness and is now misinterpreting it to mean than any form of altruism is bad.
Closely related is the glorification of competition to a degree where people are entire oblivious to the fact that a market economy is first and foremost a mechanism of cooperation. This has gone so far as to make even the notionally educated and self-styled rational tech community grasp around for speculative theories trying to frame this issue in terms of zero-sum competition. They somehow prefer to believe this against all evidence, i. e. the number of high-profile startups founded by first- or second-gen immigrants. And thereby give themselves license to do what it is they either actually want all by itself, or what they consider a proxy for good things happening to them: hurting others.
Especially when there are just two sides.
This has nothing to do with the US, it applies just as well to e.g. Europe.
Ability to control other people's lives - is a drug.
And as usual the decades of "Americans jobs" crap. There are no American Jobs, as much as there are no NYC jobs or LA jobs. The employer doesn't own the job, only the power to be an intermediary.
Jobs are a function of market demand for products and services.
If tomorrow all of US territory became miraculously healthy and had no need for drugs - pharmacists' jobs would just disappear. No market - no jobs.
Is there any other independent confirmation that it was withdrawn? I can't find any. The PDF is still up.
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
You can correlate the RIN between the Rule and the PDF: RIN 1205-AC00
Also the rule does mention the new wage levels (eg. pages 147 and 148).
If an IT department puts out a req and fills it with an H1-B worker, a US worker is out of a job. It's really that simple. People like to respond to this and cite sources funded by H1-B consultancies about how H1-B create more economic opportunities which translates into more jobs for all but this doesn't make sense because companies will A) pocket the savings and B) continue to hire H1-Bs to keep on saving per headcount. The reality is that jobs are a zero-sum game. I welcome your response if you have a counter-point.
I really don't like his personality, but really do appreciate a lot of the things Trump does in practice.
For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 1M. This means Canada brings in ~5X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. [2]
[edit] This rate has been consistent since 1992.
[edit] I originally stated the US brings in 140,000 immigrants per year, this was a mistake, my cursory search led me to the cap on employment based green cards, not total. Factoring in family members of US citizens, it's ~1M. By Immigrants I include green cards per year, as everyone else is by definition a non-immigrant. It is my understanding the Canadian number is the same category.
Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation. As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
[1] https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
[2] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...
The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.
I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure.
[1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...
And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over.
In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
>This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.
But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.
I would further argue that "bringing in immigrants" isn't the "easy way out" or even likely the "cheap way out" but rather probably more challenging. Creating a society that deals well with the gaijin isn't easy.
I see no evidence that free daycare or longer parental leave actually incentivize adults to have children. The birth rate in Finland is 1.49 and falling rapidly, Sweden and Norway are 1.8ish. Iceland is 1.75. Germany is 1.57. Spain is 1.34. These places have incredibly generous programs and are well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Finland's mat leave is 4.2 months and pat leave is 2.2 months and offers public daycare centers. If that's not long enough or free enough to boost their brith rate over 1.49 I'm not sure what you'd suggest.
Yes, mat/pat leave is great, and should exist. So should free daycare. However, I don't see any evidence that'll move the needle. If anything, it appears that pushes the birth rate further down being correlated broadly with increased development.
It is a world wide issue in all western countries, and it is independent of net 'in or out' immigration. The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
Even if you stopped immigration, people would not be making more babies, as countries that don't have net immigration still don't make more babies. Baby making seems independent with net immigration rates.
Hungary incentivizes its native population to have larger families, a policy of Victor Orban's, and has seen consistent growth in its fertility rate since ~2010. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the way it should be tackled.
> The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.
America and the UK's birth rates nose-dived in the mid-60's and hasn't recovered since. I'm failing to draw a connection to these countries being drastically more developed by the end of the 60s than they were at the start of them.
Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.
A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage.
The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada
Startups in the 1980s had the same challenge because the H1B minimum salary was a really good salary then, average salaries just rose, lets do that part again.
That is patently false.
1. If you're trying to imply that the majority of people who speak spanish in the US are illegal immigrants from Mexico, I suspect that you're highly wrong on that.
2. I'm sure there are many people on tourist visa's who over stay. I'm sure there are many less people who came over on H1B's who overstay. H1B has a path forward (no matter how bad that path is), which allows you to still work at your career. You can't group every type of visa together to make broad claims like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
You assert this as though it's just automatically a good thing with no actual analysis as to the impact on Canadians. What happens to the cultural cohesion, wages, and living standards of Canadians when immigration is at such a rapid pace? Is this not a factor? Or is the sheer availability of cheap, undercutting labour just a natural capitalist good that we should accept regardless of the hard to measure, intangible impacts?
I would assume that if a population remains stable as a result of migration, that as many people are leaving houses as entering them, and there shouldn't be substantial pressure on housing prices. I don't have specific data for this.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/vancouver-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45199034
(Though we'd have to be really mad to replace it with a lottery...)
The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
The standard of living in Canada is just as high as the US. Canada's Human Development Index is .922, 13th globally. The US HDI is .920, so a hair lower. 45% of the Canadian population lives in 6 of the 35 most livable cities in the world.
"Social cohesion" doesn't come up, it's not an issue.
Again, asserted, no evidence, no argument. Social cohesion is absolutely an issue. We feel it when we have no community organizations, don't know our neighbours, and have nothing gluing us to where we live. The famous Putnam study on social capital is a fine piece of evidence here.
I believe we can surmount Putnam's identified problems, but only if we have a rate of influx that is sustainable. That means each newcomer has a chance to get proper language training, recertification, and actually integrate into a local community, which I'll somewhat arbitrarily define as having made some real friends out of the group of local or fully-assimilated people. This is the core requirement of being able to fully participate in social life.
> The wealth and income inequality in Canada is much lower than in the US.
Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
> Some of us would like it to stay that way, and we understand that bringing in a whole bunch of people to undercut the price of labour while eroding our hard-fought social capital is not the way to do that.
The immigration rate of 1% per year has been the same since 1992 and I see no evidence of inequality increasing in conjunction with immigration. Do you have evidence? And once again, dramatically increasing wages by cutting off immigration increases income inequality. The GINI has remained a consistent .33 from the late 1990s through the present day, in spite of 1% per annum immigration.
You're going to need to back your case if you want to sway my mind.
My previous comment is more related to the fact that some migrants that follow the rules, may suffer from the fact that other migrants don't - for example at first my wife could not join me in Australia, because she comes from a country which had a high number of irregular applications in the past and for this reason that country is now considered "higher risk".
For this reason, many migrants are actually in favour of stricter regulations.
This fact is often not evident if you're not a migrant yourself, that's why I wanted to bring it up.
If so, then maybe they shouldn't have been issued "skilled worker" visa in the first place. Part of the visa process should be verification that a person really has the credentials to work in the profession they declare on their application.
Of course there also could be a process to get that accreditation without coming to the country. Something like bar exams for lawyers could be held in US embassies around the world, or online.
I would not consider startup equity equitable to salary compensation.
Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!
Low wages in software compared to the US for sure, but that's in part because Canada has very low income and wealth inequality compared to the US. Most people make a living wage, and there's not a huge spread.
The US ranks near the bottom of the world in income inequality [1]. Canada's GINI coefficient was 33.8 in 2018 vs the US of 43.4. This puts America at 51st in the world (lower being worse) vs Canada's 107th.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/ma...
Not really. They (and most other developed countries) simply pay less of their GDP towards healthcare.
Unless there's something more that is taken from wages that isn't shown on paychecks. Which would be weird considering that paycheck stubs usually have a full breakdown of where your money went and how much taxes were taken.
Canada in general has much lower income inequality, which is an a-OK trade off for slightly lower wages, as long as basic needs are covered.
But also, the cost of living in the GTA has gotten completely out of control so that's part of it.
My wife and I bought a house in a "bad" neighbourhood of Toronto back in 2005. It was $280,000 CAD and that was the cheapest we could find in the GTA for a 3 bedroom detached home still on decent public transit.
At the time both of us were both employed in tech, and we still had to struggle a bit to scrape together a down payment. We didn't perceive $280,000 as a trivial or cheap amount. And even back then we wondered how families that didn't have our (pretty decent) income level could possibly be buying homes.
That same home would be now be worth over a million. I just can't grasp how that's conceivable at all. I make really good money as a Google employee, but I'd still find it frustrating to scrape together money for that. I don't understand how my kids will ever own a home.
So I think it's less that people are under-compensated in our industry as much as costs of living have just become stupid due to housing price inflation.
EDIT: wife went to go check the mailbox and it was stuffed full of real estate flyers only, including one from an agent who will give you a free lottery ticket if you come to his open house. I smell doom on the horizon, but I've been saying that for a decade, so don't listen to me.
That's fine by me. For the vast majority of startups, the equity compensation should be considered worthless anyways.
> As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans.
The average American doesn't work in a job for which an H-1B would even be permitted, so I'm not sure what this point means? I'd expect everyone in an H-1B position to be making more than the average American.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
It's expensive, yes, but it's still a very small amount compared to their overall compensation and benefits. If your entire staff is on visas maybe you'd have a bad time, sure, but otherwise it's usually a drop in the bucket.
The real joke is that H-1B is still a lottery, and in the time it takes people to get theirs, they might reconsider living somewhere else, like Canada.
The rest of your comment is incorrect because of this misunderstanding, so I'll give you a break. And I'll also give you a break for accepting current Trump policies as standard American policies.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Actually, "more than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000)."
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
As this article was about US immigration, I was using the US immigration definition of an immigrant, which is roughly speaking, a green card holder.
H-1Bs are considered non-immigrant visitors, although it is a dual-intent class meaning they are allowed to possess immigrant intent for immigration purposes.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/immigration/common-immigration...
The split in the US for family vs employment immigration is around 80/20. In Canada it's around 40/60.
> The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
> More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year.
What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
The US has changed since the 19th century, when we needed endless amounts of unskilled labor. Things are much different today, and the H1-B Visa has been abused for decades.
> The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring.
Good. It sounds like it's somewhat serving it's purpose. Hopefully these changes will improve it more.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
Well, "generous" is a big word. There's not much handed to you when you move to the US, you'll have to work hard for your money, like everyone else. If you want to know what generous looks like, try talking with an immigrant in Europe.
Immigrants are defined in US law as lawful permanent residents, i.e. green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards issued at 366,000 per year. Therefore, the number of new immigrants to the US each year is 366,000. The 140,000 number I initially used incorrectly was the number of employment based green cards as compared to family based. I've updated the math. [edit] It's 1M once you factor in family of citizens.
Everyone else is a non-immigrant visitor, and not relevant to my numbers.
> The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018.
The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.
> What amazes me is how much hate the US gets for being one of the most generous countries on Earth.
Canada brings in 25X per capita the number of refugees and 10X per capita the number of new lawful permanent resident.
You're simply mistaken.
From: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/tab...
Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2018
Year Number
2018 1,096,611
2017 1,127,167
2016 1,183,505
This also obviously doesn't even count the number of illegal aliens coming here every year.
> The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.
Native Americans came from elsewhere at some point too, I suppose they are immigrants also according to your meaningless definition.
Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.
You are the one who is mistaken.
> Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.
Well then why are you replying to me?
> You are the one who is mistaken.
I'm wrong about lots of things, and my goal is always to get it right, and I've edited my responses for clarity, with a statement of why. However, the fact remains, 25X more refugees per capita and 5X more immigrants per capita is a lot.
Thank you for your help in figuring out where the delta was! I didn't mean to come off smug though, I saw other folks had varying definitions of what an "immigrant" was.
And refugees are only one type of immigrant. Should illegal immigrants count as refugees, since many frequently claim to be fleeing violence, even if they don't get officially declared as a refugee by the US? If so, that means the US admits closer to 500,000 refugees per year.
I don't know what definition of "brings in" you are using, but around 1.1 million people obtain permanent legal resident status per year in the US. By this metric your Canada numbers are about right (a bit low, around 340,000 in 2019).
Perhaps you're looking at purely comparing Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program with just H-1Bs? If so those numbers are still a bit off -- there were around 190,000 H-1Bs issued in 2019 -- but also that's only a small sliver of all temporary foreign work visas issued in the US (there are again over a million per year).
Canada does admit many more immigrants per capita and generally has a much better immigration system but the numerical difference is not quite as huge as you say.
I believe the cap on the number of green cards issued per year is 366,000 -- 140,000 of which are employment based. [1] Is mistook the latter for the former and have updated my post to reflect.
[edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens. Updated.
Similarly Canada's 300,000-ish per year number is also the number of new permanent residents admitted per year. [2]
My goal was to track immigration, i.e. becoming permanent residents, not temporary migrant workers, including those under H-1B.
[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...
[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-to-admi...
On an annual basis:
The US brings in 100-200k refugees. Total immigration is 1.0-1.1M. The US grants citizenship to 700-800k immigrants.
The US has set a target cap of 18,000 refugees next year [1] vs Canada's now world-leading (per capita) 28-33,000 [2]
You are correct that I was off re: 140,000 (that's the quota for employment based green cards), the number is ~1M total and I have edited my post to reflect. This is based on the total number of green cards available, as they are the only "immigrant" visa. Every other class is considered to be non-immigrants -- temporary workers, or visitors.
However, the fact 20% of the world's immigrants reside in America doesn't mean nearly as much on a per capita basis.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/politics/refugee-cap-historic...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/19/canada-now-...
What? We have 5% of the world's population and 20% of its immigrants, 4 times second place, but that's not enough for you? Wild moving of the goalposts.
While immigration policies can always be improved, your initial statement was that America is "anti-immigrant." This is hard to reconcile with the actual immigration numbers.
From the UN [2]: "The United States of America has been the main country of destination for international migrants since 1970.15 Since then, the number of foreign-born people residing in the country has more than quadrupled – from less than 12 million in 1970, to close to 51 million in 2019."
We can debate whether the number should be increased or decreased. But it is unfair to classify a country as "anti-immigrant" when it is leading the world in immigration. Even on a per-capita basis, America is way up there (look at the map on page 23 [2])
[1] https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/migration/index.... [2] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf
My parenthetical section indicated that Canada's numbers are world-leading per capita, not in absolute numbers.
Apologies if that was unclear.
You might not be, but there are certainly companies where H-1Bs are their bread and butter[1]. Taking Cognizant as an example:
* their wikipedia page says "The company has 281,200[2] employees globally, of which over 150,000 are in India", which means there are at most 131,200 US employees
* in the year 2017 they brought in 28,908 H-1B workers. This works out to 22% of the US workforce. If we include 2016 as well that works out to 38% of the US workforce.
* the figures above are conservative estimates. We probably overestimated their US workforce and underestimated their H-1B population (we've only looked at 2 years of visas, but H1-B visas are good for up to 6 years).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognizant
The US had 1.8 million new immigrants (legal and otherwise) in 2016 and ~13% of the population is foreign born. Canada exceeds that (~21%) but nothing like the 20X rate you're claiming.
I was likely neglecting the Immediate Relatives of US Citizens? Is that un-capped?
[1] https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/03/visa-bulletin/
[2] https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/immigratio...
[3] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45447
[4] https://www.congress.gov/116/crec/2020/05/12/modified/CREC-2...
And also, 2017 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Table 6, “Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status by Type and Major Class of Admission,” Department of Homeland Security.
> Immediate family of U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens can sponsor their spouses, unmarried children under age 21, and parents for a green card. This category does not have annual numerical limits.
> Family-sponsored preference visas. There are 226,000 green cards reserved each year for other categories of relatives. U.S. citizens can sponsor adult children and siblings, while green-card holders can sponsor their spouses and unmarried minor or adult children.
> The Employment Route. There are 140,000 green cards available each year for immigrants in five employment-based categories (formally known as “preferences”).
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/explainer-how-us-leg...
The US number is also the number of new permanent residents, however if my mistake was in fact that I excluded immediate family of citizens, then the number is 5X, not 10X. However, still, dramatic. I'll have to dig in more to make sure that's what I did.
[edit] Thanks for your help in figuring out my mistake!
> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 366,000. This means Canada brings in ~10X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
I love Canada, would move there in a heartbeat, but the he IT salaries in Canada are pitiful compared to the US. Maybe one of the reasons?
They just have to be legal.
Looks like there's going to be a lot of new entry level guest workers as existing visa holders get shuffled around. It'll be interesting to see if the wage distribution stays lopsided once the situation stabilizes. If the program is fulfilling its intended goals, they should match their domestic coworkers in the same age brackets.
This seems like a great move. It corrects the incentives to hire foreign workers over domestic workers, and also ensures that foreign workers aren't abused with lower wages due to their immigration status.
If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop
my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
Hiring for the later will hopefully cease to be cost effective. But the former should still be worth it.
They both compete for the same H1B visas so it has happened a lot of times. The H1B at Tata getting 70k a year took a spot from a software engineer at Google earning more than twice that. That is how lotteries work. Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. And yes, a lot of Googles new engineers comes from India, that is a good thing, the bad thing is companies like Tata abusing the system to get low paid labor into US.
How does this follow?
Mediocre engineer with a sponsored job for 70k. Great engineer with a sponsored job for 140k.
With no salary requirement both has equal chance to get in, meaning the great engineer has 50% chance to get lose the position. With salary requirement at 100k the mediocre engineer will no longer get sponsored leaving the great engineer as the only applicant left and thus guaranteeing that he get in.
Edit: With the old requirements bringing in mediocre engineers was still profitable, with the new requirements it wont be since the salary cap is set at a very high percentile.
Colleges are unrelated to visa refusals.
Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.
The US Visa system sounds completely broken, but this doesn't sound like a good fix. I suspect the way forward is a skills-based immigration system (combined with a robust refugee and compassionate family reunification system) like in other western countries, but that is likely not going to be politically possible from either party down there.
I'm virtually certain that Canada will not have a single tech company with the market cap as large as the tenth largest US tech company within in the next 25 years.
If anything Canada is actively losing ground against the US tech industry. In the past it used to have RIM, Nortel, Bell North and Corel. Today the largest Canadian tech company is "Constellation Software".
And the reason for the decline is simple. Canada's best and brightest don't go into tech. They go into real estate and property development to extract value out of the insanely overheated housing market.
And ironically this ties back to the immigration discussion. One of the major contributing factors to the housing shortage is because of Canada's aggressive pursuit of wealthy emigres. The housing market in places like Vancouver has turned into a slush fund to launder the money of CCP party members and other third world kleptocrats.
However I am confident that if the US keeps on the trajectory it's on this will change.
Canada is not competing with the US on how many Canadian-started companies exist. All the FAANGs have offices in Canada, which they will probably expand more. Immigrants that used to head to the US will now go to Canada instead, enriching the labor market further. If the US immigration system remains broken, Canadian offices of US companies will just get bigger.
Anecdotally, my wife worked for Apple Canada a decade ago in marketing, and at that point there was no engineering happened / allowed to happen in Canada, really. It was kept in Cupertino pretty strictly. But I've noticed in the last 5 years this is no longer the case and Apple -- who was probably most reluctant to do engineering outside of the valley -- is doing way more of it and a plenty of it in Canada it seems.
I work at Google Waterloo, and though I can't get into specifics about office sizes etc, I can definitely say two things: lots of growth, plenty of it from new Canadians but also a lot from Canadian Googlers returning from the US back to Canada in many cases because they couldn't tolerate the situation there anymore.
Last couple of years it feels like every week I see an email from somebody asking for advice etc. for relocation.
For two of my immediate coworkers/friends, both did it a bit after they had kids, and began to contemplate having kids in the American school system[s], and away from grandparents, etc.
It certainly makes it easier transferring within the same company. I think many Canadian SWEs coming back to work after being in SV would find the job market to be rather frustrating/annoying if they had to hunt for a new job. Transferring within the same company takes the edge off.
Positioning the country as a cheap offshoring destination for lower-skilled dev doesn't sound like a good long term bet for the local population.
Let's say you join Google as a SWE on an O-1. If you just perform your duties for the duration of the visa, you won't be able to extend. You'll have to, during the visa, continue to do something "above and beyond" (in SWE, maybe tech talks/events, host conferences, etc.) and show proof of all of this, plus obtain written documentation from employers about how amazing you are. It's not for everyone.
The O-1 works for internationally regarded film directors who want to move to the US and produce work here, but it doesn't work really well for software development.
You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2.
Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose you are hiring candidate 1 to write an app that will help you single men find hot women to date in a 5 mile radius in your 4-billion dollar, VC-backed startup.
The second candidate is being hired into the body shop that has been contracted to develop a UI for a CAT scan machine produced by a major healthcare company.
Now tell me who should be preferred.
It's possible to make many value judgments like you and I have done, but at the end of the day they can't all be incorporated into the immigration law. Making the market the arbiter of what's valuable appears to me to be the least bad option, and strengthening that is the best, given the constraints. It still won't make the law conform to everyone's tastes, though.
Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop).
So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.
If you had a job that could be done by both types of people you describe, why would you pay 4x extra for the former?
Why should the guy who can write operating systems spend their time doing work that's below their skill and training experience? And if this person is ready to do this, why is the latter person held responsible for this?
>>They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
Yes, because they are being hired to do the same job. Hiring Captain America as a guard at ToysRUs doesn't change the job description of a security guard. It just means Captain America make a bad decision to work the wrong job.
Is it? One could do both jobs (Advanced ML & QA) but I'm not sure the other could.
Question is: Should the job of guard at ToysRUs be considered a specialty occupation?
Continuous learning is how our field works. Its not just ML or any thing, tomorrow if some thing new comes up, we need to learn and work on that as well.
We don't exactly toss out our workforce and re hire kids every time Kubernetes makes a release.
It hasn't been enough to outweigh all the other absolutely horrible stuff, but it is one thing.
I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade that allows corporations to import totalitarianism via near-slave or even actual slave (see Uyghur prisoners and forced labor) wage arbitrage to crush domestic wages and liquidate the middle class. This isn't even getting into the export of environmental destruction ("out of sight out of mind") or the export of American technological expertise to unfriendly totalitarian states.
H1B programs can be shady this way too. It's not as shady as actual slave labor or near-slave sweatshops, but there is certainly a serious power imbalance when your employer can pay you sub-standard wages and threaten to cause you to be deported if you don't keep your head down.
Based on his latest rhetoric, he seems to have adopted Sanders's views on trade, which is mostly protectionist.
The election is basically that of a homeowner deciding whether he wants the guy who is spraying a flamethrower into every corner of his house, or an empty cardboard box. If you loathe your house and want it destroyed, the flamethrower guy is who you want. Just be careful, there’s no insurance check when the house burns to the ground.
It's all bullshit posturing.
That being said, I agree that Trump has only been marginally effective here and generally has no coherent plan... for this or much of anything else. Donald doesn't plan. He blusters and postures.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/09/15/u-s-median-h...
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?
You have good intentions towards the kids, but some communist intentions towards business owners. Let them decide how to spend their money. It's their money.
That and US doesn’t need to pay a dime for them developing their skills while getting to skim the cream of the crop.
We had a revolution and a civil war and unrest to fix our own failures. They can work to improve their own self determination. Look, Panama 25 years ago was a basket case. But now they are one of the better economies of the southern cone.
Tell me more of this “our own”. 25% of the current US population is either 1st or 2nd gen immigrants arrived after immigration reform of 1965. They include the innovators, laborers, entrepreneurs, researchers that pay a lot for your “our own”. Can’t eat the cake and have it too.
That's not entirely true everywhere though. For example, I was born in the US, as were my parents and grandparents. My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy, and if I can gather the proper documentation, I'm eligible for Italian citizenship. If I ever get this done, then yes, I could indeed go back to my great-grandparents' country and do what you suggest is silly. I believe quite a few other countries also have policies like this.
It actually kind of seems like we can do this. We do that by increasing the visa requirements, as this new directive is doing so.
It's infinitely better than importing huge numbers of uneducated fundamentalists whose culture is incompatible with the western values and includes throwing gays off of roofs.
It's better to have a few shining examples of truly great countries in the world, rather than mediocre mush everywhere. So citizens of other countries can point to such countries and tell their politicians and their friends - see, we can do better, much better.
As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.
Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies.
The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please".
It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at.
At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high.
After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October.
It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone.
It is not _easy_ to get an H1B.
If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
"""
I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
"""
Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending.
But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special.
It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.
I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
More reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument.
2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1.
3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens.
Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.
And regardless, the point the parent was making is that even if it did, this would be ok, because the broader influx of immigrants would create more demand for all of these professions to the point where it'd be a wash.
Why?
How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.
I know multiple Americans who are good software developers with good credentials who would be qualified for that job and similar but never got them.
An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...
It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.
Hiring isn't a competition to find the smartest candidate, silly Google interviews notwithstanding. Companies want the "good enough" candidate they can get for the least pay. Otherwise all job ads would express a preference for principal engineers with doctorates, instead of the opposite which is far more common. So yes competition drives down pay, it doesn't drive up everyone's skills.
Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs".
There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region.
Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
The right solution would be, to require high wages for H1B visas - if you're hiring a developer, the minimum wage for the H1B worker should be (eg.) 1.5x average developer wage in that area/state. This would solve companies firing local workers and replacing then with H1B workers, and still solve the problem of a company 'really needing' that one worker.
Yes, immigrants built America. But so did enslaved people. So did natives. So did rebellious colonists of the British empire. Most of those people did not consider themselves immigrants - and nor do their descendants.
Many immigrants have contributed amazing things to our nation, and they still do. But immigrants as a group are not a monolith. Many of the "highly skilled workers" that come over on H1Bs, are frankly - not highly skilled workers. Many are semi-skilled workers who are preferred over qualified Americans because they work for low wages and nearly never quit when abused.
Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us. If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants. But it's absurd to say to reduce this to "immigrants = good = America". Not when we know the current system is abusive to both immigrants, and to the Americans who are part of the toxic workplaces that the H1B visa-mill paradigm has created.
Agreed!
> If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants.
This is really just not a hard problem at all to solve from a policy perspective. Political will has been a big problem; both parties have campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has materialized. Corporations with political influence love the status quo as it allows them to import workers for similar or lower wages who can't quit or do anything that would risk them losing their job without being sent home.
Not many people are capable of traveling from distance places away, learning a new language, and then starting from scratch, with no family or friends. I'd give them a bit of credit, especially since their contributions are still being uncovered after being purposely devalued.
To your point, there are of course other hard working demographics in the US, but limiting the number of H1Bs that can come over is slamming the door on people who rightly deserve to be in the US.
My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today.
The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).
Even better would be a salary auction where US companies get to auction (higher and higher salaries for the best overseas workers.) The highest auction rates would fill the quota first. Overseas workers win bigtime. Companies seeking talent also win. Local workers win as well. Companies trying to underpay lose.
If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.
I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a suitable rate.) Their business model should not be to underpay workers, it should be to pay workers high enough to attract them and charge customers appropriately.
Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.
I think GP's point is that that's the way it's supposed to be. The shortage of accountants could be due to some combination of:
1. There are not enough people with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants in the US
2. People with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants are choosing other jobs; perhaps because they pay better, or are more fun, or have better work/life balance, or whatever.
#1 is a reason to steal^W import capable people from other countries; but I doubt very much that's the source of accounting's problems. It's almost certainly #2. In which case, if accounting firms want more accountants, they should make the job more attractive: pay more, have better hours, etc.
I think there would also be debate around how the quota is split between categories. I highly suspect that are much few Foreign Law advisors or Psychologists attempting to get H1Bs than there are "IT/Computer Professionals" (and many less positions available for them); giving each category an equal split wouldn't be fair either.
I'm not saying there isn't a way, but it would have issues too.
Your company has to declare what industry segment they're in when submitting annual returns anyway (here), not sure if it's the same case in the US.
The sacrifice to the "right now" bit is immense, it destroys incentive to learn pretty much anything.
If I just keep offering to pay more, then yes, I will eventually be able to hire a nurse that was previously employed somewhere else, but now _that_ person needs to hire a nurse. No matter how many times you go around this circle, there are not enough nurses for everyone to hire.
That is a shortage. A shortage doesn't typically come with the asterisk of "but if I wait long enough then maybe there won't be".
Possible solutions are:
-Require the hirer to contribute to scholarship funding in the area of work
- Limit H1B to 75th percentile in salary terms.
Do you mean, cap the amount of money a company is allowed to pay someone on an H1B? The entire change of rules here is because companies were not paying market rate. Requiring them to not pay market rate defeats the purpose here entirely.
If you mean require that companies pay _at least_ the 75th percentile, then yes, I believe that is what the action that this entire thread is about is going.
I would also disagree that H1B destroys the feedback loop of jobs being needed. I don't believe the number of H1Bs issued is any where near large enough to disrupt an entire industry.
I can't find anything specific about the new requirements.
1. It is unfair to the workers
2. The H1B Programme is for top talent, for talent you cannot find locally. If anything you should overpay for such valuable talent.
3. High H1B salaries also come back to the country in the form of taxes just like for all workers, which should improve schools.
Schooling is a shared problem for communities and our country, and should be paid for with taxes -- why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers?
Finally, if despite taxes, we cannot fix our school system, perhaps instead of blaming/punishing immigrants we should be looking at our municipal and state governments.
College level school funding (state/federal) has basically dried up in the past few decades with budget cuts. The idea is affordable public college education is not realistic for most people. I believe this is what the commenter is talking about needing more funding.
That’s probably not true exclusively anywhere in America, and it's not true predominantly in a number of parts of America.
For instance, in California less than 1/4 comes of K-12 funding comes from local property taxes, and the absolute majority comes from State funds which are derived primarily from state income taxes.
...
> Property based funding of schools is not likely to be a very effective target for school reform since our current system does not actually have large differences in the funding of poor students. I think that it is more likely that the dysfunction in the schools is best explained by a lack of continuity and efficiency within the schools that serve poor students. The property tax debate is mostly just an easy but misguided target for explaining the achievement gap. On top of the pure fact that property based taxes have actually still allowed for the progressive funding of schools, we already have examples of states that fund students without a total reliance on local property taxes. Take Michigan. Michigan has a centralized funding source for their students. The state takes an overall tax and then breaks it up evenly across students within the state (there are extra complexities to this that are addressed in this article). Even with these changes in school funding, it does not appear that the reformed funding strategy had any impact on student outcomes. In general, funding is not a good proxy for educational quality.
https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
Employers pay as little as they can. If it's possible to hire someone for minimum wage, you hire for minimum wage.
If it's possible to import and indenture a guy for whom a crowded shared house with an actual bathroom looks like a palace, you'll do that. If you don't, your competitor will.
>why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers
You don't put it on immigrant workers, you put it on industries whose demand exceeds supply.
Also remember that immigrant workers don't come out of nowhere. You imported 100 nurses, India and Pakistan have 100 nurses less. Vacuuming up the brightest people from everywhere doesn't help global development.
From my comment. Nurses require training. I did not assume a finite number of nurses. If I am sick and need a nurse, I need one _right now_. There not being enough of them is a shortage. It may not be a shortage in the future, but right now, it is.
Or are you suggesting that you would wait around and be homeless for 4 years until someone local built up enough training and experience in order to build your house? If you're going to suggest that you would wait and "live somewhere else", I would point out that people who are trying to hire, for example, nurses, often don't have that luxury. If they wait 4 years, they'll be dead.
No one is suggesting that high skill work status are used for people with no training or experience; they explicitly require training and/or experience in order to qualify. If think you're proving my point; if you need to hire someone right now, and there is no one available locally to do it right now, then there is a shortage, and you need to look outside of your local market.
The point is that if someone you need to hire is not available, you're going to try to find them elsewhere. You're not going to wait 4 (or whatever number of) years for someone to go to school, train, gain experience, and be available for you to hire.
Demand for nurses doesn't change abruptly and before importing people became a fad it was largely followed by supply.
The Market works. Pay fair wages and your personnel problems go away.
Or stay more pedestrian. Grocery baggers in the US basically went away for a while. I assuume they came back based in part on what grocery stores had to pay for them to work.
Suppose I want a new BMW and I want to pay no more than $300 for it. This doesn't mean that we should force BMW workers to work for free -- it means that my expectations are not rational.
Similiar, if I want a 10km Uber ride for $1, which costs less than even gas, the desire is irrational. Why should workers have to work for free to satisfy this consumer's irrational desire?
Same thing for grocery baggers "disappearing" -- of course they disappeared, there was a pandemic. They werent being paid for the risks of bagging groceries.
I'm talking about in the 80s or so when a lot of things started switching to more self-service. My local supermarkets have baggers today and you're literally not allowed to bag yourself.
I don't see there being anything irrational about not wanting to pay the price for certain services. And I don't expect either individuals or companies to sell me things on terms that aren't attractive to them. But that doesn't mean I don't want those things even if I accept that I can't have them on terms acceptable to both myself and the person providing them.
And when you reach 80k (or whatever the number was), you'll also be able to get H1B nurses.
There are some states that have a compact and getting a multi-state license for those compact states will let you switch practice in multiple states - https://www.ncsbn.org/nurse-licensure-compact.htm
However, Illinois isn't part of that compact so its a new exam for anyone licensed elsewhere.
Aside from all of this... (as related to H1Bs) - nursing isn't a specialized occupation and doesn't qualify for the H1B. A specialist nurse, however, may. https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h-1b-nurses/ ... and that is a different license (in addition to) the RN.
It's not a binary "oh no not enough people" type of deal. It's a sliding scale and the closer you get to each side, the higher the incentives are to revert to some sort of equilibrium.
It really is quite one-sided (and potentially suspicious) to just try figure out "how can we get more of these people from other countries" instead of looking at all the other locally-available solutions. The same "circle" you speak of will happen regardless, even with plenty of immigration, with the double-whammy being that it'll affect the poorer countries that can't afford to keep those skilled immigrants.
A hybrid monster that takes the worst of both a private market (heavily benefiting the richest incumbents) and government regulations (broad and non targeted rules).
I'm just proposing we auction to increasingly higher salaries so all those people get nice high wages. The H1b system is to get the best and brightest for talent we cannot find locally, so paying these immigrants handsomely seems like the right thing to do. Its also good business, because high end R&D facilities should not be crossing their fingers for luck in hiring, they should be able to purchase talent by bidding for it.
I'm not sure how this benefits the richest incumbents -- the pool of workers continues to be the same. It benefits companies who desperately need the most talented workers by making them pay fairly for that top talent.
Frankly, if some company thinks they need the best-of-the-best and cant pay fairly for it, do they really need the best of the best?
You can do that though: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?year=2019
Then the employer would go back to the H1B well, underpay another worker for 6 months until the worker bailed, go back to the well, lather, rinse, repeat.
That is 6 months, plus a couple thousand dollars minimum, to try to get an H1B status for someone you want to hire.
If an employer is knowingly expecting the person they hire to bail after 6 months, they won't go through the process.
Worst case scenario for the business: they lose a couple thousand dollars and a few months of employee development time, then still have the option to immediately hire the qualified American worker (or try the H1B route again).
Best case scenario for the business: they get an overqualified employee at an extreme discount, since that employee is willing to accept less just to be in America. Since that employee knows it's hard to get H1B status, they're probably willing to work for a discount for many years. (therefore the business makes its money back from other failed H1B attempts, and they retain the employee at a discount)
If they were super-stars they would be able to cover it from the Amazon signup bonus (and become indentured to Amazon - your signup bonus is due back if you bail out early). However superstars rarely end up in those jobs. We're looking at people with kinda average engineering skills, poor understanding of the American culture, no connections, and grim determination to grind their way out of their old life.
Liberating the indentured h1b workers is not just flipping a legal switch, it's a cultural integration project.
I don't think these are the kind of people getting an H1B visa, though. It's usually the super-talented people they hire on H1B.
https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/WITCH
The 1619 project made waves domestically for questioning and highlighting the speciousness of such arguments. It is because these companies are able to pay labor below market rate (by restricting mobility and creating indentured servitude conditions) that they are able to add "tremendous value" to enterprises in the first place. But of course, I question even that.
To those who have ever been in the unfortunate position of the counterparty in either inheriting a codebase or making the argument against them internally, the code produced by these kinds of body shops is frequently ROI negative -- they're the "high interest credit card" of engineering orgs. That is baked into the profit structure internally of these consulting companies. Your loss is their gain. They will promise whatever they need to secure the contract upfront, and fail to deliver results. They are incentivized to do so, because they are incentivized to think short term rather than long term as owners.
You pay less upfront, but the hidden risks and maintenance burdens continue to stack over time. And so from a discounted cash flow analysis, there is a strong argument to be made that they contribute negative enterprise value and serve only to extract cashflow through a sleight of hand. Of course, on a quarter to quarter basis, they provide an easy way for an enterprising management consultant (or corporate financier) to cut costs and increase apparent profit to expenses. But if it was so easy to achieve technical outcomes this way, why wouldn't everyone do it?
> they are operating in an environment where FAANGs spend a lot of money lobbying for favorable regulations
There are certainly myriad issues with how FAANGs operate. One only needs to look at their previous settlements with the DoJ for wage collusion to see they are no angels; far from it, they often behave in an anticompetitive manner reminiscent of Gilded Age robber barons. With that said, they are still able to create some kind of a long term incentive alignment by generally setting the market price for top talent quite high -- we need look no further than levels.fyi to see evidence of that. And the proof is in the pudding -- FAANGs have continued to capture a larger and larger percentage of the SP500, managing to create growth in market cap at scales that are scarcely possible in other sectors. Their P/E ratios reflect this, and it derives from their ability to turn technology into leverage over the market and a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects. That is a far cry from consulting body shops where technology is viewed as a cost center to be minimized rather than profit center to be fully exploited.
The whole "their code is horrible" is shifting of a goalpost. If that's true (and it might well be), then stop hiring them. If businesses see the point you are making, they'll stop hiring them.
On FAANGs adding value - I 100% agree. FAANGs add way more value than any Indian consulting company and that's reflected in the market cap of these companies. But surely,one can appreciate that FAANGs add value and that they lobby to have laws created in their favor. My limited point is that I don't think these American companies (which benefit from the new H1B rule) have any higher moral ground to claim with respect to their stance on immigration laws.
Also, A higher wage is an odd way to restrict hiring. A FAANG company can pay much higher wages for low-end coding job than Indian consulting companies ever can. So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
TCS has made an announcement that they will not have any layoffs during COVID https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/tcs-not-to-lay-off-e...
So, even when thousands of employees of these companies could not travel to the US, their profits soared. Anecdotally, it appears (need more data) that if these companies cannot send someone on an H1B, the job does not always go to an American national, it probably goes back offshore to Bangalore (good for us, we get those tax Rupees).
Yes. Now I will pre-emptively call out that there is a wide step function gap between slavery and indentured servitude, and indentured servitude and H1B workers. H1B workers can always leave and return back to their country of origin. In this sense they are neither slaves nor bonded serfs. You are well within your rights to question the comparison.
But the question is if we have a binary classification, should it be between slave and non-slave, or should be between free and not free? The historical context of this country post abolitionism implies through the civil rights movement that it should be the latter. And that is why I made the comparison, clumsily hyperbolic or not. When some residents are not free, there is a chilling effect for citizens nationwide. Wages are depressed for all workers. The space is made for a culture of "I'd rather hire an H1B than not because they'll be more loyal because they have no choice." This culture corrodes national freedom.
> So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)
The difference is the incentive structure. The consulting company is based on essentially ripping off the customer by selling a high interest loan to them. It runs on services with razor thin margins which are predominantly returned to the owners rather than reinvested in the firm. Fundamentally, the firm owns no proprietary IP, and is not structured to accrete nor reward the long-term strategic thinking that FAANGs do.
The FAANG may pay that same kid 120k a year but that share grant could easily result in 300k a year with appreciation over the long-term. Because they are giving the employee long term incentivization, they are going to want to see long term results or else that employee will get PIPped. Beyond that, if that employee can hack it at 1 FAANG and is underpaid, they'll just go to another one which pays them market. But the gulf between WITCH body shops and FAANG is wide because the employee gains the skills which give them mobility at the latter and not the former.
All of which is a long way to say that body shops dilute the labor pool by exploiting an externality and creating a market for lemons by flooding it with low quality product. I think they create a situation where no one wins but the proprietors of the body shop, at the expense of the rest of society.
Not really. It's just the history of the equal rights amendment.
> Let's for a second assume that's all accurate, are you in favour of government solving this problem by an executive decision? Note that the same State refuses to regulate FAANGs which have stood by as their platforms were exploited to influence elections. The double standards are staggering
I am neither in favor of it nor against it. I think it is a PR tactic that will not hold up to the scrutiny of the court. True, lasting change will obviously have to originate from the legislature -- I'd love to see something comprehensive come from there. But these PR "tactics", while not truly standalone policies, nonetheless spark, influence and shape public discourse. In this case, I think that vigorous discourse (and sunlight on the corruption of H1B abuse) is a good thing for everyone.
https://www.immihelp.com/employer/h1b-top-sponsor-2020/overa...
Some blogs for the curious:
https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-got-a-visa-normally-reserved-f...
https://swizec.com/blog/how-i-sponsored-my-own-genius-visa/
Not anything original, not anything H1B worthy, just building front-end UIs and basic BE stuff. There's of course H1Bs working on the more complex things too like machine learning (complex to me) but I'm just astounded by the number of "brilliant" H1Bs that I have to stand shoulder to shoulder with when doing my average (at best?) coding.
As some one who has had the same experience. One of the things I note is many of these people undervalue themselves and their training doing that kind of work for ad companies. They could be writing code for the robotic arm that could mine asteroids, but they write code to show ads to people.
Well people have their own priorities. But the lesson I learn is just because they work with us it doesn't mean the definition of smart gets blurred. It just means they downgraded their aim and are likely hitting it more easily compared to us.
The question one must ask is. How can we learn from these smart people?
We've had other forms of indentured servitude that were summarily abolished, sometimes with difficulty. Certainly the government should not be incentivizing this, which seems to have been the case for a while.
Granted, if family in the mother country are effectively held hostage to the debt payments, that's a different story, but there can be enough protection for US law to protect h1b workers against exploitation by law-abiding employers and creditors.
Are you saying that Amazon's H1B workers are hired specifically for to their "kinda average" skills, lack of connections, etc.? Having been involved with hiring at Amazon, using these criteria would have to be part of a secret hiring system that parallels the one I was trained on which focused on raising the talent bar and avoiding bias.
Superstars can pay back money owed back home from an Amazon bonus... not sure if OP meant “from the start” or “if they bailed from indentured servitude job”.
Temporary working visas like H1B(US) or 457(Australia) or L(Swiss) are all terrible in their own little ways, sigh.
The main issue is if you make a wrong career move your situation could quickly turn into an absolute nightmare, e.g. consistent abuse at work which you cannot escape.
If someone can get hired and hold a job paying, say, $25 an hour and keep it for a year, let them stay as long as they want.
It would probably put some pressure on wages, but it would also increase economic activity (create demand).
In any case, it aids in my job security.
Fix the real problem, and salaries will take care of themselves.
Another problem with simply raising the salary bar is that there are actually professions (especially in healthcare) that genuinely have a talent/supply gap. A small hospital in the midwest, however, isn't going to be able to compete with a hotshot SF startup with unlimited venture funding to throw at foreign hires.
When you say "extraordinary skill" you are probably thinking about the O-1 visa (which is similar to the Australian subclass 124).
Most companies I see using H1-Bs are startups looking for people to get technical work done as cheaply as possible. These are the same people who give employees 0.1% of a series A company and whine about how there's a "skill shortage".
When in truth, there is no "shortage" -- it's just that software engineering is one of the only (somewhat) high-end careers subject to absolutely no credentialing whatsoever, meaning, if you can get someone here (to the US) and they can do the work, great, they're hired.
Contrast this to the absurd coddling present in other professions. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, etc. have massive barriers keeping people out, competition down, and in the end, prices of their services up.
It blows my mind what middling lawyers can charge: $300/hr or more for mediocre law work for my California HOA. These people have zero side projects, don't study a minute out of work, and work strict 8-hour days, with the expectation of earning $250k/yr or more mid-career. This is what the cream of the crop in our field earns (Google SWEs making 350k or so). The cream of the crop for layers make millions/year at places like Cravath or Orrick billing $1000/hr or more. Even my wife, an architect, is now billing out at $250/hr.
It blows my mind how underpaid software developers are, given how difficult the work, and the working conditions are, compared to other similarly demanding fields in terms of professional education, and raw intellectual horsepower required to do the job. A typical H1-B can be productive a few months after a good software education anywhere in the world, assuming they speak passable English. My best friend's sister-in-law, an Indian dentist, had to retake the last year of dental school before she could touch a single tooth in the US.
The biggest winners from the H1-B regime are high-skilled professionals in the US. Low-end labor doesn't care about any of this. They work for cash, and still pay sales and property tax (through rent) just like the rest of us, and all for absolutely zero government benefits.
Do you think companies are going to go to war bidding up salaries for a tiny number of qualified American candidates who can do this work, or are they going to outsource to overseas firms that can do the work?
So then the question is, do you want this work being done here, in America, paying taxes here, or do you want some consulting company in Asia or Eastern Europe to get the money?
You're thinking of the O-1. The H-1B is a specialty occupation visa, not an "extraordinary skill" visa.
Other than that, the biggest issue might be to IT consulting companies (mostly based in India) that tend to have their employees work at a lower rate than tech companies.
EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)
The actual wage: This is the wage paid to other employees in the company who do the same work.
The prevailing wage: This is the wage for that occupation in the geographical area.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application##1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Labor_Condition_Appl...
No, this is only part of employment-based greencard (LC) process. For H-1Bs, as part of the LCA process, the employer needs to advertise that a candidate is going to be hired.
Temporary work visa: H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3
"The employer needs to demonstrate that the worker is being paid at least the prevailing wage for that region and occupation, and comparable to native workers in the firm, and that employing the worker will not adversely affect current workers. The employer does not need to demonstrate that there is no qualified native U.S. worker for the job."
Compare that to:
Employment-based visa (such as EB-2 visa, or EB-3 visa) that provides a path to permanent residency (a Green Card)
"The employer needs to demonstrate that there is no qualified U.S. worker willing to do the job at a comparable wage, and needs to have made a good-faith effort to recruit a native U.S. worker."
You only need to demonstrate an effort to recruit someone when applying for a green card.
This is a solid move.
H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
I just hope the new administration don't role back these changes. Typically when a new administration comes in they have a "throwing the baby with the bath water" mentality. I hope they realize the things that the previous administration did which makes sense and keeps them
in any case, having H-1B be a lottery was always weird. i just hope this doesn't impact any existing H-1B holders :(
As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I don't see this exactly.
I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders. Many of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Presumably paying a huge amount in taxes for the privilege.
Most software developers I know are not making what I would deem suppressed wages, especially in the current conditions (and I don't have an SV job). Most firms I know would hire more people, but instead are contracting with firms and individuals outside of the US.
I suspect that's going to ramp up more.
I don’t disagree one bit. I think immigrants contributed and continue to contribute tremendously to the US economy. But at the same time policies should not be used to suppress wages by the “C” suite class. By paying low salaries it increases profits for the companies and contributes to income inequality
To the best of my knowledge all of them played the game diligently and got their green cards, and many of them got their citizenship. Good for them, and in many cases good for us.
But I absolutely did not see any greater level of talent among the H1B's than any other cohort in SF/SV.
While I'm very happy to work with people from all over the world, I do think that H1B has been used to get a lot of people in who aren't any better than your local City College grads. In addition to that being radically against the national interest, it's also really unfair to the "brilliant visa holders" you have had the good fortune to work with.
In addition, it seems that even currently, H-1B program has rules to make sure the wages paid are fair [2] - if they are not, it sounds like a problem with enforcement, or with how prevailing wages are calculated. To me, based on [3], it does not look like calculating the prevailing wage is the problem.
[1] "In the past three months, U.S. employers had about 918,000 unfilled IT jobs, according to IT trade group CompTIA." - https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-got-talent-just-not-en... [2] "Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater." - https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b [3] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...
But, we don't have to argue about what we think is happening - there's data available at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. It should be possible to see how wage growth in tech compares w/ other sectors. My hypothesis is that without shortage, wage growth would not outpace other industries.
Be grateful! Not all of us are so lucky!
"Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict."
Isn't this significant?
Who knows whether it will be a positive push in the right direction, but it's certainly changing the dynamics of the region.
If your goal is to screw the Palestinains, this is a good thing. Otherwise, they should have a voice.
> And as for Iran, it's pulling countries away from their sphere of influence.
This is a nonsensical statement: those Sunni countries are already deeply opposed to Shiite Iran even more than they are to Israel.
... and those of us (perhaps sufficiently few) who work on H1B legally, for the visa's purpose (insufficient American expertise).
And no, the consultant chop shops haven't been an issue for at least four years now since USCIS started cracking down on them.
It probably means you either go into a wait queue to get your operation done, or you fly to a different country where those doctors are present. Either way the operation will be more expensive, and your country will have less know-how at the end. You also have to now deal with the consequences of having awesome things getting done outside your country, which means the next generation of neurosurgeons won't be coming out of your country. At least not all of them.
Now Google or any other company isn't going lower the bar for hiring, they'll just happily open offices outside US to get the cream of the those countries. The fact that it could hurt your feelings is just irrelevant here.
Its very much like getting hired to Navy SEALs or some into some other elite unit. They have their criteria, they really don't mind rejecting you if you don't measure up.
But just because "the spouse" doesn't need to work, doesn't mean they don't want to work.
"The spouse" shouldn't be denied the right to work just because their partner has an H1-B.
For shame.
Given vs denied is a weird dichotomy. If you read the US constitution, you will see how it's about re-affirming rights rather than giving them.
Anyway. Needing to apply to work still admits that the default case is not being able to work.
Wow, that's a bit regressive view that high earning people must marry unaspirational spouses.
If a company lowered your wages by wrongfully registering you for a lower paid position, they could still do so, because the crux is comparing the salary to a different demographic. The problem wasn't with the law, but with them screwing you and you not carefully reviewing the visa laws of the country you immigrated to.
It actually sounds like the new visa regulations will make immigration for entry level positions much harder. So your alternative would've likely been not getting a job in the US to begin with.
My point was not that it's not understandable that you were not aware of that, but that this change in law has nothing todo with being unaware of the law.
Your underpayment happened in violation of the previous law and with the new regulation you might not have gotten the job to begin with.
I agree 1000% with you on this -> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.
*
It's bonded labor of people desperate to get into the western world and/or get into Silicon Valley/US tech scene
It only benefits large tech companies
A) US citizens have lower salaries (lucky ones) or don't get jobs (unlucky ones)
B) H1B workers are paid less and are bonded labor
C) US itself loses out because many of those people would have started companies
Do you want people starting PinDuoDuo, FlipKart, Meituan Dianping, Shopify type companies in US or in other countries?
Then why instead of letting these 'brightest people from around the world' become entrpreneurs in US
are you asking them to spend 22 to 35 being bonded labor for data surveillance companies like FB and GOOG???
(A) The fact that silicon valley gets access to global talent which make sthe companies much more successful and massively increases the number of jobs available providing far more jobs for US citizens than if the visa program didn't exist
(B) The H1B visa holders are earning far more than they would get by remaining in their home country, and whilst they're bonded labour in the US they can always return to their home country leaving them at a minimum with a choice between a better job in the US or the same situation they had in their home country anyway.
(C) The US gains a bunch of highly intelligent, highly taxable employees who will likely eventually become citizens and can then create startups as well as providing a larger labour pool for the people who are starting companies.
All of your critiques are comparing H1B visas against some imaginary system where people can come to work in the US with no restriction, and let's remind ourselves these changes are from a thoroughly anti-immigration administratrion. The alternative to the H1B system is no H1B system, which is why it's been so difficult to reform. There is no law getting out of congress that reduces the restrictions on immigration.
If the alternative is no H1B that would be very bad for the US.
But I think there’s a middle ground where you can say let’s the keep H1B program but tweak it in a way that benefits the H1B visa holder and American citizens so corporations don’t take advantage of the talent shortage in tech
But xenophobia will not let that happen.
All companies started off by students who came for an MS/PhD & happened to be successful were borderline of the grey-area w.r.t. laws.
Finally, Trump’s legal immigration policy is very anti-immigration [3]. This is a stunt to get an uptick in votes. The reality is that this policy sounds nice on paper but will make it even harder for people to immigrate to the US.
0. https://news.gallup.com/poll/276932/several-issues-tie-impor...
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-is...
2. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/where-president-trump-...
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/26/fact-...
There's loads of interesting news coming from the administration each day, but when only the items that least offend people's sensibilities make it through the flagging brigade, it acts as a politically biased filter.
yes if the American can't find their competitive edge.
I see your point broadly, but I think it's possible for that to be true and to also take university-grad H1-B employees.
That's false. Maybe this was true in the past.
First, they cannot self-sponsor. Which means that the hypothetical company would have to apply as soon as they step foot on US soil. There are no incentives to do so and incentives against it. So they generally won't.
Expect the process to start a couple of years before the H1B visa is set to expire.
Even if started immediately, just for processing time alone you are looking at around 2 years. 2 to 6 months for the PERM process. I-140, similar. The AOS stage can take 10 (or more!) months to process. The last two can be filed concurrently. It's still one year on the absolute best case with no RFEs or audits whatsoever, counting from the moment the application was filed, assuming all documentation is instantly available (like employment verification letters from past workers, translations etc) and assuming lawyer time is zero (which obviously is not the case).
Of course, if you are Indian or Chinese, add years or decades to the above.
My understanding (I have always been a citizen of the US) is that the processing time to get a green card if you are Indian is so long it might as well not be an option.
It’ll never clear without reform.
In your scenario, American workers will eventually just accept lower pay (we're overpaid already anyways). Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in Canada, if they can hire at same price the same level engineer in the same city?
Who’s we? Rent is astronomical
But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
Sure that seems unlikely, but when millions of people are willing to become undocumented immigrants, it’s likely a more open policy would see dramatically larger influxes. Especially in response to local events like civil wars. Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was writing the above, but didn't want to get too into the weeds on what I wanted to be a short answer to the original question (I have a habit of going on...).
Like many things, an immediate large change has repercussions that are detrimental and can possibly be alleviated with a measured change over time.
That's how you acclimate fish to the temperature in a new aquarium. That said, it's also how they tell you to boil a frog...
There are studies showing a slight decrease in wages, studies showing a slight increase in wages, and studies showing nothing conclusive. There's basically not enough scientific consensus to use for decision making, which means it's more a moral choice than an economic one.
This is from May 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/19/quarantine-...
Basically, the UK fruit industry was worried that it might not get "enough workers" because of COVID restrictions.
Which of course is brazen corporate double-speak. There are workers in the UK, like tens of millions of them. It's just that they're not willing to work for miserly wages. So there's only two options: (1) increase local wages, or (2) import cheap foreigners. Business obviously prefer the latter. ("But but but strawberry prices would increase" isn't a good argument - agriculture is heavily subsidized anyways.)
Somehow businesses forget how supply and demand works when it comes to labor, and "journalists" aren't, so much as they just transcribe whatever falls out of rich peoples' mouths and call it 'balance'.
We'll be back to feudalism in a couple generations.
I think there is a middle ground between the disaster that are immigration laws today, and full open borders.
That doesn't make your point any less valid though.
The real bottleneck in most American metros is more people than not loath density and want a garage and a yard. Without changing that, or finding a way to make it work, it's hard for the States to absorb people.
I really do think that Americans need to figure their crap out though - either you live in the middle of a city or you get your yard. I hate cars so I'm pretty happy in the city but that isn't the opinion of everyone.
If our economy grew by 500M new jobs, that would be unequivocally good. Those 500M people would be paying taxes, buying goods and services, paying for housing, etc.
I still think that it would drag salaries down significantly. I know employment and salaries are not a zero sum game, but the offer/supply ratio is a parameter.
Or do you get a gig, show up, quit, and then live on the dole?
So you'd either have to live off of your savings or get another job or go back to your home country.
Or crime.
In the US, over 3 million Puerto Ricans are now allowed to migrate to the mainland US (say to DC). The borders are completely open to them. In Europe, similarly, around 20M Romanians are allowed to Sweden. But they don’t.
Just because people are allowed to migrate, it doesn’t mean they will. And in the case of an overwhelming majority, they won’t.
According to Wikipedia, as of 2018 there were 5.8 million Puerto Ricans living stateside. The population of Puerto Rico is around 2.8 million. There are more than twice as many Puerto Ricans living on the mainland as there are in Puerto Rico.
The myths about the negative consequences of open border policy have no basis in reality.
Most people don’t migrate away from their home country/state. But even if they did, it would be of no negative consequence for the place they migrate to.
Supposedly allowed and not at all welcome. Like most affluent countries, Sweden doesn't actually want poor people immigrating into their country. So they make things very difficult for those people. It's also why they shut down the big immigration flood, their society was highly intolerant to it.
Americans - commonly ignorant to the details of rest of the world - would be shocked to learn how regressive Scandinavia can be. From very strict immigration to virtually bulldozing minority neighborhoods in Denmark [1][2], to attacks on immigrants in Sweden and burning immigrant camps, to large political parties derived from former neo-nazi groups.
From Reuters in 2015 (the Romanians got the message):
"A series of attacks in Sweden on beggars, many Roma, has highlighted a dark side to a country considered a bastion of tolerance but where the far right has been gaining support by claiming society is under threat from waves of immigrants."
"An influx of thousands of mainly Roma migrants has shocked affluent Swedes, with beggars now a common sight outside supermarkets, IKEA stores and subways in the capital."
"There were around 300 reported attacks on Roma in 2014, up 23 percent on the year before, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. Police say the figures underestimate the scale of the problem."
"The government reckons around 5,000 migrants, some of whom also come from Hungary, are in Sweden begging. Many live on the street or in squalid camps. In recent months, attackers have thrown acid at beggars and burned tents and caravans."
"Many migrants in Sweden say they want to work, but lack of education and language skills make it impossible for most, leaving begging as the only alternative."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-sweden/sw...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immi...
"When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six."
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/15/900874510/facing-eviction-res...
"Facing Eviction, Residents Of Denmark's 'Ghettos' Are Suing The Government"
Sweden and Denmark are easy to point out as they have very racist and discriminatory policies on a national and local level. But Iceland and Norway also have terrible refugee policies and rampant xenophobia (especially in more rural setting).
It should be clarified that this is because they are US citizens. Everyone in North Dakota can move to DC too.
The US should want to keep the talent it selects and trains. These are people who build the economy, generate IP, and create jobs in the long run. Not only that, but these people who have spent 4+ years in the US university education system are extremely well-adapted to life in the US and will thrive at making the US a better place.
(Yes there's OPT, but it's not long enough and doesn't provide a path to permanent residency.)
No. No. No. That would mean that anyone from the University of Oxford would be out until he got himself a masters degree from the Christian College of Lost Hope, AR. There are far too many paid masters degrees around already that serve exactly that purpose and that are good for no one except the useless college.
Yeah no, screw that crap. I don't know the exact regulation framework that would accomplish my intent but you understand what I mean.
I'm talking about all the people with bonafide degrees and skillsets. 4-year bachelor degrees, PhDs, MDs, and the like. These people should be treated as assets to the country. (Maybe just excluding masters' degrees is the answer, but I'm not sure.) It's dumbfoundingly stupid as a national policy to invest so much in resources to train a person and then send them back to another country instead of giving them every incentive to stay.
Singapore and Australia (and maybe others I don't know about) allow international students to apply for permanent residency if they meet certain very reasonable qualifications and it works out very much in their favor for retaining talent.
Undergraduate degree holders would only be rewarded for completing degrees in in the US in emerging and vital fields (mostly STEM). Awarding permanent residency to someone completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US is simply inviting abuse. Master's holders would get permanent residency in an expanding set of fields and ideally PhDs in every field. There may be some cases of abuse, but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country because they didn't win a lottery.
You'd be surprised there. The degree that gives best odds in law school is actually philosophy. If you want to keep the tradition of Latin alive you need kids who have taken decent Latin in school. Chemistry and the life sciences, on the other hand, there is a terrifying oversupply of graduates. I agree with the need for quality control.
/s
GP:> completing an Bachelors in communication at the worst college in the US
I think the key here should be "worst college in the US" and not the Bachelors in communication. If you got a communication degree from Mizzou or Columbia that's a totally different bar than a communication degree from a community college. The institutions and programs should be accredited, and demonstrate some standard of selectivity.
You want talented people in every field to stay in your country and create value and jobs, and selectivity for university admission is often a good proxy for that. The bar doesn't need to be insanely higher either; anyone who creates value and by doing so either directly or indirectly creates more jobs is worthwhile to keep.
Unfortunately, this is ripe for abuse. You're basically allowing educational institutions to sell green cards. If you thought almost-unlimited-student-loans inflated education prices, you don't even want to see what selling green cards would do.
> but there should never be the case where a smart person educated in the US, especially in a growing or important field is forced out of the country
I agree with the premise, but this is kind of like "It is better than 1000 guilty men go free, than 1 innocent man be wrongly convicted". It sounds great in premise, but in practice can't reasonably happen. Again, I agree with your premise, but I think it needs to be approached in a different way.
That's pretty much how it's done in Australia. It props up a massive industry (education was the fourth largest export in 2018-2019) whilst ensuring a supply of qualified applicants for residency.
Prices for locals are still set by the government. So, whilst there is inflation, disadvantage to locals is limited to there being fewer places available to them. Whether it's morally okay is another question but the economics seem to work out pretty well.
As an immigrant to (and citizen of) Australia myself, I find it pretty appalling how hard it has become to become a permanent resident in Australia even if you are reasonably skilled (and the fact that permanent residency requires nomination by an employer -- which is unlike most other countries, where permanent residency is based on your own residence and skills). The work-based streams are becoming more and more narrow and it's longer the case that studying in Australia gives you any guaranteed pathway to residency (and I would argue it hasn't been the case for a fairly long time now).
[+]: A quick look at the EOI statistics <https://api.dynamic.reports.employment.gov.au/anonap/extensi...> shows that 7.2% ((LODGED+INVITED)/SUBMITTED ~= 7.2%) of people who register their interest end up being invited.
I'd even argue in favor of government financial aid for international students that meet certain bars of merit or talent. Give them a free ride if they are that talented. Then let them build the next company and hire a bunch of Americans. Hand them a US passport as well if they get there.
Also, PhDs are another story -- they are not revenue sources for the university, but they are a means to quality research, and very much an investment.
I don't know about Singapore but this definitely isn't true for Australia these days -- visa programs in Australia are far more strict than they used to be (in fact, my parents and I probably couldn't have migrated here under the current visa system -- we came to Australia in 1999).
The Temporary Graduate visa (485) is -- as the name suggests -- temporary, and only lasts between 2-4 years if you graduated from an Australian university. If you want to go for permanent residency you (generally speaking) need to be endorsed by your employer through the Employer Nomination Scheme visa (186) which requires 3 years work experience in your field -- the practical upshot is that you would need to have been granted a visa that lasts longer than 3 years (no guarantee of this), get a job in your field immediately after you graduate (seriously no guarantee of this since many employers in fields like engineering illegally discriminate against people who hold temporary working visas), and find an employer (within the last few months of your visa) who is willing to nominate you for permanent residency and has an existing labour agreement with the government.
It's not impossible to do, but it's hardly a simple procedure and it's definitely not true that graduates have a guaranteed roadmap to apply for permanent residency. There are some visa programs which in theory would allow you to apply for permanent residency earlier, but they are invitation-only and usually have pretty high requirements which most people wouldn't fulfil.
> I'm talking about all the people with bonafide degrees and skillsets. 4-year bachelor degrees, PhDs, MDs, and the like.
I know what you mean, but that's not good enough; you'd need to find a way to make it legislatively watertight, and I'm not sure that's possible.
But barring that pipe dream, yours seems like an acceptable interim step.
It's quite amazing that even 6 months after 100 year pandemic people still have wide eyed beliefs about open borders as if it's a net positive.
I struggle to see how your idea would be better for any Americans, except the owner-class.
A rising tide (growing economy) lifts all boats. Think of all the services that would need to expand -- markets, restaurants, hair salons, etc.
Furthermore, immigrants contribute more to the tax base than citizens because they pay the same income taxes without getting all the deductions, they pay sales taxes and other taxes, and do not get the same benefits.
It's well established that an immigrant with a job is a net contributor to both the economy and the tax base.
Do this thought experiment -- so many immigrants come to the US and contribute so much to the tax base that there is enough to pay every US citizen $75,000 a year in UBI and provide universal healthcare for citizens. Now you can do whatever you want, work or not, it doesn't matter.
That's why it's good for citizens.
As a result, public investment funded via taxes has moved to deficit spending and sporadic and selective philanthropy, exacerbating both the inequality of wealth and opportunity.
So a thought experiment for you. Can you find any historical precedence where these two-tier systems were implemented. And how did that work out?
Well heeled thinktanks can continue to try and bamboozle people but after watching every contracting crew in my area become 99% low paid latino immigrant I have no reason to want the same thing to happen to software development when it's one of the few remaining paths to a nice middle class life. I guess I'm supposed to retrain as an attorney or something right?
Funny, most Americans who aren't working for FAANG would absolutely disagree with you here. It's almost as cliche as the "wealth trickles down" or supply side economics.
Maybe that's just cause I'm old enough to have seen these bullshit statements evolve.
The "rising tides" lie started in the 80's and 90's and was constantly used by our leaders and the media to ensure the blue collar workers who were being devastated by offshoring and the beginning of a huge surge in immigration. Don't worry guys - even though all your factories are being dismantled and reassembled in S. China and Mexico, the gains will be spread around for everyone. And, something something retraining...
By the 2000's, enough blue collar workers, especially in the Rust Belt, had never seen any improvements, so the lie changed. It was now, "You need to get an education". I think if you're old enough here, you should remember that during GW Bush and into Obama's presidencies, that was combined with "Some of these jobs just aren't coming back..." which was appended because our leaders knew that wages weren't rising enough in the third world to ever bring the manufacturing back - not when the system now depended on a permanent devalued Chinese Yuan, Mexican Peso, etc.
So now we get to somewhere around Obama's times, during the Great Recession, when tens of millions were already unemployed and now almost NO college grads were getting offers. That was when the game was upped: "Did you idiots think we were talking about any degree? You need to get one of those STEM degrees. Haha, underwater basket weaving ain't gonna help you", cried the Boomers at the WSJ and Cato Institute. That was after college costs had been rising exponentially for a decade, so now those non-STEM majors were fked. Oh well.
But the truth is that most STEM majors aren't even having an easy time in most areas outside SV and during bubbles. Do you think the average EE or Chemistry major is getting a dozen offers in the labs when they're also filled up with hundreds of thousands of foreign students on Opt visas and who don't have to pay payroll taxes (neither their employer)? CS isn't any better: Go on to https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/ and you'll find post after post with decent CS grads giving up after applying for 12 months without getting a single call back. We have recruiters here that tell us they get 1000 applications for every job, so this isn't surprising.
The whole H1B system should be shut down, all those who are not being paid minimum $250K given 1 month to leave for each year they've been here. Those who are get a Green Card. That $250K is tied to housing costs in each city, too. They go up, so does the minimum.
Shut off the L1 and Student OPT programs completely, too, and give our burdened students a chance at a decent job. Better than them joining Antifa and burning down shit.
Let's dare these billionaire executives to either start spreading the wealth around to the whole country which gave them their opportunity, or they move themselves, their families, and their companies to the third world where they seem to find most of their workforce nowadays.
Then Silicon Valley might be actually forced to hire "diverse" black, hispanic, etc. Americans instead of giving it lip service while employing 70% non-diverse Brahmins from India.
Would be fun to build super cities at a rapid pace over the next decade though :)
Synchronous communication with your teammates in time slots reasonable to each of you is a huge difference.