"let's just have hundreds of thousands of people move into the US every year, surely they are only here temporarily to work and won't effect US citizens housing or jobs prospects". The H-1B program is a disgrace, should be considered treason.
Conversely, the question should be "Who is preventing American agriculture from mechanizing?"
Or, if you are such a pessimist in America's can-do attitude, instead take it from the point of view of market efficiency. If a good cannot be produced cheaply enough for the market to sustain it, the solution is not to modify the social contract and undermine the value of labor for the sake of the good.
We have always solved problems by innovation. The surest way to prevent innovation is to continually provide cheaper and cheaper labor. The Roman empire is an excellent example of this.
Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex. However, this is such a tired old canard. Wages make labor, scarcity makes innovation.
The part of American agriculture which employs illegal immigrants is clearly not mechanized; they are not driving combines and are tending vegetables by hand.
Types of food really are discretionary. Beans are an excellent vegetable and can be raised completely without manual labor. Trading salad greens for them would not be an overall nutritional loss. Perhaps the true market price for a head of lettuce should be 1.6x in a properly labor regime.
To draw the distinction more clearly, suppose we had zero illegal immigrants working in the field and someone said “let’s reduce the price of some vegetables by a third and create a permanent underclass”. Does that sound reasonable?
There's fundamentally two schools of thought - those who are Pro and Anti immigration. People's opinions of programs like H1B tend to align more closely to their school of thought than they do any economic or social impact.
several companies I work(ed) with ended the H1-B sponsorships. now they just outsource the work abroad, much better :)
H1-B is smokescreen put in front us to “argue” about and pale in comparison to outsourcing which no one talks about (cause companies pay politicians a lot of money to make sure no one talks about it, like ever…)
Within the United States, the upper division sales the need for H1B’s to the public within the country and then at the same time do all it can to still sub out everything to cheaper labor countries.
The big three countries in competition with the United States, China, Korea, Japan. Do sub out some things, but they do not sub out the core of their industries or allow their companies, to do just about anything they want when it comes comes to pursuing cheaper labor overseas to the detriment of their citizens it is only a largely western phenomenon, two of those countries even have strong unions similar to Germany. Who are actually taken seriously.
may sound that way but they are not, there are many companies that off-shore just about all of their development and QA. so your comment is roughly equivalent to “we’ll all be out of a job soon” (which may very well be the case :) )
As a hiring manager, I would love to hire only citizens, but only the underqualified apply. I guess the qualified citizens all just go the Frontier labs. We don't have the time to train folks, we need them to hit the ground running. Real conundrum tbh
I wish the stated goal of H-1B was "brain drain -> let's attract all the best talent in the world to the US, and keep the US (and US companies) the epicenter of the tech industry".
The stated end-game should be getting the best people in the world to stay in the US and become citizens.
I feel like this could be a bulwark against offshoring, and in the big picture, protect US jobs overall.
I think the system as-is is fundamentally broken. First and foremost, it needs to include equity when comparing the salary to US persons - H-1Bs are supposed to require "equal pay" to US persons, but they only look at base salary.
I also think consultant firms need to be fixed. They need some cap such as "no more than 1 in 10 engineers in your teams may be H-1B. This should include consultants you use - e.x. if a company employs 20 engineers, and they have 10 active consultants, no more than 3 H1-bs across both in-company employees and consultants used.
The consulting farms are the biggest abusers by far, and the low hanging fruit to target and fix. If we can't figure some workable way to fix it, just ban consulting companies from having H-1Bs outright.
The system is also needlessly cruel to applicants. They should have some long buffer, say on the order of a tourist visa (6 months?) if they lose their job so they have time to try and find a new one before losing status. Can you imagine putting your kids in school and buying a house in an at-will state, on an H-1B? Yeesh.
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[ 0.43 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] threadTrump is using the system at levels like no one has seen before, perhaps he could set an example
"Trump Organization requested record number of foreign workers in 2025"
https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-fore...
Or, if you are such a pessimist in America's can-do attitude, instead take it from the point of view of market efficiency. If a good cannot be produced cheaply enough for the market to sustain it, the solution is not to modify the social contract and undermine the value of labor for the sake of the good.
We have always solved problems by innovation. The surest way to prevent innovation is to continually provide cheaper and cheaper labor. The Roman empire is an excellent example of this.
Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex. However, this is such a tired old canard. Wages make labor, scarcity makes innovation.
agreed, two points toward this are
1. American agriculture is largely mechanic already, who has removes the labor completely
2. food is non-discretionary, caveats about choices of what king of "food" eg. fast vs healthy
Types of food really are discretionary. Beans are an excellent vegetable and can be raised completely without manual labor. Trading salad greens for them would not be an overall nutritional loss. Perhaps the true market price for a head of lettuce should be 1.6x in a properly labor regime.
To draw the distinction more clearly, suppose we had zero illegal immigrants working in the field and someone said “let’s reduce the price of some vegetables by a third and create a permanent underclass”. Does that sound reasonable?
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Partly it is importing H-1B workers to displace US citizens?
H1-B is smokescreen put in front us to “argue” about and pale in comparison to outsourcing which no one talks about (cause companies pay politicians a lot of money to make sure no one talks about it, like ever…)
The big three countries in competition with the United States, China, Korea, Japan. Do sub out some things, but they do not sub out the core of their industries or allow their companies, to do just about anything they want when it comes comes to pursuing cheaper labor overseas to the detriment of their citizens it is only a largely western phenomenon, two of those countries even have strong unions similar to Germany. Who are actually taken seriously.
HN posters when the topic is H1b visas or outsourcing: Meritocracy is horrible and I reject it!
The stated end-game should be getting the best people in the world to stay in the US and become citizens.
I feel like this could be a bulwark against offshoring, and in the big picture, protect US jobs overall.
I think the system as-is is fundamentally broken. First and foremost, it needs to include equity when comparing the salary to US persons - H-1Bs are supposed to require "equal pay" to US persons, but they only look at base salary.
I also think consultant firms need to be fixed. They need some cap such as "no more than 1 in 10 engineers in your teams may be H-1B. This should include consultants you use - e.x. if a company employs 20 engineers, and they have 10 active consultants, no more than 3 H1-bs across both in-company employees and consultants used.
The consulting farms are the biggest abusers by far, and the low hanging fruit to target and fix. If we can't figure some workable way to fix it, just ban consulting companies from having H-1Bs outright.
The system is also needlessly cruel to applicants. They should have some long buffer, say on the order of a tourist visa (6 months?) if they lose their job so they have time to try and find a new one before losing status. Can you imagine putting your kids in school and buying a house in an at-will state, on an H-1B? Yeesh.