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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

I hate the racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up.

Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work? What is so intrinsically great about Americans that I should pay more for an American to do my accounting than an Indian and why am I wrong if I don't do that?

Edit:

> The 36-year-old accountant said the young Indian assigned to shadow her appeared to have no extraordinary knowledge of accounting. His expertise was in observing and mapping what she did.

> At the close of business, the recording was transmitted to India, where workers practiced mimicking his tasks.

If this is possible you don't have a real job and the Indian will be shortly be replaced in turn by a piece of software.

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Ah, yes, the old "train everyone to be a doctor, lawyer, or CEO" mindset (actually, 2 of those 3 are at risk these days too!).

Here's the thing. Not everyone in this country can be a CEO. The WALL-E premise of everyone living the fat life (pun intended) while the robots do the work is not viable. The truth is that this country is made up of people with a broad spectrum of capabilities and talents. Furthermore, these people are not fungible resources that can easily relocate to whatever third world country that has now usurped their former job functions. We have already seen large parts of this country's population essentially permanently displaced with the mass outsourcing of manufacturing. These were good paying, stable blue-collar jobs that people who were not born to be CEOs could rely on, live a good life, and raise families. Now look at the former manufacturing cities. They did not all magically retrain to be knowledge workers. Instead, entire communities were laid to waste. Now extend what happened to manufacturing to skilled labor under your "every job to the cheapest bidder" philosophy. What happens? Maybe plastic crap at Toys-R-Us is 3 cents cheaper. But eventually a large enough percentage of this country is displaced to where society itself becomes unstable. When this destabilization eats away at enough of foundations of our society, even the wealthy will be affected.

Government's job is (supposed to be) to take the longview on what is good for a healthy American society, not to facilitate multi-national corporations in their quest to cut every cost they can.

What I don't understand in all the "jobs are moving oversea" discussion is that the opponent seems to be advocating for economic inefficiencies (creating/keeping jobs in the States at all costs, comparative advantage be damned) as a mean for keeping a healthy society. Shouldn't the correct and proper solution be some appropriate measurements like basic income or better social welfare in general?

Jobs are a mean to create wealth (and by extensions, welfare) for a society. I don't understand the reason for trying to reduce the wealth being created in some notion of keep "jobs", and if the inland American economy can not generate enough wealth for some reasons, then we have bigger problems to deal with.

Essentially, this is a wealth redistribution issue, and should be treated as such, focusing on creating "jobs" seems to be the wrong idea to go at it.

Well you certainly have a point. I would argue that a working society is a society with purpose and is ultimately healthier than a society without jobs but adequate social welfare. But more pragmatically, I don't think a truly livable basic income program is in this country's DNA.

Who's going to pay the cost of a basic income system? Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).

The globalization that allows the wealthy to eliminate their first-world workforce also allows them to avoid just about any tax they don't feel like paying.

Assuming that if the system work out when everyone/every company pays their required share of tax (otherwise, it's back to the wealth creation issue, and advocating for more economic inefficiencies won't help), and it's just a problem of tax avoidance, then the solution is to fix the taxation system.

I'm not saying that everything is fine and dandy, I'm saying that pointing finger to random chicken in the sky and shoot them won't solve the real issue. There are a lot of problems, but American politics right now is a bit engrossed in the wrong kind of trivialities.

> Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).

Where did you get that from? The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.

Edit: at a 50% marginal tax rate if the 1% get 60% richer through this kind of automation and offshoring, we could lower the tax rate on the bottom 80% to zero!

Edit #2: If the 1% get 120% richer, we could start handing out checks to everyone in the bottom 80% equal to what they're paying in taxes today! See where I'm going with this?

> The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.

You're confusing wealth with income.

I'm aware of the distinction but it doesn't make a difference to my argument.

If MegaRoboCo Inc. and their contemporaries are making $1 trillion a year each in 2050, the tax revenues (corporate, capital gains, income on dividends, income on executive compensation, whatever) can be enough to support the resulting mass unemployment.

Would you use the same argument for hiring discrimination?

I.e. if a sector of the labor economy is discriminated against, do you say, well, let's fix that issue with government subsidies/negative taxes? If women get paid 80 on the dollar, we make the government make up the rest rather than legislate that companies to pay justly?

I don't follow the similarity between my argument and your question on hiring discrimination, so I'm not actually sure what is being related here.

Anyway, the government already subsidized certain demographics, for one way or another (various types of welfare, and the population also support a bunch of subsidize that doesn't exists right now: parental leave comes to mind). In essence, it's not a question of "do" or "do not", it's just matter of deciding where to draw the line.

Another distinction is that not all discrimination and welfare discussion is about economic, a lot of policies have to do with moral, ethics and general humanity. With those constraints in mind, the consideration change a lot. The original argument I was replying to was purely economic. If you want to make a moral argument of "people need job to have self actualization and feel good about themselves", then it's not a common argument around here, and certainly worth considering, but completely different.

The parallel is in saying that inefficiencies should be avoided and that companies should be allowed to pursue savings wherever they can. If so, if they can skirt the system by hiring cheaper labor and creating unemployment for those lower skilled workers, then if we don't care about employing lower skilled workers but compensate them with alternative means (basic income, etc) then why not address other ills the same way? Don't address the root of the issue, just subsidize it away.

For the original discussion, subsidizing is addressing the root issue (distribution of wealth problem), there is also the solution proposed a hundred years ago by some guys name Marx and Engels ...

The example you brought up with women being paid 80 cent on the dollar is a whole can of worm that I'm not willing to open right now. Let's just put it simply that I think that specific issue is more complicated and one of the biggest difference is that it has more than just straight up economic consideration.

Let me highlight something I found in the data as an example of how this is nothing more than a gamed system that has nothing to do with Americans not being available to fill jobs:

Nested in the available data are several records for "Associate Data Scientist" and "Senior Data Scientist", meaning that the employer advertised the job as a role with this name.

(By the way, these visas were APPROVED!)

They then have listed as the category for the visa job role "Operations Research Analysts" for the Associate, and then "Computer Occupations, All Other" for the Senior Data Scientist role. Interesting how two jobs which sound very similar have completely different classifications for the same company, huh?

The best part: The prevailing wage listed for the "Associate Data Scientist" is $48,901 and the "Senior Data Scientist" is $61,110, because those wages are dictated by the bucket they are placed in.

The actual wages which were payed for these roles was $80k and $70K, respectively.

These rates are so far below market value it's ridiculous.

The point is that the law is supposed to be in place so that companies can get workers when Americans aren't available, but the reality is that they simply allow companies to refuse to pay the market rate.

The employer in question is Walmart, in case you are wondering.

I'm not disputing what you are saying at all. But having to hire American over foreigners knowing that company have to pay higher wages is still economic inefficiencies (the same as outsource, and actually I was specifically talking about outsourcing, not H1B visa).

> "train everyone to be a doctor, lawyer, or CEO"

Or chef, or plumber, or auto mechanic, or teacher, or construction worker, ...

Don't worry, we haven't run out of things that people do better than machines yet!

> I hate the racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up.

I do too. There are two Indian families in my apartment complex who have a breadwinner here on a work visa. I like them and their kids are my son's best friends. I don't see them as the problem here.

> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?

I don't know about you, but I probably pay more for rent and a lot of other things here in the States than a corresponding tech worker in India does.

I don't think that makes me better than someone in India, but it does mean that the almighty Free Market is certainly not my friend. If we could lower my expenses to the levels you see in India then I think I'd be okay with the Free Market.

Updated: clarification.

Simply, in a perfect world without bad governments, this would be true. Buy we live in world where if I lose my job in the U.S. I will not get any support from the Indian government. If I am stranded in some jail in some undeveloped country on trumped up charges I can't go to the Indian embassy for assistance, etc. It also affords us better environmental oversight, better roads, infrastructure, etc.

That's to say nation states are selfish and are at the service of its people. That's how we've got things set up. That's why Bangladeshis aren't allowed to work in India, or why any state adopts tariffs, etc. All selfish self interest. That is why.

It's also not racist, unless you use the old definition of race meaning nationality. If these were going to the English or to the Russians, you'd see similar backlash.

Why should the US Government facilitate the taking of an American citizen's job? Thats not why we pay our taxes.

If a company wants to offshore jobs out the country, they shouldn't be helped by our own government to do it.

Like I said, because it will grow the real economy of the United States overall if menial labour is conducted elsewhere for cheap and the high-value high-margin labour is conducted in the U.S.

Consider that as a result of 70 people at Toys 'R' Us losing their jobs, toys became marginally cheaper for hundreds of millions of Americans.

Edit: not to mention the majority owners of Toys 'R' Us realizing the part of the savings that aren't passed on to consumers are undoubtedly American investors and pension plans.

Yeah, it'll get a corporation and a few higher ups rich at the expense of the folks making a decent living on those jobs. I have an interest in seeing my fellow countrymen do well compared to those of another nation.

"I have an interest in seeing my fellow white people do well compared to those of a darker skin tone." This is the same kind of feeling with the same kind of effect. The only difference is the choice of how to classify people.

Do you really, genuinely think that if Russia was the destination du jour for outsourcing, there would be no contention?

No. I'm making an analogy to racism. It's not actually racism but only because of the arbitrary choice of classification. We usually think racism is bad so we should logically also think prejudice against foreigners is bad for the same reasons. It harms people simply because of how they scored on the lottery of birth. Just as racism does.

So you believe that nation-states should not be self-interested?

I think if you hold such a radical agenda, you should be up front about it, rather than arguing by analogy to topics people want to distance themselves from. You're advocating the dissolution of nation-states in the conventional sense. This is a fine thing to advocate for, but one certainly isn't a racist for not supporting this particular radical agenda that you happen to have.

Are you also a communist, or at the very least, do you believe that inheritance should be abolished? After all, inheritance is a literal lottery of birth in the same way race is.

And finally, as someone who is posting on the Internet, you have either won the lottery of birth in a direct way, or been blessed with enough intelligence to overcome suboptimal birth conditions and thus have won the lottery of birth in a more indirect way. What are you doing to address the harm your privileged position does to the world? Do you live a life of poverty and give all your money to Waatsi?

> I think if you hold such a radical agenda

Nationalism is stupid. What's so radical about feeling I have more in common with an Indian engineering student than a white American factory worker?

I'm not a saint and I'm not simply going to give all of my money away, whether I deserve it or not. However, I'm not going to whine about foreigners stealing my jerbs either. If it's so easy for someone half the world away to steal my job I didn't deserve it in the first place.

You won't give up your cushy tech lifestyle to feed starving african babies, but you expect a blue-collar worker to give up his job to feed a guy in Dehli?

Except my tax dollars aren't exclusively spent on white people, they're spent on the folks in my country. I guess my supporting a path to citizenship for those dirty brown Mexicans that got brought over as kids would come as a surprise then, wouldn't it? Please, save your self-aggrandizing, half-baked rhetoric for your drum circle.

In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position.

When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement....

That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering).

By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.

That's a scary thought. Morlocks and Eloi...

A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...

This is wishful nonsense.

Destroying the middle class to improve margins does not grow the real economy. You grow the real economy by investing in technology and an educated workforce that can translate their skill set to providing real goods and services.

Majority owners, investors and pension plan managers need to invest their money in companies that have real customers with real incomes that can afford to buy their goods and services.

The issue is not whether the government should facilitate this, but whether they should use violence to prevent it.

Similarly, if I don't threaten people with violence for watching "Real Housewives of New Jersey", that doesn't mean I'm facilitating people watching it.

On the other hand if I am actually a high skilled worker and will take over your job because I am simply better at it, would you still consider it as the government just facilitating me taking over your job? Am I not entitled to it? What would make you deserve the job more than me, the fact that you are American? Not trying to attack you in any way, I am just curious if and why you see this in a black and white way.

The government already facilitates research and technology which takes jobs from people. Would you like to stop that too? Newborn babies spend 20 years preparing to take your job. Should the government stop that too?

Don't forget that a "job" is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. People don't like working, they mostly want money, at least for menial jobs. The whole idea of silicon valley is to take people's menial jobs. That's what it's there for! Should the government hinder technology companies because they're threatening to replace people's jobs with computers? Of course not! In the case of both technology and cheaper foreign workers, the overall result is positive to the US economy.

If you think Americans are more deserving than other people, then, well that's just the nationalism and racism that the GP described. You can pretend it's not racism, but it's effectively the same thing - treating people worse because of who their parents are.

Come on...we can be for protecting the interests of our citizens without being racist. The last I looked, American citizens are extremely diverse.

It's not technically racism, but it's the same kind of feeling. Discriminate against outsiders because they were born into a different class.

Mimicry can handle the ordinary events. I pay accountants to notice and handle the extraordinary.

Long ago when I was in digital medical imaging we observed radiologists reading X-rays and figured we could make many times our engineer wages by just saying "Normal chest" and pressing the "advance" button. We'd be right almost all the time!

How do you know they don't have a couple American accountants still on staff for the extraordinary events?

But the extrodinary includes issues discovered by those processing the data.

I like to joke about how I could set up shop beneath a volcano, and every day predict whether it will explode with over 99.99% accuracy. I simply say "No" every day.

The claim is that an American has first dibs on a job over a foreigner, additionally there is an assumption that the local worker is better at the job. This is certainly true before the training, but unclear afterwards.

> racist and nationalistic undertones whenever this is brought up. Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?

Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually. Why should it be Indians coming in, when so many Syrians are fleeing their homes, much due to the US invasion of Iraq (and undermining of Assad - so that now ISIS runs much of Syria).

I don't see how India providing its citizens with free IIT educations, only to be brought to the US and work like coolies, chained to an H1-B visa, is some wonderful thing. We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.

You have this racist attitude of wanting Indians, and excluding Syrians etc. You want them chained them chained as coolies to H1-B visas to exploit them. Then you accuse anyone opposed to your scheme to exploit people for a buck "racist" like you're some kind of humanitarian.

Huh? Nowhere did the GP post say that Indians/Chinese are preferable over Syrians or anyone else. I assume Indians were only mentioned because they are mentioned in the article, and are the stereotypical target of outsourcing hate. I really don't get this response; the GP also expresses distaste, or at least skepticism, at treating Americans as entitled to higher pay (having "coolies").

> Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually.

I only mentioned Indians because the article was about Indians.

> We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.

Or the US could have work visas that aren't so closely linked to a specific employer. I agree the H1-B terms as they are now are ridiculous and exploitative.

>If this is possible you don't have a real job and the Indian will be shortly be replaced in turn by a piece of software.

This is actually possible for a LOT of jobs that Americans do, modulo edge cases. Most of what nurse practitioners do, for instance, can very easily be replicated by a random forest. Try telling the nurse practitioners they don't have a real job. Hell, by that metric, most of crud isn't a real job either. In fact, the whole point of "work experience" is that the newhire with zero work experience mimics the more experienced worker until he passes the Turing test ie. the Boss, given the work output, can no longer distinguish if the work was performed by the newhire or the oldhand. Its turtles/strike/mimicry all the way down.

I find fault that these consulting companies (such as Tata) essentially cheat the H1B system and block actually exceptional workers from coming to the US.

> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?

Because America is not India. All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.

> All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.

Of course they are, because the standard of living is much higher in America. If you prefer, I can rephrase the question as "Why should Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than Indians doing the same work?"

Now you aren't actually talking about workers at all, it's just a retread of "Why is America currently in a wealthier position than India?"

More like, why is it morally correct that America should interfere in the free market to maintain its lead over poor foreigners?

So you also believe that the Indian government is acting immorally when they enact environmental laws? Preventing foreign capital from setting up toxin-dumping industries is also "interfering in the free market" too, you know.

"The free market" is neither (A) a natural state between different nations with different legal codes nor (B) intrinsically moral.

I believe aianus used "free market" here to mean free access to labour.

I'm more interested in your views on "to maintain its lead over poor foreigners"

why should I be able to live in a better house than you just because my parents left me money when they died?

Our ancestors built this nation. We current citizens are their heirs. Whatever benefits there are to having been born here, those benefits should accrue only to citizens.

America is ours, we and our ancestors built it. If there are any benefits to living here, they belong to us, and not to foregners. Likewise, my nice house belongs to me and not to you, despite the fact that it was purchased with money willed to me by my parents.

I take it that you also claim personal responsibility for any and all the sins that your ancestors and elder Americans have done?

>why should I be able to live in a better house than you just because my parents left me money when they died?

you shouldn't.

This is a valuable point, though I don't agree with it. Inheritance is really more like giving gifts to people you like. That's part of freedom. Some people give their inheritance to charity or friends instead of their children. So really if you get a gift because somebody likes you, that's because you're lucky, likable, or whatever reason they had. It's not a fundamental right though.

The idea of personal property is completely off the topic. Of course your house is yours, but it's not automatically your children's when you die. That's a choice you're free to make.

As for "we built America". You mean "People of Earth built America" It wasn't done in isolation. It depended on international trade and influx of valuable workers from other countries. You could equally argue that America belongs to Italians because there lots of Italian people helped build it.

> America is ours, we and our ancestors built it.

America is and was built by immigrants who have (had?) little more in common with you than the Indians in the story. Basically nothing really, except a common geographic area and some shared ideals.

Because Indians should create a great society for themselves, not simply essentially siphon off success that other societies have built up. The thing about this matter is that is a net negative for all parties involved, it's essentially akin to tearing others down instead of working to build one's own success.

That is both illogical and racist :)

What about the success that was siphoned off from Indians due to centuries of colonialism by European powers?

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