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Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

>every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen

There is no evidence to support this assertion.

Please, read the article under discussion which contains a link to the Center Of Immigration studies. The article under discussion does provide evidence. You may not agree with it, or question its strength, but really hard to deny the article, the statistics it provides and the studies it references provide no evidence.

If the facts quoted in the study do not suffice, let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Assuming H1-Bs do occupy job positions, i.e. are employed. Then either the job is only opened if and only if there are H1-Bs around, which doesn't make sense, or not a single qualified US citizen can fill the job. Give the working age population of the US is 204 million[1] this also seems highly unlikely.

[1]https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

Your argument is flawed in several obvious, basic ways. STEM is not a nebulous concept whereby an electrical engineer is the same as a software engineer. All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions.

Also there isn't a global consciousness through which STEM grads get immediately notified of all open positions. Not every position is advertised on every single jobs board. And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there.

Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen.

>let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning.

Yes, let "us" do that.

> All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions.

What does this tautology offer to the topic? Common sense obvious true, not every STEM graduate is universally qualified for every open position. So ... ???

> And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there.

Again, common sense true. So ... ???

> Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up.

OK, true. So ... ??? Is your assumption then that they would have to wait indefinitely and that no candidate would ever show up? cited evidence of this is appreciated. Links to studies, large amounts of unfulfillable postings are welcomed.

> Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen.

So ...?

Nothing stated above bears any light to the argument (flawed or otherwise), it's just a sequence of common sense things that one can say about a labour market.

This topic's referenced article is specific in its position in claiming there is no shortage of STEM qualified applicants and presents cited statistics and studies. If you have counter data and studies, please present their facts and cite links.

You are confused as to the nature of this conversation. YOU are the one making the claim "every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen". Nothing in either of the linked articles supports this claim. They all talk about shortages, but not about _qualified candidates_. They are not the same. Even so, I just explained to you how in obvious ways, even if there is no shortage, your assertion can be proven false.

If your argument was US citizens should always be given priority regardless of their skill, I might actually agree with your position.

Your direct quote of what I said is wrong, that is but a clause in a complete sentence. The actual sentence does allow that a small percentage of H1-Bs are being used as intended by the program, but bulk of H1-Bs are not and the H1-B program suffers from rampant abuse and is being used to replace US Workers.

I have asked several times in the overall discussion for anyone to provide any link to any data of any kind which even indicates to any degree that there is a massive shortage of qualified candidates. I have yet to see one.

Given that there is no shortage of STEM qualified people then ipso facto there is no shortage of qualified candidates.

Do you have any evidence at all that you can provide indicative that their is a massive shortage in qualified candidates? Links Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, showing 100's if not 1,000s of positions going begging with no qualified candidates, or HR studies, any published studies, Dept of Labour or Commerce published statistics ... any shred of evidence at all that you can provide a link to?

The evidence is flat wages in the past 20 years.

That applies to pretty much all working class professionals.

Supply and demand law mandates a wage increase if there is a shortage of workers

How would you define that as being a true assertion? I've often seen it as "I trained my H1-B replacement"

Yes, and all such violations should be reported and dealt with. However, using a fact from a local scope to make an automatic "winning" argument in a larger, more global scope is disingenuous.

I wasn't asserting in either direction.

How big does local need to be to assert true then for you? The recent Disney accusations seem rather large. I remember reading recently about migrant workers and the job postings being listed in other states to prevent having local applicants. I guess this isn't a black and white scenario. One H1-B can be taking away an existing local job while another instance in another area might not be. "H1-Bs can take away local jobs" would be a true statement if that local scope fact is true but if you're suggesting that "no local jobs are lost to H1-Bs" then you're wrong. Local scope can invalidate a global scope.

Saying "every" as the GP did was wrong. But the argument is which is greater the number of by the book H1-Bs or the the number of H1-Bs that take local jobs. Is there an acceptable level of lost local jobs that makes the gain worth it?

I feel like it is the conflict of setting a guilty man free to never convict and innocent man. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" but not everyone agrees with that. They would rather catch the ten guilty persons and would be okay with the one innocent suffering. The greater good maybe? I'm not sure either way.

Given as fact that H1-Bs are dominated by the 3 or 4 large outsourcing body shops from India (Tata, TCS, Cognizant, et al) which simply flood the system with tons of names into a glorified lottery, I don't see how the charade that they are all the handpicked highest of the high, unique and rare technical specialist all, can be believed.

Sure there may very well be some Optical Physics Software specialist brought in by MagicLeap on an H1-B or some AI wunderkind by Google or Facebook. Far and away the H1-Bs stockpiled by the outsourcing body shops are bread and butter general skilled folk capable of filling basic roles, Linux admins, Oracle DBAs, Java Webdevs, HTML/CSS/JS, IBM MQ admins, backup operators, IT support staff and what have you. Most of it is coding camp stuff, or basic training on particular appliances that could be done in a few weeks. The diversity in IT camp should be going crazy that these sort of basic entry level opportunities are not being offered to folks that really really need it. C'mon Jesse Jackson get a clue here.

There are many, many, many Disney situations happening everywhere. e.g. Google "Southern California Edison outsource". In S. Fla an ex-fortune 500 corp outsourced many IT positions with same "train your replacement approach" and replaced with H1-Bs and they are not alone. It is rampant in the industry. You don't hear about many of these cases because of non-disparagement clauses in the layoff packages. Amazingly Disney's lawyers (should have outsourced the Corporate Lawyer Department to TCS there Big Mouse) neglected to add this standard clause to muzzle the displaced (fired) employees.

A huge proportion if H1-Bs are used to directly display existent IT workers. Period. Far more the rule than the exception.

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