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Comment by _audakel | Hacker News Reader

> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited

"exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc...

I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out.

We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut.

This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.

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I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery.

One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea.

Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.

Never thought of karma that way (as a westerner with no particular exposure to it). I always thought of it as, "Do good now and you'll be paid for it later."

"You are where you are because you deserve it, due to what happened in past lives" is a much sadder message. Good for societal stability perhaps, but horrible for ideas like individualism and self determination.

> I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery

Goodness - I know it's probably hyperbole, but what kind of fucked-up country do you come from?

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are common labor pools that many Mid East nations draw upon for physical laborers. It isn't just Dubai, though they are among the most egregious; you'll see these arrangements in nations like Saudi Arabia as well, even though it is not nearly as well-publicized.

It's not just middle eastern countries.

Many developed countries in Asia (eg Singapore) use foreign labor for jobs that "no Singaporean would do". This includes jobs like construction.

Unlike the U.S., these foreign workers are truly 2nd class citizens. Often passports are confiscated, and the idea that they'd ever start a life or family in their host country is completely off the table.

It is official policy that they can be paid less than local workers for the same job, and have far fewer legal protections.

I don't think it's black and white though. Many of these foreign workers would be worse off in their home country.

It still rubs me the wrong way. For all its flaws, I still like the U.S. System better.

Probably India or Pakistan, common sources of Dubai slave labor.

I'm guessing India because of the karma comment. What here in HN is a number on your profile, there it is a promise of a better future (but maybe in the next life).

Karma is also an explanation/justification of why your current life isn't so good - you're making amends for something bad you did in a previous life.

A rationalization.

A false promise.

What's the point? Why have children if one's best opportunity to support them is to go be a slave in Dubai?

> "exploited" is a matter of perspective.

Yes, of course. But that doesn't change the fact that companies are systematically exploiting their life context in order to pay them below a fair market wage (in many cases), and in doing so is also exploiting the rest of the workforce to pay them less. Just because someone is happy doesn't mean they aren't being taken advantage of in a systematic, identifiable, and preventable way.

How do you define "fair" in fair market wage?

If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign? And if being hired = increase worker happiness, than equal pay will decrease foreign worker happiness.

If all people are equal than whos happiness should we optimize for?

Your equations aren't telling the full story though. The salary for foreign talent isn't only lower because of potential cultural issues out education, but because ability for foreign workers to change employees is artificially limited. This artificial market inefficiency hurts both local and foreign workers and benefits corporations who exploit it.

>If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign?

Yes, it's diversity. Having people with a variety of cultural backgrounds on the same team will sometimes lead to more creative or more robust solutions.

How do you define "fair" in fair market wage?

It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."

I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12.

It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.

> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."

Fuck no, it's about getting your "membership benefits" from a communal system that you've contributed to. Americans get paid more by Americans because those Americans pay more to Americans, and invest in the American economy and interact with American laws.

Who you ought to be disgusted with are the people who break the rules in order to enrich themselves from "arbitrage" opportunities. On a fundamental level, that's called theft, the only difference is the kinds of rules being broken.

Ideas such as "membership benifits" and "Americans pay more to Americans" seems to create an us vs. them mentality and imply that the us party receive govnt benifits. The idea that country A receives befits over country B can be abstracted to simple free trade theory.

If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource" and accept the idea that country A and B can ingage in "trade", than it is easy to see how US h1b style imigration worker laws are basicly tariff. They distort the price to protect domestic, by making foreign more expensive.

David Ricardo (Supply/Demand economist) and many other economists have shown countless times that countrys are better off in the long run by engaging in free trade.

If we removed the worker "tariffs" we would get more engineers, companies would be able to make more / do more. In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.

> seems to create an us vs. them mentality

No, it simply recognizes a situation which already exists, because different nations have different laws and economies. If you want a world hegemony, it's up to you to find a route that doesn't inordinately harm specific groups (e.g. US workers) while transferring value to others (e.g. US companies and arbitrage groups.)

> If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource"

Oh? Seems to create a "people don't matter because they're just objects" mentality :P

> In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.

Unemployed or underemployed consumers never have more/better choices.

Wait, do y'all think H1Bs don't pay taxes?

There's not a whole lot of thinking going on in this thread, in general.

Wait, do y'all just ignore the part about "outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor"?

Yes, but US labor and citizens fought generations for those wages. Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that. US taxpayers paid for our economy through blood and toil.

You don't think high wages just happen because companies feel generous do you?

Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life? I understand that it gives you more chance of a better life, but just by the luck of the lottery of birth, not by any actual fairness.

Did civil war soldiers really know they were fighting for high wages 150 years later? Were taxpayers really choosing to pay tax because they expected it would give their grandkids a higher salary, or because it was the law and they'd be fined or imprisoned if they didn't? Every country had wars, and they're just meaningless wars. They weren't fought for the good things we eventually got. They were fought for a meaningless feeling of needing to support whatever group each soldier belonged to.

If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.

>Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life?

Look at it this way. I work hard and I pay a lot of taxes. I pay attention to elections and I petition governments because I want an opportunity for a good life for my kids and my kids' kids. I think soldiers who fought in the Civil War certainly wanted a better life for their kids.

This has been going on for generations. This generation is the first generation, I think in US history, that isn't expected to have a better life than their parent's generation, excluding possibly the depression. There are more young adults living with their parents since 1880.

I'm certainly not anti-immigrant, I think immigrants are the bloodline of the US economy and culture. What I'm against is companies outsourcing labor to other countries to save a little money while excluding US workers for consideration of those jobs. It's the companies I'm dissatisfied with, not the labor. If I was destitute in China or India, I would take those jobs too.

It's bad short term planning. Not only is it gutting our market, but China is stealing billions of dollars of our IP for their own use, and that includes military IP. Very few people benefit form this and the cost is great. Had US companies not outsourced and politicians not gutted labor unions, the US market would be much bigger. That's good for big business, small business and labor. Why do you think Trump and Sanders are so popular? There is massive dissatisfaction with opportunity in the US. It's about to bite us in the ass.

>If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.

The phrase "grandfathered in" refers to familial relations for a reason.

Your post is precisely what I mean by "entitlement." 500 million not-so-red Chinese don't give a hoot about the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that.

To understand the position of workers in the rest of the world, see above.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."

Sure, if you don't want to think critically about the issue at all. Absolutely agree under that circumstance. But since many foreign workers are not able to job shop, they become a lower-cost source of labor that depresses wages for everyone (other foreign workers included) because their commitment to their host company is like a figurative gun to the head. I have literally no problems with the H1B system except for when companies bring them on primarily to lower their own personnel costs. I don't even mind when companies use them despite there being existing labor in the talent pool for them (which is usually the case, despite protestations), but then to pay them below going market rate* is my issue.

I'm not a software engineer here like most, though I dabble for fun. I am, however, experienced in labor market analysis and workforce planning. And, again, I don't care how many foreign workers any given organization has provided they aren't used primarily as a cost-reduction mechanism (if they are onshore). If a company wants you to work in America they should pay you like an American.

*This isn't a terribly fuzzy metric. Typical compensation for a given job in a given geography is readily accessible. Market-specific salary surveys, benchmarked by contribution level, are a transactional norm for any company with a competent compensation team. They typically guide vs. determine and are often 18 months out of date (at least in my experience), but they're not a white whale and very useful.

My point is that you're competing with those unwashed, underprivileged foreign workers whether they work here in the US or not. Our economy is, and should be, global in nature. If we build the wall that some posters in this thread apparently want, we'll find that instead of locking everybody else out, we've locked ourselves in.

There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer, unless we deny ourselves the benefits of the work done by the latter. To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.

> There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer

Nobody made any claim of the sort! In fact, I made the opposite: when they enter into a labor market with local considerations (cost of labor, community investments) they should be treated as an equal. Right now, they are not. And one of the primary ways they are not is by being employer-constrained. That's the main issue I take umbrage with! Bring as many over as we want, but let them exist in the labor pool.

> To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.

These are not artificial factors for any of the players involved. May we be better off without them? Probably so, in the long-run. But they do exist today. Maybe in a computer simulation they can be treated as such, but right now those "artificial factors" have exceptionally real consequences in the world we live in. While national boundaries may be an "artificial factor", cost of living is not, nor is added cost of labor due to social commitments at the national level. Nor are dozens of other things.

I agree that being locked to one employer is a kind of market distortion. Would you say non-compete clauses are too? I know they're not enforceable in California, but other states effectively lock local workers to their company because they're not allowed to move to another company in the same industry within a year or two of quitting.

Should we try to prevent companies from legally hiring local workers with non-compete clauses in their contracts? I think so. And I think it's a bigger issue than immigrants from the point of view of artificial wage distortion. Yet somehow these threads about immigrant workers get a lot more enthusiasm than threads about non-compete, so there's obviously something else to it. And I can't see what else besides the GP's "I'm an American".

> Should we try to prevent companies from legally hiring local workers with non-compete clauses in their contracts?

Of course we should!

These companies depress wages for the people that live & work in the US though, not just for the people they displace. The downstream effects on the places impacted mean this is a consequence that ripples through communities of people who live in and support their nation of residence.

Foreign workers (fw) who work for less $ than the Domestic worker (dw) drive down wages. In this case fw is benefited by making more than they would in native country, while dw makes less than the old rate.

Paying old rate generally means dw keeps old rate, while fw makes nothing. This is the inverse where the dw is benefited at the expense of the fw.

If all people are equal who should recieve the benift?

What's the utility to people in dw society of providing benefits to fw? This has happened across broad industries and dw through their governments have signed trade deals that usually include retraining for the workers affected. Otherwise, dw and their governments end up subsidizing the costs of corporations making bank which has so little social benefit that it's really not normal to allow it to go on.

It's not a free for all in places like India to allow fw to displace their dw or drive down their dw salaries. The US is getting taken for a ride with these policies.

dw's society can produce goods at lower cost than without fw. But really there doesn't need to be any benefit to dw's society unless dw's people consider themselves privileged and deserving a better life than the world's poor simply because they happened to be born into it.

>If all people are equal who should receive the benefit?

The million dollar question is: which ones are you entrusted to represent?

>"exploited" is a matter of perspective.

No, not really. If the bosses and investors are taking the surplus value, defined as the gap between wages+capital costs and actual revenues, then the worker is exploited.

That is technically correct (the best kind of correct).

Just as I exploit electricity to provide light in my house, or exploit Exxon/Mobil when I derive $5 of utility from a gallon of gas that I swindled them into selling me for $2.50 or exploit Apple when I'd be willing to pay 50% more (or more) for my Macbook than they actually charge, because I use it to make money.

As applied to labor, "exploited" generally means something much stronger than "employed to a productive end".

The market in this case is being kept artificially inefficient to benefit corporations to the direct detriment of foreign workers and indirect detriment of local workers.

It's technically correct if you are a Marxist as Marx used the term that way. Otherwise the dictionary has "The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work."

I agree with you (at least assume strongly that I do), but I couldn't find a dictionary with that as the first definition. Most of the first definitions were more along the lines of "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)", making GP technically correct.

That one was from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/exploit...

I guess people use the term in different ways.

I've had some experience with the H1B staffing mills, and yeah, I'd say exploited is pretty fair, if you compare the work they could be doing vs the work they are doing. I would imagine most of those people would call it a fair trade to be in America, but I really think it's a lose lose scenario for the country (which could be benefitting from the full measure of their productivity) and the worker (because they're wasting their precious time).

What your missing missing out is the societal destruction of the USA inherit in highly polarized wealth in a society. Crime increases with wealth inequality and it's because of companies exploiting visa's like the H1B.

You've seen this crime yourself why would you want to make America crap like the Phillipines?

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