Any guess on how much will salaries for developers will rise after this move?
If the job required a unique talent that would only have been possible to fill with an exceptionally talented immigrant worker then the job won't be filled, and the company will be consequently less competitive. That will likely drive the wages of their workers down if a different company (in India perhaps) is able to utilize that worker's skills.
For example, imagine the next Jony Ive can't get a visa so he stays in the UK and works for a British company instead.. How would that impact American wages?
The wage collusion scandal happened at a time where yearly H-1B quotas were typically not met! (Edit: I'm wrong, they were met, but much more slowly than they are today, no lottery needed back then). Today there's roughly 4 times more applications than visas delivered through the lottery, and the wages in tech have never been so high. If you get screwed by your employer within the framework of labor laws, don't blame it on immigration.
Displacement of indigenous workers is also a major issue.
By the way, I wasn't trying to "blame it on immigration", my ire is solely directed at corporate lobbying for public policy, given that their sole motivation is an increase of private profits regardless of the socioeconomic side-effects. It should not be allowed.
I'm all for fewer visas delivered to IT consulting firms, but I don't see not much of an intersection between this issue and stagnating wages in the tech industry. A reform of the H-1 would be nice but it should try to give a chance to small startups as well, not just hand over visas to the handful of companies that pay engineers over $250k. The current lottery is silly but at least it's unfair to everyone equally :)
Across the economy and in most countries wages have been stagnant and STEM is no exception. And don't forget that most IT projects are not mandatory. If wages rise significantly companies will just cut back on projects which means more unemployed talent and hence the wages will drop back.
And there is no evidence that talent is better nurtured from within. It is just as beneficial for companies to have outsiders with unique experiences and viewpoints join.
If wages rose, companies couldn't just uniformly cut back on projects to keep their net profit the same in a hypercompetitive industry. Hence the wage collusion scandal, mentioned above.
The more likely outcome is companies will adopt more efficient work practices.
A slowly rising cost of labor fuels automation and increased value for society.
I believe H1B visas are currently used to get workers who accept lower-than-average wages; Hence the same jobs offered to non H1B workers at that level won't be attractive.
But in any case:
> It's no different from what any American worker would get for the same positions
It's what Americans might get if they accepted the positions, but it isn't necessarily what they'd have to offer to get Americans to accept those positions; And if supply fell, but not demand, [make better offers is] what they'd have to do.
This is actually one of the tech industries biggest challenges - how do you drive the cost of products down to compete in the marketplace when producing software costs so much due to high wages. The simplest answer is to drive wages down by recruiting immigrants. The long term answer is increase the pool of available labor by pushing for children to learn to code at school.
That's literally how markets work. They go up or down based on demand.
As mentioned in the article:
> “If firms are using the program for cheap labor, I think it will affect them and they will have to pay workers more,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University. “If tech firms are using the program for specialized labor, they may find there are more visas available.”
If that were true then wages would likely rise, and your "unique talent" could still be found, possibly even with increase probability, right?
Actually wage floors or setting up a bid/auction based system makes it more likely the exceptionally talented worker can get a visa.
(Two sides of the same coin.)
There would be nothing stopping a individual developer accepting a lower salary. But probably won't because companies are desperate for them.
Only in SV, maybe a couple other bubble towns. The most likely outcome is decentralization of SV and expansion of remote offices and remote working.
Its easy for a world-wide company colocated with dozens of other world-wide companies in just one city to exhaust the supply of even the devs who fail fizzbuzz. If you expand that labor pool to the rest of the country given the extreme level of over-education and un- and underemployment in general, its not going to be a problem to find new devs of a higher quality than the drained pool in SV.
Then consider the second-order effects. When wages rise, some development tasks are no longer worth performing, because they cost more than the value they create. In theory whole industries could become unsustainable if developers are very scarce, with knock-on effects on other professions.