How Immigration Uncertainty Threatens America’s Tech Dominance

Unfortunately this salary requirement means immigration will turn even more into a pay-to-play kind of deal. If you have money (or skills/education) borders disappear and if you're broke you're stuck in a place that offers no decent opportunities.

America was built on "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", and this H-1B change is another step away from that.

Probably they have been doing well below 100kU$S in benefits, because surely if they cant land a 100k gig and can land a 60k one, they have lower skills.

Its reasonable to feel discontent with such companies, but if there were free movement of people working lawfully they would still be compelled to hire immigrants. Its only frowned upon because the government said so. If the government says you can get H1B's with 50k salary, we wouldnt be talking about it.

I think it's $130K, which is 2x as much as before. It's senior level salary in IT (and I think for lawyers and MD's it's not starting salary either), in some cases/states Principal level. I would not invite H1B on that position, I would get one from local market for that amount of money. If you follow the line: it simply says do not use H1B more. Plus, what international student will do once he completes the college, and with quarter of million in debts (say Bachelor only) ? As is now, H1B. Will you hire college fresh grad for 130K ? Don't think so. So...who will come to the college from overseas to study and brig their passion and ideas on this land ? This is USA, this IS a country made, constructed and developed by excellence and hard work of immigrants with their hopes and dreams. Cutting that idea off, putting the country and society in the mood of "preservation", could result in dangerous outcome, as society is not ready for that. This is not Europe and will never be, the rules that work there are not applicable on this land. There is no a notion of "nation" in USA, there is no such thing. It's just a colony of immigrants moved away from their homes to build something they could not there. This is a dream land, this is an opportunity land and should remain such for everyone.

I agree H1s should get Green Cards much faster. The visa employee should also have more flexibility in changing jobs, including when his GC is being processed.

I don't like the "staple a green card" proposals for anyone who gets a STEM masters degree though. Many US Universities have already turned into masters degree mills for people trying to get visas. If Universities were allowed to sell Green Cards the problem would become much much worse.

The H1B as it is has many problems, but a big salary floor is not the way to go in my opinion. Remember H1B is not just for tech workers. If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd.

They instead need to go after the companies that learned to game the system. I'm not sure what the solution is here. A point/demand-based system like other countries have is probably wise, but given the share of mind the US still has in potential emigrants worldwide, and the breadth of different positions available, it'd be a pretty complex (and likely unfair) one.

The minimum salary could be industry based. For example, 150% of the average wage for that field. If the point of these visas is to bring in talent that America doesn't have, that shouldn't be a problem. These people should be paid above average salaries if they are truly a scarce resource.

How much would this system get gamed? This could just turn into a Visa store for elites.

Where I work, they're filling roles of what would have been called an engineering clerk, back in the old days. Jobs for which a BS is an over-qualification. The visa holders are vastly underpaid for their education level, while people who would be a better fit can't get their foot in the door, and get a huge boost to their income, because they don't have a degree.

I think the "as we all know" is that big corporations use the visa program to create, in essence, indentured servitude. People who work for far less than the market-clearing wage for the position, because are beholden to their corporate sponsor. I find it reprehensible, and particularly galling that it's all done in the name of "diversity."

Most visa holders are young and incredibly vulnerable. Combine this with my particular company's absolutely legendarily capricious hire-and-fire cycle (for 30+ years), and they can really stick it to immigrants working for them via subcontracting.

It seems this is about to happen soon, a draft of this new executive order was leaked and viewed by Axios yesterday [1]:

"A draft of Trump's executive order viewed by Axios directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to consider ways to "make the process of H-1B allocation more efficient and ensure the beneficiaries of the program are the best and the brightest." That could mean replacing the current lottery system with one that prioritizes visas for jobs promising the highest salaries."

"What it means for tech: In theory, prioritizing by salaries means visas for more senior, higher-paying jobs will be granted first, and visas for lower-paying jobs (such as those being filled by Indian IT services firms) would fall to the back of line, perhaps not getting allocated at all if demand for the high-wage job visas is strong."

"But there's a catch: Wage-based hiring means companies may miss out on mid-level workers they still have trouble filling with qualified Americans. For example, software engineering jobs will be filled quickly, but jobs for network engineers or tech support that tend to skew lower on the pay scale could be tough to fill without H-1B visas. "The demand in the job market is not always captured by the highest salary," said one tech lobbyist. So tech companies are advocating for worker skill-set to be taken into account in addition to salary alone."

[1] https://www.axios.com/h1-b-salaries-2228205505.html

>To date, as we all know, the H-1b system has primarily been used to arbitrage for lower wage by Indian companies

This isn't really true, or it is, but only in high profile yet minority cases.

H1B abuse is more about hiring someone at near competitive wages and telling them they're working 60 hour weeks and slowly getting rid of native workers who won't stand for that. So now your IT department is 12 people instead of 20. That's significant cost savings even if you're matching salaries. H1B's aren't typically paid less, they're worked like dogs instead. They can't easily migrate to a new employer, thus the abuse. This is the problem that needs fixing the most. The salary issue is secondary and something of a red herring as you can raise salaries but still have this abuse and it will do nothing for American workers who have been victimized by H1B abusers.

I don't see Trump or anyone addressing the indentured servitude aspects H1B creates. Considering most H1B's are clearing 80-120k, codifying 100k or more will do next to nothing. Worse, the only H1B bill I see has a 130k suggested salary but which can be contested and you can bet every HR company will do that.

These bills are mostly smoke and mirrors. H1B needs to be either completely scrapped or be re-done under a new program to allow H1B holders to switch jobs easily. Ideallym, if these people are truly hard to find hires they should be put on a fast path to naturalization and all costs paid for by the employer instead of this weird middle ground H1B currently creates where you're supposed to be super valuable but naturalization is up in the air. If it costs, say, $250k or more per head to bring them as a flat-fee and to express naturalize them, that'll stop abusive hiring I imagine. Corporations really need to have more skin in the game here and H1B's need to be naturalized quickly to avoid second class status.

Riddle me this:

We're hiring massively (SF East Bay), have a really hard time finding suitable, qualified candidates (from Java backend to native apps on iOS, Android, Windows). And even our junior devs make more than your new floor in base pay, not even counting RSUs.

If I would start filtering out H1B transfers (and other visa types), my hiring pipeline would be empty.

Where are the former Pennsylvanian coal miners pouring into tech? Where are the great US coders willing to move to the CA Bay Area? I don't see them. Indians, Chinese, Russians, Ukranians, yes. 3rd generation mid-westerners? crickets. ( I did move my family, from Europe to the US. )

The US education system does not generate enough coders. It's too bad before college, too expensive in college. Decent to great public school systems in those other countries take up that slack.

You restrict foreigners joining tech and the sector grinds to a halt. The US population on a macro level right now is simply too uneducated to run it.

I think, not refunding the application fee in the event of a denial might be a better solution. It acts as a rate-limit, disincentivising Indian companies from applying for many H1B's.

Picking magic numbers is the antithesis of a free market approach for a free country. Make sure people aren't criminals, and tie certain visa types to being mostly self-supporting, but people don't come to the US for the vast social welfare programs. They come for the opportunities and to work.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

Wow, such passive racism on HN. H1b is mostly targeted because it is associated with Indians. Are those sweet Canadians not stealing American jobs on TN visa ? Are your Australian mates not getting american jobs on E-3 visa ? Oh wait, they look white so no problem. But you see bunch of brown folks suddenly moving into your neighbourhood and think.. Geez.. These foreignours took'urrr'job.

Yes, like any government program, it is been abused but there are more than enough high paying jobs available in Tech. Indians are one of the richest demographics in USA. If Indians are such a low wage misers, what happens overnight ?

Only solution of h1b visa is to allow free movement of switching jobs. Right now a h1b worker is practically a slave of his/her employer which companies like TCS, Infosys exploits freely.

Also the diversity lottery based green card needs to be replaced. Those 50K/year slots would go a long way towards alleviating employment based green card shortages.

It may not be the desired tone but essentially that's how America got populated in the first place, a place where foreigners with some disadvantage in their country of origin could get rich. And many did.

Kicking the door behind you closed once you've got yours or because you're afraid new immigrants will take your job is hypocrisy of a terrible kind for a nation that was founded on immigration.

Keep hammering the fact that these people are job producers, not consumers. If you can prove that one skilled H1B results in additional two jobs being created in the region, then it becomes an easier pill to swallow.

I work in a rural region with a high number of H1Bs because one of the biggest companies in the area is a tech giant. Most people I've talked to (outside of tech) realize that these people bring in a lot value to the area and without them, 10s of millions of dollars would disappear from the local economy.

I straight up tell people, when asked about H1Bs, that I wouldn't have a job if not for them. I've worked at too many companies where the star of the team was on an H1B.

You didn't provide any hard numbers. As far as I know the tech industry is an important contributor to the American economy and if they decide or are forced to move those jobs to another country it would hurt America more than it would them.

Do you have ideas of what a tech company could put on the table?

I have a bit of an idea, and also a way to frame the problem that may sound a little ridiculous, but hopefully is helpful to someone.

I propose tech, free-trade, outsourcing, and other forces have impacted the US job market similar to the problem laid out in The Innovator's Dilemma [1].

Apple - and Steve Jobs - have been applauded for figuring out ways to solve the innovator's dilemma; specifically, Apple lets newer products with a greater profit potential cannibalize older products' smaller profits.

1. The iPod classic and iPod nano were great products that had solid profits.

2. The iPod Touch ate into iPod classic and iPod nano profits. However, it also eclipsed the profits that the earlier iPods could have achieved, since it was much more than just a music player.

3. The iPod classic and iPod nano did not mind that they sold less, and Apple changed their expectations for sales from each product line accordingly as one product took sales away from other products.

Here's how I see the US addressing a similar dilemma, but involving people's jobs:

1. Career tracks in manufacturing and energy production (coal, especially) had solid salaries and career prospects.

2. Market forces (e.g. trade deals, technology) reduced need for US manufacturing and energy production jobs. Computer programming, technology in general, and design of things rather than the manufacturing of things all have better profits for the companies involved than the building of things.

3. The people who had manufacturing and energy production jobs DO mind that they do not have a job. Government and society did NOT recalibrate goals by saying something like, "sorry your coal job experience is no longer relevant, we're going to give you basic income / job training / some other job prospects."

Apple can make the iPod classic, whose qualities are outdated, simply go away from stores without a tear shed.

The US cannot make people whose skills are outdated simply go away, though. Those people need, at a minimum, some way to pay the rent, food, and aspire to something greater than they have now.

How should the US best address this?

It makes as much sense to re-introduce the iPod classic when the iPod Touch is already out there as it does to go back to dirty energy production when clean energy production already out there, and has great qualities like an endless, easily accessible energy source in the sun and less pollution and land destruction.

However, that very thing has been proposed, and I have not seen any other plans. What about, for instance, ensuring solar panel production facilities are built near where coal jobs went away? Or perhaps big wind farms, sun farms, etc?

The places where coal is buried is not where wind or sun is best captured, but giving some kind of hope to people in those areas - whether in the form of subsidies, training, moving people, etc. It may mean some changes to those impacted, but with every big shift in technology and labor, some jobs simply are no longer necessary like they used to be.

Thoughts?

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Ch...

Many of the tech companies create employment opportunities far larger than their own staff. eBay and Amazon both have huge markets of merchants. Apple, Google and Microsoft have all created massive markets for application developers. Uber, AirBnB and Lyft have all created lots of part-time and full-time income from underutilized personal assets.

> The U.S. owns the cloud with AWS, GCP, and Azure, but if other countries can't use their services due to US government overreach, then I'm sure strong competitors will pop up elsewhere.

This is a very good point. Add on to this, tech industry among some of the businesses that benefits most from an open global economy, and would hurt most from Trump's protectionism.

For example, Google has over 90% market share in certain european countries, and EU is viewing the new administration more and more as a threat, isn't that dangerous to have someone you don't trust control your entire internet industry? I believe both European governments/society will now be more motivated to push the agenda to grow local competitors that works better for them.

If you think US owns the cloud, you're not paying attention to China. China owns China's cloud. The US has little to no visibility into these fleets, but they're huge (multiple million-server farms) and they have tons of national customers.

This development is politically interesting. National clouds are now a strategic interest. The EU is basically far, far behind in their internal development of national clouds.

> study hard while working part time

F-1 visa students are not allowed to work at all, except in a part-time position at their current school.

8.If you are lucky enough to get H1 and grow important enough in your role so that your employer files for your green card, tough luck if you are born in India or China. Be ready to wait for 10+ years.

I am on an F1 visa in the US. When I first came to the US, I was excited to become part of this country and stay here and go the H1B route. As I learned more and more about this program over the years being here, I got more and more disappointed even to the point that I just gave up on H1B altogether and will be going back after I am done studying.

It really is just not worth my time investment and trouble, if I have a great alternative at home. Sure, this might be different from people who are from poor countries, but in my case I weighted the pros and cons between H1B and going back, and my home country "won."

>Undergo TOEFL and GRE and apply to various universities

Which is an expensive scam, imho.

>Adapt to a new culture, study hard while working part time Working part time might not be worth it for certain majors. In my case, I'd have to take 1 less class each semester to have more time to work. However, at the lousy wage it would end up being more expensive in the end than not working.

>Finding a job (While its definitely easy for a CS graduate its not the same for other majors) but yet, cannot be eligible to many companies that don't want to sponsor visa in long term, not eligible for small startups with no e-verify.

My experience has been that it is not easy to find a job, even as a CS graduate if you are not an American. Could be different if I went to Stanfrod or MIT, but with a regular school, I feel like being an American (i.e. not requiring sponsorship) is a huge advantage. I think that at this entry level companies rather choose Americans than people who would need sponsorship. Maybe this would be different if it wasn't a lottery

> Make sure you do all the paper work with OPT, be updated on travel requirements and other stuff

They even recently increased the fees of applying for OPT to $410.

So all in all, H1B is just too much uncertainty for a way too long time for me to be worth it.

hey, I myself have also been work remotely for 10 months now. Do you mind me asking what tech-stack you are using?

Trump changes plenty, in the past it was assumed that the USA would honor visa once they were issued, now it turns out not to be the case.

Essentially this is breach of contract.

Yep, Obama held the line on the injustice. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it now.

Totally unrelated to the article, and perhaps a dumb question - How do you get the archive link of a URL?

In addition type O visas have no cap and are what people incorrectly attribute the H1b is for - geniuses instead of pushing out local talent.

> then they need to enter a lottery to be allowed to stay for another few years

There is a separate pool allocated for people with US degrees. Your chances are much more favorable and you are not competing against outsourcing firms.

But $130K for a talented but inexperienced graduate is tough...

Well the excellence of the research institutions (as far as CS and STEM in general are concerned) is pretty heavily dependent on immigration...

Also remember that people aren't completely rational actors, and an action like this carries a lot of symbolic significance for both proponents and opponents. Would you want to stay at a party your friend was rudely kicked out of for no reason just because the booze is good?

Tech salaries in Canada are mediocre at best, with southern BC being the most perverted relative to cost of living. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

How exactly are they supposed to afford to live there? A ramshackle crack house in Vancouver costs $1M+. Silicon Valley is dirt cheap by comparison. Toronto is also quite expensive these days.

Also, Canada does not have the same language if you're talking about Quebec (which you mentioned).

The only way Canada makes any sense is if somehow Calgary and/or Edmonton suddenly become fast-growing tech hubs. But have fun with the cold. Most tech immigrants are not going to be too enthusiastic about that, considering most of them come from very warm parts of the world like India.

It also has drawbacks. You get residency in a country, but can't find a job. I remember reading a number of stories about Canadian immigrants in that situation.

The US employment visa system ensures a job is waiting for any immigrants.

But it has been getting worse and worse in the last 10-15 years.

Would you be happy or sad if after years of drastically reduced Immigration America's tech dominance is destroyed?

Considering the number of SV companies founded by immigrants, we would have to look to decades, not years, to see the effects of this policy.

If the policy is wrong, it will be far too late to fix it once the results are clear. Foreign founders would simply go back to their home countries (or more reasonable alternatives, like Canada or Germany), and work in startup clusters there.

In about 20 years, I predict the Silicon Valley will be regarded as a startup cluster in the way Harvard is for higher education: the most well-known and prestigious, but only one of many excellent and sufficient options for your needs.

Considering I am in contact with my distant relatives that my great-grandmother left behind in Italy, my answer to your question would be sad.

Sad. America was built on immigration, any decrease is a negative to me.

Yeah but America has a lot more established companies, universities, and infrastructure. To get the required resources for the 2.5 billion people in China and India is gonna be a while.

Is there a single company in the fortune 500 that is fully remote?

Well, you're certainly painting a very black and white picture here.

In Israel, form 102 is exactly this exemption. You pay stock-market tax (25%) and not income tax (up to 25%) and you only pay the tax after you convert the options to stocks. (So, when you vest or as late as you'd like if you don't leave the company).

Try the "web" link under the subscription title. That may get you around the paywall (though recently it's been inconsistent with the WSJ).

>we will start departing in hordes and take that American Dream appeal with us.

And where will you go? I can't think of very many nations which are remotely competitive with the US as a place for tech work. Either their infrastructure is terrible, the culture and government too corrupt, their government too oppressive, the quality of life and standard of living too poor, the ability to immigrate too difficult, or the cost of doing business too high. Various places have tried copying Silicon Valley for quite a while now, without that much success.

You could try going to China, but good luck learning Mandarin and have fun putting up with massive pollution and the Great Firewall that hampers any kind of IT work. You could go to Switzerland, but good luck affording it, plus the place is just too small anyway (the country's whole population is less than just the Bay Area). You could go to El Salvador but have fun dealing with gang crime and the world's highest murder rate. The only place I can think of that might actually become serious competition is Canada.

Wealth has gravitated around massive city centers since time immemorial and China is even more hostile to foreigners. If you think America is the only one artificially gating wealth within the border then you are in for a rude awakening.

Coastal cities in America will continue to be a melting pot of culture but the wealth won't be siphoned off unabated.

The rationale behind the policy is ending the indentured servitude experienced by foreign workers and the hollowing out of the middle class.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why I should be forced to subsidize the American proletariat.

This "rural communities don't need tech" narrative is tiring and false.

"Tech" is more than Google. How many engineers do you think John Deere hires? How many scientists does Monsanto have on staff? How many lines of code go into the average modern factory?

If I had a dime for every time I talk to a farmer/laborer who plants fields full of GM crops and/or harvests those fields with impressive machinery, and then insists that "tech" is a useless industry. Or CNC mechanics who insist "tech" is a fad. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Rural america needs tech more than ever before. They'll learn to leverage tech built in coastal cities, or they'll become so irrelevant that not even high tariffs can save them.

> is if for every immigrant a tech company imports, they must hire two rural American workers from a community that's average income is less than the national median.

I came from rural America. So do lots of software engineers in coastal and especially non-coastal cities. There's nothing stopping those people from getting an education and joining a big tech company. Literally. Nothing.

Seriously. Even in poor rural communities without high school CS courses, you can sit your ass down at a computer, learn to code, then fill out college applications.

The one exception is maybe lack of access to higher education. And the GOP is an odd choice if that's your primary problem...

>What I think would really help America (and the world by proxy) is if for every immigrant a tech company imports, they must hire two rural American workers from a community that's average income is less than the national median.

There's a big problem with this idea: you seem to be assuming that rural Americans want to live in the international coastal cities. I'm quite sure this simply isn't the case for most of them (it is true for many young people, who do in fact move to the coastal cities on their own volition). So are you proposing requiring tech companies to open satellite offices in rural areas, where there's no concentration of workers at all? And what are these people going to do for the tech companies anyway? If they had relevant skills, they'd already be working in tech, not living in rural areas and working at Walmart.

>they must hire two rural American workers from a community that's average income is less than the national median.

What makes you think two rural Americans per one non-rural want to work for a tech company? Talk about condescending. Rural Americans don't need the charity of American tech workers on the coast. They can figure their livelihoods out themselves just fine, seeing as they've been doing it for centuries.