Not Everyone in Tech Cheers the H-1B Visa Program
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This approach seems deliberately lazy, as though it's some kind of head-scratcher that the displaced IT support guy hates his outsourced replacement; while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.
I find it especially galling that this NYT writer can't make the distinction, given their paper did a great article about H-1B abuse by outsourcing firms: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...
Yes, and exploit those workers with lower salary than they deserve because those workers only have a small sliver of the job market available to them that their US Citizen competitors do.
The H-1B program is terrible for all employees and only benefits employers, which is why you see big corporations like Microsoft and Facebook pushing to remove caps on it. Not because they generous but because they would love to have more engineers who are underpaid and have a very hard time leaving the company for years until they can one day become citizens (and from what I understand the path to citizenship for an H-1B worker is not easy despite them being extremely productive and high contributing members of society.)
This is patently untrue when it comes to companies like Google or Microsoft.
I came to the US on an H1-B. As I'm sure you can imagine, people talk about their salaries. I compared mine to my colleagues who were US citizens. We were all paid about the same.
I'm pretty sure these companies would get busted if managers were informed by HR that "this person is going to get a smaller raise since they are on an H1-B".
That being said, even if the salaries are all the same, it doesn't mean that wages are not suppressed. If you import supply and demand stays consistent, prices drop. I think the burden of proof is on the people saying otherwise to prove that importing tens of thousands of engineers doesn't suppress wages.
In other words, if large corporations couldn't import H1B workers, they'd have to do other things to get their work done, and those things would probably involve raising wages for especially skilled engineers. Or perhaps by investing in other productivity measures (better dev tools, better hardware, more administrative assistants, etc.).
I'm arguing that the supply is more fungible than that, especially in the long run and especially given a floating price point, and that changing the laws and regulations to solve challenges in particular business models is basically an indirect form of lobbying for special interests.
Think about it: WHY do we need programs to encourage engineering careers? Do we have programs to encourage people to go into law or medicine? Why not? Well those professions don't seem to have a shortage of people willing to work hard to get into those schools. So why does engineering have such a shortage?
These programs assume that there's something wrong with young people, or with the culture, causing them to avoid these careers.
Maybe, instead, there's something wrong with the careers themselves, and the employers, which cause people to avoid them. So why are we, as a society, subsidizing these rich companies to help them get more workers? If these companies really need these workers so badly, maybe they should foot the bill to recruit people into the profession and then train them (I mean their entire college costs here). If an employer isn't willing to pay $100k for a kid to go through college, who otherwise isn't willing to take that risk himself, then why should the rest of us try to brainwash that kid to do it, or help fund a scholarship for him?
Or perhaps, move the job to another country which has a larger supply of workers.
Microsoft could easily just pack up and move all their dev work to India. There's a large supply of workers there, and they can pay them a fraction of what they have to pay here.
Why aren't they doing this? The big companies threaten this, but they never do it.
Simple: if it were really this easy, they'd have already done it. There's obviously some good reasons why they're not, and why instead they choose to import people under H1-B, pay them roughly similar salaries to US workers, and pay for lots of immigration/paperwork-related costs on top of this. They might be (and I think they are) helping keep salaries down this way overall, but that's nothing compared to just dumping everyone and moving operations to India and paying 1/5 of US labor rates. So why aren't they doing that?
My response assumes you're saying the journalist of the NYT piece is among "most of the people" not able to make a distinction between the 2 categories you laid out.
category 1: >between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries),
NYT article: "Proponents of the H-1B system argue that it is an important vehicle to attract top talent to America. After coming to the United States, these visa holders may apply their skills to start new companies or create new, innovative products"
category 2: >and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).
NYT article: "The H-1B program’s critics say the system provides a way for American companies to turn over technology departments to outsourcing companies. These are gaming the system to snap up the visas so they can replace American workers with less expensive, temporary staff members."
It seems the NYT journalist has correctly distinguished both categories. (There are more paragraphs in that article that add more details about both categories but I only copypasted 1 example of each.)
It is true that the NYT article mentions the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.
Farther along it becomes even clearer when they say suppressing wages is good for the economy but at what cost.
"In other words, it’s true that cheaper labor helps employers increase profits and grow, and having more skilled workers in the United States contributes to economic innovation. But at the same time, individual American employees do face more salary pressure from newcomers who will work for less. And in some cases, they risk losing their jobs entirely, especially older employees who earn higher salaries."
@ericseppanen's point is that the two groups are not the same.
(A lot of the other critics in the HN comment section also seem to argue that the innovative tech companies are doing the same thing as the outsourcers.)
The NYT journalists are aware of that. The commenter ericseppanen with his incorrect interpretation of the text has done a disservice to the HN readers trusting it as accurate and upvoting his comment to the top.
One of writer's profiles is of Mr. Jeff Tan and how he's harmed by HCL Technologies which is an Indian tech firm (similar to bodyshops abusing H1B like Infosys.) The critics' commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket of people.
The other profile is talking about "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found" and the examples of that in the article include Microsoft and Google. The proponents commentary about H1B is talking about this bucket.
The authors of the article have interwoven both groups together throughout the narrative which may be confusing for some readers -- but that doesn't mean that the writers are so clueless that they completely don't understand the distinction between the two. They clearly do. Interweaving the text for stylistic purposes does not mean they have mistakenly conflated the 2 groups.
To summarize the 2 different groups being profiled:
"HCL Technologies" example != "Google/Microsoft" example
"HCL staff in India replacing Mr. Tan at UCSF" != "professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found"
>the proponents and the critics, but they conflate the companies themselves. In other words, it sounds like the proponents and critics are talking about the same phenomenon.
No, not the same phenomenon:
critics("outsourcing companies with less expensive, temporary staff members") != proponents("top talent to create new innovative products")
In the article cited, the authors only mention Google and Microsoft once:
"... Technology giants like Microsoft and Google have pressed for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.
But for tech workers like Mr. Tan, the program has had very negative consequences."
If you don't see that as conflation, I don't know how we will agree on this.
There is a difference between proponents and critics describing the same activity in different terms and noting that different companies treat the system differently and that it is roughly bimodal: "Google's" use and "Infosys'" abuse.
I interpreted the two quotes you pulled as the former.
reddit.com is that way --->
The 2 quotes I pulled for 2 different categories are not describing the same activity:
"top talent to America" != "less expensive, temporary staff members"
The "top talent innovative products" is intended to describe Google or Tesla hiring a rare PhD scientist from Germany to work on deep machine learning or automated driving algorithms.
The "less expensive, temp staff" is meant to describe loophole abuses like Infosys.
That's an eloquent way of saying, "This is why we can't have nice things.".
A much better use for these visas would be to bring in workers we need at competitive US salaries. There are plenty of positions that need filling that would still make sense to pay full market salary for. (Speaking from personal experience trying to find certain skill sets in LA.)
In practice, it's ludicrous to think that the vast US university system cannot produce employees with whatever skills are in demand, so workers must be imported from countries that have much smaller education complexes.
The reality is that many US employers don't want to pay market rate for those skills. I would argue that this is especially true in tech. The same or similar forces are at play at the bottom end of the labor market, which is what has driven much of the illegal immigration through the southern border.
Edit:// as example. Right now barely any swiss tech pros consider the U.S. as interesting destination. A lot of husstle for just minimal more pay.
Many of the students in the US universities need a work visa to work for a US employer. I've worked with several people who finished a US degree, and apply for an H-1B visa for when the OPT visa runs out. As far as I can tell (I didn't read everyone's posting), their wages were comparable to mine, so it doesn't feel like a cost savings move to me.
The logic is that employers would have to invest more in their employees (training, scholarships, salaries) to get the number and kinds of employees they want.
To the extent that all salaries are equal, there is equal treatment. But increasing the supply of labor does help employers keep costs down at the expense of others (like almost-qualified U.S. workers who can't find employment).
No, it's ludicrous to think that a vast network of overpriced liberal arts colleges with chronic grade inflation can produce enough high quality engineers and scientists for the largest economy in the world, especially when the majority of its industrial capacity is in high value add manufacturing like aerospace and defense, clean(er) energy, pharmaceuticals, and other specialized fields. The rest of the world takes education a lot more seriously than we do and even though they may not be ranked highly by the US News World Report, the rest of the world's universities easily produce enough talent in their top 3% to leave the bottom 80-90% of US STEM graduates completely jobless, at any salary. Paying someone more after they graduate isn't going to make an 18 year old take their education seriously and the best universities in the world can't help a student body obsessed with everything but their education.
It baffles me to no end that a few H1B immigrants from some podunk mining university in Siberia can bang out a complex PCB on their own faster than the vast majority of MIT/Caltech/Stanford EE graduates I know. Even though the latter have a year+ of internships each under their belt, they're useless without months or years of on the job training. When they do get that training, they're still years behind someone who had no choice but to work 40 hours a week while going to school in a poor country with few prospects. This isn't a hypothetical: I've met and worked with half a dozen different people in SoCal from the same Siberian mining university (because it was one of the few in the Soviet Union without institutional anti-Semitism) who came here shortly after graduating to fill long empty mid-to-senior level engineering positions. None were underpaid or exploited and many filled positions that their employers were actively trying to fill for years.
I'm sure that higher salaries would push a few people in the direction of STEM fields, and a few of those would be capable of filling positions that an immigrant would take. If the salaries went high enough, I bet it might even obviate the need for skilled immigration entirely but Americans as a nation just don't want to pay the price, full stop. It would mean doubling the amount of money we give out in research grants, let alone every other corner of our economy. Just look at a variety of goods in Italy or France: the public is willing to pay more per article of clothing or furniture so there is a large industry of highly paid artisans with job security and high quality of life, willingly supported by consumers.
Disclaimer: the above probably does not apply to a significant portion, if not majority, of annual H1Bs because they go to Tata, Infosys, and other sweatshops. Those are absolutely abuses of the Visa program meant only to depress wages.
Edit to add some more concrete info: based on my parents' old high school/undergrad textbooks and my own experiences, the average American STEM college student spends the first few years of undergrad catching up to the level of a good but not great high school junior in the Soviet Union. Five year dual BS/MS degrees including institute R&D were the norm back then so how do you think the average 23 year old Soviet graduate stacked up to the best 20-anything American? The level of education doesn't even compare.
That is because colleges in America do the job of professional high schools in the former Soviet Union. when you count in those too (e.g. not just kids meant to go to university), average math levels gets real bad.
American students dont to that badly on an international tests, not compared with former Soviet Union. America has bigger variety - best juniors do real good and worst one real bad. Former Soviet Union tends to even things out and sort of kill a lot of talent.
The low level details of salary, duration, mountain of paperwork etc for visa were adjusted as per demand and supply.
If it made sense to pay market salary, why aren't they filled? Market price, after all, is a look back on the transaction once it has happened. The market salary is exactly what it took to get someone in that seat.
Perhaps you mean it would make sense to pay below market salary, necessitating a change in the market (i.e. increase the supply of workers through foreign imports) to meet that lower price goal?
Mercedes and the economy are missing out because of the commerce not being transacted right?
The idea that work that's profitable at $100k and not at $120k -- that means that the work isn't profitable if the market cost is $120.
Everything is profitable if the cost of inputs is less than the sales price. It's an absurd argument.
Essentially, your statement singlehandedly destroys minimum wage arguments. "If I could pay less, then I could be profitable, otherwise I am not profitable and thus won't hire anyone."
But you are also admitting that the purpose of H1 isn't to fill shortages -- it's to fill shortages of people willing to work at a rate below what the market dictates. It's like the illegal immigrant advocates that claim that Americans don't want to pick fruit -- at $5 per hour, probably not. But at $15 per hour, suddenly there isn't a shortage.
Except in rare cases, H1s are not used to fill actual shortages but to lower costs. A junior level Tata engineer isn't filling a shortage of skills, they're filling a shortage of engineers willing to work for $50k per year.
Yes. That statement shows exactly why minimum wage is economically unsound in the long-term. e.g. why else would McDonald's feel the need to automate their cashiers?
Yes, it does. Minimum wage laws are not good economics. We would be better served scrapping them and instituting a basic income to ensure a quality-of-life floor instead.
It sucks, but that's the way it works.
There’re places outside US where you can find top-notch people for less than $100k.
Also, this applies to the skills of the employee. If your skills aren't good enough that people would pay top dollar for them, then you should find something else to do.
it sucks, but that's the way it works.
But in this case it doesn't suck for the rich management and shareholders (they'll manage just fine without doing the project at all) it mostly just sucks for the taxpayers who get less tax revenue, the community that has one fewer consumer, and the foreigner who has to stay put in his country working at something even less productive making $25k.
I assume the purpose is to select only those who are going to be employed securely enough at a high enough salary that they're extremely unlikely to ever go on welfare or otherwise be a net burden on the US.
Would it be more palatable if the employer did not pay the visa fees but did have a signing bonus equal to the visa fees?
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-the-foreign-appli...
This is ignorant ranting at it's worst. Changing companies for H-1B visa holders is one of the easiest operations in otherwise byzantine world of US immigration. The only restrictions are that the new job should be in same or similar area of expertise which is usually not a problem at all (except in case the person is drastically changing career fields) and should pay at least prevalent wages etc. H-1B holders can and do use these opportunities to find better jobs (usually with higher pay) all the time.
Everything I've read indicates that the visa is portable for the visa holder. The employee can change companies without too much trouble.
Am I mis-informed?
This rule changed so recently that it hasn't trickled into the job market yet.
https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin...
Effective from Jan 17th, 2017.
Previously, if your employer found out that you interviewed elsewhere (due to to a reference call or other means), they could fire you and there was only 10 days where you could wait for the new employer/offer to materialize.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/ombudsman-liaison/practical-immi...
So, yes - you're somewhat married to your company.
When I filed an H1 for my startup, they issued a Request for Evidence just because the documentation mentioned our investor pitch "founder previously employed by LinkedIn". They thought I had already quit my job. Luckily I was still employed and was able to send the pay stubs.
In places which have "at will employment" regulations, they can. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment:
At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships
in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is,
without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning.I wish - not where I work (California).
There are protections by law [1], but none that protects an H1B employee from being fired for trying to quit.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment#Statutory_e...
So, no, it doesn't violate its intent. And, pragmatically speaking, it's the only viable track to green card and, ultimately, citizenship for the majority of skilled immigrants into the USA.
Yes, it is still a silly setup, and most other countries have an explicit skilled immigration track that covers the same niche. Most of US immigration law and regulations is so ad-hoc and randomly slapped together (due to widely differing polices and a lot of knee jerking), that it is like that in general, though.
I have much less sympathy for folks already in the tech industry who are complaining about this. Tech is basically the most overpaid career there is. And not because it's especially hard or valuable, but because as soon as some CEO starts getting the idea that they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg then all rational thought goes out the window.
Hiring developers is basically rich people's version of blowing all their money on lottery tickets. The entire industry is completely unregulated despite putting the nation's critical infrastructure and economy in grave danger, which artificially drives up wages by externalizing the risk onto everyone else. And H-1B workers are placing basically zero downward pressure on wages as far as I can tell.
Why shouldn't engineers, part of a class of worker that arguably brings much more benefits to society than actors or athletes, get paid much more?
If the natural labor market dynamics were allowed to occur, we would be seeing top engineers being paid $500K to $1M+ per year. In fact, during the SV wage fixing cartel, this is precisely what the executives of these participating companies were complaining about in the emails that were disclosed in court filings. Will you believe tech company executives when they say that it affects wages? How many earnings calls do you have to listen to where executives talk about how labor market dynamics and immigration policy will affect their payroll costs? I'm sorry but if you think immigration doesn't affect wages, I've got a bridge to sell you...
Not only is the H1B program putting downward pressure on wages, but all immigration is putting downward pressure on all wages.
Any time you hear a tech executive talk about "shortage of workers", what they're really saying is "shortage of workers willing to work for a lower than market value wage".
It isn't because if you don't maintain your skill set by constantly keeping up with the latest frameworks, data stores, or even languages then you become obsolete. Not all of this can be done during work hours. Consequently it's a career that's prone to ageism.
I think we get paid what a middle class wage should be. There was a huge downward spiral in wages due to rapid economic changes that cause a large fraction of the workforce to make very substandard wages.
Seems like an apt comparison to me.
FYI if you think devs are overpaid, it's generally in SV (and even there, they make average considering the cost of living - a good idea is to look at the end of month savings instead of earnings).
With that said, we are getting paid a lot less than the value we add - seriously - the entire world around you works on software and if it were to stop for even an hour, we'd have a lot of issues - so with that in mind - we should be getting paid more.
Now i know you'll say a CRUD developer adds no value, but I could argue that neither do most lawyers or traders - but they get paid a lot more no?
Keep in mind that hiring developers is a lemon market. Imagine if any other industry worked like tech. E.g. if when you took your car in for an oil change, there was a 50/50 chance of the mechanics taking it for a joy ride, totaling it, and then charging you tens of thousands of dollars. Or if you went to the doctor the only treatment they were familiar with was sawing off your leg, so that's what you're getting regardless of what the problem is.
If this sounds absurd, it's probably because you're in the tech industry. The average small business owner's experience working with developers is handing over a good portion of their life savings and then either having the dev team just take the money and run, getting back something completely broken and unusable, getting back something half done and a year late, etc.
I literally became a developer myself because it was the only way to reliably avoid these sorts of issues. The only other industry this broken is maybe the medical system, but at least they're taking (small) steps in the right direction.
And we have quite a lot of bad lemons (if I may), who basically have 0 clue of what they are doing. They join teams or take on projects, blow away loads of $ and have nothing to show for it.
But imagine if every doctor or lawyer was paid based on such bad lemons for example (considering that we can still had bad lawyers and doctors even after having licensing exams).
I don't see how adding regulations to ensure safety of critical infrastructure could possibly reduce developer wages. If anything, they'd be increased because now you need more of them and they need more skills.
You have to understand how reliant companies are to their software systems today.
Salaries are not based on the value the employee brings. If that were the case, then Ferrari assembly workers would be getting a huge salary.
It's based off of supply and demand.
The value software and it in general bring to a company are way more than the sum of salaries. A multitude higher. If it were actually based on supply and demand you'd think salaries would increase.
What's the value of building a system that will scale when the business needs it, verses one that doesn't?
What's the value of a flexible system that allows the business to perform multiple M&As without a hitch and pivot to market needs?
Companies use software systems for a reason: they are very valuable. The more companies use software for competitive advantage, the more their competitors need them to compete. We're at the point where a company can't survive without a good system.
I think many developers don't know their value.
This salary is a bit higher than the median for dental hygienists, and considerably lower than for registered nurses. I'm not complaining about that, those are important jobs that should be well compensated, but we should acknowledge that software developers aren't paid outrageously compared to other knowledge based fields. The median for lawyers and physicians is, of course much higher.
There's a higher potential upside to software development, but it is a lottery, and most don't end up making a huge amount of money. Senior dev positions at top tech companies do pay very well, over twice the median salary, but these salaries aren't remarkable compared to top professionals in other fields. The field comes with considerable age related issues, and the work environment (open offices, scrum) leave much to be desired. Honestly, I think the reason for the "shortage" is that people who have the choice (i.e., aren't bound by their visa to work in software) are rationally choosing to work in other fields.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...
You can look around the site, it provides a roundup of BLS data by region.
What's unreasonable is paying someone $15 per hour for unskilled labor you could teach a teenager to do in 15 minutes. The cost of the work exceeds its value.
As an American working in Norway, I have to say that this is how it should be done in the US . My Norwegian coworkers do not resent me because I was not hired because I am any cheaper than they are. And, I get a salary that allows me to meet the high cost of living here. If companies were allowed to pay foreigners significantly below industry standard, it would be a disaster. I don't understand why this is still standard practice in the US.
Oh wait, I do understand: it allows companies to pay less for labor and pad their profit margins. But it is bogus, and this is one Trump initiative I can get behind.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/h-1b-employers-what-w...
In other words, some shops will gladly pay a senior software engineer $60K a year, claiming they are something else like tech support. There are plenty of examples of other methods some companies use.
Yes, you may find some prevailing wages are lower than what Google pays, but that shouldn't be surprising since high paying tech jobs don't represent the average wage.
The required wage is the higher of prevailing wage and “actual wage,” which is what other employees with similar duties, experience and qualifications are paid.
The separate $60,000 minimum is often misunderstood and not accurately reported in the news media. There is a rule that “H-1B dependent” employers (employers with a certain number or percentage of H-1B workers) need to make a number of attestations, including that they do not displace US workers and try to recruit US workers before hiring an H-1B worker. These are not generally required for H-1B petitions, which normally only require a specialized occupation and a certain wage.
But if an H-1B worker is paid at least $60,000 or has a master’s degree or higher, those attestations are not necessary, and the general H-1B rules apply.
If you have programmers being paid anywhere from $80K to $150K for a given skill set, the average is going to be lower than what the top companies pay.
The only way around that is to create another subset of programmers that only look at the highest wages.
And if an employer is found to have abused the system (hired someone for a lower position and then made them do higher-level work, e.g., call them "tech support" when they're really a senior engineer), then force the company to pay the H1-B the equivalent of 100 years' salary and put any employees found to have been complicit in this in prison.
Aren't there jobs whose prevailing wages are closer to the minimum?
Requirement to advertise for US workers first? No Problem, just advertise where nobody looks, like the physical local newspaper's classifieds. Advertise for a different lower-paid job title, even though the coding duties will be exactly the same. Hire via an outsourcing company whose entire operation is to game the system, and the costs are still less than a US programmer.
The worst part is the sponsorship structure -- when you hire an H1-B worker, you are "sponsoring" his or her presence in the US. they have only the right to work at your business, and nowhere else. They lose that job, and they will have to leave within days (60?). They would not only have to find a new job in that time, but a new job willing to sponsor them and capable of getting their H1-B approved in that time -- very unlikely. This means that the H1-Bs will take all kinds of abuse and lower pay without complaining, as complaining is the quick ticket home.
The simple change of allowing H1Bs to be a 2-year visa, and they are allowed to change to any job after 6 months would go a long way to clearing out the abuses, since the sponsoring company would need to treat them at their full worth to keep them.
Now, this doesn't mean there aren't problems with the H1B program. By making workers so dependent on their employers (for example, if an H1B visa holder gets laid off or fired they have to leave the country immediately without legally having the opportunity to find a new job) it most likely drives down wages slightly, but the "sending jobs abroad" rhetoric is little more than xenophobic sloganeering which only serves to distract people from the actual problems related to the H1B (the power differential between the employers and the employees, and the ridiculousness of a lottery system which benefits those who can flood the system with applications as opposed to actual companies that need good workers).
But this seat-filling is important. A person who is hired for a job shipped abroad is not living in the US, paying taxes in the US, buying groceries, spending money, etc etc. A non-American brought into the US is participating and contributing to the economy just as any American worker is.
This was at Merrill Lynch during its heyday.
But Trump can take action that will open up jobs and raise wages for American workers even in the face of a recession. He can deport illegal aliens and cut off the H-1B and L cheap professional visa categories. That would create a lot of working class and lower-tier professional jobs for Americans fast.
If the people in CA are not willing to pay their maids fair market wages, then maybe they can do their own fucking dishes.
Another is that the parts of the country with growing economies and lots of great jobs are generally cities with incredibly high rents. It's not easy to move halfway across the country to take an entry-level job and somehow live off that if you need to pay Bay Area / NY Area / DC Area / etc rents, and doubly so if you have a family.
This is one reason I think it's so critical to build a serious urbanist movement in US. The status quo of restrictive zoning, low building, and sky-high rents keeps hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the places that would enable them to build better lives. If we allowed our cities to grow and invested in the transit infrastructure to keep them livable at even moderately higher densities, it could unleash a tremendous amount of prosperity.
We heavily subsidize home ownership, which creates huge disincentives for mobility. In reality we should probably tax it and subsidize renters.
We pay people to sit around in their old location rather than moving. Our "disability insurance" program is actually a giant secret welfare program for people who refuse to leave economically depressed areas. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
We drastically restrict housing supply in economically productive areas.
Well, most of Middle America has high home-ownership rates, underwater mortgages, no public transit, gutted public education, and nearly zero public health-care. So yes, a whole lot is stopping people moving: they're broke, stuck with a mortgage, and would have to go further into debt to move, without a job offer.
The fact is that many migrants are willing to risk destitution or even death to relocate, and they will work their socks off at menial jobs for a better life (for their children in particular).
How many unemployed American workers are doing the same?
Start prosecuting employers of illegal immigrants, and you'll see the wage floor rise.
Employers are not entitled to cheap labor. Advocating for such an environment is why the US has a pseudo-populist president now.
As far as I can see, it would just create jobs that Americans won't or can't do.
And while you can raise the wage-floor, that increases costs, which may well raise prices....
Obviously reducing the number of H-1Bs will change the math, so that a few jobs may move overseas, but there are many advantages to having employees in the US.
The interesting thing will be whether SV will be willing to absorb the (presumably) higher labor rates for these citizens. Their other options will be to outsource the jobs or to develop more infrastructure in less costly areas of the US.
This is the most plausible explanation of the theory, unless of course you believe the version where the motivation for H-1B hires isn't purely economic, but rather that there just aren't enough Americans available who can do the work.
Apple was co-founded by the son of a Syrian from Homs, and Intel wouldn't be the company it is today without Hungarian-born refugee Andy Grove.
Companies founded or co-founded by the children of immigrants include Walt Disney (from Canada), Oracle (Russia and Iran), IBM (Germany), Boeing (Germany), 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).
More than 40% of the Fortune 500 in 2010 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
If the US blocks immigration, it will be much worse off. If the best people go to other countries, those countries will probably end up much better off.
I'm not arguing against immigration. Heck, I don't even think that the current administration is against immigration. (Yes, I know this is not the popular view of the current administration here on HN.)
My point was that the H-1B program is basically built on the hypocrisy that these are jobs that cannot be filled without bringing in immigrants because no one here has the skills.
It seems pretty obvious that the reality is that the H-1B program is built to enable employers to bring in high-skilled workers at a steeply discounted rate, and to keep them steeply discounted by preventing the immigrants from looking for better jobs once they get here. If this were untrue, I wouldn't read so many comments and even articles about how people here on H-1B visas ought to have the right to find another job.
In other words, make the program declare its real intentions. But that would never fly, because politically it would be unpalatable to people in any part of the political spectrum, with the possible exception of the <1% of those who profit from H-1B employees.
In passing, tech companies only use a small proportion of H-1B visas -- less than 100,000 out of 647,852 from Oct 1 2015 to Sept 30 2016 -- and most of those are Indian outsourcing firms: Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, IBM India (75,606).
https://www.axios.com/tech-firms-arent-biggest-filers-of-vis...
I looked at a couple of the tech people noted, and many of them came with their parents while they were young, a few came for college, and could possibly have stayed on an H-1B or without legal status. Often citizenship dates were reported, but other status wasn't well reported.
His top advisor, Steve Bannon, is definitely against immigration.
"Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, is not illegal immigration? As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem, we’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country? When you look and there’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country, is immigrants — is that not a massive problem?"
Fucking 500 years. Most beers i like exist for longer.
That argument gets us no where.
If you go back far enough, everyone is an immigrant everywhere in the world except for a small group of sub-saharan africans. And even in that case, they probably migrated.
It's adds nothing to the conversation.
Another option is that companies simply don't hire at all i.e. they wind back projects and reduce potential growth opportunities. I've actually seen this first hand so always a bit mindful of seemingly simple or obvious decisions.
Especially since permanent staff who are OPEX and increase headcount are very different to contract staff who are CAPEX and don't. And many H1B visas are quite willing and happy to be contractors since the US may not be their life long home. That's very different for a US citizen.
If employee cost is the issue, then a company is abusing the H-1B. It's for filling skill gaps, not lower costs.
Most H1-B holders are from pretty desperate circumstances and put up with just about anything, at least until they obtain their GCs.
Either way blaming on their employment issues on legal immigrants is just another form of the immigrant xenophobia thats up for display more and more under the Trump administration.
>Most H1-B holders are from pretty desperate circumstances and put up with just about anything
so because they have already endured a lot in order to get their H1B, it is ok to force them out of the country ?
I agree.
So give all legal temp workers GC. Then no desparate circumstance for them to work in. Which means they'll not say yes to jobs that pay peanuts.
With the same number of people in the country, this will lead to an increase in salaries offered because new GC holders can demand more.
Also, companies have more money to hire others instead of wasting it on filling H1b or go through a long winded GC process.
#Winning for all no? :)
I turned down the role. I would have to enter a lottery to get a visa and then have my visa tied to my role at that company. For me as someone with two young children and an already good life in the UK, it was far to uncertain for me.
it ist is hard to find qualified employees for that job. the last person we found works remote from canada, because that's all we could find that had the right minimum skillset and was available at all.
for the past 2y we no longer hire via h1b. why? because we cant. the chance than an applicant gets a visa is now ridiculously low. this is because of the flooding and first come first serve system this article is mentioning: we can submit for 2 or 3 100-150k jobs a year. others submit thousands at 60k no chance. (this is because we do not fire lower skill jobs to replace em by h1b)
...at that salary.
$150k sounds like a lot, but adjusted for cost of living, it's fairly middle-of-the-road salary for senior engineers in, say, Texas. In fact, it would be an effective downgrade in quality of life for many. Your employer could easily poach those engineers by calling them up and offering $225k or more, offering housing vouchers, etc.
I'll note that I'm assuming SF or NYC as your location. If you're in Texas, Atlanta, etc., I withdraw all of the above.
I'd dispute the "easily" here. IME, it's extremely hard to get senior engineers to relocate -- many of them have families, deep ties to their locations, and are way to accustomed to their way and quality of life to consider moving.
Salaries are a simple conversation point, but we could also talk about remote work, retraining, opening sites in more affordable areas, etc. I also listed many specific benefits (housing, child care) that would make a relocation zero hassle for a senior engineer.
Wouldn't this rule out exploring all the ideas that are only viable at a particular price point.
Wouldn't low cost countries out innovate us at that price point.
But, yes, keeping costs down is entirely about protecting business models. Changes would force business models to adjust. For example, employers might have to start retraining almost-qualified domestic workers instead of importing workers who have a too-particular list of jargon on their resumes.
The U.S. isn't a person that decides to put software shops in locations.
Entrepreneurs setup shop in locations where they are more likely to succeed, and for startups, it's where they can find high quality talent and get funding. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
I clearly remember now, how disappointed, sad and gloomy were the members of the departing team.
This is so ridiculous. A disadvantage against who? By any rational measure, it's the H1-B holders that are at a huge disadvantage against Americans.
As a Californian, I'd have trouble signing away my right to leave the software field for the next 7 years, or granting to my employer the right to have me deported if I quit my job.
Employers may prefer employees who they know have limited legal rights to participate as free members of the work force. In fact, the US has a long (and at times, horrendously ugly) history of programs to import workers who aren't free to choose the circumstances of their own lives. Because US citizens can't give up certain rights, they may be at a disadvantage where it comes to getting jobs where employer control over a worker's residency rights have become the norm.
After all, why would you hire a free person who can threaten to leave during salary negotiations, when you can instead hire someone who depends on you for the right to live and work in the US?
Of course, I'd never, ever make that trade. I'd rather switch fields, or avoid that field altogether. This may account for some of the aversion to software development careers we observe among people who do are free as individuals to live and work in the US without corporate "sponsorship"
I agree, that there seem to be two distinct practices. I experienced the latter, where a company performed wholesale off-shoring of several thousand jobs.
I don't understand how the stewards of that program approve such visas when they're clearly being used to replace existing workers (i.e., the argument that you can't find qualified locals is demonstrably false.)
My other hard-won conclusion: the companies that do this don't recognize the long-term impacts. They're less capable, less competitive, and their outsourcing partners can become their overlords. The outsourcers gain considerable negotiating leverage, and any attempt to unseat them becomes economically impossible.
What can we do about it? Look at the policies that make American employment unappetizing. The cost of benefits (principally health care.) Regulations that make it difficult to fire poor performers.
Finally, there's a feedback mechanism here. I saw many leave technology because they perceived that the opportunities were all moving off-shore.
1) Tech jobs (especially in software fields) are some of the easiest to do remotely. Creating higher barriers to H1-B visas will only create higher incentives to let those same workers work from their home countries instead of bringing them all the way to the US. The unintended side-effect of course is that this is actually cheaper for the employers, siphons spending outside the US economy and to the extent this is believed to be zero-sum market (it's not), you have to believe that this will depress the job market here.
2) Software is not the only field H1-B jobs are used in. There are whole categories of jobs where $130K salary is absurdly high even for top candidates (without any visa restrictions). Case in point, academic researchers and scientists.
How about a one line regulation: You pay whatever you want to your H1B employee. For every dollar under some limit (say, $130K) you pay that dollar to Uncle Sam.
At least it would keep them honest, since any cheating would be a tax violation.
A popular rebuttal is that immigrants will contribute to the growing economy and will pay taxes. But we are talking about completely open borders here (anything else is just some fiddling around current system), where anyone willing to do even minimum wage job can migrate. How can such people contribute enough in taxes, when the welfare cost needed to support them (schools, roads, sewers, hospitals...) and their families far exceeds the taxes paid by them? And while I admit that I don't have any stats to support my argument, I am just going by my gut feeling that generous welfare is usually paid for by the richest and not by the poorest.
Another offered solution is to cap welfare for new migrants until they pay enough taxes. But that just creates a two-tier society and is a separate can of worms in itself.
What stops this from happening in the Schengen Area, where some countries participating have welfare states and some (I believe) do not? Genuine question - I've heard other people make the same argument before and it seems like we have a pretty good real-world example to either verify or refute it.
EU countries are much more uniform than the rest of the world in their level of welfare support and social development (e.g. UK and even Portugal are much more alike than say Bangladesh and the US).
Besides, there has been a lot of movement from poorer countries to richer countries within the EU, and many people in the richer countries are angry about this. See Brexit etc.
There has also been a lot of movement back towards such countries as soon as their wealth levels improved (or UK ones got worse), which happened in no small part thanks to remittance payments. It's the sort of movement you also observe in-country when industries in certain regions do better than others. How many people from Scotland moved to Southern England in the last 100 years?
But that is the whole point of the European Union, which is also expressed in things like the infrastructure and development funds: we promote solidarity and cooperation between neighboring countries, rather than competition that will ultimately result in war.
It's a shame how you only need a couple of generations to forget everything about their history.
Or why are migrants, against the laws of the EU, streaming through and past Hungary, Austria, Germany, Denmark, in an attempt to claim asylum in specific countries, when each country that they're literally walking through is also amazing and beautiful?
The guy that you replied to is effectively describing what's happening in the EU.
Well, the math on that doesn't work if you're taxing all income rather than just labor income. Driving down wages while doing the same work will increase profits, so the same taxes ought to get paid.
And then there's the issue that adding labor to the economy should make it grow... unless for mysterious reasons like land-rents or parasitic finance systems all growth capacity is getting sucked away somehow.
The amount of a welfare state you can sustain is certainly dependent on your tax revenue, and in turn on the quality of your economy, on political willingness to set high enough taxes, etc. But I don't think there's a point at which a welfare state is flatly impossible.
And there are certainly lots of unforeseen possibilities. Perhaps an economy where employers can hire anyone without bureaucracy will grow companies that generate enough revenue, even without lots of human employees on payroll, to sustain the welfare state.
If you're thinking of women/couples having a lot of kids to collect those kids' welfare, it depends on how the welfare for those kids compares to the cost of raising the kid. Also many people would be morally against bringing a kid into a life of potential suffering just for their own monetary gain. But for someone with no dependents, moving to a new country poses no risks to anyone except themselves.
In that sense, the risk to oneself is so great that only a privileged few in developing countries who wanted to relocate would actually have the resources to overcome them. So for many people, relocating might legally be a choice, but it would be practically impossible.
Realistically, migration is only an option for you if you (1) have a job offer from a company based in the place you intend to migrate, (2) have sufficient funds + skills to cover yourself until you can find a job, (3) have family who can support you and lend you their networks until you can find employment, (4) have sufficient funds to start your own business. Incidentally, those criteria also form categories of US visas (H1-B/TN-1/E-3/L-1, O-1, Family Reunion, EB-5), though, they impose more stringent requirements than economics would.
It's especially common among young people that want to display their virtuous radicalism and who haven't ever really had to pay for the bad consequences of anyone's actions.
That's a bit ridiculous. A Syrian Software Engineer shouldn't have to work 1000x more than an American SE to get a job at Google HQ. Let the deserving be decided by their ability for the job rather than their birthplace.
It bothers me how we neglect to work towards a borderless planet. Sure, it wouldn't make sense in terms of economy, politics, and a lot of other things in the beginning, but shouldn't we at least be talking about it and envisioning it, and we even work towards formulating the logistics involved?
Wrong framing, though. My adversary isn't some other worker. It's the guy who hires workers, works less or not at all, and takes home the profits.
One hopes that when you hire a Syrian software engineer, both you and they will benefit. I'd certainly prefer to hire a good Syrian software engineer than a mediocre American one (and a good American one than a mediocre Syrian one, naturally), if we're hiring someone anyway.
What I was responding to was how there may be no responsibility for the American to renounce his privilege such that the Syrian has an easier time becoming a possible candidate (Both in skill set as well as logistically). Additionally, it may even be irrational for the American to do so if we consider them as adversarial actors (In competition, unlike when recruiting co-workers).
Please understand my commentary here is simply in response to the equally extreme logic applied by the grandparent (A world of no nations/borders being optimal) and by no means constitutes my complete opinions on immigration, visas, and the like. We can hopefully elevate the discussion above, allowing immigrants only out of charity, to more rigorous reasons.
In regards to why I advocate it - like I said, the way the system works today, some people have more privilege than the others, and this isn't by choice. We should be trying to bring everyone upto the same datum, not the other way around. While the current visa systems are not the texbook definition of discrimination, we are in some way still limiting people's choices based on the land they were born in.
If we're talking first principles, a human should be able to roam wherever he chooses. Of course, this isn't an ideal world, and I'm not advocating for terrorists to be able to make it through wherever they wish, but I'm sure if thought hard enough, we'll be able to come up with a system that ensures that a couple of groups of terrorist, and a few other kinds of knobheads don't pull their entire nations down. But right now, we're working in the opposite direction.
From the terrorist portion of your comment, it appears you agree that certain actors can be excluded. If we can exclude people from our tribal zones, then nations have strong logical foundations, as they are simply the manifestation of the ability of tribes to exclude others.
Another thing is the free flow of capital. Why can money have open borders but people can't? Anyone who advocates for closed borders should also be in favor of capital flow controls.
(Personally i m not pro-open-borders as of yet)
For a politician, it would make sense to advocate for easy capital inflows, somewhat controlled capital outflows and highly selective immigration process.
Most people think of SS and other entitlements as being something they have earned and they don't want them shared with others.
Everyone wants a handout. Most people just want to pretend like they earned it.
You can even go into SSA.gov and see how much you have "earned".
I'm certainly no expert, but that sounds more like a description of an IRA or 401K, I think.
As far as I know, the social security program in the US isn't actually structured in such a way that each person's SS taxes are going into an individual investment account under their own name (despite the "how much I've earned" statements which might seem to suggest this).
In fact, the SS taxes being collected right now from you and the entire current generation of earners, are going directly to the current generation of retirees.
So rather than being a career-long savings/investment scheme where your own money comes back to you at the end, it is actually implemented as a wealth transfer scheme from the current generation of earners to the current generation of retirees.
Some years the fund might book a surplus (more taxes raised than benefits paid) and in some years a deficit.
But I agree that it seems to be a common view (or perhaps just metaphor) that people's own SS taxes are being accrued against their name for later payback as benefits. But as far as I can tell, social security has never worked that way and wasn't designed to.
It's not structured that way, but you do need to 'earn credits' to establish eligibility for benefits, and the benefits are calculated with a formula based on the amount of your wages that were subject to social security tax; and the official name is old age insurance. It certainly feels like it's retirement insurance that you pay into while you're working, and get the benefits should you live long enough.
In my mind, this is fairer than the US system, but there is a good case to be made that keeping elements of a "contributory" system helps to maintain political support for the welfare state among people who are a bit more, um, selfish.
(An interesting piece I read a while ago that describes how the "contributory" nature of Australia's social security system in the 1940s was actually just a cover for a general tax increase: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-27/berg-chifleys-politica...)
So I'm curious: can you move to Australia at 64, work for one year, retire, and receive a full income from social security?
I don't think any Millennial pays into Social Security under the delusion that they will ever get anything back. The program is on track to be insolvent once it's done serving the generation currently in power.
I suppose you're attempting to imply that people who have thought about the consequences, or who do care, or who are old people who have had to pay for the bad consequences of people's actions, are unlikely to agree. Is there a reason, is there evidence, to believe that much more interesting claim? Or is this merely an accusation of "virtue signaling"?
When you live and work in (let's say) America, you are paying taxes and following the law. If suddenly, anyone could come to America, America would probably experience a huge population increase from Africa and Asia. While some of them may be productive people, there will definitely be a lot of them who will not necessarily follow the law or find useful jobs. In addition, if it was so easy to enter America, what's stopping them from entering, committing a huge crime, and then leaving?
Another reason to be against what you are proposing is because it is in a nation's interest to make sure that the people living there aren't poor or starving. If an American doesn't have that many skills and can only work in a specific field, by allowing anyone in the world to compete with them increases the likelihood that they will be out of a job.
Immigrants and the children of immigrants are also disproportionately likely to be productive citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if half the current Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants and the children of immigrants. (The figure for 2010 was 40%.) See my comment below. [3]
It's certainly possible that the majority of America's wealth is generated by relatively recent immigrants.
Of course, this is controlled immigration. No country anywhere lets just anybody in.
[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/7/9/8922783/immigrants-crime-donald-...
[2] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/criminal...
If we look at France or Sweden, two countries who excepted a lot of migrants, we can see that the results are not so good. Sweden is now ranked as the country with the most reported rapes [1] and France has areas where the police are afraid to enter [2] .
Think about immigrations like drugs (medical ones). There are many drugs that can save many peoples lives but are not able to pass the FDA for whatever reason (eg. lack of money). While it is sad that people will die because of that, if most drugs were allowed to be marketed by doctors, many more people could die. Similarly with immigration, currently a lot of people who have the potential of adding a lot of value to America are not allowed in. However, if most people were allowed in, it could cause a lot more damage to America.
[1] https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/pics/large/932.jpg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-go_area#France
To become a legal immigrant in America takes a lot of effort. It's almost like saying people of new money are less likely to go to jail.
As for illegal immigrants I've got no idea as to how many bad actors there are.
However I'll give a stat that many liberals in Europe failed to realize. Their are many people in this world that do not like Western culture. E.g take Muslims around the world wanting sharia law (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...). We shouldn't block immigrants from coming to the us. But we should only allow immigrants who will "melt" and become part of the American melting pot.
I wish someone would explain this to Donald Trump. He is currently lying his head off about immigrants "pouring in" as though Homeland Security didn't even exist. Just visiting the USA is a huge pain for many people.
I've been hassled entering the USA on a 5-year visitor's visa (in fact, on 25 years of 5-year visitor's visas) with hotels booked, return tickets booked, and a well-paying job, house, wife and pension in my country of origin.
Many people have been handcuffed imprisoned and deported for entering on the wrong visa, including one woman who had an American husband, an American-born child, and several years of living as a permanent resident in the USA.
Both. Illegal immigrants are generally keen to avoid any contact with a legal system that might deport them.
Either way, the USA has almost no illegal immigrants who are Muslims. Almost all Mexicans are Christians (88% Catholics). Most Cubans are Catholics as well (60%).
Indeed, the USA has very few legal immigrants who are Muslim either. "According to a new estimate in 2016, there are 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States, about 1% of the total U.S. population." At least a quarter of those are US-born Americans like Mohammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaq O'Neal, Mos Def, Busta Rhymes, Yusef Lateef etc.
"According to a 2004 telephone survey of a sample of 1,846 Muslims conducted by the polling organization Zogby, the respondents were more educated and affluent than the national average, with 59% of them holding at least an undergraduate college degree."
That quickly adds up to lower crime statistics in illegal communities. It does not mean less crime in those communities.
In fact, it creates conditions for ongoing gang crime operations unchallenged in those communities.
And your evidence for that claim is...?
Frederick Trump was a German American businessman. Born in Kallstadt, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 16 and started working as a barber. Several years later in 1891
There's an old joke about immigrants doing dirty jobs that Americans won't do, and being married to Donald Trump may be one of them...
The Trump family lied about being Swedish, though more recently, Donald has aired his pride in his superior German genes.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/9/29/1575870/-Shocking-vi...
That looks like a speculation, and a justification that a less skillful local worker might want to use. There are all kinds of H-1B Visa holders out there. More, equally, or less skilled compared to the local workers - but they are invariably less expensive than their local counterparts with same skillset. That's why companies are using them. Low quality software has a cost associated to it as well in the long run, so we can safely assume that the companies are deciding what's financially best for them. It's equivalent to competition in any market. Same argument is used by the less developed nations when an American multinational company begins their business there and kills all small local players in the market. Then these local companies bring their fake nationalism/patriotism in picture, but with globalization it's bound to happen and whining about it is not going to help.
And your argument for full globalisation doesn't work for me. Should we send all manufacturing to a country in the Far East with questionable labour laws and regulations. I don't feel comfortable with that. Certainly not the level playing field you think it is.
The fact is humans living in a particular generation are far more connected to each other than to our ancestors.
The problem is this is classic utopianism completely divorced from the historical development of our political and economic systems, property rights and the structure of nation states and societies. Tribalism will always perpetuate the concept of the outsider and a natural suspicion, and often with good reason. That's how colonialism happened.
In any time going and being accepted in other societies is 2 different things. In other times we would need technology and resources to travel, account for disease and the reception of native populations. Now we have nation states and rule of law that governs movement of people for travel and emigration. These rules can be improved but there is no alternative that does not impose controls, even if we have post nation states there will still be controls.
What I would like is significantly less restrictions and more 'openness' and good faith policies that acknowleged every human being's right to travel and see the rest of 'their world' unhindered.
However, consider the realities that are encountered. A few examples: Years ago, the European pioneers showed up 'freely' and for all intents destroyed the Native Americans' way of living (and many of their lives). There have been areas with diseases in humans and animals in certain countries that are much less common in others, that could cause disastrous scenarios for livestock, agriculture, and humans if introduced haphazardly. People also showed up 'freely' and kidnapped humans from Africa and sold them as slaves in the US.
If one argues that there should be rules in place to prevent such things from happening, then you essentially need a process by which to discriminate whether 'outsiders', and how many, should be allowed in one's physical space (edit: along with sufficient military force to repel a large group that will attempt to forcefully ignore such a process).
To sum up, 1) If US companies want to import employees, pay them US market rate for their skill-level and what their responsibilities are. 2) Those that exploit the H-1B visa sponsorship should not be given this leverage over their new employees simply because they were able to work in the US because they were sponsored.
do you think that a person has a basic right to live wherever they want?
Think about that and try to scale it - at some point the idea breaks down.
"This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization."
It wasn't very long ago that the idea that it was desirable for borders to one day disappear was common enough that the President could say so on behalf of Earth. I suppose this was also the era where things like the Schengen visa came into existence. I haven't heard many people on any side of the political spectrum express such an idea recently, unfortunately, and I think that's a goal that the left has conceded without entirely realizing it was conceding anything.
Because there are some really big problems in practice. The biggest is wealth inequality at a global scale, there are several billion people in poor countries who would happily move to western nations, likely causing negatives for the poor and rich countries.
The other is that the more me learn about each other the bigger the cultural divide is/seems. The religious right is often derided in the west, but imagine if it was the whole world voting on things like gay marriage and women's rights, animal rights, etc.
Do we expect poor people who take the initiative to move (i.e., not refugees) to remain poor? My impression is that poverty is mostly about opportunity and access to resources, not about personal desire to be poor.
I don't see how social issues would be particularly different from the status quo in the US. If you asked individual states to vote on gay marriage (which was the case until 2015), they'd vote differently. Different states still have wildly different rules on abortion, including places where abortion is effectively inaccessible. And that's not a disaster for the Union. It's even possible for people to move between states en masse and tilt voting one way or another, but that seems never to happen in practice. Even organized efforts with this explicit goal, like the Free State Project, seem to not be succeeding.
Yes, especially the ones with the most means, this risks creating a serious brain from the poorer countries. It also risks wealthy countries becoming too reliant on poor countries paying for education. We already see this to some extent today.
Also, as a species we're very migratory. Huge population movements only really ended when modern day nation states began. Even militaristic empires like Rome couldn't stop them.
> I don't see how social issues would be particularly different from the status quo in the US. If you asked individual states to vote on gay marriage (which was the case until 2015), they'd vote differently
Just how different are they? Some states may be against gay marriage, but is it 51% against or 60%? I doubt there would be states where it's much more than that, but if we took the world as a whole it would be.
No studies I know of though, if anyone has any I'd be interested too.