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> The argument against H1B isn't an argument against immigration or immigrants, it is an argument against corporate welfare.

Which argument against H1Bs are you referring to? Because Steve Bannon's, which may well be the most influential in government policy right now, was embedded against an argument that also specifically called out the overall proportion of immigrants in the US population as a problem. It is, quite directly, an anti-immigrant argument.

Do you have a source for Steve Bannon's argument?

https://www.google.com/amp/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/201...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-explained-his...

FTA: On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.

The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”

“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly.

“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.

_____

edit:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/2/14472404/ste...

A Vox piece provides a more detailed transcript of Bannon's views:

"BANNON: You saw these guest workers. You saw the CIS report yesterday. You saw that, what is it, 61 million? 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? You were with Jeff Sessions for many, many years. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?"

Ugh, thanks.

Beyond the obvious awfulness, the "progressive plutocrats" bit is impressively slimy. I guess he had to name their politics to differentiate them from Trump's record as a plutocrat employing immigrants at (illegally) low wages?

Cited in my other post about it in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598624

> it is an argument against corporate welfare.

Explain. As I see it, none of these companies could hire enough in the US to exist here at all without H-1Bs. They would have to move operations somewhere else if they couldn't bring people here. I've never worked on a team at Google that was more than a third from the US.

Tech companies already have offices around the world since not everyone wants to or can move here. If there were fewer work visas, they would just hire less in the US and more abroad.

>H1Bs aren't allowed to start companies, so this point is moot

People who started the immigration process on H-1B do. They are one of the only ways to effectively come here. Getting a green card can take 8 years for someone from a large country.

"The argument against H1B isn't an argument against immigration or immigrants..."

Whatever the "arguments" may be for or against, the policies that fall out of those arguments have an impact on immigration and hiring practices.

-- So are you saying we should let H1bs start companies and not be reliant on the job?

-- "It isn't surprising that many companies are founded by immigrants or children of immigrants."

50% of the company is not immigrants. 50%! That number is mind blowing. That is much higher than the country as a whole.

-- "startups valued at more than 1 billion dollars? OK..."

?

-- "those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy"

You think immigration is to blame for income inequality?

-- " I have a hard time believing "

This is not an argument. You're just asserting that he is lying without any argument.

> and those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy on the backs of immigrants.

You're very obviously wrong. The employees of Tesla and its suppliers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value from the existence of Tesla. If Tesla survives for 20 years, that tally will be in the multiple hundreds of billions. Elon Musk will end up owning a single digit percentage of that value creation. The same is true about nearly all successful corporations. Of all the financial value created by Google over its existence, Larry & Sergey (and the early Google investors, most of whom liquidated not long after the IPO) will end up having owned a tiny sliver of it.

Uber's drivers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value created by Uber. Over a 20 year span, that number will dwarf what Kalanick and Uber's investors extract. Further, Uber riders will derive a similarly extreme financial value over what Kalanick does, through convenience / time saved etc.

Good luck naming a company that isn't true for.

Oracle

Fantasy. The vast overwhelming majority of corporation valuation is in stockholders' hands. By what measure can employees be seen to benefit from this? They are given a tiny stream of revenue for their labor. That's it. Explain.

I'm pretty sure the argument is that total payroll is way above any dividend payments. It's a good point, but I think it fails to account for the investment of the employees in form of opportunity cost/work.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, total employee compensation in the US in 2016 was $10 trillion. [1]

The market capitalization of listed US companies, according to the World Bank, was $25 trillion. [2]

Assuming average gains of 10% per year in the stock markets, which stockholders would be glad to receive, I think, employees receive 4x as much as stockholders of listed companies.

1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A033RC1A027NBEA

2: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?name_desc...

That means for the 1% to own 99% of everything, they must have bled cash from corporations for a generation, holding their wealth in cash, leaving corporate valuation at a symbolic level?

Or that the majority of people spend everything they earn (or more) and never accumulate wealth.

One definition of poverty is, spending a day's pay on a day's food.

This feels like a straw man, I did not make the argument that founders will retain all of the value. Obvious the economy is complex but corporate profits and executive pay are at all time highs. Employees are capturing less and less of the revenue stream. Now, founders may not retain their ownership but the ownership will remain in the hands of the class of the wealthy.

(I think it is a weak point for me to make, but I'm pretty sure there won't be Uber drivers in 20 years, probably not in 10.)