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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like free market though doesn't it? Hire the cheapest workforce that can do what you want?

Its not a free market if workers get deported if they quit or are fired.

Not quite IMHO. Free market requires equal conditions for the available workforce pool. Then, the worker is free to set his price. Not the other way around.

It's not free market but H-1B makes the market freer. If you want a truly free market, allow free immigration similar to what the U.S. did with some races before about 1910.

It wasn't free immigration even then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

True, it was racist.

Maybe it's the "selectively free market". Free when it makes things convenient for me (I can hire cheap labor), not free when it makes things inconvenient (I don't compete against cheap labor or other business which might be more competitive here if they could hire the same cheap labor).

Or maybe "we want fully free market for whatever we produce but not for when someone competes for my job"? :)

HN comments usually skew hugely against any kind of regulation and towards "free market will take care of it", except when it comes to jobs and pay it seems.

Yes, that's a good way of putting it. Free market is often a layer of rhetoric on top of arguments for whatever deregulation makes you the most money.

If the comments skew against regulation, I wonder how they skew toward a Communist like me. I don't usually get more than 2 or 3 downvotes, though maybe that's because I don't comment in threads that are very populous.

You can shortcut all of these speculative definitions by acknowledging that the free market doesn't exist.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but if government regulation is involved, then by definition it's NOT A FREE MARKET.

H1B, by design, interferes with the free market in hiring. Even worse, the current implementation clearly stacks the deck in favor of corporations and employers and suppresses wages for the entire tech workforce.

Actually, a free market would be making them residents the moment they begin their new job and allowing the H1B visa to be transferable for free to any company the moment they enter the US.

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