Anti-Immigrant Ads Aimed at Tech Workers Are Running on Public Transit

Edit: in case readers assume I'm being racist in some way: I'm a Sri Lankan national.

I've repeatedly argued here on HN that while I support immigration generally, and would like to see a good program for skilled immigration, I am generally opposed to the H1B and other employer sponsored visas.

The reason comes down to basic freedom. Immigrants should be free to choose their career path in response to personal interests and market signals, just as people born in the US. I don't think that tech employers should have the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live and work in the US. I think that is virtually guaranteed to be abused.

I think that this power on the part of tech companies has skewed the market, badly. If I refuse, for instance, to take google's white-board exam on data structures as part of an interview, google can say to me "ok, then we won't hire you", and that's fine. But what if they get to say "ok, then we won't bestow upon you the right to live and work in the US, or grant you a spot in the queue for permanent residency"?

I pretty much believe that if people with the freedom to choose their path in live don't want it to involve becoming a software developer in the valley at the salary offered under the conditions demanded by tech companies, that's the market's answer. I absolutely do not support giving google control over a shadow immigration system where they can coerce would-be immigrants as a condition of living and working in the US.

Beyond that, there have been some pretty horrendous black eyes for the program, such as Epson, Disney, and UCSF's decision to fire tech workers and have them train their replacements brought in on a visa marketed specifically for people with skills you can't find in your existing workforce.

This ad campaign, though, to me, is cringeworthy. Ever see that argument hat allows your opponents to see you the way they want to, attribute to you positions you don't hold, and avoid engaging with the arguments you've raised? This is pretty much it.

For my part I don't even agree with the ad, and I consider myself lucky to work with my H-1B coworkers. But it can be disagreed with minus the pretense that it's equivalent to painting a swastika on the side of a bus.

I can't claim to know Lynn's exact thoughts (Lynn being the person quoted here), but this kind of rhetoric is common among racists/xenophobes.

Diversity (in some respect) is inherently good for innovation. You could have a room full of CS PhDs, and if they all come from similar enough backgrounds then they may all come up with the same solutions to certain problems. "Merit" on its own isn't always enough. Simply having a different background could give someone an edge in such a group when it comes to innovation.

I think skill-based immigration is important and useful, though I do think that there should be some sort of regulation to ensure that (1) immigrants are not exploited (they are paid fair wages equal to what a non-immigrant would be paid for the same job) and (2) some effort was put into recruiting from the US first (because I think US-based companies have a duty to the United States and its citizens, at least to some extent).

[1]: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2010/10/08/anti-immigran...

I think your typical anti H-1B person would have no problem blanket granting all H-1Bs citizenship in order to equip them with the agency required to demand fair wages for themselves, which would level the playing field for everyone.

1.what fraction of the job market H1B workers took away?

2.among these jobs taken, how many were taken by H1B workers that are brought in directly from other countries?

3.how many are people who went through college/master/PhD eduction in the US and followed the rules and got H1B?

It must not be hard for DHS to gather these stats, right? It would be a lot easier to counter arguments/come up with strategies using these statistics.

But it needs to be purely pushing wages up, not down under any circumstance. This guarantees that.

But the IT job market, specifically in Silicon Valley, is an almost pathological failure case.

There have been hundreds of attempts to replicate the unique success of Silicon Valley across the world. Even within the US, where the regulatory environment, market size, and other confounding factors can be ruled out, they have all failed to varying degrees. The not-so-secret secret to SV’s success is now pretty well established to be very similar to an airport’s “meeting point”: It doesn’t actually matter that much where it is, as long as there are enough signs leading you there. And there needs to be just one meeting point, or the concept falls apart pretty quickly.

SV is the meeting point of tech. Throw the best people, some good universities, a lot of capital, and maybe a decade of experiments with LSD in one pot, stirr, wait, and watch it bloom.

Tech immigrants in the Valley are competing for jobs on the micro level. But zoom out just slightly, and they are a necessary ingredient of building the world’s most competitive innovation pressure-cooker.

It may be useful to make the analogy with capital: just like people are competing for jobs, VC firms are competing for deals. Yet you never see attempts by that industry to restrict foreign capital to flow into the Valley, even though they would have all the resources to make their case to legislators.

On a moral level, there is something not quite right about professionals with $60,000+ starting salaries to be antagonistic towards those using education and dedication to seek a better future among them. But even if you reject what some will surely call “SJW virtue signaling”, you should pragmatically choose to advocate for policies that help both you and your presumptive competitors: advocating for some of the practices that are close to indentured servitude will do just that.

But that’s difficult to do, in practice: are you actually advocating for their benefit? Or are you trying to drape so many gold chains around their neck that they’ll sink, I. e. pricing them out of the market? If you are in SV, you have all the possibilities to discuss these questions with those affected by them. Make sure you do: that ability is but one of the perks of living in the world’s best place to find smart people of any background.

However, I'm very much against programs like H1B that are abused to suppress workers' salaries. Industries should not be permitted to bring in foreign workers (who are often not even citizenship track!) whenever the demand for a certain skill increases and salaries go up accordingly, all to bring salaries down to a level that's more "affordable" for those industries. It's wrong and it's anti-worker.

If the paragraph above sounds "racist" or "xenophobic" to you, I'd suggest examining the role you played in the election of Trump. It's not wrong, racist, or unethical for workers to protect their rights and their livelihood. I love diversity and immigrants, but H1B isn't designed for that, it's designed to suppress worker salaries, and also reduces employment opportunities.

My solution to the US immigration problem is to bypass portions of the existing system with a simpler labor law. Federal minimum wage for all workers inside the US is raised to the US Census median household income, divided by 2080 hours of full-time employment ($28.39/hour). If you pay your worker more than that, no one cares where they came from or how they got here. Anyone paid more is, by definition, adding value to the US economy. If the worker pays all applicable taxes on that level of income, about the only thing they can't do is vote.

If you can document and verify that your worker is a US citizen or permanent resident, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 2-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($7.92/hour). Instead of showing your tax receipt to receive government services, you show your government-issued ID.

If you can document and verify that your worker is a non-resident non-citizen, entered legally, with a valid visa, you are exempted from the blanket minimum wage, and can go as low as the US Census poverty threshold for a 6-person household, divided by 2080 hours ($16.23/hour). Instead of showing tax receipts or ID cards for government services, you show your stamped passport.

This largely eliminates the incentives to displace domestic workers with lower-paid foreign workers, for the lower end of the income scale. At the upper end of the scale, worker mobility and competition encourages companies to pay foreign workers the same as domestic workers. Once they are on site, they can easily go to work for anyone else that pays more, so you can't use them to resolve the "labor shortage" that occurs whenever a company pays too little for the work.

To round it all out, you put an outflow duty on remittances, transfers, and cash posted or hand-carried out of the country, to encourage immigrants to bring their family with them, and stay (and spend) in the US, rather than sending their earnings back "home". To this end, a working immigrant can sponsor a number of nonworking immigrants commensurate with their income, and maybe even earn a subsidy for converting some of those sponsored individuals to workers. "Chain migration" is what we want, economically. It is better for the money to stay close, and circulate locally. Ideally, all the best and brightest in the world decide to come work in the US, they bring their closest dependents, and spend all their earnings on local businesses. In doing so, they provide jobs for domestic workers, because most low-skilled service businesses cannot afford to pay the premium for foreign low-skilled workers until those wages are bid up by an actual shortage in available workers.

And the best part is that you no longer need to police millions of people. Police only tens of thousands of businesses, and allow economic forces to take care of most deportations and illegal entries. The US could go back to its golden age of immigration, where the major motivators were whether the immigrants could support themselves, and whether they were carrying any contagious diseases. People that can support themselves by working will support their communities by spending.

Is this true? It is a very important point to say the least.

> "It is important for our riders to know the ads contradict our values,” a transit spokesperson wrote via email.

Why is the transit system making political statements? What do "values" have to do with it? Have they disproved the claim(s) above, or not?

> San Francisco’s BART took a strong stance on immigration issues. Its board of directors passed a safe transit policy in June 2017, which banned federal agents from questioning riders, and stated its “commitment to stand together with the people of the Bay Area in opposing hate, violence, and acts of intolerance committed against our riding community and employees.”

Following immigration law equals hate/violence? Or perhaps agents were overstepping their authority? They need to get their story straight because it is hard to understand as a non-expert on the subject. Perhaps just poor reporting.