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Comment by Trundle | Hacker News Reader

You contributing to supply would still suppress wages though no?

As an American citizen formerly at Google - no, not really.

The supply of engineers that can pass Google's slightly ridiculous hiring bar is still fairly small, and Google tends to take whoever meets it regardless of how many people it has already hired. It's not like they're short on cash, after all, and there was plenty of work to go around while I was there.

Anti-poaching agreements, proprietary tech stacks that are useless outside of Google, a broad prohibition on moonlighting, standardized salary bands (which actually blunt the impact of immigration on wages), and a tendency to offer non-monetary perks like free food and private Cirque du Soleil shows over more cash - those depress wages. Immigrant coworkers are not a significant concern.

There are tons of studies that show that high-skilled immigrants create more jobs than they occupy and overall boost a region's economy, but all of those are conveniently ignored whenever someone wants to make a point. Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without the H-1B visa.

Yes, there are companies that abuse visas and pay low wages etc. Why not focus on improving enforcement rather than rant about immigrants?

This is true. High skilled are desired and add to the economy; unfortunately, in an attempt to ride on the coattails of legal immigrants, supporters of illegal immigration purposefully conflate the two and dilute the former's repute, unfortunately.

Also last quarter, 65% of Apple's revenue was from outside America. And, yet, looking at their total H1B numbers, only about 9% of their employees are H1B holders.

If American companies earn money from the rest of the world, is it really that unfair that they hire a small percent of international people to work at their company?

1) https://www.immihelp.com/employer/APPLE+INC/205136/applicati...

2) https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/02/apple-reports-first-q...

The 9% only includes H-1B folks who are directly employed by Apple.

Apple also has hundreds of contractors employed by Tata, Infosys etc on H-1B's, in Apple's internal IT department ("IS&T"). These people are paid less than the 9% of people above, and would not count towards Apple's own H-1B numbers.

Like how many?

3000 if I remember right

40% of Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrant families. A large number of jobs and companies wouldn't exist today without work immigration.

One major issue you're going to have with studies like this is the same as with studies on any social or economic issue - there's room for 'massaging' the data to fit any narrative. It's the same thing with things like minimum wage. In Seattle after the city increased the minimum wage they commissioned an independent study from the University of Washington study to try to assess the overall results. The study indicated that they'd lost ~5,000 jobs and the changes were hurting lower income workers resulting in fewer hours and an overall loss of $125 per month per worker. So they canned that study which was supposed to run for 5 years, and commissioned an individual well known for evangelizing wage increases to carry out a new study. There's a writeup on WaPo here [1] about that. The Michael Reich individual they quote, in that article is the person who was commissioned to carry out his study. And he managed to report that wages are up and there was no increase in unemployment.

H1-B (and immigration in general) is not only a fairly hot political topic, but also one where there an immense number of massive corporations that benefit substantially from the system. There have been an large number of reports, including government reports during the former administration, indicating a substantial depression of wages due to H1-B visas. [2] I hate to cite Wiki, but really - there are a ton of reports there and me giving dozens of links in this post is less reasonable than just linking Wiki there.

So on this issue, your phrasing is already hinting at some angling and I'm not sure you even realize it! In the US there are a huge number of STEM educated individuals who are not working in STEM. Certainly many of them are doing so voluntarily, but it's equally certain many of them are doing so involuntary. Filling these jobs domestically would of course create at least as many jobs, but on top of those created jobs it would also allow citizens to also occupy the 'creating' jobs, all without the wage depression of H1-Bs.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/new-s...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Wage_depression

Short term may be. Long term companies like Google will be forced to expand where high skill talent is, so you loose jobs and slightly long term, you run the risk of loosing the entire silicon valley. Have you seen Detroit ? Imagine San Francisco like that.

Wealth creation is not a zero sum game, nice try

Why are people unlucky enough to be born in the wrong part of the world less entitled to "suppress wages" compared to the hordes of Americans entering the field?

Why is there no bike lane between me and work?

I guess I should just not work for a living, then. I'm hoping that people making such an observation have native American ancestry.

Sure you can. But you have to go back first.

This is an extremely aggressive and rude attitude. How do people end up hating other people this much?

Normally we'd ban a new account for posting this way. Fortunately your previous comment was a fine one for HN, so we won't do that this time. But if you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.

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