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Comment by throwaway28473 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: if immigrants are willing to do the same job for less money, why do US citizens deserve special treatment and higher wages? Why should companies be forced to not hire in an economically optimal way?

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I think the simpler form of that question is "what's wrong with globalism?", to which there's many answers.

One of the foremost would be that an American company should support the livelihoods of the American people, especially as long as other countries like China wouldn't allow an American to work so easily in the reverse situation. It's just a natural tribal instinct, also, to care more for the welfare of your neighbor than someone across the world.

I'm not commenting on the validity of those arguments, though, as I think a core part of America's success is being unusually open to immigration.

> an American company should support the livelihoods of the American people

And people who are living and working in America are American, they may just not be citizens. Citizenship is itself an arbitrary legal distinction made by the government. The vast majority of citizens received their citizenship by being born in the country rather than by any effort or merit on their part. So the claim becomes "an American company should support the livelihoods of people born within the borders of America," which I think is pretty clearly an arbitrary claim that needs a lot of explanation before I'll accept it as reasonable.

> It's just a natural tribal instinct, also, to care more for the welfare of your neighbor than someone across the world.

We're talking about work visas, which means those people move here and thus become your neighbors, so you'd have to extend that "natural tribal instinct" defense beyond place of residence.

>And people who are living and working in America are American, they may just not be citizens.

Since when? I have literally never heard this. This is a patently absurd claim to make. Just because someone lives here does not mean they are "American", unless you think that all of the inputs to national identity are vapid, meaningless attributes that are completely transferable.

>We're talking about work visas, which means those people move here and thus become your neighbors, so you'd have to extend that "natural tribal instinct" defense beyond place of residence.

Just because someone has moved in next door does not mean they are now "part of your tribe". This has never been true throughout history, and it will not magically become true today regardless of the outcome of this immigration debate.

“American” is the demonym for the USA. Demonyms refer to natives and inhabitants of an area, or more broadly to characteristics of the area. The term is absolutely not used exclusively to refer to citizens, but I’m not interested in a semantic argument, so suffice it to say that my point is simply that citizenship is an arbitrary legal distinction, and in my opinion a horrible place to draw the line between inhabitants of the US that the government should protect and care about and other inhabitants that the government should not protect or care about.

>The term is absolutely not used exclusively to refer to citizens, ...

It absolutely is used exclusively to refer to citizens by an overwhelming majority of people who would use that term. Attempting to split off "citizens" from "natives and inhabitants" is a naked attempt at trying to redefine a word that carries significant meaning to further a specific agenda.

>...citizenship is an arbitrary legal distinction

Says who? It certainly doesn't seem arbitrary to me. There are considerable responsibilities that come with being a citizen. Men have to register for the draft. You can be called for Jury duty. This isn't arbitrary.

>...and other inhabitants that the government should not protect or care about.

I don't think anyone here is arguing the (American) government "should not protect or care" about non-citizens, but that claiming they shouldn't put American citizens first is dubious at best.

Again, I am explicitly not making a semantic argument. I made my point about citizenship clear, and it does not depend on any particular definition of the word “American.”

I am saying that the choice of legal definition of citizenship is arbitrary, not that it is poorly-defined. Legal definitions vary a lot from country to country. Again, I’m saying it’s a bad choice for the threshold at which a government should protect and care about an inhabitant of its jurisdiction.

> claiming they shouldn’t put American citizens first is dubious at best

That’s precisely the claim that I’m saying is extremely dubious. How is it reasonable to say that people who fit the precise definition of citizenship in US law (usually through no choice or action they made) should be prioritized over other inhabitants of the same country? I agree that this is a common belief, and I’m challenging people to justify the belief.

Because without some distinction of who has responsibilities and obligations to the Sovereign state then we can't have any sort of consistency at all in how we govern ourselves. This is a concept that has deep philosophical underpinnings, coming from Aristotle to Plato and elsewhere. To put in bluntly: Citizens have skin in the game in a way "inhabitants" don't. If the social fabric of a nation-state starts to break down, the Citizens are the ones that have to deal with the consequences. The only way we've come up with to denote who has to deal with this is the Citizenship marker.

I'm curious. Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from? It appears to have become quite common over the last couple years. It has to be coming from somewhere.

We're not talking about tourists here. Immigrant workers routinely become married homeowners and parents with extensive personal and professional networks in the US and few links to their countries of origin. My long-tenured H1B coworkers would do no better upon moving to India or China than I would, save for language skills. But that's moot anyway. If the US decides to kick them out and they have to give up their current lives anyway, we'll move them to a third country with deterministic approval for skilled workers, like The Netherlands.

Americans can flee to Canada or any number of other countries which open their doors to us, just as the draft-dodgers did when the "social fabric of the nation-state broke down."

I agree it's weird to blow up citizenship as a concept. We should be talking about making citizenship actually possible for the people who are committed to it, not locked away behind quotas and waiting lists.

> Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from?

My guess is this being a counter reaction to today's "build a wall and screw the others" mentality displayed in politics.

I do understand people are tribal. I also care more about people closer to me. But nowadays our lives are highly interconnected and profit off each other, thus i need those to do well as well. The problem is overcoming the prisoners dilemma of short term tribal benefits vs long term global benefits. The focus on citizens over others seems a obstacle to that.

Especially these days, where those "others" seem to be a great political scapegoat for all the other problems slowly breaking down the fabric of our society.

I don’t understand the “skin in the game” argument at all. How is it worse for a citizen than a non-citizen if the social fabric of the state breaks down? Besides, this seems like a bizarre argument for why citizens should have “first dibs” at jobs. What does that have anything to do with a doomsday scenario?

As for the necessity of making distinctions regarding obligations to the state, how is that relevant, particularly to job prioritization? Other than perhaps military conscription and some tax laws, I’m not aware of many significant differences in obligations between citizens and non-citizens, and especially of any with any relevance to job prioritization.

> Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from?

I haven’t expressed any such belief, nor do I hold it. I just see no good reason for a government to prioritize citizens above non-citizen inhabitants, especially for job availability.

>I don’t understand the “skin in the game” argument at all. How is it worse for a citizen than a non-citizen if the social fabric of the state breaks down?

Because the "inhabitants" can just go home, while the Citizens are stuck here - this is their home.

>Besides, this seems like a bizarre argument for why citizens should have “first dibs” at jobs.

This is literally what a sovereign government is supposed to do: provide for and prioritize the needs of it's citizens. If your contention is that anyone should be able to come here and be afforded the same protections we'll just keep talking past each other (which I think we already are). It sounds like, by extension and since you don't consider "Citizen" a meaningful distinction, that "inhabitants" should have the same voting rights as Citizens. This is a recipe for chaos.

>I just see no good reason for a government to prioritize citizens above non-citizen inhabitants, especially for job availability.

Then you've missed a lot of reading on what the entire purpose of Government even is.

> Because the "inhabitants" can just go home, while the Citizens are stuck here - this is their home.

I highly doubt that most immigrants who come to the US to work are buying and maintaining a second home, and are instead making America their new home.

> This is literally what a sovereign government is supposed to do: provide for and prioritize the needs of it's citizens.

This is precisely the claim I am disputing and looking for some justification. “Most people believe this” is not a very good justification for anything, so I’m challenging people to question why they believe it and why it’s a reasonable desire. “High school textbooks say that governments should do this” is also not a great justification in my opinion.

It's true that accepting immigrants into the tribe is historically unusual, but that's why it's a distinctive and important feature of American national identity.

I think you should go back and review some of that history. Integration into the "American tribe" has been bumpy at best and downright violent at worst. It's often taken actual war to make it happen. The Draft Riots come to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots

I think your assessment is correct on certain level. But the problem is, American companies, especially, IT companies, are making money, big money across the GLOBE. They are literally monopolies in many European countries and contribute neither local employment and tax. Make no mistake, they are THE biggest beneficiaries of globalism. Their product, internet service, is dumping to the whole world, probably except China, without any check and balance. It should not happen, let alone last to date.

In that way, if globalism is to be fixed, internet companies need to be both held accountable in and outside of US. If they pay fair share to hire local people and pay taxes in the country they operate, I believe US won't have this ridiculously high salary for tech workers. In short, tech salary being so abnormally high and jobs concentrated in US is the symptom of globalism. Once fixed, the tech workers salary will be more evenly distributed across the countries, immigration problem will be fixed as a result of that.

As internet industry is plateauing, the technology is becoming ever more commoditized everyday, and the policy makers are finally doing the job to act on it, I am staying optimistic that the redistribution of tech workforce from US to the world will finally happen.

The internet has no boundary, that is just a globalist fantasy. It definitely should have boundary, as the tax and economic activities created alike. GDPR is a very welcome move, and it is taking effects, I would expect more systematic approach coming after it.

True but if the American company has market access to other countries, what's wrong with hiring people from such countries ?

The main problem with globalism is that capital conspires against labor but labor doesn't respond with a unified front.

Companies and money can cross borders, people cannot (generally).

Why is that a problem principally a problem of globalism rather than capitalism?

Yes! I think that the amount of propaganda and cultural infusion of negativity against unions (often slurring unions with communism) is the real cause of the stagnation in worker rights and wages.

Because that is a race to the bottom for Americans. Americans enjoy a very high standard of living, and having to normalize your wage expectation with people from countries with significantly lower standards of living would destroy that. American companies operate according to American laws, and American laws should be setup in the interest of Americans, not as some charity for the world.

As to "deserve", American citizens also paid the taxes that supplied the infrastructure, education system, legal system, police, etc that allows these companies to grow. That aside, America is a sovereign country, and no one but its citizens has any right to expect it to act in their interest.

Fresh college graduates have not paid taxes yet. Every legitimately employed worker pays taxes regardless of citizenship.

> Because that is a race to the bottom for Americans. Americans enjoy a very high standard of living, and having to normalize your wage expectation with people from countries with significantly lower standards of living would destroy that.

Malthus pokes its head.

The workers get paid a fraction of what they produce. Thus the whole society is richer the more workers you have.

Do you really believe americans would be richer if 90% of its population were to be decimated, leaving the survivors with the highest paying jobs?

The potential flip side of this is why aren't visa workers being paid market value. Are they held back so much by employer's biases that they can't reliably compete for a fair salary on the open market?

Mobility is the number one reason. The second one is legal expenses: the employee does not pay them directly, but does so indirectly. A visa application can cost up to 10k, and also you have a 40% chance it doesnt go through, which means its way more expensive.

Also, what is market value and fair? Does the immigrant have a thick accent? A slighlty incompatible culture? A lower quality education?

Because the United States is a sovereign nation founded for the benefit of its citizens and their posterity, not an economic zone for the benefit of the profit of transnational corporations that only exist the way they do because of the legal system, civic institutions, international influence, and military power of the US.

In the long term, Cisco needs to be competitive in the global marketplace to survive. When you force companies like Cisco to pay above market rates, it benefits American workers in the short term but over time the company will lose to e.g. Huawei who are operating in a much more favourable regulatory environment. At that point, America loses in a big way.

Huawei's favorable regulatory environment has less to do with its ability to bring in foreign labor like Cisco and other US tech companies, and more to do with trade barriers set up by China for national security purposes (also, potentially other actions in violation of its membership in the WTO). The US claims Huawei as a national security threat, because the Chinese government could be using their devices to backdoor critical infrastructure. In the same manner, China claims Cisco as a national security threat [1]. The point here is that the spherical cow of all things being rootless, unbound, purely individual and rational economic transactions does not actually exist. Behaving as if it does is a loss for your group as other groups adopt more mercantile policy.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/cisco-chi...

It is for the benefits of americans as a whole to get workers that produce more than what they cost.

Not that I agree with our immigration laws, but have you considered that it's not so much "willing" as it is a choice between poor options ("take this position at less than market rate" or "stay in this country and have little or nothing")? In other words, you are presenting the case as if it's a simple free market at work when in fact there are many other factors making that not the case.

Self-interest. It's (arguably) better for Americans that American companies (over) pay Americans.

It sounds like immigrants are willing to do it because they have no other option. The issue here isn't US citizens deserving special treatment; the issue is closing the loophole which only benefits the companies.

It's not about citizens vs immigrants, it's permanent residents and citizens vs "temporary" workers

Because labor needs more power against capital. Immigrant vs non-immigrant is a shoddy technique, but constraining supply is an effective way to gain negotiating power against capital.

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