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Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

> “These students required work authorization to remain in the United States after graduation,” the suit alleges. “In other words, Oracle overwhelmingly hires workers dependent upon Oracle for sponsorship to remain in the United States.”

Tech company abuses H1B or other visas to underpay staff and undercut local labor market? Not surprising.

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The fix to this is give more rights to H1B workers, so they aren't stuck with one employer, rather than not letting them come in the first place.

Why not just have immigrants, who come to the US as free and full citizens, at liberty to decide on a job in response to personal preferences and market signals? If that means going to med school or becoming a florist instead of working in the valley as a dev, that's the market's answer. This whole notion that there's a "shortage" because people won't do this at a price Oracle has decided is reasonable is astonishing to me.

About 1.2 million immigrants come to the US every year. Unfortunately, these free folk don't appear to want to become devs in the valley at the rate Oracle thinks they should, any more than the people born in the US.

The problem is that immigration slots in the US are generally based on family reunification, and don't come close to meeting demand. But a bug can always be a feature. I think tech companies like this. It creates scarcity, which makes their control over one of the few avenues into the US very lucrative. They can use this to ensure that would-be immigrants are not in fact able to participate freely in labor markets, but are beholden to corporations for their right to stay in the US and not be deported.

If H1B workers had the same rights and could demand similar salaries as their local counterparts (while also requiring additional effort and costs to hire) I suspect you would find that firms wouldn't hire very many H1B workers. in effect both policies have the same result.

> If H1B workers had the same rights and could demand similar salaries as their local counterparts (while also requiring additional effort and costs to hire) I suspect you would find that firms wouldn't hire very many H1B workers.

They they shouldn't hire them. The H1-B program isn't meant to allow firms hire foreign workers at low salaries, even though it's abused to do that. It's meant to help fill real skills shortages (and if there's a real shortage, firms should be more than willing to pay a premium to satisfy their unmet demand).

FAANG would hire same or more, my previous employer who treated H1B as slaves would hire fewer. I'd say both of those things are positive developments.

Eh, I suspect they would. Talented people are born throughout the world, and historically, an 'unfair advantage' of the US has been our ability to attract them. Look how many big companies were founded by a 1st or 2nd generation immigrant.

It'd be a great way of letting the market figure out how many work visas we need, in any event, rather than having a number someone plucked out of their ass.

That assumes no local candidate can do the work, there will be some exceptions but why hire someone is more of an administrative hassle with greater costs for no benefit? If the person in question is somehow better than a local candidate by enough of a margin to justify the costs then they probably are priced incorrectly. (IE miss classified as a junior dev as opposed to a senior)

I'm pretty happy to let companies and candidates figure that out. If companies are only hiring foreigners because of "cheap!", greater H1B freedom would curtail that - or possibly just lead the company to open an office in another, cheaper country. I don't think it's really the business of the government to decide who is worthy and who isn't.

The entire point of H1B is to allow companies to hire skilled workers when there's shortage of said skill in the US. If the company suddenly doesn't hire H1B once they're forced to pay them equally, then you know their real motive.

Why? What's wrong with not letting them come in the first place? It would create more opportunities for people already here, and increase demand for education that leads into this career.

> It would create more opportunities for people already here, and increase demand for education that leads into this career.

You're wrong on both counts, because the economy is not a fixed-size pie. Higher education benefits a lot from foreign students paying full price.

This is fairly settled economics.

Oracle only has so many position to offer, if they're going to H1B applicants, they are not going to other people already looking for jobs here. The fairly settled economics of supply and demand say that having all those extra workers will drive wages down. At the very least, let's shut it down for a while and see how things go. It's not like it's a decision fixed in stone.

> At the very least, let's shut it down for a while and see how things go. It's not like it's a decision fixed in stone.

Sure, let's also let some of the passengers fly the plane because hey, they did it in a video game.

Learn about it before you go and try and wreck the system.

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

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-06-16/immigr...

These economists can't even predict the past, and you're throwing around these slogans like they're laws of nature. And slowing down H1B visas will not "wreck the system", that's just hyperbole; it can be restarted any time. Anyway, the resolution of this Oracle case will be revealing. It will be interesting to see how it affects H1B policy.

Actually what I did was link to several articles which include a lot of reference materials, but as the saying goes:

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Here are a few more

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2016/10/02/3-rea...

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/21819/concepts/lump-of-la...

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/02/the_lump_of_lab.htm...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2017/how-immigration-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht...

When CATO and Paul Krugman agree on something, MAYBE it's worth paying attention.

A friend of mine got a copy of the H1B petition that Oracle submitted on his behalf. The document includes a DOL classification of his job and the minimum wage for it and the amount Oracle was offering him.

My understanding is that the law says the wage being offered must at least meet the minimum wage specified by DOL

Have you ever looked at the DoL classifications? Very easy to make a level 3 "software engineer" at 135k a level 1 "programmer" at 65k and everything in between depending on your comfort. And it's all above board and by the law.

Aren't the DOL classifications nationwide with no COL adjustment? $65k is entirely reasonable for entry level work if you're averaging across the entire country, as is $135k for senior level work.

If a company is following a bad law doesn't it make more sense to make the law better than lambaste the company for hand-wavy "abuse?"

BLS (which is what most employers use as supporting wage data. Some employers provide their own sources which is a whole other can of worms) allows you to search by "metropolitan statistical area."

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/faq.aspx

For instance a level 1 "programmer" in SF makes about 70k. A level 4 "Software Developers, Systems Software" makes about 158k...

My point is that the argument that h1b employers must and therefore do pay the prevailing wage is incomplete with out knowing the employees skills and the wage data the employer chose to set as the prevailing wage.

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