Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.
We need foreign low skilled workers and they want to work, but we need to regulate that workforce so they don't undercut our native low-skills workforce by being unregulated and overwhelming the workforce with cheap unregulated labor.
If they reliably can’t find work when here illegally, then there’s less incentive to be here illegally.
> "ABOUT E-VERIFY"
> "E-Verify is a web-based system that allows enrolled employers to confirm the eligibility of their employees to work in the United States. E-Verify employers verify the identity and employment eligibility of newly hired employees by electronically matching information provided by employees on the Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, against records available to the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."
Legislators and govt executives look the other way in order to preserve competitive agriculture.
IE, if you get "tricked" via a stolen SSN, then the business gets punished regardless.
That ship sailed some time ago to China or anywhere there is a sweatshop.
Some of these leafy green things are gonna get automated anyway.
In 2012, there were 3.2 million farmers,[19] ranchers and other agricultural managers and an estimated 757,900 agricultural workers were legally employed in the US. Animal breeders accounted for 11,500 of those workers with the rest categorized as miscellaneous agricultural workers. The median pay was $9.12 per hour or $18,970 per year.[20]
From 1999–2009, roughly 50% of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. were noncitizens working without legal authorization.[23] Large farms rely on new immigrants (such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, and Mexican) that do not have many other options to work for extremely low wages. The legal status of the worker has been shown to impact the wage received for a job. An agricultural worker with no documentation earns an average of 15% less than one with amnesty or green card.
There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benefit that makes it all worth it: being able to live in the US. Without that incentive, it's going to be really tough.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
Annual subsidies to US farmers is of the order of $25B+ per year. This includes non-tariff barriers such as price supports for sugar, import barriers and quotas such as on lamb and beef, export supports, crop insurance and other benefits.
The DoA has been doing this for 75+ years and the majority of farms are now corporate-owned. The majority of these taxpayer subsidies are directed straight into the hands of corporate shareholders.
Redistribution from the many to the wealthy few isn't socialist redistribution.
There is no such thing as “unregulated workers”, just employers that don't obey the regulations applicable to their workers.
In the middle of the US, there are lots of (white) Americans that work in these jobs. Many are very proud of their profession.
Next time you want to go on a trip to "expand your horizons", go to a podunk town in a fly-over state and get to know your fellow Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agricultural_universit...
And its not just the owners, it goes right down to a lot of the year round labor.
The American people you see doing this stuff are by-and-large the family of the land owner or teenagers whose backs are still functional (and have school duties during the off-season).
If you have a family, then you're going to need either a primary job, or an RV to move around. The only people making money farming are the land owners, and even then...
It's really just about the bottom line. Exploiting people is cheap. Paying or treating people properly is expensive. That's it. Tim Cook or your California farmer don't give a flying fuck about these people.
It's just about the $$$. Immigrants work hard for cheap.
This is not true. Farming has always relied on exploited labor in some form. Once easily exploited labor disappears with no machinery to replace them, so too does an agricultural industry. Lots of developed European nations are facing this exact problem.
Paying people proper wages will either cause food to get massively more expensive, or will migrate production to crops that are more readily harvested by machines. So grains will still be dirt cheap, but meat and vegetables will be very expensive.
I personally lack a romantic attachment to these industries, but in general people seem fairly happy to support something like the dairy industry.
Do you support slave labor?
If you want to support an industry, you subsidize it, you don't import workers to work for breadcrumbs in terrible conditions.
What data supports this frequently touted conservative notion? There could be other factors. Like for e.g. tomatoes can only be sold at $2/lb before they run into competition from imported tomatoes. So the max anyone can afford to pay is really $X/hr. If they could only find someone at $2*X/hour, they would either not farm tomatoes or invest in machinery.
They should also work on a visa system for seasonal (low-skill) workers
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia.
Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.
That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.
My point was that the large companies which have the best data, and whole teams of people doing the math on this issue, have consistently fought to preserve the old ways of doing it and since they're for-profit corporations it seems unlikely that they're doing this for any reason other than the econ 101 explanation that they profit from workers who can't negotiate as well.
Is this supported by data?
If it isn't, this is just thinly veiled parroting of propaganda.
I'm not against any color but blindly saying a star trek bar is better than a more homogeneous bar is just parroting
Also: > I’m not against any color but...
lol.
I am all for diversity of ideas and background. Something which would make a companies more productive at the same wage.
I also believe that no race is superior to another- everybody has different goals. And so long as one doens't try and interfere in another's society, the world would be a very smooth place.
Either way, why use a proxy and not the real thing: idea diversity. Then what you propose is laziness at best.
Also, what do you mean by right direction? Diversity of ideas means diversity of goals right?
Source: personal experience
What you're saying is "at the price my company is willing to pay, we're unable to find qualified candidates." That means you can either pay more to attract qualified candidates, or do without.
Alternatively, we can raise the supply curve, which has the affect of lowering wages, and might allow your company to attract talent without paying more.
My company pays at least market rate and can afford to go higher if the candidate negotiates, so I don't think that's the issue. At least, we never had a candidate refuse a position due to money concerns. The skills we look for are not that specialized either, it's not like I'm looking for ML PhD's with a background in medicine.
Anecdotally, it just feels like almost everyone who is already good, is already happily employed. So either we need to head-hunt candidates, hope to coincidentally catch them while they're between jobs, or hire very junior candidates and train them up.
Of course, the issue might also be just that we need better recruiters to populate the candidate pool :)
This is wrong on so many levels.
1. "Qualified" supply means experience. That means you arent hiring 22yos working at subsistence salaries shacking up with three buddies in a double-bunk apartment. It means you have to pay a "qualified person salary." I'm a qualified person, I have 18yrs experience at top firms. But guess what...175k/yr in SF/SV doesnt cut it, it gets you a 1br apt. You cant raise 2 kids in a 1br apartment. Where would the kids sleep? in the bathroom? on the dining table? Also, option compensation doesnt count, as I cant pay rent with options.
2. If you want "qualified talent" perhaps SF/SV would not age discriminate. But they do. They want young people willing to earn so little they are forced into having 3 roommates.
3. There are tons of qualified workers. Most of us dont want to move to SF/SV because the prevailing wage is too low. Pay the right wage (i.e., perhaps something that one can raise a family on) and your "shortage will magically disappear.
>> Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand.
I think what this typically means is: we're looking for talented developers willing to earn so littler they are forced to bunk with multiple roommates and/or live in roach infested apartments, something only desperate overseas workers are willing to do.
here for some actual facts: https://archives.cjr.org/reports/what_scientist_shortage.php
maybe tell them about triplebyte
Where are they looking? Have you shown them "Who's hiring" HN threads?
Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies. BLS estimates that the number of employed software engineers will go up 24% next year, that’s insane.
Also, I’m not seeing this supposed depression in salaries. The median salary for a software engineer is 103k a year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/.... That number has been growing expontially in the last decade and a half.
So there’s data that shows that engineers are getting hired more and paid more than ever before. I can’t find any to prove that H1Bs are dragging down salaries.
Why is this? This sounds like a huge U.S. talent development problem. How does this visa change help to fix this issue?
>I can’t find any to prove that H1Bs are dragging down salaries.
The very fact that the number of employed software engineers is expected to go up by 24% in a single year is the evidence you're looking for that there is a massive supply distortion in the labor market.
It doesn’t, I’m against it.
> The very fact that the number of employed software engineers is expected to go up by 24% in a single year is the evidence you're looking for that there is a massive supply distortion in the labor market.
Yes... because the demand for software engineers is increasing every year and can’t keep up with supply.
yes...the very definition of a labor distortion that drives down wages.
https://archives.cjr.org/reports/what_scientist_shortage.php
By "not enough engineers" I'm assuming you mean not enough engineers willing to work for so little they are forced to bunk with 3 roommates?
I know plenty of engineers. Most dont want to work as SWEs because the median salary barely affords a studio apartment, especially after California taxes.
Also, what about the 40+yr olds who are oddly purged from the workforce regularly. If there were a shortage, elderly workers would be retained, not purged in favor of cheaper, younger workers.
Tons of engineers go into consulting, real estate, finance, etc because engineers simply dont make enough, especially given the SF/SV center-of-gravity of jobs. There isnt some magical shortage of workers. There is a shortage of workers willing to work for near subsistence wages [in SF/SV prices]
That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unlikely anybody can be more specific than "increased labor supply decreases wages".
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
And there are more serious problems with H1B than just lowering salaries. It's very difficult for H1B workers to switch jobs once they're here, and employers (especially contracting shops) use that as leverage against them.
And don't even get me started on H2B workers, who often make minimum wage, have to live in employee housing, and have even less recourse than H1B workers because they make far less money.
We need better immigration policies, and I don't think tying immigration status to job status is the best way forward.
We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
they're not...
> We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
We can't produce enough internally, so we do.
You can make the argument that many of those with degrees aren't as skilled as companies would like, and in turn they seek employees from abroad, but it's blatently false that the US isn't graduating enough engineers to meet demand.
WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro...
Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/
Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
There's huge age discrimination at work in the tech industry, and older, very qualified workers struggle to find good jobs because tech employers prefer young and naive serfs.
https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/reforming-h-1b-a...
A link to a 2000 profile in Salon on him: https://web.archive.org/web/20150307053811/http://www.salon....
I'd also add that BLS data suggests that this induced demand isn't true. As the projected employment growth for engineers between 2016 and 2026 is 600,000 where there are around 60,000 people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US and even more getting masters or doing bootcamps.
And the projections are for 300k, not 600: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.h....
where are you getting your data from?
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Additionally, you can see what degrees people are graduating with here https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37
So yes my numbers are correct if not lower than they should be for both.
WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro...
Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/
Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
I particularly appreciate the part where you passively-aggressively calle me a xenophobe not knowing I'm an immigrant too. Classy move.
"We compare winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on U.S. firms, and to approved U.S. patents. Winning additional H-1B visas causes at most a moderate increase in firms’ overall employment, and these H-1Bs therefore substantially crowd out firms’ employment of other workers. Additional H-1Bs generally have insignificant and at most modest effects on firms’ patenting and use of the research and experimentation tax credit. There is some evidence that additional H-1Bs lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits."
Perhaps the need for immigration is great, because hiring companies lack trust in the competence of the available pool of domestic candidates.
L-1? Not much good for US companies that want to hire at the US HQ locations.
O-1? Even the average master's degree holder doesn't qualify for this. Also, not eligible for a green card.
TN? Only really applicable to Canadians, not eligible for a green card.
Waiting for a green card outside the country? De facto discriminatory against Chinese & Indian applicants, the two biggest pools of high tech workers because the green card queue times are insanely long.
Americans don't seem to realize that it's really, really hard to get into the country legally to work and the H1-B is one of the few avenues to get a green card for a skilled worker.
It is not true, though, in most of the rest of the US. Visa holders make close to competitive wages at higher expenses to employers due to the costs of visa sponsorship. I personally know a senior principle engineer at one of the large .coms who has been living and working in the US for almost 15 years and has not bothered to achieve citizenship, because he is doing very well even working under a visa.
So they take a stab at it once more by investing in a masters degree in US which increases their H1B lottery chances. I am not generalizing all the masters degree holders but a major chunk of them.
Source: https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm
Goto Disclosure Tab & Download the H-1B_FY2018.xlsx excel. Filter NJ state and Employer City as Edison.
If there was no market for Masters H1B with fake experiences on their resumes, these thriving bodyshops wont exist.
A tiny chunk of them may do this, by going to so shady US universities. But that's a very small %age
The majority? How did you get that data? Sounds like proper BS to me. Campus recruitment in India is a joke. There's nothing to "crack" there. How do you explain the same majority completing their graduate studies in the US (much harder than in India) and getting jobs in the US (also much harder than in India)?
Source: https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm
Goto Disclosure Tab & Download the H-1B_FY2018.xlsx excel. Filter NJ state and Employer City as Edison.
I did not say that and this was not your original assertion.
> How do you explain all those thriving body shops in the US ? Just how many of them are in New Jersey alone. See the LCA filings data from DOL.
This still does not explain your claims of:
1. Those people not being able to "crack" campus recruitment of Indian companies.
2. Those people actually being the majority who come to get a Master's degree. I saw your doc and filtered exactly like you said. I didn't see a "majority" number. Perhaps you are using that term very casually?
And except for Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chili and Uruguay, the rest aren’t what one would think of as “sought after”, otherwise you’d have other people trying to take advantage of their citizenship policies.
Said countries have even laxes immigration policies, similar proportions of immigrant populations, the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that you're spouting, and yet it's just not really the problem that it's made out to be at all.
Chile is also cracking down on illegal entries now that they’re more prevalent. No country will have unrestricted immigration, otherwise why not form a union with neighbors?
Also my claim wasn’t false as you suggested.
Also, I’m for immigration where we have proven needs. I don’t agree with flooding the market and depressing wages for average workers. PhDs, sure, rare skills, sure.
Or, let’s put it this way, would you be in favor we took Japan’s immigration system part and parcel and implemented it as they have?
The United States puts American workers at a unique disadvantage to immigrants because there isn't much of a social safety net. It ends up a race to the bottom for cheaper disposable labor.
See: The European Union
Inb4 "Yeah, but they have immigration control," yes, they do but upon entering and leaving the Schengen; otherwise, it's based on agreements with other countries.
It's why you can travel to Europe for up to 90 days on only a "visitor" visa (which is, really, just an entry stamp).
...but to say that countries don't trust their neighbours have strict border control between themselves (and haven't formed a union with their neighbours) pretty much negates the realities of the Eastern hemisphere.
I’m not pro jus soli but to characterize birth tourism as a big problem is crazy. A conservative think tank estimated it at 40,000 births per year out of 4.3 million (0.9%) — the average delivery costs $32,000 for an economic benefit of $1.28B per year. Then those poor kids are going to have to pay US income taxes for the rest of their natural lives no matter where they live. We can expect the first 18 years to be abroad since their parents don’t get citizenship and the US has effectively zero social safety net anyways. What’s the big deal?
So, no, we still would allow millions of legal immigrants in. We’d just crack down on unregulated immigrants.
And by no stretch of imagination do they need to wait for 27 long years!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/20/th...
I am not going to read any newspaper article when I have a living proof in my family.
And it wasn’t easy other. They had to wait 18 years before they got naturalized.
You even missed out on the basic fact that I am talking about legal immigration and "anchor baby" is a term used pejoratively in reference to immigrants who have dubious intentions. H1B is for highly skilled workers who have proved their mettle even before immigrating.
And for your kind information, what you call "single anecdote" is called "precedence" in legal terms and carries huge weight in future course of action
No, they can’t - not in anything resembling a reasonable timeframe. The only benefit they gain is the ability to have their child sponsor them once they are adults. It takes 18 years to become an adult, 1 year to petition for a green card and 5 years to get citizenship for a bare minimum of 24 years. I said 27 because I used 21 years of age to calculate. That’s not a benefit really, taking into account the fact the children have to pay taxes for that whole period while living abroad. Then the child has to want to live in the US, move there and sponsor their parents at their sole discretion.
The idea parents get massive benefits for having a child in the US is an “anchor baby” in colloquial terms, pejorative or not. It applies colloquially to legal and illegal immigrants - and so does the family reunification visa process. The idea of an anchor baby is a myth.
Your single anecdote is not outweighed by facts, it’s not precedent unless it happened in court (the whole immigration process is almost entirely discretionary and capricious, you can be denied or delayed for any reason, and you have almost zero recourse because you as a foreigner have no right to immigrate to the US except by asylum — and no amount of “my parents got in” is going to change the mind of a consular officer or immigration judge). You didn’t read the article I sent you, you bragged about it, and you’re still wrong.
I don’t respond to people who make preposterous assumptions about others. Your entire answer is laughable at best and I won’t dignify such mediocrity with my reply.
You have a good day, Sir!
Do you even peruse the rejoinder's properly?
IMO jus soli doesn’t make sense as your place of birth doesn’t make you intrinsically any more or less of a given nationality. Living somewhere does, being part of a society does, etc. I’d prefer birthright permanent residency for instance - you can claim PR any time, and if you live in the country for 3/5 years you can petition for citizenship like anyone else.
If it works it's normal. Just in a different sense.
Birthing children is no easy path to citizenship, you have to be here, birth your child for the low average price of $32,000 then your child gets citizenship — not you - and has to wait until they’re an adult so they can sponsor you for a green card which is when your 5 year clock starts, so sure, squeeze out a baby who moves to America and a mere 27 years later, problem solved. The whole interim period paying US taxes - and then for the rest of their natural lives - no matter where on earth they live. EASY.
I’m not pro jus soli for what it’s worth, but your arguments are just flat out wrong.
If the US Dept Of Labor and/or the local state department are incorrectly measuring a) the local wage for the position and/or b) whether or not the company has made a good faith effort to find a local employee and failed (both conditions of an H1B position), then that is a failure of regulation, not of the concept of the visa itself.
https://www.glassdoor.com/research/h1b-workers/
> Another reason we shouldn’t be surprised that H1B workers are paid about the same as U.S. workers is because the law requires it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi...
If the government was setting up a program to fund boot camps for ERP and other big boring tech like what is done in India and elsewhere, that would be different. But we’re not doing that.
Yeah, obviously. You prefer we discriminate based on college education. Why? Don’t people without masters degrees deserve equal treatment? Equal opportunity?
> The country shouldn’t take in for employment a bunch of people it doesn’t need should it?
The country isn’t a person. If a company wants to hire someone, then obviously they do “need” them.
I don’t necessarily believe caps are valuable on immigration but given that we’re working within a framework where they’re a thing, shouldn’t we prioritize on skill instead of using a lottery - assuming there’s more interest and companies willing to hire than slots?
Why? It's not a prioritization based on employer needs or what employers want. Obviously if one has a degree they enjoy being a protected class, and if they don't have a degree they don't like being discriminated against. At least a lottery gave equal opportunity.
I also want to point out that this policy is not what companies want. They want the removal of sponsorship requirements and quotas. They generally want to be free to hire who they want.
From Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. Let me tell you something. America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would not be a Silicon Valley without the H1B. [...] You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. [...]"
the rest of the video is pretty good too. I recommend watching it.
This has been debunked so many times. Even if you take the data at face value, this statement cannot be backed up. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/us-students-are-laggi...
Yes, we are behind a lot of countries. A lot of (VERY) small and (VERY) wealthy European countries for the most part, but also a handful of small Asian countries. But wait, we are ahead of Sweden in science? Is Sweden in the middle of some kind of crisis in their inability to educate their children? What about Norway and Denmark? What about Belgium and Austria and France? They all score about the same as the US in science, are they producing a "generation of dummy"?
What about this: https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-the-results-of-pisa-student-a...
If you don't just include the rich countries, Europe is doing terribly compared to the US. Of course when the US average is calculated, they don't just take the scores from the rich states separately.
That number sounded really high to me and I went looking for information to refute it. Turns out 50% may be a rather modest estimate today:
Foreign Students and Graduate STEM Enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
> The report found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are.
The Disappearing American Grad Student https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
> The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.
Maybe getting a PhD in the US is a huge waste of time because there's fierce competition for most academic jobs and scarce employment prospects?