Comment by ahnus6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahnus6 | Hacker News Reader

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They can't compete? How can they not compete? The link you're showing me shows average wages for the H1-B group near $80k for all occupations. That's well above the median income for Texas, and well well above the poverty line.

So if this large pool of workers in the US can't "compete" what are they doing? Refusing to work and therefore making $0 rather than making $98k? That doesn't make sense. You seem to be implying these workers are displaced into other industries. These industries must clearly pay into the six figures, otherwise these workers are still better off competing with their h1-b friends. What industry are all these displaced American software engineers pushed into, pray tell?

Your link doesn't prove shit about market wage levels, as often H1-B offers are skewed towards more entry level positions, so of course the H1-B wage of all workers in broad job category may be lower than all native workers of all experience levels.

I'm not going to argue the point of whether H1-B's are offered lower pay. As I said, that merely lowers the market price of labor where the H1-Bs are allowed. If the companies were really saving money they could use the mere fact that they have access to H1-B workers and offer that pay level to natives. It would be cheaper and easier.

Please explain to me, if there is such a large pool of qualified workers, why they don't work for the reduced H1-B wages that you claim are setting the market rate. What is their better negotiated alternative?

>The link you're showing me shows average wages for the H1-B group near $80k for all occupations.

You might not understand how things work. The wages are representative of what the staffing firms who contract out the labor charge for the H1B employee. They make substantially less than $80k even though that's the rate a company pays to avoid hiring a US employee.

that doesn't change the economics at all. the money paid to the worker through a middle-man has no bearing on the labor market as seen by the company and their bottom-line. You could send your paycheck into the incinerator every month... it makes no difference.

as you say the $80k is the rate to avoid hiring a US employee. maybe that's lower than what it would be with no h1-b, but then what are these displaced american workers doing for more than $80k?

>what are these displaced american workers doing for more than $80k?

Being unemployed and making 0k. Avoiding hiring US employees for over $80k doesn't mean they're hiring those who accept below $80k. They're not being considered for those jobs at all in the first place. I assure you there are legions of very smart lawyers who work very hard on the process for employers - I would know, I've prepared the petitions, and the sham job postings with intentionally obscure and unnecessary skill requirements placed in print newspapers when the H-1B worker was our client and already chosen for the job ahead of time. There is often no intention to consider American workers. There are entire IT departments at companies like Disney, for instance, that are de-facto off limits to American workers. H-1B workers are very attractive to employers not just for the low wages, but also for the fact that they're dependent on the particular company sponsoring them and will often stick around forever and endure the shitty wages, hours, and work environment.

The lack of perspective and basic reasoning on this is staggering.

> shitty wages, hours, and work environment.

A "shitty" wage is better than being unemployed and making 0k. Perhaps not if we were talking about at or near minimum wage. But we're not. We're talking nearly double the median income of the location in question and well beyond the poverty line.

If there were really this untapped market of native talent to replace H1-B imports, that are on average making $80k (actually $100k for tech), then that immense pool of workers can settle for $70k, $60k, $50k, $40k, $30k... and why wouldn't these companies take them at some low price between $100k and minimum wage? Why would these companies insist on hiring H1-Bs at a $100k a head if there was this large population of native, qualified, unemployed workers making $0 that would be lucky to get a measly $40k (to throw a number on it).

"Legions of smart lawyers" also sounds expensive. You don't need a legion of smart lawyers to hire from this large, unemployed, qualified, bonafide American talent pool that you insist exists.

The mental gymnastics H1-B paranoiacs go through does not fail to impress. During the first dot-com bust and post-recession at least it had a whiff of plausibility. But tech employment is at all time highs, it's beyond ludicrous.

And another thing that doesn't add up, the average for non H1-Bs in that pdf was close to $200k. And the unemployment rate in Texas is lower than the national average which is already low. In tech heavy cities like Austin it is even lower (near 2%!). So I have seen no strong evidence that H1-Bs are pushing American tech workers out of the middle class, the opposite in fact.

If you really know someone in tech that is unemployed and making nothing, then either they are not qualified or they have some other limitation making them unemployable. There are plenty of job listings at all levels across the US that are not open to H1-B sponsorship and some that are open just to US citizens (and do not require an existing clearance). Scapegoating H1-B programs in this economy isn't even offensive, it's just sad.

I'm staggered that you accuse me of lack of perspective and basic reasoning, then posted this. Why pretend as if I wasn't talking about a shitty wage relative to the market rate of the skills in question?

Most tech workers wouldn't take a $40k job because they realize that's a gross undervaluing of their skillsets. It's a much smarter decision to continue applying and hope somebody recognizes your ability and pays you what your labor is worth, rather than tie up your schedule and possibly relocate to work the low-paying job. You can ask these bad-faith questions all you want, and they might be helpful for confusing and misleading people online, but I assure you, employers have thought about them more than you, and have long since found their answer.

It seems to me that you're in outright denial about companies getting cheaper labor through the H-1B system. Instead of asking these "if companies really want to save money, why don't they just x" questions, I'd ask you why Disney DID lay off hundreds of IT workers at a time and had them train their H-1B replacements who often lacked the same skill level as their predecessors if it wasn't a significant cost savings? These aren't allegations, they're reality. What was found in court wasn't that Disney isn't guilty of replacing workers, it's that they did do it and it's perfectly legal! Wages have dropped, many Americans have switched to other professions they wouldn't have otherwise, and profits for IT firms have gone through the roof due to the H-1B program. Try reading rather than theorizing all by yourself. https://www.nber.org/chapters/c13842.pdf And go tell the Disney workers they didn't really lose their jobs.

I don't normally post opinion pieces, but this is very devastating and well-researched: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/07/27/bill-gates...

Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a "shortage" of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislation that, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.

As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages.

...

If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies tried to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.

From your own citation: "Counterfactual simulations based on our model suggest that immigration increased the overall welfare of US natives, and raised workers’ incomes by 0.2% to 0.3%."

So they found that H-1B, etc increased native worker incomes overall.

So they mentioned some distributional issues ... "wages for [high-skilled] US computer scientists would have been 2.6% to 5.1% higher in 2001"

Oh that kind of blows a little bit. But let's put this in perspective. 2.6%-5.1% higher in 2001 would be the difference between 100k and 103-105k. Sure I would love to have had that dough... but this 1) fails to demonstrate a substantial savings to firms 2) completely burns your argument workers making $0k.. they're doing quite fucking well. (100k was close to the average for mid-level software engineers in my neighborhood in 2001). This is not standard of living altering stuff.

And overall the economy did better with immigration.

> Most tech workers wouldn't take a $40k job because they realize that's a gross undervaluing of their skillsets.

What do you define as "undervaluing?" What sets this number? What makes $80k a fair wage vs $40k? Well the ultimate is the market. It is absolutely true that the mere act of bringing in more labor via H-1B will lower wages. I will not dispute that, that's basic microecon.

But how do you determine what your "labor is worth?" Because your labor is worth whatever that market price is, there is no "hope" to it. If a population is refusing to work for offers of $40k, because that "undervalues" their skills then that implies that the market has jobs that are correctly greater valued. If this were not the case then these people should just stop and take the $40k job, why continue applying for something that doesn't exist?

Of course not everything is smooth. The lag in filling these positions is what contributes to frictional unemployment. This is a good chunk of what makes up the unemployment figures. The fact remains, and what you just ignored... the unemployment rate in all industries, but especially IT and most engineering disciplines is the lowest it has been in years.

The Disney issue ultimately displaced not much more than 100 workers which is less than 0.2% of their tech and IT workforce, if that is the worst of the "bad news", it doesn't diminish my point.

Again, there is no disputing that a foreign worker program will lower certain wages in the short-term, possibly longer. There is plenty of evidence that this has not affected employment on higher skilled jobs.

The other weird thing that is always mentioned by H-1B foes is how shitty these Indian workers with no experience are (it was mentioned multiple times in the article you linked). So how does that square? If these workers are truly that crap, then why would anyone be surprised that Disney or anyone would want to get rid of expensive workers that can be replaced by these crap workers. Why should Disney or anyone pay top dollar for someone that can be replaced with the human equivalent of a shell script. If these crap workers really don't work out (and yes this has happened), well then the market isn't really harmed then is it?

What about automation and consolidation of services. Both have had tremendous effects on the IT industry. There were well paying jobs for "Computer Operators" a few short years ago.. now there are literally a handful and they pay barely above minimum wage. The influx of H-1B holders had little to do with this.

Finally, I'm not going to argue this, this is just a question: What do you feel gives you more entitlement to a job that an immigrant will willingly bring themselves over here and do for less?

> You don't need a legion of smart lawyers to hire from this large, unemployed, qualified, bonafide American talent pool

true, but I think the point is that the lawyer fees are less than the extra costs and risks associated with hiring from the existing pool of local US workers (i.e. losses from employees who freely leave the company after a short period, transfer knowledge to competitors, shop around for higher salaries, and confidently exercise the fuller collection of employee rights which H1Bs may lack)

> If you really know someone in tech that is unemployed and making nothing, then either they are not qualified or they have some other limitation making them unemployable.

That's certainly one interpretation of the matter. Here's another: If the labor pool lacked exogenous labor inputs, it is possible (though far from guaranteed) that corporations would be willing to use their resources to hire more from the existing pool of US candidates and then train them and/or help them to overcome other limitations.

> There are entire IT departments at companies like Disney, for instance, that are de-facto off limits to American workers.

what I hear from people who work or used to work in IT at Hollywood media companies is that Disney is not alone in that

A prominent example of how Americans are discriminated against, and how H1-B's are favored: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...

If a high-profile company like Disney can pull this off, think about how many smaller outfits would be doing this and flying under the radar.

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