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Comment by SomeoneFromCA | Hacker News Reader

It is very strange that people in this comment section shout "nationalism, BAD" when someone says that skilled people should stay in their own country and potentially help these countries to grow out of poverty, and statements like the one you just made - essentially rob these country of talented people and bring them into US - is somehow not nationalistic and good.

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I left my country to escape a totalitarian regime. I think just because you are born in a place doesn't mean you have the responsibility to completely sacrifice your life. Humans collectively have an obligation to help lift poor countries out of poverty. The question is are you against immigration because you genuinely care about the poverty in my country?

For me it wasn't totalitarian but "corrupt beyond salvation" (think bottom 50 on corruption index). A friend of mine recently went back and lasted six months before he came back to the US - he opened a startup and had to deal with bribes, threats, blackmail and "forced partnerships". I myself would never go back there.

Calling the Indian Government a totalitarian regime is stretching it a bit too much. India is still a paradise of liberty compared to China and some other countries in our region. Indians want H1B because they want to earn in dollars, plain and simple. All other reasons are secondary. H1B is modern-day bonded labor. You guys are the sugar slaves of this age, like it or not.

Makes you a slave master nonetheless.

As far as I know I'm not from India.

> H1B is modern-day bonded labor.

That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? Bonded laborers were forbidden to leave their jobs under penalty of the law (like actual prison time). H-1B holders are free to leave any time, they just experience a massive drop in income.

It's not just a "massive drop in income"; if you get fired/laid off or want to leave your H1B job, you have 60 days to leave the country or find a new H1B job (which might not be so easy with quotas & applications etc).

Why do humans collectively have an obligation to lift poor countries out of poverty?

Because the world without poverty is a better place.

You’re just repeating sound bites. Why? explain in detail how this helps humans (especially since it goes against darwinism) and doesn’t hurt them.

If you are a social darwinist, I am not here to convert you.

This seems like a bow out and still I have no answer, just an assumption. So once again, what benefit does humanity have for decreasing poverty instead of the country decreasing it themselves?

I do not owe you answers, but I can continue a conversation if you pay me.

Humanity's competitive advantage—the reason we survive, thrive, and outcompete every other species—is that we work together. We cooperate, to balance one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

Social Darwinism is entirely based on misunderstandings of science and history. It is a dead-end philosophy, and needs to be eradicated with knowledge, replaced by the spreading of compassion and cooperation wherever it is found.

I agree with all of this, except I don’t see the value an impoverished set of humans can provide. They will have a point of few that is valid and valuable in certain contexts but are these useful? Secondly when the new baseline is removing poverty you remove the desire to become something more, which is where the real innovation comes from. So by not helping them we get better results, not worse.

Also I would love some papers on how natural selection is no longer valid, this sounds like pure opinion.

Because the opposite is to go and exploit them as it happened for most of the human history and is still happening here and there. Some of those country are drawn in poverty as the result.

Are you already tired of "helping" others? Don't forget that we aren't trying to cooperate for a very long time as it may seem to be. We aren't still great at doing it either.

What may seem to be broken to you isn't wrong in essence. We should help each other. We should support each other. And less poverty is better for all of us. Maybe we should just do it differently. Perhaps the way we are doing it isn't good and we should find a better way to do it.

By the very nature of a highly skilled worker, they likely cannot realize the full value of those skills without a certain economic and commercial context. It is definitely not the case that for most H1-B employees the counterfactual is "growing their own countries out of poverty." Most likely, the counterfactual is being another 75th percentile wage worker in a low income country.

In addition, this line of reasoning totally discounts the very real benefit of foreign transfer payments from workers in the United States to their international families, often supporting large extended families.

Could you please express yourself in simpler English? I cannot understand what you just said - not a native speaker.

Their thesis is that many of the home countries of H1B visa holders do not have the social, technological, and economic infrastructure to support lots of jobs with the skills that they are able to use to their potential in the US.

Thus, if they go home, they will not likely be "lifting their country out of poverty"—they will just be stuck in one of the jobs that is available there. Low-skill, low-pay jobs, without any prospect for advancing to something more like they would be able to do here.

I don't know to what extent this is true, but this is my understanding of their post.

A highly skilled person can only thrive in the right environment. As an extreme example, take the best programmer in the world, and send him back 500 years in the past, he's probably not going to be very productive.

(The counterpoint to this, which the GP didn't talk about, is that this person is still likely to be able to retrain and be productive in that society in other ways.)

Why don't you go to one of those countries and help it to grow out of poverty? It's pretty easy to be generous at the expense of others.

Can you see how someone emigrating of their own volition and bringing their skills is different to a country purposefully trying to encourage immigration of skilled workers from [poorer] countries where there is a skills shortage.

The end result looks similar but motivation matters.

What we forget is actually an individual - relocation is a basic human right. There should be no lottery of birth.

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