David Bier needs to talk to American workers who have been displaced by Infosys or TCS. His ivory tower view sounds great in academia papers, but my experience says that the system isn’t considering US citizens like it’s supposed to.
Used property, the H1-B program brings in new talent and contributes positively to the American economy through both innovation and actual tax payments by the immigrants who can't even get all the benefits their taxes pay for (making them greater net contributors than US citizens).
* builds a bad work culture
* hires all candidates who pass the coding interview
* sets interview standards that require more than just local applicants to reach your staffing needs
it can easily be true both that you've never rejected a qualified US citizen and that you're deliberately seeking to hire H1-Bs.
I think they are violating the public justification more than the actual intent.
I agree on this one in particular. It is quite transparently a process that has morphed into a way to reject older candidates. The older you are (relative to a fresh college graduate), the harder it becomes to jump through the various algorithmic hoops (even if you studied Computer Science in college). That's exactly what the majority of the large tech companies want --- hire large numbers of folks who have no life outside of work so that they can work them more / pay them less.
You can always claim 'but he/she did not make the cut' and appear impartial, while selecting for young kids just out of school. It would have been interesting to see how this would have affected fall hiring, but for the confounding effect of the recession.
No longer a problem, unless the problem was really that they're not "american" enough all along?
The problem is that they’re not “American”, and my politicians shouldn’t be making laws to put its citizens at a disadvantage when they could be making laws that help pull up lower socioeconomic Americans to participate in these higher paying jobs.
Once these immigrants become citizens, they’re as “American” as me.
That whole time they're paying taxes like a citizen, but without most of the rights and benefits, and no representation.
So, there's a whole pile of people that your government is effectively disenfranchising, and harassing with this kind of activity. And it's disproportionally towards folks who have brown skin.
Oh wait, it's racism, and this is working as intended.
You can't know ahead of time which ones will go on to be successful, or maybe have a kid who is.
The solution to people in the US going through tough times is to help them directly, not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU.
I volunteer your neighborhood to host the first 500,000; do you have a pull-out bed or a few spare cots we can use?
As for the ones who can afford their own houses, I think the market for real estate has increased here at at least 3x the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, we certainly don't need more buyers.
The legal minimum H-1B salary is substantially higher than the median American salary, and of course, the average salary is in turn higher than the legal minimum. They are better equipped to afford the median rent than the average resident of your area.
> the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc
Are you under the impression that immigrants don't pay taxes or something? Skilled immigrants are higher income than average and pay far, far more into the system than they take out of it.
But, since you bring it up...
The legal minimum H1-B salary is based on 'prevailing wage' standards, of which there are many to choose from. Sufficiently so, such that one employer I know was hiring PhD statisticians with 20 years of experience in bioinformatics for 90K/yr. In downtown Cambridge, a block from MIT.
Doesn't that sound like a princely salary for today's senior scientist with a family in Massachusetts to support? Maybe they'll throw in a gym membership at Planet Fitness.
Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story.
The median American worker makes something like 30k+/year. So yes, the person making $90k is paying far more into the system than they take out, even if you account for the fact that the current system is not quite fully funded. Skilled immigrants are also less likely to be on disability, be unemployed, end up in prison, etc, or otherwise end up in a position where they are extracting more resources than they put in.
Another interesting fact about MA is the cost of public elementary education is massive, if this employee had children the tax burden per child is greater than 16k+ per year. To offset the tax burden for a 2 child family they would need to own a home that would have a property tax bill of over 32k a year. In many US locations people are a massive tax burden even if they are making what is considered a good salary. Someone making 90k a year wouldn't be able to afford that. In fact someone making $96,250 with a family of 4 can qualify for subsidized housing if they live in Cambridge,MA.
The marginal tax rate in the US is to low for the services the government provides and the country is going broke because of it. The pay for many of these H1-B visa is too low for the location and experience they require. The system has been abused by companies, and neither side is going to correctly adjust it.
- Edit spelling "subsidized"
Don't forget that most families have two working parents. $90k/year * 2 = 180k/year.
> Another interesting fact about MA is the cost of public elementary education is massive, if this employee had children the tax burden per child is greater than 16k+ per year. To offset the tax burden for a 2 child family they would need to own a home that would have a property tax bill of over 32k a year.
Many immigrants do not have kids, and the ones that do have kids only send them to elementary school for a very short fraction of their working career. The average person making 90k/year pays more into the system than they take out of it. The system is going "broke" because the median person makes ~$30k+/year, and a large fraction of the population is on public assistance or in prison, not because the people at the 90k/year (or 180k/year) end of the spectrum are draining the system of resources.
Can you find any apartments in the Cambridge area for less than 3k a month, I picked that number because of was incredibly low? If it is so easy can't you find actual show proof. Don't even get started with finders fees for many apartments/rentals. Housing in the Greater Boston Area is a huge game.
The median household income in the US is around 60k, and many have households have spouses that do not work (or part time), and are in areas of low cost of living. There is no way to compare the wage you need in Rural America vs the coasts. Most of the H1B-Visas are in companies in the high cost areas of the nation that haven't correctly scaled over the years.
I've met several while I lived there. In the Rindge Homes, or who were getting Section 8.
The ongoing outlay for city & state services is overwhelming MA, even with its high-earning, high-educated population. Even at a (risable) $90/K a year, the debt keeps growing, and adding more people will only increase the consumption of public services whose costs are not being adequately reflected.
Opening offices in Canada and EU directly correlates to the sales of their products and services in those markets.
Not quite sure what your point is.
Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of US workers(~330 million) is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength.
No skills in use that can't be learnt/trained.
Except that this is a myopic view of the economy as a zero-sum game that is not supported by actual... well, evidence.
https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent...
The point about Canada and the EU is that companies can and will move operations to places with more liberal immigration systems. Taxes, innovation and many other benefits will accrue to those places, rather than the US.
Here's an example that was in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
H1-B has been massively abused for decades. Any attempt to reign this in should be welcomed by American workers, who are the ones this abuse affects most.
You're also making the economic assumption that Americans are a perfect substitute and this is at worst a net 0 loss for the economy.
I think neither is true.
You must have missed what happened in 2016
That notion is disappearing in the US quickly, though, and soon the rest of the world will follow. It's going to be nice living in a giant global slum with a few extremely wealthy pockets with a de-facto segregation by IQ and wealth /s
I think it's better if each country tries to retain their elites to build their own nations, instead of having everyone end up in Silicon Valley to work on spying technology.
How do you define yourself? Don't you have a people, a group or tribe (whatever you want to call it) you belong to? I know people who define themselves as "human" and "citizen of the world", but they are quite uncommon.
Is a legal construct, which can be granted to a natural person by law.
Legislation can be (relatively) easily changed. I don't think there's anything preventing legislators from granting citizenship to $PERSON for $REASON.
So I'd argue that it is something that can be given - it's just that there's reasons that it's not.
It says nothing about requiring blood spilt.
If you have 1 million jobs held by Americans and 1 million jobs held by immigrants, and you kick out the 1 million immigrants, you do not get 2 million jobs held by Americans. You get 500k jobs held by Americans and 1.5 million extra jobs in China, India, the EU, and other any other regions that are less keen on punching themselves in the face with self-destructive industrial policy.