Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

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kinkrtyavimoodh

> "My grandparents were labor leaders and I'm pretty certain they'd be ashamed I can't or haven't done more to rectify this.

Unfortunately tech unions are typically the ones railing against H1Bs entirely. The mere presence of H1B workers fundamentally increases worker supply (by definition). In fact it was the "US Tech Workers Union" that championed recent actions against H1B workers. And let's be honest they were not fighting to make our lives easier (by making H1B less draconion), only theirs, by reducing the supply of workers.

And while some of them will sugar coat this by pretending to care about H1B worker's conditions and all that, the truth is that as long as the US continues to be a more desirable place to live compared to many other countries, and as long as you need a job to live here, foreign workers will always tilt the equilibrium a bit towards lower wages compared to a domestic worker supply. The true solution would be if you made the path to permanent residence easy for skilled individuals so that they don't need to take these employment decision under duress.

The “US Tech Workers Union” doesn’t appear to be a union at all. It appears to be a subsidiary of the “Progressives For Immigration Reform” non-profit aimed fairly exclusively at the H-1b issue, and the only spokesperson I can see for it is the executive director of PFIR.

So, I wouldn’t take the “US Tech Workers” as being representative of tech workers or tech workers unions without further research.

Funny to see this pop up because I happen to know who is behind this cluster of sites (i.e. https://ustechworkers.com/ https://www.cfpup.org/) and it's basically one super right-wing guy and some wealthy donors. None of these is a real union or even a real community group. It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration. I always thought it was really shady.

> It's wealthy lobbyists who want to oppose immigration

That is funny, I would have never thought that wealthy lobbyists would ever be against easy and mass immigration policies to dilute the labor supply. Much better for corporations to hire people who are willing to work either more cheaply or out of a sense of desperation because job demand is lower than the available/willing worker pool.

Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?

To be clear the person I'm thinking of is not a professional lobbyist, he's a PE investor. I don't know/understand his motivation and have never met him personally, this is a "friend of a friend" scenario.

> Do you have a sound logical reason for why wealthy lobbyists would go out of their way to spend money on opposing immigration?

Xenophobia.

Follow the money, as always. It's a bit hard to find any solid policy suggestions in the links above amongst all the fearmongering, but I'd wager that whatever their stated aims, they're not really pushing for reduced immigration, but rather for reduced protections for skilled migrants.

The more power employers hold over their skilled migrant workers, the more money they can make (from not only their skilled migrant workers but also from the rest of their workforce, who are now competing with the latter.)

This type of misleading behaviour and false-representation is called astroturfing.

The "US Tech Workers" "union" is actually a front for the John Tanton white nationalist network. It is not an actual union.

It is true that some other unions like the AFL-CIO have historically opposed immigration on these grounds, though.

It isn't about worker supply or wages. It's about workers' relative abilities to stand up for something (anything) versus having to keep one's head down and build whatever evil thing management wants built.

As long as the "risk of having to leave the country" for speaking up about anything is greater than 0% the obviously-wisest thing to do is keep your mouth shut.

It's no single thing because people's decisions are affected by the sum total of their life's balance sheet.

The labor market is something that emerges from the equilibrium of several opposing forces. We as a society decide which causal factors are 'reasonable' and which are 'unfair'.

As a simple example, you could argue that 'the wages for married individuals with kids are depressed due to the massive labor pool of single people in their 20s who can be employed for far less as long as you offer them free food and some cutesy perks like happy hours and pool tables'. Ceteris paribus, and as a pure fact of economics, this is true. Of course if you have a bigger supply of labor and hold other things constant, wages will depress, but as a matter of practical policy, we don't consider it 'unfair' that there exist single people who are competing for jobs that married people are also competing for.

But many people do consider it unfair that there exist Indians who are competing for jobs that Americans are also competing for.

This is a matter of policy and your personal sense of what is fair and what is not, not economics.

Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living? For the most part you can't change your cost of living. (Yes, you can move else where but the delta between how you you keep/earn is pretty much relative around the country)

Single people tend to be younger and less experienced. They tend to be represented in entry level positions, and get paid as such.

>Should you have to compete for your wage in comparison to individuals from a foreign country with a much lower cost of living?

That appears to be the reality we've been living in for a couple/few decades. Airplanes, container ships, and the internet have made the world a much smaller place.

Not really. The borders still exist and the export controls still exist as well. It's just been tolerated in the last few decades.

> As long as the "risk of having to leave the country"

So, immigration is generally speaking something that corporations are incentivized to want because they get more manipulatible and desperate employees?

Can we just demand that companies that hire immigrants cannot fire or lay off those immigrant employees for some minimum number of years unless they declare bankruptcy? It might decrease the number of immigrant employees corporations would hire but it would simultaneoulsy ensure a huge amount of safety for the immigrants that do get hired (and for their families).

Politically, it seems to be a big crappy case of playing the ends against the middle... The ends being: 1. All the shitty racists lobbying _against H1bs_ because "took er jerbs" on one side. 2. All the shitty FAANG capitalists lobbying _for_ it on the other because they want to keep engineering salaries controlled.

My quick bandaid bill would: 1) Any H1b holder can switch to any job as long as it comes with at least ten percent pay increase. 2) Any H1b holder gets an automatic green card after x years or paid y in federal+state taxes, whichever comes first. 3) Hiring company pays 80pct salary for the extent of the Visa, come hell or high water. You _really_ need that visa? Fine, prove it by taking on more of the risk instead of foisting it on the poor visa holder who came to help you.

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