Comment by think814 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by think814 | Hacker News Reader

I am someone who went through (fully legal) immigration hell while building a company that in the end, employed 100s of US workers and had global competition (meaning, if we didn't do it in the US the jobs would probably go to some other country).

Here's my conclusion from this experience: if you are in a business that depends on Intellectual Property competes globally (i.e. not a nail salon hiring local workers), then in the area that gives you your competitve advantage YOU NEED TO HIRE THE BEST GLOBAL TALENT. Period.

If the immigration system doesn't allow that, then either you'll hire remote, or you'll be beaten by an international competitor with more liberal skilled immigration rules. Neither is a great outcome.

There are simple ways to ensure H1-B is used to hire this type of talent. The recent rules that prioritize H1-B applicants based on their salary are positive IMO and address a lot of the Tata/Infosys abuse (which is real). If you are truly going after the best global talent, that won't be cheap!

H1-B is super old school. The notion is that you only hire someone in H1-B if there's nobody that can do the job. However, the challenge today is not if you can do the job, but can you do it better than the global competitors? That concept is super foreign to immigration legislation (no pun intended :).

Short of a whole new immigration framework, increasing the number of H1-Bs and prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix - no lawsuits needed.

The point of law is to serve the nation

Is it in the nation's best interest for you to hire the best person? or to hire a tax payer?

It's not old school, it's self protection.

Talent and skill development also happen in the workplace... so requiring U.S. companies to hire U.S. workers serves the nation. We see a similar issue in academia, where top programs have a huge cohort of foreign students - students who are likely to take the knowledge gained (at institutions built in part through decades of public funding) back to their home countries (understandably).

That's not quite true in my opinon. Take your example of academia. Many students will chose to stay in the US after (if they can, because salaries tend to be higher than in many other countries) rather than depart. Also, instead of "taking" knowledge, they might actually create some new knowledge. Think about how many brilliant professors in US universities were once foreign post-docs there. If the US chooses to close its borders to this sort of talent, it will considerably weaken itself in the longer term against countries enacting more rational immigration policies.

And many students choose to return to their origin countries... some of these countries are even exerting influence on our academic institutions, e.g., China’s “Confucius Institute” model. If you think that’s in the interest of the U.S. you’re being willfully ignorant.

That's not what I said. Yes, some students (a small minority) will be acting in the interests of other countries. Overall, the US is a net winner in terms of benefits vs costs of foreign students. This is one of the reasons many colleges are currently under strong financial strain: no international students to pay the bills. Would you rather close borders to all foreign students?

Maybe. American working class students have been priced out of many top academic programs, yet foreign students continued to pile in, solidifying the prohibitive cost of these programs. How is that a good thing? I’m personally happy to see these institutions struggle... they clearly need to find a way to serve more than the wealthy elite here and abroad.

How else are universities supposed to finance these programs?

Most have multi-billion dollar endowments and run their campuses like country clubs for the world’s elite’s kids.

The US is incredibly lucky that so many of the smartest people in the world come to do research at its universities. Most countries would love to be in that position. Cutting off that immigration in order to "serve the nation" would be incredibly short-sighted.

> students who are likely to take the knowledge gained (at institutions built in part through decades of public funding) back to their home countries (understandably).

Or, if they're allowed to, remain in the US and contribute to its continued technological and scientific dominance. Even if they eventually leave the US, they don't just soak up knowledge while they're in the US. Most actual research is done by graduate students, for relatively meager pay. The US has a continual influx of extremely smart people who are willing to work relatively cheaply to keep American research institutions at the forefront of scientific research. How is this a bad deal for the United States?

It’s about balance... what SV is doing with H1B is not about keeping the U.S. at “the forefront of scientific research”.

I was talking about academia, which is why I said "scientific research."

What SV is doing is perpetuating US dominance in software (and some hardware development fields). If most of the skilled software engineers in the world become off-limits to SV companies, then the global software industry will cease to be so heavily concentrated in SV.

It's strange and amusing to see people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year complaining about foreigners undercutting their salaries. They imagine that if immigration is restricted, then the open jobs will go to Americans. The reality is that the jobs will leave. Aesop must have written a fable about this sort of situation.

Do you think Xi and Modi would be allowing their citizens to work and study in the U.S. if it were not advantageous to China and India?

It's possible for both the US and China/India to benefit. The US gets a massive yearly influx of extremely smart students, many (maybe most) of whom want to remain in the US. Even if they do eventually return, they work for US research labs while they're getting their degrees. China and India eventually get some of the students back, now with increased skills.

But it's not as if China and India are in control of this process. Unless they're going to take the drastic step of preventing young people from leaving, it's not up to them to say how many students go to the US. They do increasingly try to get students to return, and any increase in xenophobia or restrictions on immigration in the US will make that easier.

That's a huge competitive advantage.

Country X gets the top students from country X, the US gets the top students from the world!

That smart TA from X European country helping American undergrads on that problem set? He's not helping undergrads from his country. He's not publishing papers that would boost his country's schools either.

One might ask if the lab he works at would even exist without foreign grad students! Would there be enough native applicants to staff it?

Graduate school isn't a zero sum game. It's an ecosystem and ecosystems have a huge network effect.

We're in a bad position today - but we should be aware that an under-investment in education and other social services has caused our tax payers to not be the best candidates.

Would love a citation on this one. Forcing above average American students into cram schools to memorize leetcode problems would probably help make Americans “the best candidates” for the whiteboard merry-go-round, but I have a strange feeling interviews would start morphing again if that happened.

American students are very reluctant to study stem compared to most rich countries so USA wouldn't be able to compete with the rest of the world without importing talent.

So the choice is to let companies import talent or see them move to another country.

They're already outsourcing the jobs to other countries because of cost regardless of talent level.

If the US did away with the H1B visa entirely, companies here would hire people they would have previously overlooked and train them to be as competent as what they would have hired abroad.

Facebook already trains people, they hire a ton of inexperienced people every year and train them to become software engineers. All they require is that you are smart/hard working enough to pass their tests.

That's true, but there are many ways to "serve the nation". Note that a foreigner who comes to work in a country will also be a tax payer, the same way a US citizen is. In addition, given the barriers to entry, they might be more qualified than the equivalent "native" employee (since the company is willing to pull the extra effort). They might become citizens after some time as well. Also, if you make it hard to hire necessary talent from abroad (as is the case in the US, and to a lesser extent in Europe as well), you end up making your own companies weaker in the process.

But we know how the system is used today, not in the hypothetical: to hire 30-40% cheaper, and to hire people that, for years, will have fewer rights than citizens.

That is not always true: top tier companies like FB (the subject of this article), Google pay internationals the same as locals. As for the issue of rights I fully agree: much better to instead give foreigners much more security when they immigrate in terms of visas.

Can you elaborate on what do you mean by "or to hire a tax payer"? If you hire the best person overseas and bring them to the US to work via immigration process, that person becomes a tax payer to the US, no?

> prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix

You have to remember that H1-Bs are used for many occupations and industries outside of tech. Prioritizing by salary only effectively means that 99% of all H1-Bs would go to 3-4 large companies.

Yes, nurses, doctors, etc may not get paid as much as a FAANG engineer a couple of years out of college, but they are still often needed.

I think that if you want to prioritize by salary within industries that could potentially work, but then you're bordering on a "new immigration framework".

> Yes, nurses, doctors, etc may not get paid as much as a FAANG engineer a couple of years out of college, but they are still often needed.

Doesn't that mean nurses, doctors etc. should be paid more, rather than the reverse?

I'm not saying that they shouldn't get paid more, and I'm also not saying that people in tech should get paid less.

But tying it to only salary doesn't create a balanced system.

There are occupations that are understaffed and have a need for foreign skilled workers that simply can not practically match what a FAANG engineer gets paid.

"should be paid more" doesn't mean anything in the US or any society based in capitalism. With capitalism it's mostly supply, demand, leverage, and a few others. Compensation isn't connected to moral obligation.

And specifically FAANG engineer's price is established in a free market where as nurses and doctors are protected by licensure which drives their price above the natural market rate.

Therefore their wages should probably be lower.

The caps on the available residency spots might have something to do with this as well.

There are plenty of doctors on H1Bs. The Midwest is full of them and they command high salaries. At any rate, different job categories can have different requirements. I know soccer coaches that are H1Bs. These are coaches who train elite junior teams for example. Musicians, theatre all works the same way.

> The Midwest is full of them and they command high salaries.

Yes, they do, but that does not mean they will beat out what FAANG is able to pay an engineer if H1-Bs are granted based solely on salary.

> At any rate, different job categories can have different requirements.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean different salary requirements, then that effectively goes away if you start granting H1-Bs based solely on salary.

> Musicians, theatre all works the same way.

This is... kind of my point? I seriously doubt that these musicians and artists are being paid comparably to a SF-based FAANG engineer. If they are, they are more-likely-than-not qualified for an O-1 anyways, so the point is kind of moot.

Different job categories have different wage requirements. This hasn’t changed.

I know that. I'm not saying they don't.

OP at the top of this thread suggested that it effectively should, by just giving H1-Bs to the 80k jobs per year that would pay the most.

I am disagreeing with that statement.

I don't understand this comment. The justice department alleges that Facebook went out of its way to hide jobs from Americans bc there is a power imbalance that favors the employer of an immigrant worker. This wasn't about hiring better talent, but about hiring talent that you can underpay while still retaining. As a side effect, qualified Americans were harmed.

These allegations may or may not be true but I fail to see how your framing addresses the complaint.

I agree that forcing higher pay for visa holders helps to align incentives.

The idea that FB wants to underpay any employee is preposterous. You are aware that FB & Google pay 2x other companies such as Microsoft and Amazon?

If you join tech companies such as FB, Google, Amazon or MSFT as an H-1B immigrant, if your performance is good they want to keep you, so they sponsor you for greencard. Once an employee gets a greencard he/she is free to leave the company, so if the goal is to underpay you want to NOT sponsor for greencard.

As part of sponsoring an employee for greencard you have to post an advertisement for the position the employee is already doing a good job in, so most employers see this as a formality and don't recruit as vigorously as they would for a position that is actually open. This should be expected, and the problem is the stupid rule, not the companies. The rules need to be changed to advertise before the position is given to an H-1B candidate, not afterwards.

> if your performance is good they want to keep you, so they sponsor you for greencard

I think this is an important factor that shouldn't be ignored. An employer can not choose to keep you on an H1-B forever. That status will expire after 7 years, at which point you are either leaving, or have already begun the PERM process.

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