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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

The government thinks our salaries are too high

The companies that hire these engineers either pay them to work there or pay them to work here. So you are competing with them regardless. But the US can benefit from both migrant farm workers and skilled laborer immigrants. And unless you're one of the few natives in the US, your ancestors got the same benefit. Let's just let them immigrate here and then we get the benefit of their expertise and their culture.

This is patently false. Beyond a certain headcount you run into regulatory issues in India and China. And the timezone issue alone makes a lot of work untenable.

There are clear benefits to the employer to being able to pay them to work here.

Personally, I think people underestimate the unique talent in the west coast of the US, so wages will not be immediately depressed - but it is clear that this is a move premised on the idea that we have to lower the salaries of technical workers in the US.

If you listen to what the Fed says, it actually does. It thinks unemployment is too low.

But that's about general conditions in the labor market - this is the government specifically singling out technical workers in the US as being overpaid.

I’m really not sure there is a strong argument against this. I think our salaries are too high, and I’ve been thinking that since I started contracting about 15 years ago.

Why are our salaries worth sacrificing at the altar of "being #1 country"?

I frankly don't care if we are #1 all that much and certainly am not willing to forgo hundreds of thousands of dollars just to placate some "national security leader"'s insecurity around maintaining American exceptionalism.

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