Want jobs? Encourage immigration
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
If you hear politicians, and if my perception are right, they talk about jobs. Not whether or not we get more purchasing power than ever before. Not whether or not our lifestyle is more fulfilling than ever before. Jobs. More jobs. Less jobs. More competitive Americans. No manufacturing jobs. Colleges not creating enough people to fill jobs. Robots are destroying our jobs. Robots need to be maintain by something or someone, probably another robot or human being.
But jobs are just proxy. A proxy for our self-worth, our independence, or whether or not we have a future. Jobs, for us, are just means to an end. Yes, some of us are musicians, football players, programmers, scientists, etc. We like our jobs. I suspect the vast majority of humans don't really enjoy all that much working their job.
Rather than talking about creating jobs and destroying jobs, which is an assumption that exists in a world where there are scarcity and there's boring things to do for humans to maintain their existence, why not talk about the end, what should our goal be in life? We can then rearrange our actions in life based on our conclusion what our life should be and what we want to achieve rather than just simply on what needed to be done at this point in time.
After all, if a strong FAI comes, we may not even have jobs. At the same time, we ought to figure out what's our life purpose other than going to a job and work for someone or operating a business just to simply maintain our existence. There's no longer a need to grow your food, goes to the hair saloon to cut someone's hair, pump the gas, etc. How are we going to live for the next 10,000 years and 10,000 years beyond that and so on?
It's nice that you have the freedom and the time to ponder such ideological issues. It's nice that you're able to look higher on the hierarchy of needs rather than scrabbling for scraps. I mean that in the non-snarkiest of ways, really.
But for the vast majority of the population they need a job right now. They don't have time to worry about your high-minded concepts of personal fulfillment, and whether or not a FAI will usher in a utopia of zero scarcity. They need to make rent and put groceries in the fridge this week.
The politicians are focusing on jobs as a core issue because that's what's foremost on people's minds. It's foremost on people's minds because it's exactly what they need. They need more jobs in a stronger economy. Imagine if all the unemployed folk in this country just sat around waiting for the post-scarcity society to hit them upside the head!
Well, it's more like jobs achieve what they need. They need money to buy things to put stuff on the table, and jobs are a way to achieve that. The welfare system could of course, solve that, and even eliminate it if we have a sufficiently wealthy welfare system(which we don't). Of course, it won't fulfill self-worth and autonomy well.
Indeed, we are in a recession and the employment rate is crappy. However, there's a whole lot of people in the United States who can afford to think about this and their ideas of what the good life is shaped by what their parents wants or the narrow-minded view of going to college or doing whatever you need to acquire good jobs that earn lot of money.
What are the actual numbers here? How does this situation compare with other countries in the world?
The huge majority of Americans have, if anything, excessive food on their tables, and the great majority of Americans live in houses with sounder roofs over more square feet of floor space than people in most other countries. Why should Americans feel any urgency about changes in immigration policy when they know that most people who might like to come to the United States will instantly have more access to food and housing as soon as they set foot in America?
Because things out there aren't nearly as bad as the average American believes. As an Asian immigrant to North America, it's constantly shocking how backwards many Americans imagine the rest of the world to be. Yes, much of the world has running water, sewage systems, fast food, and the internet.
Not everywhere else in the world is begging for a National Geographic special, or commercials full of starving babies pleading for your aid. The India of 1980 is not the same as a the India of 2011. The China seen in Tiananmen Square is not the same China one sees today. Many Americans' impressions of the rest of the world seem firmly rooted in the Cold War.
It used to be true that moving to the USA meant pretty much a guaranteed, dramatic rise in the standard of living. But guess what? America's QOL is dropping precipitously, while parts of the world previously considered "developing" can now give America a run for its money in terms of QOL. There's a great equalization going on, and that is why the US needs to worry about its immigration policy.
Ten years ago immigrating to the West was the thing. People would smack their own grandmothers silly for a chance at a one-way ticket out of Asia and into America. You would be surprised how quickly this has changed. I've known many people who came to the US and Canada for degrees and then have voluntarily gone back to Asia, despite offers to stay.
tl;dr: America needs to get its head on straight, it's no longer the gold standard for quality of life in this world.
How do you know then that they'll be massive job creators? Certainly each of them had ambitious parents and that's something, but then so does just about everyone who actively works to immigrate to a new place for a better life... assuming we can't figure out who the next Brin will be when they are 6 or 10 (and we can't), is the author arguing we should just open up the floodgates to everyone with educated parents? Because that's a heckofalot of people.
Personally, I think that Vinod Khosla and Manu Kumar are better examples. I'm of the understanding that Khosla didn't have a valid visa when Sun was founded, but an exemption was made because of the sheer success of the company from nearly day 1.
The other thing I want to look at is people like Robin Li of Baidu, American educated, employed by American companies, but when it came time to create a company, he went home. Possibly, even likely, that was because a company serving Chinese should be based in China, but it's certain that since he didn't have a green card, he wouldn't be able to get a visa as a founder to stay here. America loses when people who could stay here to found companies return to their country to create jobs and foreign competition there.
As far as Baidu goes, I don't think it could exist as a non-Chinese company, and more because of China's government policies than the USA's.
From there, the author goes on to say that if the immigrants and their children are more likely to start companies, why are we preventing young adults from coming here to start companies, especially if they are validated by making something people want as demonstrated by either VC validation or pure revenue numbers? The third path of Startup Visa 2011 is for people valued enough to receive a US education or H1-B visa, as currently they are not valued enough to be allowed to start a company, with no visa existing for them to do so.
I find it a bit of a stretch, but not intellectually dishonest, though I do see why it's reasonable to think so.
I take the point on Baidu, but that's the sort of company I'm looking to promote as a counterpoint when we pitch our next follow-ups to ABC and NBC after Amit's story.
The author uses immigrants' children/very young immigrants not immediately connected to the plan of starting a company to reference the entire immigrant demographic as a whole, since current US policies make it extremely improbable we can come up with good positive examples of a young immigrant starting a company, because US immigration rules prevent this situation from occurring.
Her logic is as follows: -Fact: "According to statistics from Partnership for a New American Economy, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants or their children." -Examples: Immigrants' children starting Fortune 500 companies
The logic here is using the immigrants' children to support the point that both immigrants and their children start companies, since the only direct immigrants who started the companies were either much older and already gone through the green card or broke the rules to start their company.
One of the major problems in our advocacy is that there is this big negative space that we /think/ can be filled. By definition, because it's a negative space, there are no positive examples to point to in making the argument. Positive examples strengthen any abstract argument, so they must be made. In this case, the author goes to young immigrants not immediately connected to startups to make the case that immigrants as a class make for good founders.
From there, the author makes one of her major points:
-Argument: US immigration prevents people from starting companies shortly after entering the country due to current visa rules -Example: Amit Aharoni/ABC story -Conclusion: Therefore we should change policy to allow more people like Amit in, hopefully creating more successes in this 'immigrant' demographic.
> " Innovative individuals will move their operations abroad to cultivate next ideas."
The problem here is that the "immigrant" visa is really the same thing as a work visa, and that leads to a great deal of abuse.
For one thing, the eligibility is tied to an employer, who is incentivized to embellish, cheat, and otherwise finagle their way to a visa. The expectation that the visa is temporary also sets a lower bar for entry - even though many of these people will eventually become American PRs/citizens.
The recent trend to "stage" the H-1B green card process is a step in the right direction - though it doesn't go as far as it needs to. There is still a major problem of indentured servitude. Once an employee has a green card process in the pipeline their employer has them over a barrel - and many will not hesitate to use this as an opportunity for abuse.
Not to mention, with the green card backlog the way it is now, it would be years before "your huddled masses of immigrant entrepreneurs yearning to breathe free" are actually able to start businesses. First they have to go through ~8-10 years as a rank and file employee, before they're granted the legal freedom to pursue their own future. The startup visa would go a long way to alleviating that, though the heavy involvement of VCs in that initiative will mean that bootstrappers and other scrappy startups that don't want to raise hojillions in funding will be still at a severe disadvantage.
How do you fix this? IMO the US needs to setup a track for immigrants to immediately receive green cards, where having a job offer is not a prerequisite (though it would certainly help). The focus needs to shift away from fulfilling "temporary shortages" (which we all know is bullshit) to simply permanent, mass importation of worthy talent. Set up the process to filter people based on the assumption that they will permanently stay, as opposed the the current process where we'll let just about anyone in, since they're "temporary" H-1Bs anyways. This will raise the calibre of people you're letting in, and also make sure you're giving top talent maximum freedom once they're here. The whole "immigration policy masquerading as work permit" thing really needs to GTFO.
You should try having a functional and effective national government - just a thought?
How many of those countries have a net INFLOW of immigrants from the United States? How many have a net outflow of immigrants to the United States, under the current United States system?
For startup visa, the latest version has other paths, involving $100k in US revenue or simply being a H1-B/student visa holder with sufficient assets/income to not be a drain on US taxpayers: http://kerry.senate.gov/press/release/?id=4e6a51f6-fb2b-4212... Meaning, there's less pure reliance on VCs as the gatekeepers for visas and green card, a la the criticism of the 2010 Startup Visa by folks like Vivek Wadhwa.
Additionally, the Lofgren-Polis IDEA Act opens up a whole new path, though one I don't think has any chance of passing in this current environment: http://www.usimmlawyer.com/news-blog/42-blog/293-rep-zoe-lof...
By and large, though, completely agree with the points here.
Which other countries are these? As the holder of an employer-tied 3-year temporary Danish work permit, with no possibility to even apply for the Danish equivalent of a green card until I've resided in the country with solid employment for at least 4 years (and passed a language exam, something the U.S. doesn't require), I don't think it can be this one...
Though to be fair, the Danish consulate was friendly and efficient with processing the employer-tied temporary permit.
Meanwhile, how many people are emigrating from those countries to the United States, under the current United States system? (I know quite a few recent immigrants from the United Kingdom and from Ireland in my community.)
There are considerable innovations coming out of that country - the fact that it's not a hotbed for internet startups seems hardly relevant in the big picture. Businesses are being created by immigrants, who are creating wealth and employment in their respective communities. The fact that this in general has nothing to do with dotcoms is really a detail. Canada continues to be extremely competitive in traditional engineering disciplines, and is world-leading in many fields of science, not least of which is molecular engineering. The University of Toronto, after all, still holds the patent on insulin.
Next time you see a video of the International Space Station, with its bleeding-edge, unprecedented robotic arm, see if you can zoom and see which nation's flag is on it. Or dig into the US's collection of scientific and communications satellites and see how much of their R&D actually occurs in Canada.
I hope people on HN realize that the word "innovation" applies to all manners of fields. So often I feel like this community has blinders on, and very narrowly define "innovation" as "things that occur in my field".
The benefit may indeed be non-zero, but it doesn't seem that the benefit is signficant.
Google is a juggernaut that I won't touch simply because they're such an outlier, even in the get-big-fast world of dotcoms.
And let's be honest, in terms of job-creating power, this "innovative" industry of software is a drop in the bucket: http://jobs.lovetoknow.com/Largest_American_Employers - the employers with the largest employment impact are not the ones we would traditionally consider "innovative".
For reference, Google has about 30K employees world-wide.
In any case, we can argue about semantics and labor theory all day. Why don't you go to Toronto some time, climb the CN Tower, hang out in Chinatown, take the TTC to Bathurst, Eglington, Pape, and tell me that Canadian immigration policy hasn't been a gigantic boon for the country.
I'm a Canadian expat in the US right now, and the difference is startling. Canada has done a remarkable job of integrating its immigrant population into the middle class - the US likes to imagine itself as a melting pot, but for the most part ethnic diversity in this country is still separated along enormous socioeconomic lines - lines that are significantly blurrier in Canada. The fact that Canadian immigrants are first-class members of society from day one I believe is key to this difference. As is the fact that a "straight to permanent residence" policy sets the bar higher. The US is letting in enormous numbers of refugees and family reunification individual - people of questionable worth to society - with "straight to PR" tracks, but still bars the door to working professionals and highly educated academics with decade-long "indentured H-1B servitude". You tell me if that policy makes sense.
As a young Albertan, still living and breathing here, I question how well the 'cultural mosaic' has stood the test of time. Granted, I do see some good like you mentioned, but looking at some of the recent economic impact data (I'm not an expert in this field and have merely googled and wikapedia'd for my research) it does look like there are systemic struggles that have developed over the last 25 years and that good you mentioned, is fewer and far between. It's a really interesting point of discussion though, so thank you.
It's not perfect - I'm sure if you look at the data you will still see an income gap between native-born Canadians and recent immigrants, but having lived on both sides of the border I have to say America's problems are at least an order of magnitude worse than ours. The socioeconomic stratification of immigrants in the US means that several ethnicities are automatically assumed to be poor and uneducated - an assumption that largely doesn't hold water in Canada. With the sad exception of the aboriginal population, there is no real ethnic group in Canada that's as systemically impoverished and and marginalized as the blacks and latinos are in the USA. Sure, we have ghettos, but by and large they're not defined along racial and ethnic lines. The wide gaps between races in the US really does encourage a very pervasive undercurrent of racism that's largely impolite to mention in company, but easily felt. I simply do not get the same vibe in Canada, and that's a very good thing.
Having never lived in AB though, I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on it - I know the racial/ethnic balance there is not quite the same as Vancouver or Toronto, so maybe the scene is different. I can tell you that in the extremely industrial town of London, Ontario, the economic stratification between immigrants and non-immigrants can be more easily felt, but even then for the most part the poverty that pervades that city is blind to race.
Getting the permit was the big problem, since not only does the company have to prove that domestic workers aren't suitable for the job, but also every worker in the EU. Thankfully, once you have it, it's very simple to renew.
If I'm not mistaken, the language exam only applies for naturalization, but even then you're still subject to an anonymous review by the people living near you as well as a "cultural exam" to see how well you've assimilated (among many other things, naturally).
They have separated citizenship from work visas. Anyone can come, they do not need to prove that they can do work that anyone else cannot do, and as long as their employer sponsor is happy with their work, they can stay and work. The governments compete on how quickly they approve the visas and how business-friendly they are in doing so.
The system works well enough that 60-80% of the people living in these countries are not from these countries. They work, study, bring up families and they go back home wealthier than when they left.
(I am missing out a lot of politics here, and there are plenty of things I would want to change, but the GCC does have the most open economy in the world, both for goods and for people.)
Disclaimer - I live in the UK, where my start-up is, because I grew up here as my father came to complete his studies and then became an academic here. I have lived and worked in the USA on H1-B visa and so know first-hand how bad that system is. UK has a similarly bad visa system, I am told, but I love the start-up ecosystem here.
As idiotic as US work/immigration policies are, most countries are far worse. Europe particularly. Commonwealth nations possibly excepted.
In the developing / BRIC world, it's less bureaucracy and far more petty (and not so petty) corruption you have to deal with.
Europe does not have a great track for entrepreneurs (though hopefully that will change with the blue card program), but at least my experience with ordinary skilled migration is overwhelmingly positive. And anybody who thinks there is less bureaucracy in the developing world is highly likely to be living in a dream. At least in Russia the corruption comes on top of the ridiculous red tape.
I also don't understand why the green card backlog isn't being handled efficiently. Surely, if somebody is paying, say more than 20k in income taxes every year for, say 5 years in a row, there is reason to believe their contribution to the country is a net positive. Why not just give them citizenship and be done with it?
As an outsider, I feel like the US is the opposite of an "agile" government. It seems like there is a lot bickering and fear-mongering at every level and important decisions are being made based on populism and emotional appeals rather than rational decision making. I'm not sure if this is really the case because my news sources are the likes of Reddit and the so-called "liberal media", but unfortunately this is perception I get.
For about every aspect of the US federal government, you're right: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/us-government-blows-20000...
It's /really/ hard to manage the world's largest GDP effectively. Governmental gridlock tends towards the status quo and institutional inertia is huge. This is Vernon Vinge's 'to scale, you need complexity, but complexity inevitably leads to collapse' theories in action.
If any country can do it, it's the US. The universities attract the smartest students from all over the world, and have the best faculty in the world by a large margin. The government simply needs to figure out how to harness all the brainpower to solve real-world problems.
Yes. That is intentional by the design of the federal Constitution. A friend of mine, an engineer, was discussing American politics with me and another friend, a mathematics teacher, one day. The mathematics teacher decried the inefficiency of United States government. The engineer replied, "I'm an engineer. The one thing I'm afraid of is EFFICIENT government." Many Americans are strongly in agreement with Henry David Thoreau that "That government is best which governs least."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)#.2...
What does it mean to say that a government "governs the least"? Does it make the fewest number of laws? Does employ the fewest number of people? Does it spend the least money? All of the above? Some of the above? Why are these good?
So naturally they are wary of people coming along and doing the same to them.
This doesn't really apply to Canada.
Foreign students have one year after graduation to find an employer, convert to H-1B and then ask the employer to sponsor the green card. Nothing wrong with this.
However, of course H1-B to green card to citizenship must be done in a more timely manner. In many cases it takes too long. The time spent on waiting for the green card (sometimes as long as 4-5 years or even more, due to slow bureaucracy) must be in some way counted towards the citizenship requirement of 5-year residency.
I think as baby-boomer generation starts to retire en-mass, U.S. will have no choice but to liberalize and simplify its immigration policy. It is competing against many other developed countries for younger workers and talent, and the earnings disparity is becoming less of a factor in many developing countries. There's just no way out but to make immigration process faster and more attractive if the U.S. wants to win.
"But I disagree with author's suggestion that all US-educated graduates must be given green cards. A lot of them came to US to study because they could afford it (often via wealthy parents). I don't think it's fair to give green cards only because they graduated from a US university thanks to their rich parents." Very insightful!
However, the green card wait times are more due to scarcity, with many more people entering the green card pipeline than by law can exit each year, rather than slow bureaucracy.
I agree re: the future of immigration policy, but I think the talent war is even more important than you think. Right now, and since the 60s, US immigration policy has been aligned on a family-unification platform, and with strict numerical limits, a huge percentage of American immigration is taken up by family-based immigration. As liberal and pleasing as it is, it's going to have to go, as America will have to fully enter the competition for top talent.
I am not so sure about the statements on family-based immigration. First, even close family members often spend many years waiting. More importantly, though: we all ideally want future Sergei Brins just to come and start next Google and hire thousands. But let's don't forget that he came to states as a young child (just as some other founders mentioned in the CNN article) with his well educated parents. By the time he started Google, he was 20-something and effectively an American. Would he be able to do this if he just came as a foreign student? Not so sure. So, we need to get families too, but those who have not just hopes, but also education. We need smart families, smart parents. We need to make America attractive to them.
P.S. I am stunned by all negative comments on CNN site saying immigrants take American jobs, and America educates foreigners, but not its own citizens. It seems to me many people don't realize that foreign students are in fact paying for Americans to get to schools by paying much higher tuition fees that make schools profitable and able to offer scholarships to locals.
Agree about the need for "long-term investment" in smart families, but I think the political importance of strict immigration numbers and the short-term pressure over the talent war is going to shift US immigration policies away from families and towards talent.
Re: PS - ugh, completely agree. This is one of the better argued articles in terms of foreign immigrants = US jobs rather than purely abstract foreign immigrants = stronger US economy, so the comments are less rancid but still vile. Compare to Rey Ramsey's piece on HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rey-ramsey/open-americas-doors...
From personal experience, everything is wrong with this H-1B visa (slavery to employer) and even with proposed Startup/ Entrepreneur Visa which again promotes slavery to "someone."
If US is serious, they should allow 5 year unrestricted visa to all foreign graduates from US universities (no government benefits during this period). With this visa, these graduates can either work for anyone or start business. The exit from this visa to green card should be based on specific number of people employed or revenue earned or income earned.
Keep it simple.
Not so sure about green cards for recent students based on revenue/income of their business. We then have to ask the government to audit a lot of financial papers from people who have a great interest in showing higher numbers than there are in reality. Someone with family resources can "make" high revenue/income be shown on paper. It's not that difficult to do. But green card based on number of employees with some minimal wage limits makes sense.
The major problem with current system is on employer side. The H-1B created bodyshopper contractors because employers didn't want to hire foreigners directly and pay equivalent wage as other employees. Any visa system where majority of applicants leaves employer soon after receiving green card show the system is flawed. Applicant is a slave of employer and green card is his/her ticket to freedom.
There is no reason to believe that The proposed entrepreneur visa will not create bodyshopper VC or VC services firms. It will create again same slavery but now master will be a different group.
Even a simpler approach as I suggested may create bodyshopper universities.
Confirming revenue/income/number of employees through IRS Tax return is not as difficult. We already have some visa categories like investor and person of extra-ordinary abilities that require extensive proof and onus is on applicant.
American universities are interested in foreign students because they can pay a lot of money for the opportunity to study and then have some time (a year or more) to get a job in states. Most Americans fret at the idea to let foreign graduates (even from US universities) to compete for the same jobs with American-born graduates (I already hear: "our own children cannot get jobs after college, why let foreigners to compete!"), however this is part of the deal: allowing them some time to get employed here makes this student visa more attractive. Read: they will be willing to pay more to study. Good for American universities.
However, giving them 5 years of time to get employed or start a business? In the eyes of most Americans this is beyond reasonable. It's going to create a major outcry and will not be voted by Congress. The only situation it's going to work is if America had a population shortage and needed more people (like Canada, Australia), but this is not currently the case in America.
Now let's look at American businesses. They are interested in skilled but cheap labor. And H1B gives them exactly this. You call this slavery? I agree, up to some extent. But these people are foreigners and until they become citizens, they have no voice and are effectively nobody. So, it's their price if they want to be in America and eventually become 'somebody'. Sounds harsh? Correct. We live in the world of conflicting interests of different people, not in a paradise. Don't forget about this.
We can't do A/B testing to see if our suspicions that we'd have more startups and more jobs for US citizens if we allowed more founders—not more blanket immigration, mind you—into the country. The people who do find a way in tend to be the best and the brightest of the pool, so our anecdata looks favorable. There seem to be indications that immigrants and first-generation citizens tend to be 'hungrier' than more established populations, though that doesn't say anything about success/failure rates.
From a physics perspective, it's like hunting dark matter. We suspect that job growth would result from passing Startup Visa or STEM Green Cards, but economics theories are nowhere close to the rigor of physics theories. VCs still only invest in solid, market-driven ideas. I'd rather trust to them and to the market as a whole as to who sees success than have the government throw up artificial barriers to block non-Americans from American networks of capital and talent, especially when it means the failure to launch of startups that might make my life better.
Kauffman does indicate that young companies produce the most net job growth in America: http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-analysi... , though as Steve Blank says, 'startups' are lumped together when there's a large differentiation that needs to be taken into account: http://steveblank.com/2011/09/01/why-governments-don%E2%80%9...
The best bit of public policy analysis I've seen on Startup Visa and implications for job growth is from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), but they studied the 2010 Startup Visa, which is much more limited than even the 2011 Startup Visa. The 2011 version of the bill doesn't address STEM Green Cards and is strictly limited in an attempt to pass a conservative House of Representatives, whose majority has a strong anti-immigration faction.
So we're left with all of the arguments that you state. However, note that a thoughtful person like yourself isn't the target audience of something on CNN. The NFAP analysis is probably more 'chewy' for someone who wants to dive into the issue.
EDIT: Forgot the NFAP link: http://www.nfap.com/pdf/092910NFAPPolicyBriefImmigrantEntrep...
I believe in skilled immigration to the USA, and that the current system is badly b0rked (and in fact somewhat "geared" towards illegal immigration) but these articles, with their leaps of logic and poor reasoning strike me as a setback for any sort of immigration reform.
At least he's advocating, which is good, and given the low IQ of Congress, it probably doesn't matter that his articles leave much unanswered and generally fall short of being cogent arguments. But noise probably works better than cogency in this regard.
There's an economic fallacy at place here. Jobs, in and of themselves, do not benefit us on the whole. You could give some number of people a "job" to walk around in circles all day long and pay them money for it, but the net effect would be that society sees no benefit from this. Productive jobs, however, are good things. There is a conflict, though: the more productive your job is, the fewer employees are necessary - actually resulting in fewer jobs.
Hopefully you have witnessed this first-hand over the last few decades. Travel agencies have been replaced by Priceline, Expedia, etc. Tax specialists have been replaced by TurboTax, TaxAct, etc. Even simple legal matters can be handled by LegalZoom and the like, reducing the need for lawyers. All manufactured media products (books, news, movies, music, games) are now transferred digitally, which eliminates the need for factory workers to produce physical products. Online banking eliminates the need for bank tellers. Countless other examples.
Essentially, technology kills jobs. We develop software and devices to handle what was traditionally done by people, and sell the services at a much cheaper rate because we don't have to pay for all the overhead that old services once required. This is a good thing, however.
Anyway, I'm all for immigration, and I'm all for tech companies. But the fact is they destroy jobs more than they create them, and are therefore partially responsible for the current unemployment rate. The logic behind this article is all backwards because of this.
It is troubling that few readers pick up on the use of examples with gross jobs created and not net jobs created. In this case, Amit Arahoni's 9 jobs created are gross, not net. A more-clear example would be that of Craigslist. How many jobs has Craigslist created? Well, 30 jobs in gross, but likely a large negative number in net as it played a large part in displacing at least one entire industry (newspapers).
I mean if all we wanted was jobs we could just outlaw gasoline, electricity and non-human powered generators. That would create jobs for untold millions.
It would also be utterly destructive for our standard of life/health/happiness/etc.
I remember being told (as a European) in the equivalent of high school(?) that if I wanted to go to an American college, I would have to start preparations a year and a half in advance - mainly due to the time spent on processing visas.
I would have loved nothing better than to go to an American college, but, at least at the time, that made it neigh-impossible to apply for an American college, when studying at a national university or, hell, another university in Europe or Britain seemed so much easier.
I don't know what other people's experiences are, and it may be a cultural thing; maybe the process is otherwise facilitated in, say, India and China.
EDIT: FWIW, this was after 9/11. Just to account for whatever that may have changed.
http://chronicle.com/article/Chinese-Students-Prove-a/129628...
For example, I'm an Australian. That means I qualify for (and have) an E-3 visa. What's that you might ask? It's a special work visa created specifically for Australian nationals. It applies for two years and can be renewed indefinitely.
What's more, unlike an H1B visa, it's not subject to quotas and the employer doesn't first need to "prove" they couldn't find a suitably qualified domestic worker (a system fraught with abuse that simply acts as a wealth transfer system from companies to immigration lawyers).
The problem? When I need to renew it, it may take USCIS months. Plus it's more expensive than applying for a fresh visa. Also, once approved they renew your status not your visa. What does that mean? It means if you leave the country for any reason you don't have a valid visa to re-enter the US so you have to get a new visa anyway.
Basically, you need to leave the country every two years to apply for a new one (since you can't apply within the US, of course).
What's more, each time I will have to fill out the exact same set of questions (DS-160), make an appointment, give them my passport and wait for it to be returned.
Why does this visa exist? Essentially to settle a trade dispute between the US and Australia over wheat. Australia does not subsidize wheat. The US does (as does Europe) to a huge degree, yet Australian wheat is still price competitive but the US keeps Australian wheat out of the US on the flimsy grounds of "quarantine" (something Australia complained loudly to the WTO as an artificial restriction of trade for years, which like most things that are not to the US's advantage, it simply ignored). This was eventually settled and the E3 visa was one byproduct of this.
But you can see just how screwed up the system is that factors like this cause visas to be created.
Others have posted about the whole H1B problem (quotas, etc) and the backlog of green card processing basically allowing employers to treat you like indentured servants. That needs to change.
Some argue H1B visas are used to pay substandard wages in lieu of employing domestic workers. The substandard wages bit is true but that's because of the H1B processing problem. The real problem for domestic software engineers at least is that most people who call themselves "engineers" or "programmers" suck.
I've been shocked at some of the people I've interviewed, their inability to code very simple problems and their complete lack of theoretical foundations. And those are the ones that make it past resume screening and phone screens".
The government needs to accept that tech companies are basically the most mobile in the world. Look at big tech companies and you'll see they need data centers, some of which need to be in the US (which really doesn't employ that many people). Everything else can be done from anywhere*. Barriers to entry, kneejerk legislation (eg Sarbanes-Oxley) and software patents are all contributing to driving the future Googles and Facebooks elsewhere.
All of this makes me a little sad actually because the US has forgotten it's route. The US is a country of immigrants (IIRC population 2 million in 1800, 50 million in 1900).
One of the reasons I've come to New York to work is because I want to see it. New York is the beating heart of commerce and you can see capitalism and commerce in every form here, some pretty, some not-so-pretty.
I want to see it before it doesn't exist anymore.
My picture of the US is one of decay, rotting from within, collapsing under a mountain of debt and unsustainable policies that will be its downfall. The Roman Empire was enormous and collapsed. The British Empire was enormous and collapsed. Don't think it can't happen again.
I'm an American and I live and work in Sydney. I came in on the 457 subclass visa. Not sure if you're familiar with it. It's pretty much the same as the H1B (No E-3 equivalent in the other direction unfortunately). The employer has to prove the job can't be filled by a domestic worker. This particular visa program is also rife with abuse by employers looking to keep costs down [1]. A typical H1B visa holder in the USA would have their health insurance paid for by their employer. 457 visa holders are usually required to purchase their own since everyone else is covered under the national health care system. H1B visa holder's children in the USA can attend public schools for free. 457 visa holders in Australia have to pay public school tuition (~$5k/year/child) in Australia on top of paying normal federal and state taxes. Personally, I'm very satisfied with my situation but this isn't the case with all 457 visa holders.
Much like the US, Australia is a nation of immigrants. Most people I've met here are 2nd generation (i.e. their parents immigrated). Yet, there is a surprising amount of opposition to immigration[2].
[1]http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/employers-avoid-fines-despite-visa...
[2]http://www.smh.com.au/national/allout-assault-over-issue-of-...
As for the health insurance [1], this is definitely news to me and I'm a little surprised because it was passed by the Labor (left-wing) government. It's not all bad though: there are arrangements for countries with reciprocal health care agreements (mainly a handful of European countries).
If you think about it, that's fair enough. A broken arm in the US without health insurance could bankrupt me. The US doesn't provide Australians health care. Why should Australia provide it to Americans? It's just that the US doesn't provide health care to Americans either.
It's a good tip for those going to work in Australia: negotiate for employer-paid health insurance.
Honestly though, I don't think Australia is such a great place to live anymore (compared to 10+ years ago) for no other reason than the insane cost of living. It's cheaper for me to live in downtown Manhattan than it is in inner-city Perth and buying lunch doesn't cost me $15 here.
But I digress...
It is my understanding the Australian visa and residency system isn't paralyzed however. Getting a residency visa is (or at least was) relatively straightforward if you're degree-qualified and you speak English.
I agree that there is anti-immigration sentiment but the example you point to about illegal immigration (namely "boat people" from Indonesia and beyond). The problem there is that an awful lot of "asylum seekers" are nothing more than "economic migrants" attempting to jump the queue, where such migration is paid for by essentially indentured servitude to people smugglers once they arrive, possibly for years.
There are many reasons to clamp down on illegal immigration. [1]: http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/457-health-insurance-faq-visa...
The problem in Australia is it can get rather parochial, especially in areas such as medicine. In contrast, the US is more open in this regard.
The degree of difficulty to immigrate to US or Australia is relatively similar. Therefore, it is difficult to say that more immigration will create more jobs. Rather, there are some deep seated structural problems with the US economy at present, and the way Australia copies the US in all manner of politics, it will not be long before these problems arrive at our shores.
They went on about a whole lot of made-up factors like people missing their families and the rest, but the simple fact of the matter is that the cost of living in Australia is out of control.
It used to be you could sell your crappy 2 bedroom semi in an outer London suburb and move to a nice big home in Australia, and have plenty of money left over to send the kids to a good school.
Nowadays that's not the case.
Same for the young Australian - you used to be able to go to London for a couple of years, save up your money and come back with a decent stash of savings. Also no longer the case.
Honestly I think Australia is choking on it's property prices which has fuelled massive debts. It's why your chicken sandwich costs $15, because the rents are out of control because of the price the owner paid for the shop.
W/regards to not having access to Australian healthcare, I already knew that because I met a NZ guy ages ago who explained the whole deal. Not sure what the situation is now but back when the conversation took place there was no reciprocal agreement and people from NZ had to pay full-freight to get access to healthcare.
Also, the UK authorities are making it much harder for Australians to stay on after completing a 2 year working holiday visa.
Most Australians are OK with immigration in principle and practice. It is, as already described, a nation of immigrants.
The thing they don't like is the people smuggling business bringing in those who claim refugee status, after destroying their documents saying who they are. I think the general attitude is - you can immigrate, just get in line and fill out the forms like everyone else.
You may see this as the same but I don't think the average person on the street does.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but if you are not entitled to Medicare, you are exempt from paying Medicare levy (and surcharge), which the rest of the residents do have to pay. Though, you have to get it back with tax refund at the end of the financial year (it is paid with PAYG taxes) after you apply for a letter from Medicare that you weren't eligible.
Private hospital insurance should cost you about the same per year, so it's a fair arrangement, I think.
For me NY is the informal capital of mankind. That's exactly why I went there for vocation. Quite impressive. But it also got me wondering about what NY could have been by now i.e. What quantity of office and housing space was added to Manhattan in the last decades in relation to the decades before? Zoning laws are to me just one another expression of a society that wants things to stay the same, because it's quite good now. It's about preventinting new stuff from happening. When watching the NY-skyline, do I see the concrete manifestation of a vibrant people or rather the remnants of what made it the informal mankind capital?
"All of this makes me a little sad actually because the US has forgotten it's route."
Some economists argue that the demographic dividend played a key role in the economic booms of Ireland but especially China. They also argue for considerable growth to happen in India and Brazil because of that. To me, the US is the oldest example of demopgraphic dividend at work. It's immigrants-turn-citizens concept basically made the rest of the world their asset of which to expect demographic dividend. The harsh immigration-laws are not that different from around the world, but considering from how they once were, todays laws are a negative archievement. They are there to prevent stuff from happening.
"The Roman Empire was enormous and collapsed. The British Empire was enormous and collapsed. Don't think it can't happen again."
This attitude of preventing new stuff (or competition or abandonment) is a major obstacle. One obstacle the Romans didn't overcome and neither did the British.
PS: The book "The New Deal in Old Rome" (http://mises.org/books/newdealoldrome.pdf) is a fun read, that's telling the story of roman decay using the language known from modern politics.
We're trying to get ammo, and then trying to hack together some press coverage to highlight these stories.
If that's true, why are you coming to the U.S.?
On the other hand, I'm not so enthusiastic about lowering immigration barriers so we can get cheap workers to robotically throw together CRUD forms. (I guess that work is outsourced, anyway?)
The entire of human history has thus far been fueled by population growth. When there were 10 million of us, this wasn't a problem. When there were 100 million of us, this wasn't a problem. When there were 1 billion of us, it was mostly not a problem. Now as we zero in on 10 billion... it's becoming a problem.
The way our society and our economy works should in so many ways tell you this is true. Look at the urban decay that occurred in many American cities in the 20th century.
Urban decay post-WW2 was fuelled by the interstate system, the cheapening cost of owning a car and that it was cheaper to build new communities than it was to maintain existing infrastructure.
Some cities experienced negative population growth with devastating consequences (eg Detroit, Baltimore). Certainly in Detroit's case, there are large swathes of the city that really need to be returned to wilderness. But who's going to pay for the demolition, relocation and clean up?
The Western world is essentially dying with net migration being pretty much the only reason any Western country is growing at all. The social experiments of the early 20th century (ie state-funded retirement) are, at present rates, ultimately unsustainable when we get down to 3 or even 2 employed people pre retired person (initially it was in excess of 50 to 1 at least for Social Security).
An aging population is a natural consequence of slowing population growth, just like urban decay is. So far we've largely shown ourselves at being ill-equipped at dealing with either, except for politicking around migration, which basically just kicks that can further down the street.
It is my opinion that there need to be an awful lot less of us and there will be one day, one way or the other. As much as people point to space as a solution to these problems we have an economy built in basically digging not-that-deep holes for our metals. While there are metal-rich asteroids out there, the cost of moving, processing and using those materials is so many orders of magnitude more expensive (both realistically and conceivably) that I have to wonder if it will ever be comparable (although it might one day be viable just because every other way has become so expensive, which will be an earth-shattering adjustment for us all).
So migration is, I believe, a short term fix. But it doesn't address what I believe to be a key driver in unemployment: we're slowly automating our way out of the most unskilled jobs (and increasingly skilled jobs too). That too will be a challenge.
Let's say you are British. You can move pretty freely throughout much of Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with a minimum of hassle.
If you are American, the situation is very different. There are very few countries you can easily emigrate to. Yet most countries want rights for their people to be able to immigrate to the US.
I would be in favor of a global open border policy. Eliminate passports, visas, and all restrictions on the flow of people. As opposed to now where through WTO style agreements goods travel much more freely than people.
But I don't support one sided policies where people can move easily in one direction but not the other.
I think Obama is starting to hear too: http://trendguardian.blogspot.com/2011/04/startup-america-te...
Sometimes they even go into what i believe to be none of their business, last christmas i was coming back from France, going through Washington (just a 6h stop), and despise the fact i had my ticket saying i was going to Montreal, my canadian working visa, the U.S. agent bombarded me with question on what i was gonna do in canada, where i was staying, on a not so friendly tone as if i was lying.
This is why i now refuse whenever possible to go through the U.S..
As for the Visa situation, it is really a pain, i had numerous companies contacting me -thinking i was Canadian as i list my town as Montreal- from SF or Seattle, then after successful interviews, getting refused by they H.R. department because i'm French and VISA paperwork is either too much or just not even possible for them.
This seems to be pretty standard. They are trying to catch you on a lie. I don't know about the "not so friendly tone" though. I guess it depends on the agent and what kind of day/issues he is having.
It's regrettable that today skepticism at the border is so general--surely most visitors to the United States, including you, mean no harm to the United States--but there are legal problems with being selective about whom to interrogate, so almost every visitor is questioned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumors_about_the_September_11_a...
Misinformation: rumors later shown to be false:
[...]
Claims that terrorists entered the United States through Canada On September 12, 2001, Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counter-intelligence told the press that five of the terrorists had entered Maine from Canada via a ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and/or a remote border point in Saint-Théophile, Quebec near Jackman, Maine.[1] The myth was revived again in April 2009 when Janet Napolitano, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, informed a Canadian television interviewer that some of the terrorist-hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks entered the United States from Canada. In the same month, senator John McCain also told Fox News that some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada.[2]
I will say that Canada for the most part has unusually welcoming customs agents (my wife is Canadian). So you may be "spoiled" by living in Canada. Unfortunately, even Canada's openness seems to be changing a bit now, based on my experiences over the past several years.
I'm guessing that you are too young to remember traveling through Europe before the Schengen treaty took effect and opened up the borders in 1995, but as someone who studied in France and traveled across Europe in 1991-1992, I can assure you that you would have been subject to the same treatment back then at the German, Spanish, or Belgian borders. The job of the borders guards is to be suspicious, and 9/11 has only solidified those tendencies.
And you need to be awfully careful about what "polls show that most Americans are for". For example, polls show that most Americans would like to see US foreign aid reduced from about 25% of GDP to about 10% of the federal budget. The trouble is that the actual level of US foreign aid is about 1% of the federal budget. So, do "polls show" that most Americans would like foreign aid cut by 2.5x, or that most Americans would like foreign aid increased by 10x? -- In the absence of more information about what "most Americans" actually think the level of immigration is, and what they think its impact is, polls purporting to show that most Americans would like more or less immigration are pretty uninformative about what would actually benefit most Americans, or what they would choose if they had better information.
It would be better to keep party politics out of this. (Though from what you've written I wonder whether party politics are your only reason for being interested in the matter at all.)