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Comment by whycombinetor | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to follow what immigration has to do with discrimination against US-born individuals. Is the connection because, without the broader pool of applicants available through visa programs, companies would be forced to hire an increased amount of US-born people who wouldn't otherwise have been hired, some of whom would have been potentially not hired due to discrimination? If anything, my discrimination meter would go in the other direction, that when a company explicitly doesn't sponsor any visas, they would be discriminating against non-US-born individuals.

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It is probably more precise to just stick with the term "US-legal" instead of thinking about birth. That's a better term I should have used.

The mechanism is if there's one perfect candidate of the right age, race and caste but the person isn't US-legal, then companies will be forced to consider people of the wrong age, race or caste. Maybe not right away, but when the supply of the perfect age/race/caste US-legal people run out.

In my experience, the visas usually accentuate the distorted racial makeup of tech companies because they all go to overrepresented countries.

That's an interesting take; I haven't ever heard that argument used a defense of the Jones Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 , which is the classic example of protectionist/anti-foreigner-employment legislation.

Certainly it cuts both ways. But I think in the case of H1b visas, the people are all coming from a few areas of the world that are already overrepresented in Silicon Valley. It's largely a question of what does the country owe to the people who helped build it and fund it with the taxes they paid. Should the country be able to toss them aside for low-priced import labor? Certainly protectionist measures can be misused to create overprotected classes, but in this area I think the ageism especially in the US is really a problem.

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