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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

One major reason: the green card backlog is immense – especially for immigrants from India; it can take decades for them even to have a chance to apply.

This is bad even from the most hardcore selfish, anti-immigrant position: you want people moving in when they're educated and young, not when they're a decade or less away from retirement.

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The current wait time for a green card for an Indian is on the order of 100-120 years.

One of my reports, an engineer from Chennai, doesn’t want to renew his H1B in two years time and is considering either working from our office in Bangalore or beginning a startup in India. The dynamics have changed in the country. The startup scene and the maturity of mobile networks has made India a far more attractive place to live and work than it did 10 years ago.

Most developed nations are going to regret the end of this brain drain.

Same here in Eastern Europe.

I was on a contract in Switzerland in 2020 and while the pay was awesome, it wasn't sustainable - permanent employees in the same company make around 2-2.5x of what I do back home, but the cost of living (especially real estate) is 3-4x, so I have no incentive to migrate there.

I mean, Switzerland is nice, just not that nice when you're an immigrant.

I don't recall anyone from my former team staying either, despite getting job offers.

Except if you come from the EU and you have a job in Switzerland, you get a permit, more or less _by default_. You are even allowed to stay for 3 months just looking for a job!

Good luck trying that in the US.

Side-note: Having watched a number of "Benefits Britain" episodes recently, I realized that the main reason why the Swiss insist on a permit (for which a job is necessary - or a lot of money) is because certain folks from the East would immediately come and take advantage of the benefits system, as they did in the UK before Brexit.

This behaviour was so alien to me that initially I did not understand the permit situation - why have it if I get it "automatically"? That's why.

I hear this a lot but I'm yet to meet a person who travelled this far just to be on welfare.

I'm sure they exist, but it sounds like such a weird reason to go, considering the abundance of jobs and generally better labour laws in the west.

For what it's worth you're probably no more clued in on British benefit dynamics after watching those episodes than you were before, they're propaganda and not even particularly enlightening.

I moved back to India almost 4 years ago. I haven’t regretted it one bit; I have sacrificed nothing except maybe relatively cleaner air.

Most of the smart folks (engineers or otherwise) who would’ve targeted the US don’t consider it any more. For software folks, Bangalore/Hyderabad/Gurgaon offer salaries which are objectively the best outside NY/CA/Seattle.

The current visa process is an insult to talented people. There is no need to go through that mental torture, there are way better options available.

Great for India though. I'm Indian and immigrated to the US when young so didn't necessarily have a say in the matter, but I've always thought that it's a shame that the best people there are simply going to other countries, not helping to actually improve their mother country. So I'm glad to see more people improving India through startups and entrepreneurship in general.

As an Indian who came to the US at a very young age (in the early 90s), I would offer a different perspective.

That it isn’t that the best and brightest chose not to stay. It’s that the society and system constantly put up all the wrong barriers and left them no choice if they wanted to actually realize their potential.

I can only speak of (south) India of the 80s before the economy was opened up, and there was basically no tolerance for anyone who thought differently. People were stopped by all the wrong obstacles. Bureaucracies, bribes, an unnecessarily closed market. And that’s just market forces, before we get to societal forces. If you dared to veer off the usual path, you were often ostracized. Silly caste based judgements and such.

That India lost its best and brightest for decades is a tragedy. And I am truly happy to see the tremendous progress that has come in the last 3 decades.

But I hold nothing against NRIs (Non-resident Indians like my parents) who were willing to pick up their very comfortable lives and start from scratch in a new land, rather than to put up with a system that had failed them for decades. We’ve battled homesickness, culture shocks, the constant tug of war that is immigrant identity, and other such things, to arrive at where we are.

It’s the reason why I can nearly instantly relate with immigrants from any country before I can relate fully to those that have never immigrated in either land.

I agree with you too. I definitely don't look down or hold anything against NRIs, since I am one as well. I just meant that in the aggregate that it's better for a society to improve itself rather than having its best and brightest move away, regardless of the reason, including bureaucracy and the others you listed.

A country is supposed to help it's people, and get loyalty in return. A country does not have a "right" to people.

Where did GP say it did?

Indeed, I was just expressing my happiness at seeing my birth country improve, not saying that a country should trap their populace there to do so.

Works both ways. Indians don't have a right to migrate to America or Europe.

I think the term "right" is misleading — all rights are granted by governments, none are natural things which would exist without governments (no matter how much my inner anarchist wishes otherwise), government can create the right for others to enter as easily as the right to vote or the right to a fair trial, and that means American and European national governments can if they wished create a right for Indians in general to do just that.

They haven't, but they could.

I mean if we're going to base the rights of humans off of what their respective countries say their citizens have, then with equal strength a country can declare that it has the right to keep its citizens in its own territory.

Yup, that's a fair criticism. Also feels kinda sorta true, given origin countries can revoke passports? But I'm not confident about how any of that works in practice.

Part of why I think the term "rights" is unhelpful, it comes with moral associations that makes people (me included) feel unclean when peering behind the metaphorical curtain and examining how such things function in practice.

Does an Indian individual have a right to be treated equally as Icelandic individual, with respect to us immigration system? Because the system is unfairly discriminating against Indian citizens.

It isn’t unfairly discriminating. The quotas are based on population.

And naturally there are going to be a higher number of immigrants from countries that have a bigger disparity in quality of life, career prospects, etc.

How could these lotteries be made more fair to those born in the most populous countries?

From what I have witnessed, it could be made more fair by simply punishing fraud by taking away the number of applications a company can apply for, and by issuing 10 year bans to candidates found to be lying. There is so much lying about credentials and job experience in these situations.

That will reduce the amount of fraudulent applications, making way for more honest (and higher quality) applicants.

They used to call it "God's Green Earth". Did you check with God about whether anybody had the right to tell people where they could live on it?

To be completely honest, a lot of that backlog is completely self-imposed thanks to the way (mostly Indian) body shops game the H1B system.

Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or

A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0].

my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?

Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).

Let's be real for a moment here: if the people applying fraudulently were to simply respect the law and only use these visas for real specialty occupations the backlog would clear itself in a few years.

Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [1].

[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-h-1b_b_5890d86ce4b0522c...

I’m passionate about this. I’ve already lost 2 of my best reports (1 Indian and 1 Chinese) to our Canadian office. The few remaining people we have on the H1 pretty much had the current lane duck session as their last hope for reform, but with Republicans controlling the House and then low hopes for Democrats in 2024, I think we’re gonna lose them all. Especially if the UK implements the immigration reform they’ve been promising by switching to a Canada like points system.

> I’ve already lost 2 of my best reports (1 Indian and 1 Chinese) to our Canadian office.

With remote work did you really lose them ?

In a way, it is good for the developing countries in the long run.

Wouldn't the most hardcore selfish anti-immigrant position not want people immigrating at all?

There’s a difference between not allowing anyone in, and actively driving out young people who are already in and would make a substantial economic contribution over their careers.

There are of course hardcore anti-immigrant people who advocate for the latter. That position is generally founded openly on sentimental nationalism and/or racism because it doesn’t make any economic sense.

It makes economic sense to the fellow workers that are from the first world country. H1B visas etc are mainly a tool used by company founders, CEOs etc to keep wages down.

It’s hilarious that we just had a massive pandemic after which 90% of the discussion on this forum was about how everything can be done remotely now, and you think that American workers need to compete with H1Bs who no longer are competition for them when they remote work from Beijing instead of Hawaii, except, now, potentially at 1/3 the salary (at which they still live much better quality of lives in Beijing than they did in the US).

The complete lack of logic of the anti-knowledge worker immigrant position never ceases to amuse me.

So you think unlimited H1B workers should be allowed to immigrate because the work can be done remotely anyway?

Only a tiny fraction of jobs can be done (well) remotely. Those jobs are just over-represented here on HN.

We’re not talking about H1B visas but young adults who have already received an education in the US and are now facing deportation. This makes no sense for the national economy.

I feel for these young people and I hope to get to stay in the country of their choice. As a general point, though, the law of supply and demand applies to labour as it does any other commodity.

Maybe net each one of these young people against a proposed H1B slot.

This is just a fact. If a company can hire someone for cheaper they will. They focus on profits and not on the well being of the country in which they're based.

Why are Indians who oppose immigration for creating a brain drain in India allowed to prioritize what they think is good for Indian people but white Americans who think Asian immigration is bad for them get attacked for prioritizing what they think is good for white people?

Because white Americans who oppose educated Asian immigration are stupid. GP said educated young Asian immigration is good for the US. It's even better for people who are already in the US, whose property values go up and whose tax revenue goes up for them to mooch off of. The alternative is that these people have been educated on America's dime and then are deported to another country that will benefit.

If white people should support immigration because it is good for white people than doesn’t than mean you are making an argument that is racist and white supremacist? Because usually Europeans who oppose non-European immigration are the ones called racist and white supremacist. Why is it ok to support immigration by highlighting the ways it is good for white people but bad to oppose it by highlighting the ways it is bad for white people?

You have misunderstood what I said. It is good to support it by highlighting the ways it is good and stupid to oppose it by letting your racist antipathy to Asians get in the way of supporting something that is good for you and instead end up spending money for other countries to benefit.

Having an opinion on Asian immigration policy isn't inherently racist. Racism can influence opinions in a way that leads to bad policy.

Do you admit the mere possibility of being wrong about immigration being good for white Americans and promise to come to the defense of those who are called racist for arguing it is not?

I'd certainly support them if they are not racist. Are you willing to admit that most of the people who are against immigration of educated non-white young people from Asia are doing so because they are racist?

What argument can a white person make against immigration that you personally would consider to not be racist? If you deny any exist then you are just attacking people for being white and disagreeing with what you think is good for them.

If a nonwhite person made the same argument, they would be as stupid as the white person making that argument. If only white people make an argument, that is a good clue that the argument is probably racist.

To answer your question, I have to evaluate each argument separately for stupidity or racism. An example stupid argument is that it depresses wages for people who are already here. An example racist argument calls out educated non-white immigration in particular.

If everyone in Germany agreed the jews should be kicked out and only jews disagreed then by your logic that would mean those jews are just a bunch of racists. I disagree with you and await your list of caveats and exceptions designed to specifically deny white people the ability to stand up for themselves.

Irsaeel doesn’t allow non-jewish immigration. Is that because jews are racist?

Immigration is so bad for white people the only reason to support it is if you personally benefit (understandable) or you hate white people (unacceptable). So which one is it in your case?

Which interests are fighting H-1B immigration, and why?

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