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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

I am sure anyone who work in STEM can attest: immigrants do a lot of the work. Look to your left and look to your right of your work desk, chances are there is an immigrant in one of the directions you look.

And yet many of those immigrants are on borrowed time. One layoff and they risk losing decades of their life and deported back home. That kind of treatment isn't fair. Especially when these are highly productive, extremely capable, and very educated demographics. They are the ideal and model citizens for any kind of country. Yet they are treated like disposables.

What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?

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> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry?

Protectionism of course. The fear is that companies are looking for cheaper foreign labor. Ironically, when allowing some visas with many strings you end up with indentured servants that push labor prices down, not up.

A train of thought is that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, only employers unwilling to pay for labor. Of course it's all very complicated. Attracting top talent is also good.

It's not easy to know what the perfect policy is but there are lots of arguments to sort through.

And yet there are plenty of companies that openly exploit the visa system to bring cheap labor. Just check the top companies with the most H1Bs and you'll see a lot of consulting firms.

I remember when I was just out of college looking at jobs.

I forget which H1B consulting farm it was that emailed me(a citizen), but they were advertising a "Full-time salary job" doing software engineering in NYC, $39k/year.

Yea...no shit they won't get any takers and will use that as evidence to hire H1Bs.

They should be handed a permanent resident card with their doctorate. Maybe even Masters degrees, at least in STEM.

Canada has an immigration system that prioritizes educated people who speak their languages. It is a much saner model.

Proportionally they also take in 10x as many permanent residents each year. They also don't have per country limits.

I'd interject here that America has no official national language, and I think it's prudent to keep it that way.

In other words, language requirements are not something we should copy from Canadian immigration policy.

If you can't communicate effectively in one of your host country's main languages, you're not going to be able to support yourself and survive.

That's just not true. Ever been to San Diego? Little Saigon? Chinatown?

Right, that's called "ghettoization". It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. You really think things will work out great if you bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants in one little part of a city?

I guess it worked "ok" for America historically because America abused and exploited so many immigrants for so long (go read "The Jungle"), but I don't think that's really something to emulate.

> Right, [San Diego / Little Saigon / Chinatown is] called "ghettoization".

Just because a geographic concentration originated from forced-segregation policies over a century ago does not automatically mean those bad policies and pejorative status continues today.

> It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. [...] exploited so many immigrants

Hold up, I think the goalposts are moving a bit here: Earlier you said it was about "supporting themselves" economically.

However now it sounds like no amount of economic-self-sufficiency is enough--you're saying those people ought to be blocked/deported unless they can satisfy some ill-defined requirement about where they live and who they socialize with.

> bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants

I am doubtful that millions of people who *checks comment-thread* have doctorate degrees and PhDs will be arriving to work for the rest of their lives in restaurants.

If they do... well, then they're probably choosing it to escape something crappy enough that we should be letting them in for humanitarian reasons anyway.

Also:

1. If being unable to support themselves is the concern, why not make that the actual requirement to stay... Versus of an indirect and error-prone language requirement set by what are probably a bunch of old white monolingual men in Washington, DC?

2. Automatic translation tools have advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few decades.

>If being unable to support themselves is the concern, why not make that the actual requirement to stay...

That's a good idea. That's how it is here in Japan: knowing the language is good, and gets you some points on your visa, but it's not a requirement. If you have a high-paying job offer from a sponsoring company, and a good educational and professional background (or other factors, like if you're in academia), then that's good too. They figure you'll learn the language on your own in that case.

If you have no education and no way to support yourself, and can't communicate with anyone, why would they want you? Unless it's to exploit you. I don't think we should be promoting exploitation.

>Versus of an indirect and error-prone language requirement set by what are probably a bunch of old white monolingual men in Washington, DC?

US doesn't have a language requirement. We're talking about Canada, so you mean a bunch of white bilingual (English/French) people in Ottawa.

Have you even traveled?

There are large pockets of all kinds of folks all kinds of places. There is even a city in Mexico with a huge Chinese population.

Americans travel all over expecting to just use English and get by (myself included).

You can absolutely do so, I've known many, Americans in Paris, Chinese in Mexico, French in America, on and on

The US prioritises an ability to swim through a river, climb a small fence, and/or trudge across some desert.

Most immigrants do not arrive via the southern border.

The prioritized ones seem to.

It started with surviving a cruise over ocean... So I don't think that is much different in that sense.

It's much the same in Japan, though education, work experience, and salary count for more than the language.

There was a bill like that where PhDs would be exempted from visa limits and such. But it was discarded because the House considered it would cost the US 1 billion dollars over 10 years.

Don't know who or what kind of analysis they did to pull that 1 billion number. It just shows how inane and stupid the entire US immigration and laws are.

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-i...

It's stupider than that. For some reasons they couldn't just add a processing fee to offset the cost.

Ironically, every PhD in the US costs nearly ~$1M in funding.

People who graduate are stuck in a weird love-hate relationship. You can't hate it because of the generous funding; you can't not hate it because of the insane politics behind immigration that tied to all sorts of historical notions of racial supremacy and so on.

Why not in anthropology? Why not in literature? Because those degrees are not "needed"? Not "useful"? Or are there too many US citizens with those degrees already? Curious.

I believe highly trained individuals in any field should be welcome and treated with respect and equal opportunity. Almost every field supplement each other and the society in some war or the other. I'd urge everyone to look at the declining quality of teachers everywhere. And what it results in? Go figure.

It makes sense that if the primary motivation for offering an easier route to immigration is to ease shortages in certain critical areas, the route should only be offered to those areas.

So, yes, if there are enough citizens and permanent residents meeting the current requirements and enough in school to meet projected demand, there's no need to offer a faster route in those fields.

They are not useful, sorry. They are vanity professions. All of the anthropologists in the United States could be abducted by aliens from Alpha Centauri tonight and we wouldn’t notice a difference in the morning. If all of the semiconductor professionals disappeared in the same manner we’d have serious problems.

I’ve got nothing against anthropology as a field or anthropologists themselves, but they wouldn’t even show up on the tech tree. You don’t need a PhD to be a school teacher and, frankly, we would be a lot better off if instruction was done by practitioners instead.

Yeah, I mean, then you'll see even more master mills (which are already a thing) and PHD mills.

Because the consequence of filling every labor gap with immigrants is to suppress everyone's wages. You're increasing the supply.

And if it really is a critical industry, being dependant on available foreign labor is quite the risk. There's not really any guarantee they'll want to keep moving here.

Ok, then give them citizenship so they’re not foreign anymore. And besides, I thought we were facing a problematic population decline?

Based on this article, I don't think oversupply is the problem here.

Also, the US economy is already overly dependent on foreign labor. From offshoring jobs to manufacturing to onshore labor, every sector of the economy is filled with foreign labor. How many things you own were made outside of the US? How many of your coworkers are immigrants? How many foreigners do you interact with when working on a large project at work?

It's not a matter of "oversupply" or not. The harder it is for companies to hire, the more they are willing to pay, so long as they can still generate revenue at those wages.

Immigrants coming to the US to get shit done in tech are creating jobs, directly or indirectly. And if we loosen the visa requirements so the people on them aren't at the mercy of their employers they won't get paid less than citizens would for the same job.

The only issue is if we underpay the immigrants. If Joe Schmoe American isn't the better pick then he shouldn't get the job over someone in a visa queue.

> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?

Those folks don't vote nor have enough money to create significant lobbies.

It’s not just that, immigrants are massive job creators. Out of the top 500 billion+ dollar unicorns in the US, 51% were started with by an immigrant. 66 of those 500 companies had atleast one Indian cofounder.

Wow! I wonder what the reason behind this is?

People who are really motivated to start a company are also really motivated to move to the best place to do it.

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