A case for dynamic scoring of high-skilled immigration
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The new immigrant is denied some basic rights like being able to find a new job without employer permission and the america suffers because it might not get quality. Because unless the situation in your home country is really desperate or you are in your early 20s, any decent experienced professional would balk at the terms in the H1B visa.
As for the standard, "immigrant keeping wages down thing". Maybe the US can look at the "Shareholder Value", "Stock Buybacks" and "Monopolies are efficient" philosophies pervading the economic establishment for "keeping the wages down".
What? Most do, because usually people want to stay. But H1B does not “terminate in a green card” and you 100% have an option in the matter (you have to sign the I485…).
You can renew indefinitely with an approved I140, btw (typical for backlogged Indians) (not that this doesn’t suck).
Realistically, there's not very many Americans who could get become an engineer if only they had a little more scholarship money. Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. If you have any empirical data that contradicts this I'd be interested in seeing it.
Also, Canada rapidly (like in one year) transitions most temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US. Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status which is quintessentially discriminatory, and IMO treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.
Not all discrimination is wrong. For example, the American immigration service currently discriminates against people by criminality, among many other factors. The purpose of the U.S. government is to serve and protect the American people. If that means discriminating against migrants, that is, literally, their entire raison d'etre.
Canada just chooses to welcome skilled immigrants, whereas the US has an immigration prohibition. See: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-n...
Canada also has a ranking system that picks the best immigrants with the highest scores (unlike the lotteries the US relies on).
But charging immigrants a higher tax rate is discrimination, 100%. Your comment is baseless, and entirely invalid.
Combined with "About 286,000 new homes are currently built each year, according to 2021 data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. But the country's housing supply is not keeping up with population growth."
Is absolutely not serving the Canadian people when their home prices are completely unaffordable to a growing number of their population. It also suppresses wages for their own skilled citizens.
I do think importing skilled immigrants is a good long term strategy for their country, but they should tone it down a notch until housing prices are better.
There is restrictive zoning laws, inordinate red tape, extremely high development charges (taxes), super long delays, NIMBYism in general, that all contribute to the Canadian housing shortage crisis.
Immigration is demand side thing. The solution to the housing crisis is to not to try to mess with demand, but to increase supply.
Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.
> suppresses wages
This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.
I think it is unfair to make these kind of statements. You are essentially telling the parent poster that they are racist. Perhaps your experiences have created your own kind of biases and hatred.
I agree that often times people do use secondary arguments to guise what they really mean but I think the way through that is to either refute their arguments, not to suggest they are racist.
Why? Why should we only worry about supply, especially when that's a much, much harder issue to tackle?
I live in a rural part of the US. There are no real zoning laws to speak of, red tape, high taxes, delays, NIMBYism, etc. None. Zero. Yet our house prices have also surged. My parents were able to afford 60 acres on a construction worker's (single) salary back in the 80s. My wife and I both have degrees and we could afford 15 acres with a much worse house, and that was 10 years ago. My wife's brother just bought a house for more than we spent.
It's in town, which is undesirable around here, on a regular in-town sized plot. The house is half of our home's size and needs a lot of work. Yet it's 25% more than what we paid with a much higher interest rate.
You people in cities always think it's all that red tape you have, but the problem is a lot simpler. There are more people than ever and housing supply hasn't kept up with demand. That is something the Canadian and US governments could fix going forward incredibly easily, without somehow finding 4x the home builders we currently have.
> Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.
Ad hominem. I'm sure racists bring it up, just as it seems everyone else is afraid to bring it up for seeming like they're racists.
> This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.
That's an incredibly silly argument, and I don't know where to start. Again you're ignoring basic supply and demand. If immigrants didn't suppress wages, companies wouldn't bother hiring them. If they need 10 coders in a department and can't get enough, they'd have to raise their starting wage to entice more potential workers. If they can get 6 and fill the rest with immigrants they don't need to do that.
That's so basic I felt silly typing it on here.
Are you aware that housing prices surged during and immediately after COVID, i.e. circa 2020-2022, a time period which had the lower immigration numbers in recent history.
Lowest immigration in recent decades, yet the massive housing prices?
Yet you blame immigrants? Why do you hate immigrants so much?
> an incredibly silly argument ... felt silly
So you respond with the word "silly" repeatedly. Tells me all about your character.
> ignoring basic supply and demand
This is wrong. It's called the zero-sum fallacy. This doesn't apply to labor, at least not in the same way as to material goods. I'm not going to explain it further to you, but my example "North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom." demonstrates this.
> raise their starting wage
And you think highly-skilled workers would magically appear out of thin air, as soon as this is done? http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html
> suppress wages
Your tone of language belies an incredible level of hatred, resentment, and rabid xenophobia towards immigrants.
> I live in a rural part of the US.
Why does it entirely* not surprise me that a rabid immigrant hater is from a part of the rural US (likely a Trump-supporting region), and which likely has seen few immigrants (versus liberal states/regions)? Rural areas with few immigrants that are responsible for much of the hatred towards immigrants at the national level.
The wickedness of restricting the free movement of people is that people like you want to use the violence of the state to exclude people peacefully moving. It's a morally evil thing to do. It makes you morally monstrous (not that you'd ever care of regret repent of it, I'm sure).
Personally, I really shouldn't engage with absolute evil moral monster like yourself, it's not great for my mental health. It makes HN a toxic, and suffocating place. Thank you (/s) for making HN far less welcoming, with your xenophobia.
I've generally avoided engaging in any immigration-related thread on HN for a few years now to the vitriolic level hatred of immigrants that many people here hold. This post has sort of been an object lesson in that -- most of the responses to my comments have been of a xenophobic nature. So I probably should go back to ignoring immigration-related thread on HN.
I agree with a points based system, but there are clearly many structural issues to the Canadian system.
Your link also says 65% of food bank users are students.
Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.
I wonder how they collected these statistics. Do food banks seriously hand out forms asking people to fill out (a) their country of birth, (b) how long they'd lived in Canada?
Conservatives and right-wing media in general have shown a proclivity towards making up false statistics and false numbers, if it advances some conservative cause. For example, fake scientific papers denying climate change, or fabricated (un)scientific papers saying that the COVID vaccine is somehow dangerous. I would not trust data someone puts forward blindly.
I agree with the sibling comment that:
> Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.
This is true in my case as well.
For the refugees, I have no problem with family reunification because if the situation is bad enough to qualify for our humanitarian refugee program, chances are that it's also bad enough for the rest of that migrant family.
There is a temporary visa for parents and grandparents, but there is no access healthcare with it, which is serious matter[2][3][4]. For example:
> She says he needs a different type of care and has even offered to pay out of pocket, but she can’t get him into a long-term care home without an OHIP number.
Did you bother to google Canada's family immigration laws?
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigrati...
[3] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-pa...
[4] https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-ca...
1) https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
With a 200k CAD income, I'm likely[1] a top 10% earner. Most immigrants to Canada likely earn more than the average Canadian, since the Canadian immigration system heavy selects for high-skilled individuals with. So, considering skilled immigrants' tax contributions are likely quite a bit higher, don't immigrants' parents deserve to have full access to free healthcare?
[1] The statistics top out at 100k: https://www.statista.com/statistics/464262/percentage-distri...
I also think your argument would be more constructive without some of the strong language you use. For myself it takes away from a constructive conversation and reads poorly.
I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, many individuals on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you don't deserve to have any rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights or freedom in this country" etc--and, no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent sentiment / level of hatred using politer words. You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect such extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.
I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.
Where did you get this idea from? Ask anybody hiring managers in tech (who are willing to pay well), and they’ll say there’s nothing but a shortage. And I’m sure there’s multiple other fields besides tech with a serious shortage.
Employers requested 758,944 visas for skilled workers (H1B), and the U.S. government due to congressional limits, can only issue 85,000 and will have to reject 673,994 applications.
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Your general thesis has been that immigrants are treated as unequals without rights by the US government. I am not arguing if that is true or not. I am simply stating that those processes are hard to change when there is no shortage of people wanting to come to America. There is not a supply shortage of people wanting to come, so there is no incentive to make the process easier/better. Adding proof with your statement that we annually reject more applications than accept.
Just because there is demand, doesn't mean it's morally right to treat people badly, and to restrict their rights and freedoms.
Canada is an excellent counter-example to this.
Canada gives most people moving to Canada their full rights and freedom, unlike the US. From a purely moral point of view, that's highly commendable.
There is huge demand (and millions of people willing) to move to wealthy countries the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait UAE, Qatar, etc. That demand and desire exists mostly due to higher salaries there.
There's no reason the US should treat immigrants worse than Qatar or Saudi Arabia (I would say the conditions of the H-2 work visa and especially the undocumented are probably worse than in some countries in the middle east), but the US (or at least Republicans[1] in the US) chooses to do so out of general disdain and hatred towards the concept of granting permanent residence, and integrating new people.
[1] I'm clarifying with Republicans here, since many blue (Democratic) states have indicated they'd like the welcome immigrants, Democratic politicians have introduced legislation that is immigrant-friendly; and all of these efforts have only been opposed to and blocked by Republicans.
I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.
https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf
It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.
As an example, the California math curriculum is being organized around more extreme versions of the idea of keeping grades together, even though some have not learned previous material. They point to the fact that blacks wind up staying in class to higher grade levels.
Troglodytes like myself point out that if someone is missing key concepts in math, it is absolutely essential that this not be glossed over. You have to go back and fix the foundation before trying to go on. Systemically not even trying to do this allows only the pretense of an education. People like me then point to poor test scores and adult outcomes as evidence that pretending people failed to learn doesn't work. We need to have more rigorous standards, offer more support, and be willing to go more slowly at first until people "get" concepts.
When you look at states by black/white disparities in the prison population, progressive states dominate the bad end of the spectrum, and conservative states dominate the better end. (No state is actually very good, but some are less bad than others.)
My opinion is this. Conservative states do a lot that's obviously bad. What progressive states do is not as obviously bad, but generates worse results. Rigid ideological lectures around equity don't change that. Most people think that we live in a more progressive and tolerant society than we did under Reagan. But black/white wealth disparities have been increasing, not decreasing. Not because of old problems like redlining. Which was banned in 1968. But because CURRENT policies passed since 1980 are bad.
So what would I change? First I would end the drug war. It was always a race war. Second, I would bring back school bussing. Data showed that it really worked.
No, it's the immigrants' fault...
(I wonder who you blame for lack of black Americans in C-level positions, doctors, lawyers, politicians, various millionaires and billionaires, etc. Not that many folks from India in any of those, so immigration from Asia can't be it...)
> Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer.
The flaw in that kind of logic is:
1: Many people who enter college can't graduate, for many different reasons.
2: Many people who graduate are incapable of working in the field they studied for, again for many different reasons.
In my experience, I went to an expensive school that had a high dropout rate. A lot of the dropouts were people who either had poor study habits, or simply weren't able to understand the material. Unfortunately, everyone who took out loans and then dropped out still had to pay back the loans.
He basically said that, if you're planning on working in a field that does not need a college degree, it's not "worth it" to go to college. In 4 years, you'll be making more money then someone graduating, and have no debt, and have savings.
It was "sacreligous" on his part because the school had a 99% college acceptance rate; but years later I bumped into an alumn from my class who went the contractor / no college route, and was doing well and very happy.
Edit:
> That's why all the smart people became home contractors
That's not a job for everyone, which is why college is also needed. I'd really hate being a home contractor, for many, many reasons. College was the right path for me, but I'm under no illusion that it's the right path for everyone.
Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.
One way to see this is that a million people every year who are already in college choose not to study cs or it type things. They could do it as part of regular college but they don't. Then they get out and can't get a job.
This country treats immigrants unfairly but even that poor treatment represents more opportunities for them than elsewhere. So they put up with it. But that won’t always be the case and it’s already very different than when I came here. Not sure I’d decide to immigrate to US if I were starting today, knowing what I know now.
I migrated, not to US, and my brother stayed. We work in the same industry, and has 2x my quality of life with 60% of the income.
Peope who immigrate on these visas are typically not lower class in their home societies, they are usually upper-middle class. And usually you wnd up just in the middle class in the west. And standarss of living for middle class have beeen declining for the past 10 years or so, while developing nations are developing.
There is also cost to immigration - losijg contact with family, expense and stress of applying for visas, etc. You wouldn't make the jump for like 10% improvement, the QoL improvement has to be at least 50% for it to be worthwhile.
I want to eliminate the H-1B (and some other non-immigrant economic visa categories, but the H-1B is the most salient) and instead allow would-be immigrants or temporary workers not admitted under any other visa category but not personally disqualified from entry to get an annually renewable paid self-sponsored work-eligible visa (with lower fees for those eligible but on a waitlist in an immigrant visa category) . If employers want to pay for the cost, they can, but the worker’s visa status won’t be dependent on them.
Also, Canada rapidly transitions temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US.
This is an obnoxious way of starting a point.
For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country. You can renew status, but not visa. If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. Such as when the applicant is already living and working legally in the US.
We choose not to prioritize and allocate resources to it (or choose to bureaucratically overcomplicate it given the resources allocated to it).
It’s not fundamentally hard, failure is a choice. And its a choice we shouldn’t make.
If that's true, you couldn't visit your family back home?
Personally, I have spent a lot of energy dealing with partially dysfunctional immigration system, I would not be willing to do that again
Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example.
If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”).
There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here.
tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.
This is crazy. I would inderdtand if the Gov asked for a million dollars upfront, but this is just pointless abuse and cruelty.
UK has the same shit, if you apply for Permanent Residency you can't leave, and my parents suffered a serious ilness and I couldn't go.
We give out student visas openly, incentivizing universities to bring on large numbers of international students at full rate vs. discounted local students. We then do not provide immigration visas to these same students, leading to them being deported some years into the professional workforce.
This is a recipe to create a skilled labor shortage.
A half century ago, the idea was that you bring a lot of the best and brightest of poorer foreign nations to the US for a university education. Then they return to their home nation and eventually work their way up to positions of power. Hopefully, their positive view of the USA will influence their decision making. In addition, many will have maintained contacts they made during their school years.
It's not a crazy tactic given that the cost was mostly borne by the foreigners.
But if you make visa program too punitive, then folks will simply chose not to come. A person in their 30-40s, want stability so as they can raise their kids, have a place to call home and not be on a perpetual cycle of anxiety.
In my mind, this will disincentivize folks who have most to contribute to US economy. I don't know much about China but for folks who are really good, salaries in India is already pretty high and closer to US salaries and will have fewer reasons to immigrate.
It isn't? They've been trying their hardest since the late 90's, and have never been able to make it work. They'd love to pay $1.00/hour for programming work in Bangladesh like they do for textile manufacturing, but as of a quarter-way through the 21st century, they haven't been able to.
Agree that an auction will raise more money. My point was that there is significant amount of money H-1B programs generate already.
So yes - there’s a whole lot of $$ that are currently paid into by h1b holders.
The dividends could be used for a raft of things, including what you've suggested. Alternatively, it could simply be divided by every person in the country and evenly distributed. Dividends, as they offer in Alaska, are very politically popular, and stand a good chance of being legislatively approved.
As with all of these discussions: what costs? And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?
I'll use one of the most cited papers on migration (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100) (part of the text here: https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf). It's a longitudinal study on Denmark during the period of 1991-2008, exploring the results of a wave of new refugees in the country.
The tl;dr is that low-skilled natives were effectively pushed out of their previous employment. They could not, or would not, compete with the migrants owing to ostensibly lower wages and worse working conditions. Instead, they leveraged Denmark's generous free education system, and earned degrees. This afforded them higher wages over a long period of time.
So, one of the costs of high migration - particularly low-skilled migration - is that the poorest lose their jobs, or earn less, or have to work in worse conditions. If you live in a country without free university education, these people will have to contend with a permanent quality of life downgrade.
Then there is housing. The West has experienced enormous pressure on rental and home prices over the last couple of decades. Part of the reason for this is high migration. People need to live somewhere. In many places, for various reasons, production has not kept up. This means locals are forced to pay more for accommodation. This, once again, disproportionately impacts the poor.
I also cite demand for social services and infrastructure, which also appears to be failing to expand at sufficient pace in many nations.
> And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?
Your question implies no distinction between locals and immigrants. That is clearly incorrect. A nation exists to protect the wellbeing of its citizens, not citizens of other nations.
There exist Pareto optimal economic policies.
The number of slots feels extremely arbitrary to me. Is it based on anything remotely 'real'? As in statistics or other hard numbers? Or is it some 'magic number' that Congress handed down at some point?
The amount they pay will be more than offset by the value generated by high skill of the highly skilled employees this gives them access to.
American university education is really expensive. I don’t think any amount of money from this is going to help subsidize that. I’m not sure why it is so expensive but charging more for h1b and green cards isn’t going to help that cause.
Edit: I support the idea that the US workforce should be self sufficient and not rely on immigration. That has to come through reducing cost of higher education. I just don’t trust the uscis to give up their $$ in support of that cause.
Under that proposal I would probably not hire a US citizen at all if a foreigner is available. Sure the foreigner might be more expensive (that is: if I am not reducing his salary to compensate for the H1B fee), but at least I don't have that Damocles sword hanging over my head. Especially if the firing happens in a time of hardship when my finances are already strained, that could be the straw that breaks the camel back.
A lot of firms also hire direct in India. Accenture or ibm will have a token representative in the us with a majority of the worker bees in India. I think singling out Tcs or infosys is a bit of a dog whistle. The biggest offenders are American consulting companies.
Furthermore, if the H1B is causing a cost/loss to someone, then the money should go to these people. You can argue that the H1B is harming local workers, but it cannot possibly be harming future/potential workers to which you propose to give the scholarship.
The way to solve is by more parental guidance. American parents usually leave everything to the kids to decide. STEM courses are hard. Asian parents push their kids to take difficult subjects even if the kids resist.
This way the difference between an H1B and a real citizen employee is transparent to the employer, and the employee can move between companies without issue (or even take time off work, as long as they still pay)
Any excess money the employee has is either spent in driving up the local rental market, enriching landlords, or sent back to their home country. Minimizing rental competition is in the best interest of US citizens. Minimizing exporting money is in the best interest of the US government.
If it is paid by the employee, then companies would probably reimburse at least part of it. If it is paid by the company, it is already factored in the .salary amount. In the end, both employer and employee only care about the net amount the pay or get.
Now let’s say that the H1B, when he receives his $100k salary, goes and rents an apartment. He pays $2000/month for the apartment and lives in a nice luxury rental, and the apartment complex has one less available unit and charges $2100/month to future renters. The H1B is sending $30k/year back home. Instead, let’s say the H1B must also pay a $40k tax/year from their $100k salary. Now the H1B isn’t renting a luxury rental. They’re sharing a bedroom in a house, and sending $5k/year back home. The luxury rental stays on the market longer, and the next renter pays $1900/month, instead of $2000/month.
The key is that the H1Bs will take significantly lower than the “market” price which companies are being forced to pay. The companies are willing to pay significantly more than “market” price in order to displace their older workers. The claim for this system to work is that there aren’t enough US citizens to perform the work, and yet they’re laying off older US workers.
Wasn't this shown to be false because skilled workers exists. But just not willing to work for peanuts?
H-1B is a non-immigrant (but dual intent) visa capped annually at less than 1/10 the level of the cap on immigrant visas, it has very little to do with “how much immigration we want”.
If we switched H-1B to a salary auction system I would additionally love if it came with a streamlined 2-year path to a green card, because if they won the salary auction and stayed on for two years we’d know these are truly the most valuable workers on the planet and we’d benefit from them joining our workforce permanently.
That said, I understand a complicated change like that would be a major uphill battle and not directly related to our subtopic.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/h1b-visa-lottery-auction-tech-w...
An auction would be good for everyone aside from companies that are abusing the system to get cheap labor that's basically trapped in the US.
We have high import taxes to protect our national beef production, but we don't produce enough beef locally to satisfy demand. So near the end of the year the government determines how much we need to import to satisfy demand, create quotas for that amount and auctions off the quotas.
Seems to work well enough AFAIK.
To make it more concrete, it would be nice if NGOs could hire foreign talent just as effectively as Google can.
"Universities and related nonprofit entities, nonprofit research organizations and government research organizations are exempt from the cap"
Insane work hours. Long stretches of unpaid overtime sometimes without weekends. No autonomy. No freedom. No say. Oh and shift work.
TSMC not being able to find workers has nothing in the US has nothing to do with a shortage of workers. They're just terrible to their people.
So they'll get H1B workers who are then basically trapped and can be mistreated.
The current system is terrible for everyone. Bad for the economy by keeping smart hard working people out. Bad for the workers who make it here who need to put up with TSMC. And bad for local Americans because H1B wage lower bounds aren't high enough.
"They keep saying we're slowing them down, but they're not giving us the information we need. Most of us are capable of doing it if you gave us the correct information."
Also safety was not important.
Plus, when the workforce is 99% H1B visa holders, what does "local worker pay" even mean?
the answer to me seems obvious.
if i lived in honduras and you said i could come to america but i had to work for tsmc, what's the chance i decline?
Keep in mind, in Australia, plumbers and electricians get the maximum points for professional skills. So would nurses, pilots, and even lawyers (though they must be admitted to the Australian bar).
Hell will freeze over before the US lawyers who write the immigration system rules agree that foreign lawyers and patent agents should have access to the US job market the way they think STEM workers should.
Yet it is clear that important policy questions cannot be settled by shouting.
For the longest time the challenge for (macro)economists was to break-down their tools and make them understandable to wider audiences. Separate ideology from empirical fact.
You can't operate in a democracy by arguing that some black box said so (incidentally a lesson also for the various AI acolytes).
> In July 2022, hopes were high the FY 2023 defense authorization bill would include an amendment on green cards for individuals with Ph.D.s in science and engineering. In what has become a familiar story, it was not to be.
> “According to a Congressional source, the House Rules Committee did not rule the amendment in order because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said the provision would cost $1 billion over 10 years,” as reported in July. “To address the issue and offset the cost, a $7,500 fee was added for the individuals who received permanent residence under the provision. However, the House Ways and Means Committee said the fee could not be included because it amounted to a tax and, therefore, violated Clause 5(a) of Rule 21 of the rules of the House of Representatives.”
That's just the first order reason. The second-order cause is that there is just not enough political will to get this over the finish line -- nobody wants to spend enough political capital pushing it through all the little things that can stop a bill, so a random reason pops up every time. All the hurdles here can be overcome -- just nobody in a position to do something cares enough about it compared to all the other legislative priorities they have.
As for the reason no congressman wants to spend political capital on this subject? I don't know enough about congressional politics, internal or external, to say.
The primary takeaway I have about this whole saga is that it's not enough for a bill to be without much opposition -- it must have people actively pushing it through all the little vetoes that different corners of congress built into the procedure of passing bills. It's not opposition that kills bills -- it's indifference.
Why, just so companies can have cheaper wages?
What benefit does America get by having more foreign born and trained tech workers?
Why not make it easier for police, doctors, nurses, social workers, and teachers instead?
Talented, highly educated people are a huge net-positive on the economy and everybody else profits from that.
You have to be a hardcore racist and/or an idiot to argue with data that overwhelming.
And frankly if you're an American high-skilled worker who is concerned about foreign talent "replacing" you (an absurd idea in a labor market where demand continues to outpace supply, and will continue to do so as long as technology advances), then are you actually as highly skilled as you think you are? If you're being outcompeted by foreign talent then you need to "get good" - it's a skill issue.
The argument for foreign workers replacing domestic workers in unskilled jobs makes more sense, because the demand is for commoditized labor and there's negligible difference between employees beyond how little they're willing to be paid. But for high skilled work, by definition, it's your skills that should differentiate you. If they don't, then that's your problem to solve. It shouldn't be up to the rest of society to lower the floor of high-skilled work to accommodate your lack of skill.
You argument is hinged as a defense against anti-immigration.
I’m not anti immigration. I am against simply making it easier for software developers to get visa’s, that doesn’t make America any better (than giving visas to non-developers)
Creating jobs that only go to skilled tech workers, and/or tech workers who live in tech hubs isn’t much of a benefit to America.
Create well paying jobs that any american can do with tradeschool or on the job training—those are jobs we need.
Not workers willing to make an internet enabled juice machine.
And if you have a great idea, have funding and customers, sure we can give you a visa, but in exchange the US tax payer gets 20% stake.
To address the crux of your point, America should continue to be a place where the best and the brightest head towards to start companies. However, I think it’s fair to value quality over quantity. We only need to look up north to see the potential pitfalls of loose migration policies.
Your argument hinges on natives not achieving similar results with I’m not sure is true.
Given history, I’d say it’s likely the natives would succeed (as there’s precedent for their ancestors succeeding). However it would come at a higher cost to the “business” - really, the few at the top who are disproportionately profiting.
Furthermore, given the state of the import’s homeland it’s likely the immigrants only succeed because of environment in America, not because of anything unique they bring. And there’s no precedent for them maintaining - much less creating - the culture that allowed them to immigrate to a new land and be so wildly successful.
On top of that, investing in a native population has long term benefits that vastly outweigh importing talent for immediate gain. Unfortunately our politicians are choosing the opposite and sacrificing long term health for short term profits.
Are you implying that if they don't emigrate they'll be properly utilized in a way that is a threat to the US's current hegemony? If so, why aren't these countries doing that now?
The reason is rooted into how PACs and in turn mega money and corporations work behind the scene to fund and elect politicians. It’s advantageous for companies such as Google or Amazon to have a pool of labor that cannot leave their job without jeopardizing the immigration status of them and their family. It keeps competition down and less turnover.
The status quo also serves easily talking point for politicians to flame their base. Immigration is no longer a policy issue as it should be. It’s now a way for politicians to score easy points. One side thinks it’s an attempt on electoral demographics change while other side wants broad reforms under the umbrella of “comprehensive immigration reform” - for them even skilled worker immigration I should be tied to the whole dreamers act. At the end it’s not going anywhere with the current status quo. Backlogs are ever growing and some of the case dates are as long as 50years.
How about you allow anyone who manages to get a job with decent salary? Let's say $250000 year?! Residential permit obviously includes family. Very fair, very transparent and easy to implement.
This "dynamic scoring" is unfair, untransparent, and will just lead to mistreatment of foreign workers by large companies!
Any US citizen (or citizens in any country) doesn't want fair competition against immigrants/foreign laborers. They accept immigrants because it (is supposed to) enlarge the pie to share. That's why things like dynamic scoring attempt to capture a bigger picture.
I'm personally skeptical about metrics with a lot of guess work, but I appreciate the effort here. The impact of the immigration is just hard to quantify.
Immigration system is byzantine and unpredictable. Person can even get kicked out with very short notice. And frankly salary in US quite often does not even cover expenses (rent, insurances, taxes...).
Semiconductor engineer from Taiwan has options in mainland China, Singapore, UAE... If you count expenses (living, travel and legal), cultural values, taxes... This engineer may actually make more money outside of US!
To make a better case, the CBO or other entity should be making predictions today and tracking how well their prediction panned out in reality. Ideally, there'd be a built-in mechanism of only allowing dynamic scoring when there is > X years of accurate predictions at > YY% and that if the average accuracy dips below that threshold then dynamic scoring is disallowed until it gets back above.
I don't really get it tbh. Why even bother paying for college if you're just going to major in BS?
When I was in HS, councilors looked at me like I was an idiot when I said I didn’t want to go to college after HS (admittedly I regret it, but didn’t affect my “success”)
It seems you could learn more, have a lot more fun, and make many more friends, if you pocketed the 190k and used the money for 4 years of debauchery around the world.
That they haven't done this just means they don't want to, a Mitt Romney here or there notwithstanding
Also, while in theory, these programs are supposed to attract the best and the brightest, the reality is different. In software, some that come in are good, but a large number have substandard skills.
You would be right if most startups were not already hiring mostly remote engineers from LATAM. If you can't compete against H1Bs (mostly Indian outsourcing companies) as a US based software engineer, you definitely can't compete against LATAM remote engineers with 10 yrs of experience and costs $100k all in (no payroll taxes, no benefits).
The real difference between someone who resides physically in the US vs a remote worker is that the person physically in the US:
- pays taxes
- raises families
- starts companies
Your original comment suggested the H1B folks actually push down US salaries. If that is true, then LATAM workers who work US hours should also apply a downward pressure on US salaries. My company hires like 30 LATAM engineers, 10 US engineers and 0 H1Bs. We simply will not hire junior US engineers - completely idiotic use of capital. However we will pay 300k for a staff / principle US based engineer. That engineer will lead a team of 5 LATAM engineers and level them up. This model is going to have a downward pressure on US based salaries if enough companies adopt it.
Companies that really think that they can benefit from foreign knowledge labor are readily capable of opening foreign subsidiaries. No immigration bureaucracy gets in the way of that.
You could remove the H1B quotas tomorrow, and the fact remains that employers will prefer American talent when they can get it. Because cultural barriers are cultural barriers regardless of immigration status.