Apple agrees to $25M settlement with US over hiring of immigrants
reuters.com
reuters.com
Shouldn’t any immigration system actualize the will of the voters?
The reality is that without immigration, this work will just shift to India, full stop. Visa sponsorship is a plum that benefits the outsourcer in their recruitment.
The current system very much benefits the US. Work visa holders pay taxes, support the local economy, and navigate a difficult journey to a green card and citizenship.
When you let populists rile up “the voters”, you get what’s happened in agriculture. Long standing seasonal migration get harder, and the farming moves to Mexico. We let the packinghouse unions get busted, and now there’s an environmental disaster in feed lots and rural facilities.
And they take jobs from locals, and increase the labor supply which can decrease wages. More people also exacerbates an undersupplied housing market. There are pros and cons to immigration. But yes, let’s just dismiss the concerns of those rubes and force them to do what you want.
Considering the percentage of immigrants/foreigners in Silicon Valley, it can be easily argued that its success was entirely due to the ease of foreign workers being able to work in the same location. If it was somewhere else that was more attractive, then who knows, Hong Kong could have been the alternate world Silicon Valley.
Such an underrated point. The workers aren't independent farmowners. They're low-paid employees of massive corporate farms that own that land. We utilize an incredibly small fraction of our land capable of growing crops and we use excess as a diplomatic tool for US hegemony. I just don't understand this distaste for immigrants. Let them in and we're all better off. They even pay into SS and never pull out a dime and all they get is pseudopatriots at the wall cosplaying and directing hate towards them, despite allowing them in being a net benefit to all of us.
Indeed, it’s not clear to me how these foreign workers are benefitting local economies. Profits from tech companies seem to be accruing to the elites. If you take a middle class California family from 1980, are they and their kids better off due to the immigration-fueled rise of Silicon Valley? Or did all the profits go to the elites and tech salaries just force the kids to move away from their family to Tennessee or Texas?
Their million dollar houses would suggest so. They can cash out and move to Tennessee or Texas as you point out.
Is this not the problem that needs to be addressed. Looks like the rich and media have successfully made a scapegoat out of immigrants when the actual problem is the money accuring to the elites and government inefficieny in improving housing supply.
Even in terms of voting power—immigration reduces social solidarity and undermines the economic left in the long run.
Shouldn’t the immigration system—and every system—be designed to pacify voters?
To an extent, yes — but like all humans, voters can sometimes focus too narrowly on the short term, and/or on their own desires and fears; sometimes a broader perspective is needed. (That's why some elected officials used to say, in effect, "My voters elected me to exercise my judgment.")
A good government should explain to the electorate the consequences of restricting immigration, because in reality people who don't want immigration probably wouldn't actually like living in a country with no immigration. However, it's a lot easier to appear to be doing something, without really doing much.
The ultimate example would be the Brexit vote in the UK. The population were promised that it would solve all their problems, enormous amounts of anger which could only be quelled by an exit were successfully generated and in 2016, 52% of the population voted for to leave. Fast forward to 2023, and only 33% of the population thinks it was a good decision.
Meanwhile, the benefits of both low-skill (e.g. farm workers) and high-skill (e.g. Silicon Valley workers) seem to have gone to a relatively small slice of the population in wealthy coastal cities, while reducing the opportunities available in the rest of the country.
In my home state of Virginia, we saw massive immigration since we immigrated there in 1989. It’s made northern Virginia richer, sure, but that hasn’t “trickled down” to the rest of the state. And all those immigrants helped northern Virginia take over control of the whole state politically. What would happen if you gave folks in Virginia in 1989 a picture of Virginia today, and then asked them to vote on whether to accept all that immigration?
There are always a lot of arguments about immigration, that it is useful for skilled people and that they pay taxes. But it does not even pass the sniff test, a local person would pay even more tax (most likely) and needing to import qualified skilled people is just a sign of failure somewhere in your education system. For many reasons you should not want to import skilled labor, it is not a good deal for a country...
However, it is good for-profit focused business to increase competition and lower wages in their industry. Which is exactly what Apple does and others did before. But the same rich people who buy their expensive hardware and have truly little competition in their luxury ivory tower will tell you otherwise. I do not even blame them, they cannot relate at all, they don't have the relevant experience. I feel like some minimum wage hard work with shitty hours should be mandatory to be allowed to talk about those type of things, otherwise it's just people talking out of their asses...
I believe that what are considered elites got there not by being competitive but mostly in ways that are closer to what cheating is. We are in an era of major stagnation in mobility for the lower part of the society precisely because the elite have been reproducing themselves and have shut down the competition by faking it and creating all kind of "standards" impossible to meet for peoples without the means. I think immigration is just another cheat to prevent equalization. If we look at the distribution ok skills/competency of humans, it mostly follow a normal distribution, yet revenues are really not distributed like that...
sounds like you might be happier back in China?
Impact aside, which is should absolutely impact more, I'm almost doubtful the practice is even a net loss for them. ${years} of the hiring practice for an unknown number of individuals may have even been worth more than the fine.
Some other comments note it may have other impacts though, so maybe that's the real influence.
The optics are that this is totally ok.
A hundred thousand CS graduates a year in this country and yet the biggest companies claim they can’t find workers. So they hire people from overseas and pay them some of the highest entry level wages in the nation all the while kids I grew up with in the Midwest, who were coding in junior high, work in factories.
I call bullshit, it’s clearly discrimination
There are only a few tech niches where these companies truly cannot find talent, most projects could surely be accomplished by local graduates. That narrative doesn't pad the pockets of the CEO's though.
Similarly the top x% of both local and international are stronger than the top x% of local candidates, even if local and international have the same distribution of talent.
I think big tech happy to hire and does hire those CS graduates if they pass interview.
Those interviews are designed around favoritism.
Additionally favored people can skip the interview with the right managers approval.
Whe I worked at LinkedIn it was almost 100% Indians on my team and the rest of the department was like 75% non-American.
The chain of command is literally all Indian people except Ryan R.
Seems like there's no real desire to fix this problem - which isn't a new one by any means - otherwise it would already have been done ages ago?