New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
science.org
science.org
Here's my take: you get a work visa for 3-5 years that's tied to your employer and allows you to freely leave and re-enter the US. Believe it or not, we still have visa holders that can't leave the US without having to re-apply for their visa.
On renewal that becomes a 3-5 year visa that isn't tied to your employer. You can freely change jobs.
At the end of that period, it just becomes a green card as long as you satisfy presence tests. Naturalization has continuous and physical presence tests. Just use those. Failing that it is simply renewed for another 3-5 years.
If you satisfy the extraordinary category or get a NIW you simply skip the first step of having an employer-tied visa.
This would free up USCIS to deal with actual visa fraud rather than all the pointless hoops they currently (are forced to) enforce.
[1]: https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/columbus/news/2023/12/21/congre...
Besides if Europe / Australia / Canada have much simpler immigration why would any skilled/productive prospective immigrant would even think of US.
US wages are significantly higher, and it also has a much more developed tech industry (picking the T from STEM since that's what I know about most).
The US's tech industry succeeds in spite of their immigration policies, not because of it
2. Immigrants are absolutely aware of this. That is reason why overall skilled immigration has not grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years like it did decades ago. US is no longer the top destination of choice for international students in STEM fields. It is only a matter of time that you'd see the effects on overall productivity. The Social Security Administration is already hinting towards this future. The funds are supposed to run out by 2041 (reference https://www.ssa.gov/newsletter/Statement%20Insert%2025+.pdf ) . Quoting from the document ".. the birth rate is low, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is falling.." . The US simply doesn't have enough productive people to fund benefits for the population for the coming decades.
The only problem with it is that the problems it solves are problems for people who don’t have a say in the matter. While the drawbacks it implies affects people who have a say in the matter. (Either through voting or lobbying)
The fact that the current system imposes a form of long identured servitude on imigrants is not a bug but a feature. This benefits the employers in very direct ways.
The fact that the current system processes applications from select regions of the world much faster than other regions of the world is not a bug but a feature. It is a system which maintains plausible deniability while in effect racially selective. This is a sad and quite odious, but it appears to be consistent with the preferences of many voters.
All in all: a good plan with some fatal flaws. And I am very sad to say that.
I was on the hill when the initial congressional negotiations over immigration began in the mid-2010s.
The stumbling block has always been illegal immigration. [0]
The Dems congressional leadership at the time decided that no reform on legal immigration would happen without illegal immigration reform (eg. DREAM act)
The GOP congressional leadership at the time decided that no reform on illegal immigration would happen without legal immigration.
Neither side budged, and neither side really cared because immigrants (legal or illegal) can't vote.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nancy-pelosi-immigrat...
This really is the alpha and omega of migration policies all around the world: the people affected don't have a say, and the people not affected use the issues to play hateful games.
In the twisty little minds of Congressmen, we can’t do anything good and obvious unless we solve their tangentially related problem first. All of that stuff you said about the system sounds like it matters but honestly those concerns never even appear in their minds.
Time spent getting a degree at an accredited American university should count as the same.
It makes zero sense to educate kids and then force them to grow those fruits abroad. If we’re going to teach them, it makes sense to give them a chance to work here applying their new skills. This is such low-hanging win-win fruit.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It's clear anyone to the right of AOC isn't welcome on this website.
Please delete my account. thank you.
Why do you think we have such a convoluted immigration scheme?
Can you think of ways to exploit the system you have suggested?
I'm guessing most are going toward computer programming/support roles, but I could be wrong
Thats why parent comment said most.
Question from non-USA-an here. I wonder if this will lead people to spam the patent office with low quality inventions hoping something will stick and help them secure a EB-1 visa.
1. Large companies pay a bonus for every patent applied and bigger one for approval.
2. Patent lawyers are paid for filed patents.
3. Patent office makes money on each patent. They view the review process as a cost center and optimize it for fast approval.
Not just "incentivized to ignore quality", they aren't duty-bound to consider quality at all. The PTO evaluates applications for novelty, not quality.
The three main relevant parts of the US Code are:
35 USC Sec. 101: is it patentable? (i.e., it must be a process, machine, process, or manufactured good. It can't be something like an idea or song)
35 USC Sec. 102: is it novel? (i.e., no one single prior existing item teaches all the limitations of the patent claims)
35 USC Sec. 103: is it non-obvious? (i.e., you can't combine a couple of different patents to arrive at your patent)
There's a few other important sections (like 112 that ensures you're giving enough detail), but none of them look at "quality". In other words, you can patent a worthless invention as long as it passes those wickets.
Edit: Somewhat surprisingly to some, they don't necessarily evaluate infringement either. So you could, in theory, have a novel patent that you can't use to make something because it infringes on an existing patent.
As it should be.
The USPTO is in no place to evaluate a patent's quality, unless youre a USPTO clerk whos first name starts with Albert and your last name ends in -Stein.
---
But in seriousness, novelty is the important factor in a patent, not quality. As utility patents/improvement patents are a thing.
The clerks are expected to do a certain amount of work per week and granting a patent counts as more work than denying a patent.
So; clerk are incentivized to grant a patent as it takes less effort and yields more production units. If a patent is of poor quality and later is invalidated in a lawsuit; the clerk will not lose production units. Therefore; the clerk is incentivized to grant patents as they count as more production units and not penalized for granting a patent they shouldn't've.
https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/Examination%20Time...
In fact, the most production units that can be obtained by a patent examiner for any particular patent is to issue a final rejection, get the patentee to ask for re-examination, reject again, and then have the patentee abandon the patent.
Hasn't it always been the case? There's a ton of old patents for shit which can't work as described.
When at lockheed we had what I referred to as the "Croatian Coalition" a bunch of Croatian engineers that were all over all the patents we were filing (RFID for weapons) -- they were all so proud of all their patents (as they should be) - but they were really aggressive on filing for not just the satisfaction (getting a patent must be a great feeling, I am not yet personally on any even though I have influenced several)
But they like the bonuses and internal recognition that came with them.
Also, spamming the patent office would be hard unless you have deep pockets/are a patent attorney or have Big Corp funding your efforts (and rewarding them)
I am sure there are cheap ways to file, but for the average person, not so much.
The patent lawyer is just there to file the patent and help their client get past the approval process.
It is the PATENT OFFICE who's job it is to judge quality.
Have several patents, btw.
Edit: so at some point in the patent portfolio cross-licensing negotiation, there's a pure numbers game, so for large corporations there is some value in patents nobody is ever going to implement.
At least that's my recollection from 15 years ago about why Google paid me as sole inventor of a patent. (I was working on indexing, and thought "Oh no, if someone does X, then indexing becomes incredibly harder, basically DRM for the web. Webspam could hide more easily. Oh, but if we patent X, that might make my life easier in the future." The patent lawyer zeroed in too much on my mention of CAPTCHA as a possible use case, so I'm not sure if Google could really use my patent to prevent its use as DRM/Webspam hiding. At some point, I decided pushing back against the lawyer to make the patent more broadly applicable might not be good for society. I didn't feel strongly enough to turn down my patent bonus, just strongly enough to stop pushing edits back to the lawyer.)
"Having N patents" should be something that gets frowned on, not something you highlight on your resume. When asked about this myself (during interviews or whatever), I proudly boast that I have zero patents to my name and that I actively avoid being part of the problem by participating. I see it as an opportunity to 1. help steer our culture in whatever tiny way I can and 2. get up on a little soap box about the problem.
In the past, I've been asked to help out with patent applications for these so-called "inventions" that I developed, and I always tell my manager "If you want to patent this, I can't stop you, but do not put my name on it or associate it with me in any way."
If you invented it, then they have to put your name on the application as the inventor. There’s also a declaration that the inventor is supposed to sign as part of the application. If the inventor is dead or otherwise unavailable (e.g., refuses to sign), there’s an alternative form that can be filed.
The inventive step is the actual decision of 'we will do this thing in this way', or rather determining the 'method'. In fact, the guidelines we follow are that someone implementing the design based on some instructions, i.e, just working on a ticket, is explicitly not to be included as an inventor - unless they actually decided that's how it should be done.
Of course, it's nice to work in a place whereby you get to design and implement the system and become an inventor. In my opinion and experience at least. But I can see some organisations whereby developers are popping off tickets in sprints and implementing them - but that is by definition not an inventive step.
How many do you have? Patents are more difficult to obtain than HN gives credit and they cost a non-inconsequential amount of money too.
That seems like an odd retort to me. Like I have zero because I find the whole idea ethically dubious. When I was at IBM, they had occasional patent brainstorming meetings. I remember saying to one of the more senior engineers that everything I worked on was straightforward/obvious, and he told me I'd be surprised, which didn't do much to sway my thoughts on the ethics there.
Everyone who had been there for a few years had a couple patents. I don't remember any of them now, which I guess is sort of the point: it was all basic stuff that would be very difficult to honestly characterize as an "invention".
It would be like me saying "designing your own operating system is easy" and having someone respond "how many OSes have you designed?"
And by the way, your own story bears out the same: despite working for IBM (a company where attorneys familiar with the patent process are no doubt legion), participating or being aware of these patent brainstorm sessions, and stating that everyone had one after a couple years, you have zero. So what would you know about the patent prosecution process? Certainly not enough to say that it's easy.
Evidently, based on patents being issued, it is easy to get a patent in the sense that you don't need a novel or nontrivial invention to do so. You don't need to go through the process to observe the results.
Perhaps there is a lot of paperwork, and in that sense it's not "easy". Or perhaps it is not "easy" to convince the patent office to accept trivial patents or patents on nonpatentable subject matter like math, but the volume of these things suggests that it can't be that hard.
If you knew millions of high school students write an OS as a project each year, you could safely conclude it's not that hard, even if you haven't done it.
So the hard part is having enough money to pay a lawyer. And being morally opposed to patents, especially software patents, is a valid position.
Step 1 - Come up with a software idea and give it to a lawyer (let's not even get into how hard this step might be)
Step 2 - ???
Step 3 - Patent
There was nothing hostile in my reply. I just laid out the exact facts that GP put in their post in order to support the opposite conclusion that GP was pushing.
From your comments, it seems like you have little exposure to the actual time and effort spent in the patent process. And that is okay!
Source: I've done it just to see what the system is like.
There's another reason too:
Having a large number of patents for a given subject matter makes it a veritable arsenal for use against other companies, either offensively or defensively (since a common defense to a lawsuit of patent infringement is a countersuit with your own parent infringement lawsuit). Gotta feed the dancing gorilla
EDIT: I won't pollute the thread with thank yous for replies, but they are appreciated.
(thoughts and opinions always my own)
Those wouldn't be perfect metrics, and they might be easy to fudge. So it then becomes a question of if disqualification of the capable is worse than qualification of the incapable.
I personally prefer to let more people in than less. It's not like it's smooth sailing in the US if you can't do skilled work.
IIRC 3 years of work experience are considered equivalent to 1 year of college education, which allows those who didn't get a degree but have extensive experience to also have an avenue for obtaining a Visa.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/17/key-facts...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/06/h-1b-...
The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.
(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)
On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.
…
Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.
“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act#Full_details_of_the_...
The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.
I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.
EDIT: just checked and it’s obsolete. Not sure if there is a post-Brexit equivalent. https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor
Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).
Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.
Canadian here. Nope.
- Racial bias
- Sexual bias
- Age bias
- Candidate's English / French ability.
- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.
- Candidate's personality.
- Candidate's appearance.
- Candidate's communication skills.
Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?
Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.
But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.
And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.
Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.
Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.
South Park also did an episode on this.
I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.
Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.
In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?
Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.
Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.
My proposal for green cards:
zero-sum - points based system based on your current salary, taxes paid and the occupation shortage list OR straight up auction
non-zero-sum - let people apply for a green card as long as they've stayed in the country for X years without any criminal infractions, have earned above N*min-wage for all those years.
If you're asking about work visas, probably just ranking by location-adjusted-salary and handing them out should do the job.
The problem is they don't update it constantly like Canada does. Needs funding I guess.
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-chapter-...
As someone who had someone come over on a O-1 visa, I 100% would have been willing to pay double for that person specifically.
It also removes the common issue of people who are hiring people below market rate or are trying to push salaries down for certain industries. It makes companies really make sure they actually need that technical expert from overseas.
Then open it up to everyone else if there are quotas.
If an employee is recruited at $250k, they clearly have skills the market values.
The point would be that we fill and address the talent problem longer term. AKA if you need to hire foreign workers, you have to invest in developing new talent.
I would say that total comp should be taken into account, but we should take a more strategic approach to addressing workforce gaps rather than just relying on importing talent.
Simple and objective.
Make it 250k for 3 consecutive years and forget about school.
I know plenty of people in this boat from India who wait 15 years to get a GC because of our idiotic process.
If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.
This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.
The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.
I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.)
Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them.
Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.
So now you go look at your typical STEM department at a good US university. As you go into masters and Phds, the percentage of foreign students goes up. This isn't because most international students love academia: It's because the immigration system, as described earlier, just makes the piece of paper they hand you so much more valuable that it'd be for someone that is already a US citizen. And since it's especially valuable for students from visa-capped countries, guess what? Students from those countries are disproportionally going through that route.
If we cut the visa limits, and said that a STEM degree and some STEM employment after was a guarantee for a green card in 2 years, I'd expect the number of international students that pick that route to plummet. The disparity between the demand for green cards and the visa limit is so wide, every year the incentive to study longer just increases.
If none of those numbers change, I'd expect that the patent route will just be pushed further. So just like the visa caps are a subsidy for post graduate degrees, this rule clarification will be an implicit subsidy for patent attorneys. Then we'll have yet another set of people with a lot to lose if we raise the visa limits, or stop the per-country quotas.
Nonsense. I've been at a typical STEM department at a top us institution for a decade and interacted with thousands of students. I can count the number of students who were in it for a visa. You don't do a 5-6 year PhD simply for a green card. There are easier ways.
Such as?..
If you're from a capped country, your options are limited. For EB-2/EB-3 the wait time for Indian nationals is around 12 years.
They're acquired either by huge companies for a defensive portfolio or by retired old men who get scammed by bottom feeding lawyers willing to file anything for their fee.
Not much really. The reason being it is already happening as incredibly common thing for last few decades or maybe even longer.
I have seen many fine researchers at workplace like you mentioned above.
And countries in Europe that have not seen as much Tech immigration have seen huge boosts in Tech salaries. Comparable Europeans earn almost 1/3 - 1/2 what their American counterparts do today!
Indeed, this balance between supply and demand is exactly what keeps US tech salaries high. Our dynamic economy creates a lot of tech roles while our restrictive immigration limits high skill immigrants from filling those roles, raising salaries.
Tech companies have been lobbying unsuccessfully for years to raise or eliminate the h-1b cap, which would absolutely cut salaries. That’s why they are lobbying for it, to reduce their labor costs.
Personally I think this is all going to be moot anyway. With software development becoming a mostly remote role after the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot less barrier over the past few years to hiring offshore teams. My own small division of 100 people has offshore teams in 3 countries.
AFAIK, my company has never considered outsourcing to remote Euro workers. Is there a perceived difference in engineer quality? Time difference?
- The hiring pool is much smaller than in the US, one reason is probably demographics and lack of skilled immigration. This makes it less attractive to hire/grow there.
- Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.
- Taxes are much higher than in the US, so even if employers spend a lot of money on payroll, much less of it will end up in employees checking accounts.
- Demand is much lower. Tech industry in Europe is definitely there, but not booming to the same degree as in the US.
Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.
Now imagine an entire country specialising in hardware like Germany.
Intuitively, yes. If you're both brilliant, care about money, and want to stay and live in the EU, you aren't going to be a software engineer.
In the US, it's a solid path to a lucrative career.
I'm not 100% sure, so I have to ask. Are you being sarcastic about immigration not exerting tremendous downward pressure on US tech salaries?
Tech begets tech, tech jobs beget tech jobs. Personally, I think we are not remotely close to “peak software” in particular.
Our immigration system targets skilled workers from abroad, and brings in a lot of them. It's a far more "rational" and less confusing system than the US, but also explicitly geared around bringing in skilled workers as permanent residents and it brings in a lot of them.
The downward pressure on compensation rates is real. Apart from exceptions in FAANG type companies, salaries here are often 1/2 of the rates of US employers, and it isn't because we're a lower quality product.
As a result a large % of us just move south to the US on a TN visa, or take remote jobs from US employers. Because the disparity in compensation is very high. And it's in large part because the market here is flooded with talent from abroad.
Tech salaries there are lower than what a skilled employee can get in Israel, China, or India.
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.[1]
> American tech workers are getting pushed out, and they aren’t coming back
If the downward pressure on salary in American software jobs is so extreme that salaries frequently go all the way to zero, while there is a countervailing upward pressure on salary among Indian no-job-yets, why do we say it's "categorically false" that there is a downward pressure on American software salaries?
[1] Note that this is what you expect from a pricing shift, not an increase in the value created by the work. The quantity of software labor purchased has gone up and sellers are being forced out. If the driver of increased quantity-of-jobs were increased value created, you would see sellers entering the market, not leaving.
Yeah. A lot of people are leaving because of the housing insanity. That doesn't mean they're leaving teach and losing their jobs. There is zero evidence for that.
This isn't evidence for any impact on jobs. It's evidence for the mismanagement of the Bay Area and California as a whole.
The US created literally all relevant consumer technology in the last 30 or so years and demand for tech talent has exploded ever since.
Having a competitve sector/ economy which regularly pushes the edge of innovation and hence expands demand (both on sell and supply side) is actually what keeps salaries up.
This logic is as deeply flawed as often as it comes up.
This narrative is purely a lobbying effort.
Where, exactly?
Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2].
[0] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-unemployment...).
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-median-wage-....
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433814-000-most-ste...
So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc.
The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative.
> Where, exactly?
The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemistry, etc. However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.
> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?
Here is some data that tries to at least look at this question: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring...
The gross number is only 1/3 of stem degree lead to stem jobs. But that includes quite a bit of soft degree's, still in the ballpark of half of all graduates not working in their field.
> software jobs
Yes there is higher demand for software which is met with higher wages and drawing underemployed people with other degrees as well as immigration. The immigration restriction argument is that increasing that part of the equation will lower wages and increase corporate control of their workforce.
So an alternative way to meet that demand is to hire us citizens who have those qualifications or a related degree that could be trained.
Another good one. We hired a person with a MechE degree with experience working at JPL into our customer support because they are so in love with the area because of easy access to winter activities (snow shoing, skiing, etc).
Imo your narrative amounts is simply not grounded in reality.
It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
No offense, but maybe your resume didn't reflect that you had the skills required.
The companies I worked at and now portfolio companies of mine pay Bay Area market rate to both citizens and non-citizens.
We hire noncitizens because we didn't find the right talent we need.
You can't "command economy" human capital. It just doesn't work.
Upskilling has a 5-10 year long lag time.
Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix.
>Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem?
Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
Companies should train employees, simple as.
I bet most people working in it learned on the job. The certainly dont teach every single specific detail of the entire tech industry in universities.
This is just gaslighting.
Maybe.
We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity.
When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
With an decent background shouldnt take someone too long to get up to speed and that time isnt going to break the company.
Its what they do in other countries. lol
You clearly have with an agenda.
That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required.
We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
Kinda telling that the so called smart people who have trouble getting hired have no clue that that's not a requirement for H1B.
The midwest is not sending their best.
Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem.
Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India.
Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
(the right talent at the shit-level wage we want to pay) is more often than not the rest of that sentence.
We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years.
The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
Companies would collapse and fail, unless the government gave a massive corporate stimulus package (probably 4-5x the size of PPE).
> none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained
It would take at least 1-2 years. At that point, an Israeli or Indian startup has taken market share and won. Welcome to cybersecurity and networking.
Even National Labs don't do that.
In my area (not cybersecurity) I’m still seeing very serious and brand-new-to-me problems come up even after many years.
The solution for this is good testing and QA not fear mongering Americans into hiring immigrants.
On the other hand, if your attitude is that you now know your stuff and you’re done learning, that isn’t going to produce the best outcomes for you.
> Testing and QA
Business processes can’t take the place of experienced judgement.
This is utterly incorrect..
Testing and QA are techical processes run by engineers.
Where did you get your degree ? Your knowledge of tech seems extraordinarily limited. Theres solutions to your problems you're not even aware of.
One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League - total number of undergrads (64.5k), divided by 4, assuming a 4-year college course.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr...
We didn't discriminate based on educational program.
But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost.
For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
With most tech jobs if a person has a computer science background they have the skills.
The company is just lying to justify outsourcing.
Until you do it, you don’t know how to do it. In other words, juniors fumble around and make lots of mistakes - that’s how they get good.
I took networking, os, data structures, etc. in my degree.
It taught me a lot more than "how to learn".
Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.
It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas.
I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy.
Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.
Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.
This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries.
The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital.
BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.
That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs.
And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.
On the other hand, if all the foreign talent congregates elsewhere, the Midwest kid will need a visa to compete with them.
The non-zero sum is that having all the people in one place makes more opportunities than if they weren't together.
Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm.
I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy.
So let's go at it one by one.
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly.
That is how the world works.
Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking.
No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws.
Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years.
I'd bet on that.
> Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.)
Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US).
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent.
How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration?
> It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today).
Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing.
Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor. And that's why it's not zero sum.
In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.
20 years ago, the Chinese backlog used to be in the decades range. Now it's 2 years.
The Indian backlog used to be multi-decade too, but is now 11.
Already, we've had engineers at portfolio companies decide to return to India to either earn a dollar salary or start their own startup.
At this point, we've decided to straight up outsource jobs to India, Israel, and Eastern Europe. The talent base we need doesn't exist in the US.
These guys could have become taxing paying members of American society. Now they'll make contributions to India, Eastern Europe, and Israel instead
Good! There’s a billion people in India and plenty of opportunities for growth. The net benefit for all of humanity is larger if they stay there.
Put another way, is it really all that great that the US drains the top talent out of India and Eastern Europe?
For example, the founder of Zoho (Sridhar Vembu - I actually lived in the same apartment complex in the Bay Area that he started Zoho at) has become a NatSec cabinet advisor to Narendra Modi's administration, and has a chip on his shoulder about his experience dealing with US immigration. It was a big reason he returned to India.
Wang Huning, the Chairman of the Chinese Politburo and Xi Jinping's right hand man - soured on the US after his experience dealing with the US as a student.
A good friend of mine from college in the ML space who's parents are pretty high up in the ruling party of a major SEA state has been constantly complaining to me and them about how they lost 2 chances at the F1 to H1B conversion, and every single time became more and more ambivalent about the US. They can end up returning to SEA and make a large company, but they will also have a chip on their shoulder about the US.
Another good friend of mine was an Indian national who specialized in EE and Condensed Matter Physics (semiconductors type work) - even did grad school in it at a Stanford type program. He left the US to work for a major Chinese company in SEA because immigration in the US was horrid.
Plenty of Israelis feel the same way now about the US due to similar experiences.
The US Immigration system exudes a sense of American exceptionalism because voters say "Love it or leave it". But the people who leave end up becoming successful, but still angry at how much effort and stress was expended for naught.
China is now a near peer in 2023. There's no reason to fuel anti-Americanism in India, SEA, LatAm, etc and push them to the other side.
China and India combined take in less than a tenth of the immigrants the US takes in yearly. There's really no reason anyone should take their opinions on immigration seriously.
The US's biggest strength is it's soft power at the elite level.
Because of bad experiences like immigration, the US has been losing influence as foreign decision makers soured on the US due to crap treatment.
So what?
Countries like India or Vietnam only began starting to warm to the US because of the diaspora. If the diaspora gets treated like shit, anti-Americanism begins to breed.
A similar thing happened in China in the 2010s.
The Pakistani nuclear program was jumpstarted by PLA technology transfers in the 1970s [0][5], Pakistani Tank Technology like Al-Khalid are results of PLA tech transfers in the early 1990s [1], Pakistan began adopting Chinese fighter jet IP in the early 1990s [2], and the entire indigenous missles program in Pakistan began thanks to Chinese IP transfers in the 80s [3]
The US-Pakistan relationship was always transactional and surface level. Chinese SOEs would at least invest in Military affiliated companies like Heavy Industries Taxila, Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, Khan Research Laboratories, Global Industrial Defence Solutions, and National Defence Complex
The countries in the list abovr had a relationship with the US that was similar to that between China-Pakistan, but began pivoting away from the US in the 2010s.
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/41394229
[1] - https://www.dawn.com/news/1217909
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20121021154725/http://www.flight...
[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20081007232310/http://www.wiscon...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/02/archives/bhutto-confers-w...
Though, even PINSTECH pivoted to China by the 70s [0].
The India-Pakistan rivalry forced Pakistan to try and reach parity with India via Chinese technology transfers.
And yea. American hubris will lose us the next war.
Or more accurately, the processes are obfuscated and full of inexplicable delays. Why would someone even consider hiring a lawyer for something as simple and common as employment-based immigration? And how can the green card process take longer than a few months?
That's funny. I guess every visa holder is some little genius doing particle physics work
You're going out of your way to give very specific anecdotes here, the average level of talent I've met on a visa is something very easily matched domestically. It's pretty hilarious actually, some of them can't actually program and have an SWE job title
And then begin lobbying against the United States.
Which is now having impact on hiring higher level positions because we broke the pipeline of Jr. -> Mid Level -> Sr.
Could you explain what you mean?
Heck, workers with PR/citizenship are probably more likely to unionize for higher wages because they feel safer.
They pay extremely competitive rates. They are the reason for and a source of complaints regarding gentrification in my area.
edit: as an example the starting rate for high school work-study and college interns is the hourly equivalent of $78k/yr plus the same benefits as full-time employees from the second they show up.
The work environment is spectacular. There is no work from home because that is a practical impossibility so the work-life balance is carefully considered and benefits are outstanding. There are no after-hours tasks (there can't be, really).
You show up, work 9-5 in a relaxed environment, go home, cash your fat check, and enjoy travel and hobbies.
From IPC soldering-certified technicians to senior RF scientists and everything in between we cannot find enough workers for the amount of work we have.
For sexy startups trying to use sexy AI to steal user data in order to serve them sexy ads yes, maybe the market is saturated.
For hard-STEM fields my experience has been that there are too few people who take their linear algebra classes seriously.
Hard-STEM seems to have lots of jobs where you can grind your ass off for the better part of a decade or two and hope to make $100-120k/yr by then if you're lucky. At least on the coding side you'll get to that level within a handful of years if you're willing to job switch often and optimize for that salary. Glad to hear there's at least one hard-STEM place where the grind isn't as bad.
The "hard-stem" places rely on a bit of gaslighting and the "holier than thou" self-image of the "hard-stem" people to pay them less and to overwork them
As much as the IT world has issues, it is night and day compared to the hard-stem world where a lot of times they won't even look at you if you don't have a MSc or PhD. Learn on the job, what is that?
My point is for the past several years staff has been clearing 1M W2 or more per year and the nominal offers are high 6 figures. L7 and L8 offers are nominally 1M.
If I could make that money working on cool science and aerospace I would. When I graduated, Boeing, Lockheed etc wouldn’t give me the time of day but adtech welcomed me and paid me more in 1 year than Boeing would have in 10.
If you have:
* Received an alert on your phone saying that it's going to rain in your local area in the next 10 minutes,
* Been alarmed by a paper containing synthetic aperture radar data showing high-resolution plots of coastal erosion and sea level rise, or
* Used a map or route planning application that has satellite imagery textured onto high-resolution terrain and 3d models of buildings and landmarks,
You've PROBABLY used our products.
The military just the sugar daddy who pays for the other stuff.
I mean, I don't do any of that stuff.
I just stare at error-ridden digikey product listings all day, argue with PMs about the reality of their schedules, and sit through endless design reviews. But somehow, someone somewhere in the company does that stuff.
(side note: for the first 5 months of 2023 I did 1.5 hours a day of real analysis. I'll probably get back to doing that after getting through most of Lang.)
Can you give me a hint of the types of employers I should be looking for who would value this? How should I go about finding them?
If this is a contractor that requires security clearances, that’s a significant barrier to recruiting even US citizens. Most of your best applicants will be snapped up by someone else prior to completing the months long clearance process (which requires telling their current employer they’re looking to move elsewhere at the start).
But let's be honest, it's pretty standard practice to require US citizenship.
This is most likely an intelligence/defense agency or contractor, working in secure environments where you can't take work stuff in or out.
There are several companies in my area that can only hire US Citizens, and they all pay lower than the company I interned at.
This kind of issue cannot be analyzed anecdotally.
More generally, if another country became the global nexus for top tech talent, capital would eventually follow there, and the long term effect on US tech salaries would be negative.
I doubt I’d qualify for EB-1 [1]. I’d have qualified for EB-2 at 28 when I attained five years of work experience [2][3]. If I didn’t have a BS I’d need ten years experience. If I had spent the usual five years flailing about in a PhD instead of dropping out early, I’d have delayed “work experience” another three years.
Now this hypothetical version of myself waits as short as two years (China-born) and as long as eleven years (India-born) to get an application considered. Meanwhile, they’re trying to maintain work authorization, either via the time-limited OPT or hopefully winning an H1-B which has its own highly competitive lottery. And when they finally get PR/citizenship, their (now quite old) parents have no hope of receiving PR/citizenship so they’ll probably be flying across oceans to care for them as they age.
All of this for the mistake of being born in the wrong part of the word.
Meanwhile, I’m some fuckup who happened to be born in the US who has never known struggle. It just all seems cosmically unfair.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent... [2] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent... [3] aswell23 is correct that I would qualify for EB-2 based on my BS degree. I had misread the EB-2 requirements. The text originally read: “I’m still two years shy of the 10 year minimum years of experience for EB-2 [2]. So that leaves EB-3.”
EDIT: clarify second paragraph with third-person pronouns.
EDIT2: clarify based on apwell23’s comment
EDIT3: further clarification based on apwell23’s second comment.
not sure what your link has to do with age requirement that you mention. eb2 has no age minimum.
You also wrote bunch of other falsehoods like visa renewals requiring lottery, renewals don't count against yearly visa quota. Most of the stuff in your comment is not correct.
> Letters from current or former employers documenting at least 10 years of full-time experience in your occupation
EDIT: I see where you misunderstood. I emphasized the age to show how long someone would be waiting for a non-precarious situation. I’ll edit above.
Apologies if I’m unclear, I mean getting the H1-B in the first place requires a lottery. People who graduate with US undergrad degrees can start on OPT or the like but must transition to something else when that’s exhausted. One friend just went through exactly this where she exhausted her OPT, lost work authorization, but missed three attempts at H1-B.
What else is wrong?
Thats if you are in the second row in the table above. i.e "Exceptional Ability".
You don't need it if you have masters or bachelors + 5.
> Meanwhile, they’re trying to maintain work authorization
There is no 'meanwhile' , they are not in eb green card queues without going though the h1 lottery first. In no case are you going though h1b lottery and in green card queue concurrently.
On the second point, first claim, you can be in an EB-1 queue without an H1-B (e.g. OPT or TN [1]). On the second claim, I admit to not knowing someone who is in the queue and in the lottery but they’re on TN, preparing materials for an EB-1 and applying for an H1-B. My understanding was that they’d apply for both concurrently (due to the EB queue period), but I have no references to back me up.
[1] If you were born in China and then immigrated to Canada, you’re still in the China queue for EB.
just saw this.
> What else is wrong?
> And when they finally get PR/citizenship, their (now quite old) parents have no hope of receiving PR/citizenship
Family based greencards have current wait time of ~11months start to finish.
Yeah, I was a bit loose with the parents situation. I made a general comment based on a specific circumstances. That’s my bad.
To petition for parents you need to be a full citizen not simply a green card holder. That adds five years. For India-born folks, this practically puts their parents date over a decade away. Meanwhile those parents become elderly and live thousands of miles from their grand children. So, for a lot of folks who spent years pursuing PhDs and have Indian passports their parents might immigrate at ~seventy while they’re in their fifties. I dunno man, that’s fairly old. Their parents might not make it.
I can’t edit the original post anymore, so your comment will have to serve as the correction.
China and India are the outliers. For most people, pre-pandemic (and post financial meltdown), the wait was under 2 years - almost everyone I know got it in under 2 years (EB-2, MS or higher degree).
If you weren't born in China/India, and had an "advanced degree" in a STEM field (i.e. MS or higher), the green card process was/is fairly smooth. The real bottleneck is the H1-B visa quota/lottery.
In the second point, I only have an imprecise opinion which is that I’d rather suffer some loss of quality of life personally if the median human experience is raised.
Would you support kicking out someone who doesn’t qualify for an EB or H1-B (in practice, you’re kicking out non degree holders) for a foreign born person who does qualify? If not, it seems to me we are embracing a lottery of birth place. To be clear, I’d like to see substantially more freedom of movement even if it means reducing my quality of life.
They're not outliers in the sense that a significant percent of the world's population come from those two countries, so disadvantaging them disadvantages a significant fraction of the world's population.
Huh, it is unfair in the same sense that football, basketball or movie stars are living in mega mansions or penthouses and flying in private jets while millions in US struggle for basic needs in US.
Most H1B coming from India are among top 1-2% of India's vast population and thats pretty fucking huge luck. Going through normal wait of immigration process, which no one forced them to undertake btw, is a kind of elitist thinking where any delay in fulfilling upper class want is an untold atrocity inflicted upon them.
Only a tiny handful of about 250k high school football-playing seniors are able to find any at all job in their sport (if they even make it to college). Meanwhile, the roughly 100k yearly US CS grads have an unemployment rate of maybe 10%.
I'm so put off by the immigration process in the US that I have decided to leave the US permanently. Don't worry - i still work for the same US based company remotely from a more cost effective nation. I just don't pay your taxes anymore.
Short-term: Perhaps.
Long-term: A more-stable LATAM (and world) economy is in America's interest.
It's a fantastic deal for us because they're not immigrating here and therefore driving prices of housing, social services, etc. to the unsustainable levels we're seeing now. Outsourcing over the past decades has been a huge boon for the US. They're generating value for US companies and we're able to take advantage of that. The US needs to grow its own families and social networks organically. Every country should.
>but the one thing it doesn't do is optimize for the interests of America.
Generating wealth for US companies and providing stability to their home countries is a win/win. This is optimal for US interests.
Housing prices are a big problem, but the fix isn't depopulation; it's fixing zoning and building rules.
If that means our tech and financial sectors look more like Europe, that would probably be a good thing too. The tax base thing is a trap. Having seen the influx of tech workers and rich immigrants move into Virginia, I don’t think it was a win for the median person who was already there.
2. American immigrants feel a very high amount of affinity with the US and the opportunities afford to them by the country, regardless of how much affinity they feel towards their neighbours. I think the main problem is that native born Americans feel a fairly low amount affinity towards each other - and that has little to do with immigration.
3. I think having a low immigration, stagnant tech and finance sectors is probably beneficial to the median person who is already in the US and doesn't really wanna work that hard and compete with immigrants. I agree with you there. If you go to Australia the ones who are getting the highest grades, becoming doctors and lawyers, buying expensive properties are all immigrants (usually East Asian / South Asian). If you want to relax and just enjoy life without working hard Europe is absolutely ideal for you.
America is great because it was founded by rule following British people with a long tradition of self governance. What’s come after that is debatable. It’s certainly made America rich, I’ll give you that.
> 2. American immigrants feel a very high amount of affinity with the US and the opportunities afford to them by the country, regardless of how much affinity they feel towards their neighbours.
Yes, but what is the “US” they feel affinity for? I think the “US” they have affinity for us a very shallow concept. It’s not like say the French or Chinese that have a thousand years of shared history they identify with. My whole family is immigrants. My parents just got back from visiting family in Canada and Australia and were complaining about how much better America is. But what is America to them? They don’t care about Appalachians, or the constitution, etc. They like that you can make a lot of money and live in much bigger houses than in Australia or Canada.
> I think the main problem is that native born Americans feel a fairly low amount affinity towards each other - and that has little to do with immigration.
I think the two things are directly correlated. The vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries. That means the ones that immigrate tend to be the ones that have weaker social ties. And I strongly suspect that persists for at least a couple of generations within family cultures—if only because it takes longer than that to really develop deep and broad family networks in the country. But most Americans are just a couple of generations away from those initial immigrants. (None of Donald Trump’s grandparents were born in America.)
> 3. I think having a low immigration, stagnant tech and finance sectors is probably beneficial to the median person who is already in the US and doesn't really wanna work that hard and compete with immigrants. I agree with you there. If you go to Australia the ones who are getting the highest grades, becoming doctors and lawyers, buying expensive properties are all immigrants (usually East Asian / South Asian).
I agree. So I think where we differ is on whether that’s a good thing or not. A bunch of my family is exactly that kind of immigrant to Australia. They’re doing well individually. But does that make the country better for the median Australian that’s already there?
Their love of rules and self-governance was so great they had to leave their rule-following, self-government-enjoyer country where they called them 'non-conformists'. This doesn't really add up.
But this is what the US is encouraging with its immigration policy so you reap what you sow.
Or another way that if US company has decided to not employ US born local at least those got employed overseas will not compete for housing, schools and other services for which they easily out compete locals if they are employed in US. Means another win. That would be pro-nativist argument. I know they are not much loved here but that's that.
If tax dollars are the issue, just tax the company.
Or the software engineer with a US college degree paying $>50k / year in income taxes to state and federal government?
Because you know that they are only restricting the latter type of immigrant.
Because anyone else employed for that role/ income would've not paid income tax or any other tax at all. Its to immigrants credit that they pay taxes when they could simply chose not to.
The right believes in either no immigration or immigration based on an impossibly high bar with caps preventing immigration from undesirable origins.
My view is that in the long run immigration policy simply does not matter because we will have figured out how to educate, recruit, train, and exploit the high quality remote labor from any country. The most talented folks around the world will find a way to reap the rewards of the American economy either by residing within the US or doing it from afar. The after tax wage spread is margin that can be exploited.
Really sucks.
But yea. That is what probably happened.
Then again, I guess it makes sense. Both the US and China have made it much harder to leave China and enter the US now.
That is not great if we are in a talent Cold War with a near peer.
Which policies do you think create this?
It could be entirely probable the Chinese just don't find it attractive to live and work in the US after getting their college degrees here.
Turns out, just about every Chinese STEM program will get a military grant, the same way just about every American STEM program will get a DoD grant.
On the Chinese side, they put a cap of $50,000 on money or assets you can bring outside of China each year [1]. Tuition is included in that cap. That means most American universities are out of reach for Chinese students, and immigrating from China to the US with your entire family is a pain (you need some money to land on your feet).
Also, during 2019-2022 there was this small policy called Zero COVID that severely restricted ingress and egress.
Also, US Consulates and Embassies paused visa processing for almost 2 years during the pandemic.
[0] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/06/04/2020-12...
1. Is that why they give special virtually uncapped visa classes to Australia, Singapore, Canada and Chile while everyone else has to deal with h1B?
2. Do you think there are country based limits when admitting people through the southern border or granting refugee status?
What is "virtually uncapped"? Do you have a source explaining how Australia, Singapore, Canada and Chile are treated differently? And as an FYI, I see no problem with Canada having a special regime.
BTW Mexico gets the same special regime as Canada under NAFTA.
No clue what parent meant by virtually uncapped.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B1_visa
Counted separately but included in the overall cap.
Another interesting difference is that H1B1 seems to not be dual intent, contrary to H1B. Definitely not the panacea that was hinted at in this thread.
Today if you're an illegal migrant and claim asylum, you get +inf points. If you're born in certain countries with long wait time, you get -inf points.
Clearly the system today is working within your definition.
Re-read the parent comment again. They say "point-based system [...] regardless of national origin", which implies that the origin country wouldn't have any effect aka point-value (neither negative nor positive) attached to it.
> if you're an illegal migrant and claim asylum, you get +inf points
Bringing up the asylum visa category makes zero sense, because it was obvious from the context (both the parent comment and the entire thread) that the conversation was about a point system in the context of employment-based visas. Having a point-based system go cross-category or even used at all in most categories doesn't make sense.
So no, the system you described isn't working with their definition at all.
All I was trying to say that the point of the comment i was replying to was making a faulty statement “well, the way you explain it is already how it works under conditions XYZ” with a “those XYZ conditions you mention directly contradict the premise you are addressing.”
The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way?
Let's dispense of the common issues:
1. Tech layoffs. This is unrelated to immigration. This is de facto employer colusion to suppress wages. Notice how all the tech companies started doing layoffs at about the same time? The counterargument is "economic conditions". You may have a point with VC funding drying up due to rising interest rates but many of the biggest companies are massively profitable. Profits tend to fall so they want to suppress costs to maintain profits. That's it.
I will say that layoffs should basically prohibit you from applying for more work visas for a period. For example: if you've laid off anyone in the last year, sorry you can't sponsor a work visa. You can escape this by, say, paying severance of at least a year's total compensation. The point is to remove the economic incentive of suppressing wages from the layoff-then-rehire cycle.
2. Lowering wages. Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less. Poultry farms are an excellent example of this. They pay undocuemnted workers less. If they ever start making noise about wages or conditions, you clear them out by calling in an ICE raid, pay a nominal fine, rinse and repeat.
How do we know this? Because when states actually go after employers rather than the workers, it's an economic disaster [1].
Also, we used to have a temporary worker program for seasonal and agricultural workers called the Bracero program. This filled an economic need. Eliminating it created more undocumented residents because crossing the border became too difficult and expensive.
3. A rising tide lifts all boats. There's mountains of evidence for this (eg [1]). Unions increase non-union wages. If we didn't have wage suppression by forced undocumented workers it would raise wages for everyone.
Immigrants aren't "stealing your jobs" or "lowering your wages". There's a long history of trying to blame immigrants instead of (correctly) blaming the concerted effort by capital owners to lower your wages.
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/alabamas-immigratio...
[2]: https://www.workrisenetwork.org/working-knowledge/unions-rai...
Threads change pretty fast and prefixing your comment with that kind of goady meta makes it strictly worse and less effective at advancing your arguments.
Just because we needed and encouraged immigration 200 years ago doesn't mean we have a duty to never adjust policies based on current needs and realities. What was necessary in 1900 may not be desirable anymore. Surprisingly that's a fact that people usually have no problem applying to the 2nd ammendment, but is a big no no when it comes to immigration.
Edit to quote the specific part of the message I am reacting to.
This only happens because there is no policing of companies exploiting undocumented workers. I've seen wages lowered time and time again in various industries due to the exploitation of undocumented workers. I've seen it in the restaurant industry, construction, trades, cleaning services, etc.
https://chicago.eater.com/2017/11/29/16716666/mcdonalds-bake...
I wish I could find the articles that came out about this at the time- but the bakery was reported by employees, mainly black employees that were losing their jobs to the illegals and experiencing pay cuts. The company complains about losing 21 million- bc they had to start paying fair wages to get actual citizens to work. I understand your sentiment- that if there is no pay gap between undocumented workers and citizens- then the wages should go up- but in reality- you just doubled the labor pool, so wages will not go up. I also agree- we should be blaming the capital owners for this- but my opinion is that capital owners write the laws and that's why enforcement on undocumented labor is non-existent.
This is a platitude not an argument about whether hiring tech workers from foreign countries is good for them or for US citizens.
I also don't think the value you're expressing is historically supported.
> Profits tend to fall so they want to suppress costs to maintain profits. That's it.
We have internal emails from major tech companies showing that the CEOs are conscious about how these decisions affect the labor pool and their control of it (as well as competitors). So we already know there is a plurality of motivations going on in backroom discussions.
Why the lack of curiosity?
> Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less
You just said it lowers illegal immigrants pay, not the citizens. Also this example is from the bottom of the labor market, not Electrical Engineers.
> This filled an economic need.
Yes, farm businesses would prefer to pay cheaper people without rights or benefits. That's the need it's filling.
> Unions increase non-union wages.
Being pro-union seems incompatible with the rest of your post. you think unionized companies would be with hiring some illegal immigrants on the side who aren't protected by the union?
Settlers founding new places are different from immigrants. The US was created by British settlers. Its language, laws, political system, and to a great extent its culture are British. If you look at various statistics, the Anglo countries share strong commonalities, even though people of British descent are now a distinct minority in the US (while being a majority in Britain, Canada, and Australia).
Over time, other people moved in. Those were immigrants. But for a long time it wasn’t immigration as we know it today. Many of them created greenfield communities, settling large swaths of the Midwest, etc. Those communities were pockets of Germans, etc., in a country that was still distinctly British.
“Immigration” since the 20th century looks quite different again. Immigrants aren’t founding new greenfield communities, they are moving into (and changing) existing ones. The place where I grew up is culturally unrecognizable now thanks to immigration (both of foreigners and of people from other parts of the country).
This is ahistorical enough to have been inaccurate at the end of the 18th century when Canada and the US were barely in their larval stages. The perceived cultural and systemic distinctions were already invoked for propaganda purposes even then, curiously mirroring US/Canada tropes to this day:
By delivering abundant food with a paternalistic flair, the British sought to strengthen loyalty in Canada. Lord Grenville assured Dorchester that the aid would impress “the minds of His Majesty’s Subjects under your Lordship’s Government with a just sense of His Majesty’s paternal regard for the welfare of all his People.” In 1791 the Crown canceled that debt with a flourish meant to contrast British benevolence with the crass commercialism of the republic. Upon arriving in Canada, the king’s son, Prince Edward, announced: “My father is not a merchant to deal in bread and ask payment for food granted for the relief of his loyal subjects.” By contrast, in the republic, the bread merchants ruled and imprinted their names on their towns. In the Mohawk Valley, the people renamed one town as Paris, not after the French metropolis, but to honor Isaac Paris, a merchant and miller who had loaned them food in 1789. The British promoted a Canadian identity framed in contrast with the republic, understood as an amoral land of greedy competition where demagogues flattered the common folk but exploited the poor among them.
From: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, Alan Taylor
The preferred term for Australia's historical ethnic majority is "Anglo-Celtic" not "British"; calling it "British" can be seen as ignoring Irish-Australians.
One big difference between the Australia and the US - there was a significant minority of Irish Catholics in Australia from the very beginnings of British settlement. Although they did experience some discrimination, it was a lot less than in the US, so they integrated more quickly and easily into the establishment. People thought it was a big deal when a Catholic of Irish descent was elected US President in 1961; Australia had its first Catholic and first Irish-descended Prime Minister over 30 years earlier, and it was an event which attracted far less notice.
> Over time, other people moved in. Those were immigrants. But for a long time it wasn’t immigration as we know it today. Many of them created greenfield communities, settling large swaths of the Midwest, etc. Those communities were pockets of Germans, etc., in a country that was still distinctly British.
You seem to be drawing a "settler"-vs-"immigrant" distinction based on majority-vs-minority ethnicity. From my perspective, that's a rather idiosyncratic usage. To me, an immigrant is an immigrant, regardless of their ethnic background. A "settler" is either an old-fashioned synonym for "immigrant", or else a term for those immigrants who "created greenfield communities".
Various Native American tribes — estimated population in 1492: 60 million [0] — would like a word.
[0] https://theworld.org/stories/2019-01-31/european-colonizatio...
First time in an immigration discussion on HN? They always bring the "America for Americans (who look like me)" types out of the woodwork.
And depending on the subfield, it simply cannot be filled in 2-3 years.
There is just an institutional failure in supporting STEM at the undergraduate level in the US.
The US has had periods where immigration was relatively unrestricted, and periods where it was heavily restricted.
>> Restricted immigration actually lowers wages
The US passed laws restricting immigration after World War I (Immigration Act of 1917, Immigration Act of 1924). These were in effect until 1965.
Wage growth was slower to non-existent after restrictions on immigration were removed compared to the period when they were in effect. The evidence from US history does not support your assertion. You can deny the law of supply and demand, but you can not repeal it.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/trump-h1b-changes-miss-...