Musk, Ramaswamy defend Silicon Valley's foreign-born hires | Hacker News Reader

Musk, Ramaswamy defend Silicon Valley's foreign-born hires

thehill.com

40 pointsmoosedman16 comments

I am a tech founder who is a strong Elon and Vivek supporter... But I have to disagree with Elon and Vivek here.

We already have special visas for really high IQ and talent individuals called O-1. H1- Bs are used to higher lower cost line workers like entry level accountants at McKinsey and junior developers. These individuals then have to work insane hours and can't quit and don't make as much money.

The H1-B is just a money grab by tech CEO's and big consultancies to increase their profit margins. We need to ban the H1-B.

The downside is that the O-1 is an inferior visa. It may be easier to get an O-1, because you avoid the H-1B lottery, but otherwise the O-1 makes your life harder.

The O-1 is tied to a single employer, just like the H-1B, but the transfer process is harder. After the initial 3-year term, you can only renew it for one year at a time (but you can repeat this indefinitely). Once you reach that phase, you'll be applying for a new visa half the time, and you must plan your life around the process. For example, you may have to decline speaker invitations at a conference, because it's the time of the year you don't have a valid visa stamp in your passport.

And if you want a green card, the O-1 again makes your life harder. The final adjustment of status to permanent residency currently takes 1-2 years. If you are on H-1B, you can continue traveling internationally as before. But if you try the same on O-1, your application will be considered abandoned. You will have to apply for advance parole documents, which take months to get.

The US immigration system really seems to select for conformity.

H1-B could be kept, but make the salary for it at least $500k to avoid people abusing it for cheap labor like bringing in cashiers on it at $26k.

FYI, your hero recently called for the execution of a government witness: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Musk - Immigrants are bad, unless the oligarchs of Silicon Valley are using them to destroy the American middle class.

Musk is an immigrant.

Musk is exactly the sort of rootless global elite that so many nationalist populists have a problem with… but he gets a free pass.

He gets a free pass from the white nationalist America first crowd because he's a white, South African apartheid nepo-baby which gives him extra cred with the anti-immigrant crowd. To them, he's one of the "good ones" (plus they really want his money).

The H1B program will be used to destroy the entire tech industry with desperate and cheap labor from India.

University Graduates are not even given a chance, and I would discourage anyone from pursuing anything related to Programming and Development unless they have a Java Certificate or a degree from the University of Hyderabad.

Entire corporations are using Indian labor to replace American workers. Just visit any corporate campus across the US and it is evident.

Junk away....

Fun fact: H1-B labor is, in most cases, more expensive, because the company needs to pay extra attorney fees.

Musk says China rocks. Musk says the Chinese are smart and hard working whereas Americans are complacent and entitled, especially Californians and New Yorkers:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-china-ro...

How would he even know, it's not like tech firms are even giving recent American graduates a shot. They hire H1B because it creates a dependency on the company.

There's no shortage of suitably skilled American candidates for software engineering positions, especially in the current job market. Companies have manufactured the illusion of a shortage to enable industrial scale visa fraud.

There is no shortage of US candidates but there is a shortage of qualified US candidates. Getting an engineering degree from an average US college doesn't mean you are a qualified engineer. In fact, most new graduates know absolutely nothing about software engineering.

It's just the market is so bad now and those tech giants don't want to give them a shot. So many experienced engineers on the job market right now. Why hiring a new grad?

The software engineering field is largely "engineering" in name only. Very few jurisdictions globally recognise software engineers as qualified engineers, but that's a separate issue.

I agree with you, and the same also applies to the other parts of the world. So the question comes down to: why so many kids are failed by our colleges. I am pretty sure those tech giants actually pay more for H-1B workers.

Doing business in China means restraining from criticizing China:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513666

Doing business in the West means helpfully criticizing pro-labor politics here.

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