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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

And we see PG talking up H1B on twitter. I'd like to think that if he still read HN he might not do that.

Really companies should be banned from importing more people[1] if they laid off a certain number in the last year. That way the job market would be more likely to self correct.

[1] I think they should still be allowed to hire people who are already in the country on a visa, as it's unfair to make their risk of being kicked out of the country worse. And they should be allowed to renew existing visa workers

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IMO the main issue with H1B is that it makes it harder for them to move. This reduces their ability to negotiate salaries which ultimately drives the equilibrium price for everyone down.

This is why unions in Europe often end up in two seemingly contradicting (but not really) positions regarding labour immigration. One is to try to limit it, and the other is to ensure that the immigrants gets as strong rights as possible if they are allowed in.

> companies should be banned from importing more people

Reverse outsourcing. Don't send the job overseas, send the overseas person here!

Literally “If Mountain View won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to Mountain View” :D

I think it should be a decay function that looks back longer than a year.

I think if you say you're hiring 0.01% people you should be willing to pay 0.01% salary.

An argument against not being allowed to import more people after layoffs (and it’s the one people like PG and Musk are making) is that the people who were laid off simply don’t have the skills required to allow companies to succeed.

They need to import labor because the domestic labor pool isn’t good enough. A quieter part is that people immigrating also expect less for their outputs.

And once they are hear the H1B somewhat locks then into an employer gutter damping salaries

It’s spelt here. To hear means to use your ears.

Small tangent but I’ve seen a sharp increase in typos in the front page comments throughout December. Very surprising to me (I’ve been here since 2016.)

Mass layoffs are generally not that discriminating. Because they don't want the news to leak in advance, it's usually a circle of the top brass and the HR department that decides who goes. And with mass layoffs, it's usually entire teams not just people who were on performance plans. Hence, I don't think their argument is good. I have little against importing talent when there is a shortage[1], but mass layoffs are good evidence that there is not.

[1] Well, except when the country fails to invest enough in education and training. It's wrong for the UK, for example, to consistently not fund enough medical students, and make up for it by importing staff educated by third world countries.

How can that be true though?

Are you and Elon saying that India’s education system and universities are just plain better than MIT, Stanford, etc? If so - why are so many studying abroad in places like Canada and Australia?

If not, then are Indians just genetically smarter than Americans, so that their pool is better?

It just seems like immigrants are willing to work more for less, so that in the future when they’re citizens, they can work less for more.

Working more for less is the issue, that's exactly what this boils down to.

Yes, it’s a major component at least. I’ve wondered if there should be protections against this to maintain some baseline of safety for people’s workloads, but that would never fly in North America as far as I can tell. And it could actually harm some people who legitimately need to work overtime to take care of their families.

Sorry, I wasn’t making a case for that argument. I’m only pointing out that it exists, it’s a prominent way of thinking, and it’s worth considering.

I don’t personally subscribe to that belief.

My position is more so that wealthy, powerful people stand to gain a lot by disempowering their workforce, and they’re working hard to do just that. People like Elon would love to see cheap labour and AI beset the workforce such that it had no leverage and lower wages. He has said about as much in various ways already.

I’m a little disappointed that my comment wasn’t voted down more, because I really did phrase it as my own opinion.

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