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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the situation for US citizens would improve if they were allowed to naturalize. Their wages would go up and companies wouldn’t have the relatively cheaper labor pool to constantly draw from.

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This is another mistake what people make when describing H1Bs. Yes there are abuses where bad actors abuse the system and undercut the local wages. But a huge portion of the annual H1B allocation goes to people who are not the “cheaper labor pool”. They get paid the same wages AND the companies spend additional money to the order of thousands of dollars to sponsor the visa. Google is not hiring H1Bs on a cheaper rate. They still get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

But I do agree with the theory that allowing a lot of these H1Bs would be a net benefit for the economy. A lot of people who naturalize end up leaving jobs and starting businesses that employ more people. We should be encouraging that, but instead the system actively discourages that.

it's not a mistake because it's what ends up happening. There's serious research on it that everyone seems to want to ignore: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23153

If they’re not a cheaper labor pool then the only reason companies wouldn’t hire them over citizens is because they are tied to the company. This would also be solved by naturalization.

Any iteration of this turns out to be better for US citizens if they’re are naturalized.

Not to mention that 50% of all unicorns in the US are started by immigrants, like 60% of those by specifically Indians.

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