Florida public universities to pause hiring new H-1B workers
wusf.org
wusf.org
A recent college grad may not be able to actually do the work that these universities are looking for.
Untenured position in Florida - I'm guessing the pay was not great, no?
But I am guessing that Florida is, in general, not the most desirable place for academics to be.
In theory, you could trust USCIS to identify areas that have real need. But that process hasn’t been reliable in decades: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-anoth... (“Salzman spoke of the latest data on STEM graduates and jobs, reiterating that STEM programs turn out at least 50 percent more IT graduates every year than there are U.S. job openings. He also said that if the H-1B program is ramped up to the numbers that are being advocated (up from 85 000 to 185 000), that worker oversupply could possibly increase to the 90 percent mark or more.”). Note this article was written before the impacts of AI, etc., started being felt. So things are even worse now.
Part of this is we broke the pipelines in United States to domestically produce such talent. Foreign student visas made these jobs extremely unattractive for domestic students with options because of low pay + debt load while making them extremely attractive to foreign students because until recently, many people around the world were willing to do whatever for US visa.
Look at it this way. Except at the tippy top, employers aren’t looking to hire “the best.” They decide what the role is worth, and then select from the pool of people willing to work for that level of pay. A de facto path to U.S. citizenship for someone and their kids is basically a form of non-cash compensation for H1Bs. So even if the cash pay is the same, the foreigner worker is getting more value than the American worker. The effect is the same as if the government kicked in an extra $50,000 a year (or whatever) to the paycheck of foreign workers but not American workers. So if the role pays $100,000, it will draw a pool of foreign workers as if it pays $150,000 a year. So, at every level of job, the American worker is competing with more qualified and motivated foreign workers, because the job simply is worth more to those workers.
For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors?
"First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics"
> they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season.
Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty?
EDIT: As has become traditional, rayiner edited the original post when it was proven completely false. Here is the article that "proved" their point: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res...
> Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors
The article says that there was no “statistically significant relationship” for other races. That doesn’t mean you can infer that people from other races didn’t move away. It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
I suspect the trend would hold true for affluent native-born black and hispanic families too. There’s just very few school districts where you have affluent asians living alongside affluent black or hispanic people. In fact, I’m not aware of any. I live in a county with a lot of affluent black people, adjacent to the most affluent black-majority county. My daughter is the only Asian in her class, which is otherwise about 70-30 white/black.
> Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty
My dad’s family was actually affluent landowners. That’s just what most of Asia was like until very recently. My sister in law is Taiwanese. The communists killed much of her extended family during the revolution.
It could be that, but the study itself doesn't show that at all. It actually shows the opposite. Hispanics were, by far, the largest subset of students in the study. In the Central Cities area of the study, Asian and black student population was about even.
This is really egregious internet-style arguing.
> Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors?
> "First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics"
But you omitted the portion after the semicolon:
"First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics; therefore, white movement was a reaction not to the broader emergence of non-white neighbors, but to Asians specifically."
To be totally fair to you, the first clause in isolation clearly means what you interpreted it to mean, it seems like the author of the article doesn't understand what "correlation" means. But it looks like the co-author of the underlying study draw the same conclusion as I did:
"'If we just look at the basic correlations, we don’t see this kind of white flight from low-income suburbs,' said Boustan. 'To me, this very clearly rules out basic racial animus.'"
The rest of the article explains that the white flight is caused by dislike of the increased competition Asian students bring, not racial animus like you suggested.
> There is a reason American families move away when Asian immigrants move into school districts
The study shows that "American" families didn't move away, "white American" families moved away.
> not racial animus like you suggested.
Can you share what it is you think I suggested? I don't see where I provided a view on this topic. I simply pointed out your incorrect assumptions of the data.
These days I think it's clear your dad had it right. Your stance seems to be that protectionist and isolationist policies will keep citizens safe from international competition, but how long will that last in a Capitalistic society? And how will that prepare them for the future when the competition inevitably arrives.
And lo and behold, the ultimate competition is already here and it's not even foreign people, it's AI that is even cheaper than foreign people!
Monsoon season is here, we should all be looking for our boats.
+ most countries don’t crush their graduates with nearly the same debt
+ PhDs abroad can be quicker to get making lower pay acceptable
First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.
Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.
So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.
Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.
I’d add that Florida higher education pays below average vs. nationally and the state is dealing with some serious cost of living issues at the moment (e.g. insurance).
It’s kinda like it’s the purpose of these laws to dismantle public higher education.
We should stop listening to institutions (corporate or academic alike) demanding quality at the lowest compensation bound possible, leveraging visas for labor to accomplish this. Pay the talent, develop the talent, or go without the talent.
It's usually companies who hide behind 'we use data from HR to ensure we pay market rate'.
Paying market rate doesn't make people change jobs.
The host interjected, “Well, we have plenty of talented people here.”
“No, you don’t,” the president replied. “No, you don’t have certain talents and people have to learn.”
Why are universities not creating a talent pool for their self-sustainment? Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
They say, "those who can, do - those who can't, teach", and I believe it. Maybe the real question is: Are universities going the way of the physical newspaper, the personal blog, the dinosaur...?
So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
If you want the world to be wealthy in consumer excess and quality of life, China is the path to success, not the US. Whether the US succeeds or not is irrelevant unless you are very wealthy as an owner of capital. The innovation will happen regardless (most likely in China, but also potentially Europe, Canada, and other developed countries).
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec (August 2024)
> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023).
> These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker (March 2023)
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
There are no credentials required.
>authoritatively say
Experience beats credentials.
>qualified labor pool
No degree required outside of a HR checklist. CS students are not necessarily qualified outside of academia in the real world. H-1B just means you jumped through the hoops of credentialism to be a "qualified" candidate. Many universities require you to have a CS degree to work as an tech employee, so they shut out many qualified candidates. Their loss, and eventual downfall.
>Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
Yes, extremely overrated. The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt. The practices are on their way to automation. The hard work has been done.
Gee, I wonder what the academic backgrounds of the theorists and engineers who made that possible is. Probably no advanced degrees and no people on sponsorships right?
The weather-climate might be nice, but the political climate is less so.
And frankly, depending on the time of year and where you are in Florida, the weather climate is atrocious, too.
> and near-incomprehensible accents.
Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?
How did you make this jump?
From here; the implication seems to be that it's only in college lectures that people are faced with strong accents.
You don't hire a professor at a R1 school just to teach math101. You hire them they can build a research lab or otherwise help to advance the frontier of the field (cancer, stats, etc.). The talent pool in several of these fields is very very small for Americans, because the brightest just go (used to go?) to work to finance or tech. So if you say you can't bring any bright foreigners, you are constraining yourself to a lower talent pool than other countries, and thus will pay a price (in less research, in no foreign students applying and thus no $$ from them, etc etc)
This is a fair take but maybe a pause is just a pause. Considering how big of problem visa abuse is in education in multiple countries, these organizations taking a break to review things and start to take it seriously is probably a good thing.
The visas in the US around education are even more liberal than they are for STEM jobs (which IMO is a bit exaggerated online), there's less or no cap limits in edu and the organizations can sponsor people easier than companies. IT abuse is the big ticket item while no one really talks about education. Both need better enforcement.
Why is this necessarily a problem?
> According to a records request obtained by IFP, O'Brien said at least 315 of the 1,300 H-1B petitions approved between 2017 and 2022 were for physicians, PhD scientists or STEM faculty.
Yeah, we don’t want no stinkin doctors. Our healthcare is cheap as it is. /s
Why stop at nationality. California for Californians! Pretty bad take.
I don't know what to make of that, it's like we are left wing in theory but right wing in practice.
I’ve never seen a MAGA hat arguing for more (or any) H1Bs - quite the opposite.
Adding to OPs point, Trump did a major immigration push, yet a major push to punish companies/employees who create the demand that immigrants were filling was not part of that. Imagine launching a 50+ billion dollar drug war, but only going after drug users.
It's just plain human to support outcomes that benefit one's self, family, friends, or community (especially if they are suffering, or losing what they were once afforded by their country or ancestors); even if you might have voted the other way if you were observing from outside, where you have the luxury to make more neutral decisions based on the big picture and long timeline.
As long as the delta isn't too gross, of course - there's where the subjectivity really comes in (How much benefit? How much harm? What does it mean to "deserve" something? Where is the line between simply deciding how your own country operates and harming others unnecessarily?)
That being said it isn’t like these people are necessarily aligned on any other issues. What might your Black or Persian friends think of gay people for example?