Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.
This thinking is wrong. For IT jobs, the work is pre-defined and you go find people who can do the job. For product development this is sometimes the case, but for truly innovative products, such as AI models, this is not the case. You have to hire the best in the world and give them the resources they need, as opposed to defining the project upfront and hiring people "who can do the job".
I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s. Based on nothing but an old geocities post some rando put up about training a model to only unlock a pet door for their cat.
I implemented the same and it worked.
Where you see true innovation I see run of the mill. OpenAI, Google, etc are propping up data center rental business they came to rely on to titillate biology with whatever spaghetti that sticks. That's it.
The interesting science isn't happening anywhere close to big tech.
The mathematics of LLMs exists in textbooks from 1950s. Your entire comment chain here is little more than reciting propaganda.
Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?
If your powers of analysis were worth anything you would be running the world not copy-pasting hype straight from CNBC and Big Tech PR
As you are not running the world your analysis is worthless. As such I say; good day, sir.
"Why is it important Google exists?" is a more interesting question.
(I’m not opposed to immigration at all but it was transparent how for decades the industry resisted any change which would make it easier for a skilled H1-B worker to take a better job)
Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who really lived up to the idea that the best in the world were coming here—I’ve known a few of them myself—but that there were a much greater number of people who were not in that class and it wasn’t exactly a secret that their managers knew they could be imposed on more than their equivalently-skilled colleagues.
That H1B labour allowed other firms to build tech, which kept those firms competitive, creating a deeper economy and experienced bench.
That depth then enabled more advanced tech firms to be born.
At least thats what I think they are saying.
The analogy would be that China took over low tech manufacturing, and then because of that were able to develop expertise to move up the value chain.
At the same time, supply demand curves are real. If you have more workers, it should result in competition that drives down wages. (ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL)
There was a distinction being made between Tech and IT, which I am not too sure about.
Sort of a meaningless statement when all things are definitely not equal.
If there are 5 million people in a country, or 200 million, the theory of too many workers means the 5 million people country should be paying everyone vastly more.
But that is trivially untrue.
Economies grow and shrink and adapt around the number people.
> Sort of a meaningless statement when all things are definitely not equal.
Hey, don’t look to me for a defense of the weaknesses of economic models.
At the same time you can’t really discuss complex systems like economies where one part affects another, without holding some of the factors in stasis.
Centris paribus does extreme amounts of heavy lifting.
So software engineer salaries have gone up dramatically in the last 35 years H-1B visa has been around. In fact, the H-1B visa is the reason the salaries have gone up. Without it the industry would be stagnant, just like non-tech S&P 500 companies and most companies in Europe in the same time period.
As others have said, H1-B has been good for companies, and bad for American workers. The same companies who were found to be colluding to keep wages down.
Europe is stagnant because of regulation, not because of immigration.
I am saying the reason silicon valley exists is because of the immigration of the smartest people from around the world. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US.
Consider the seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need"). It was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration been bad for American workers? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, without them the center of tech would be Beijing.
Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.
Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz
Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.
The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.
In Singapore, the rage is mostly against higher earner immigrants, because they take all the good jobs, making the middle class in Singapore poorer.
I'm sensing a bit of a mix in your US centric argument.
All in all, a lot of people just hate immigration, always have, always will. It is a topic as old as time.
"We have always been a nation of immigrants who hate the newer immigrants." -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
Really it is not immigration people hate, it is having to compete for food.
How would you like to make t-shirts for rich Chinese, for $5 an hour? There is a reason Americans are not doing that. It is because we are smarter than the rest of the world. How do you think that happened? Were all the smart people born here? Nope. It is because smart people born around the world immigrated here. The prosperity they bring doesn't only help high tech workers, it feeds the economy, so everyone benefits.
Americans are absolutely willing to work in factors, but capitalists want chattel slave workers instead.
Your view of history is farcical, acting as if American workers had any real say in their countries industrial capacity rather than a few thousand people decided to inflict mass poverty to tens of millions of Americans.
Let them lose.
Google and the rest do not prop up humanity. They prop up a financial engineering Ponzi scheme.
You're just parroting media and social tropes you grew up with.
We could assert in our children social truth about other forms of economics; for example, healthcare as a tent pole rather than stock valuations; still requires technology and jobs and we don't remain the last modern economy on the planet without universal healthcare. We're losing to Russia and China in healthcare.
But thankfully we win when the metric phallic rockets to nowhere and Google search uptime?
You should consider your economic benchmarks and their provenance; a bunch of self selecting biological organisms that we socially describe as billionaires have convinced you via their fear mongering that if we don't give them all the power giant foot will step on us
A big factor has been diversity quotas to make organisations DSG numbers meet the requirements of institutional investors, political pressure and activists.
Problem is: pushing diversity into traditional male roles didn't result in boys diversifying into non-traditional roles such as nursing and teaching, and now you have those other roles being filled with immigrants to make up for the shortfall. And those immigrants don't care for diversity.
Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads.
Downvote all you want, it's the truth.
Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.
The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.
The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.
Yea, keep that same energy and see how it plays out.
"They also pay the social security and Medicare taxes so listless rednecks can collect SSDI for being unable to work."
However immigrants are a net increase in investment and GDP. Yes - terms and conditions apply (its economics, when do they not)
Immigrants have to pay rent, buy clothes and groceries from wherever they live. This creates demand which depends the consumption economy. These are positive growth levers. This is despite whatever work they do in that region.
In contrast, asset prices like house prices rising, because they have become stores of wealth, are a different deal altogether. In that situation house owners benefit from just holding onto property, and not renting. The asset appreciates all the same.
The issue which can be brought up is wage depression, and paying immigrants under the table. This should depress wages for American labour.
One solution for this is to increase minimum wage, and to ensure that everyone is paid minimum wage.
This is a simplified model of the situation, but in general immigrants put more into the system than they take out.
These are pointless growth levers.
Their billable rates ranged from $44-76/hr in 2022. The people in the cafeteria probably made more. They get minimum viable salary like indentured workers in hopes of getting a green card and more opportunity.