Someone else would have taken that job maybe for a higher salary.
Looking holistically the person leaving the US (or lets say 100 people to make it easier to see the point) means 1 to 30 less startups and so maybe an entire company or more not being started. That is less revenue for US.
What most people from the "they steal our jobs" mentality (not saying that is you, but this a seperate point) don't get is productive people create jobs by being a customer of many businesses.
That doesn't mean your plumber isn't qualified—just that people looking for webapps want to hire workers who know how to make them.
There is the other side plenty of workers successful at programming language could be trained to fill any gap. That's what happened in the 50s and 60s..
PS The number of roles that there aren't qualified Americans for could be counted on one hand. This has always been about reducing salaries, not shortages.
Of course I am exaggerating, but this is not a 1 dimensional problem.
This is why in the modern world some sectors are always crying about "worker shortages" while asking always more migrant workers to come in - salaries are compressed as a result, and locals have no incentives to enter the branch.
Hence importing workers may be useful for needs that are limited in time and space (say, install a specialized foreign machinery in a power plant), but systematic importation leads to dequalification of the local workers, who flee the branch that has now low salaries.
This might be less true if there is resource starvation but we have transport and imports and exports. You can accomodate more people and feed them.
>The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows
Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!
Besides, yeah, if you hire people who will work for any salary, the amount of jobs will increase, but salaries will decrease, for locals as well. After some time, locals will flee sectors where the migrant workers are brought in, creating further self-inflicted "labor shortages"...requiring more migrants!
The main winners are capital owners, who, thanks to the migrant workers, can now acquire a larger part of the added value generated by workers.
Yes the job market exists.
I feel like the better argument is that the greencard holder was the best candidate and thus will be more productive in the role. It is just efficient resource allocation. That, even without new companies, will drive profit/expansion/more jobs
There isn't a "lump of labour" that gets distributed in the economy.
It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
What meritocracy? This is a myth pushed to justify a kind of "just world" interpretation of our social ills. Nepotism is increasing, social mobility decreasing. To believe in meritocracy in the face of this is to deny reality.
Is that really true? I’m sure in some fields where you need rare experts I believe it. For the average engineer who is just another cog in the wheel of big corp, I highly doubt it.
Have you ever hired someone before? Did you decide to take the best person you found or did you pick an American?
Many times. Sometimes we don’t offer sponsorships so we hired who didn’t need one. Other times not. During the interview process where they’re from isn’t the matter at hand. Either way, there’s no shortage of good candidates - solely American / GC or not.
Though let’s be honest - there is a question behind the question, isn’t there? Why don’t you just ask that instead?
You answered it - you picked the best person, who sometimes was not American.
Generally though, the foreign candidate is not so much better that hiring an American would have lowered the bar.
Sometimes it also comes down to leveling - I’ve had to down level people due to budget concerns. Americans can hold out for that better job, but the other cannot so companies take advantage of that.
My point is that it’s not a skill issue, it’s a wage + location issue. Foreigners will find that their wage is better than what they can earn at home, so they can undercut that citizens who’s held out for a better opportunity.
Just to better understand, genuinely, do you mean that the company would increase their budget in the event that a foreign worker had not been available, and that an American would have taken the job at that time, given the higher wage?
Other ways to solve is to settle for less if the job isn’t that crucial, or look for someone who lives in a lower cost of living area who can take the wage. But that also depends on the whole RTO fiasco.
To be clear, if you are doing leading edge R&D or some super special project like SpaceX, etc then yeah you need to seek the brightest minds across the globe. But to maintain your CMS or work in some ERP softwares, you can definitely find an American to do it.
The basic point I’m making is a large majority of H1B work can be done just as well (within an acceptable error rate) by someone here. There are reasons why you need some special talent but those aren’t as common.
Have you ever hired someone before?
Do you work in hr?
You didn't answer!
I can already on the ground see the effect of the Trump policies. So many tech jobs that would have been in the US are being lost. And companies are learning how to be effective with overseas teams.
Immigrants doing a very large portion of tech work can't be just because they get paid less
It is solely about that. Remember, immigrants didn't really play a role in the US tech industry for half of its existence and didn't play a major role until a decade ago. This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.
Sergey Brin? Paul Graham? Elon Musk?
Isn't this just because foreign students pay more than citizens? Isn't this just capitalism and the free market efficiently allocating resources?
Something about 'having the cake and eating it too'.
> Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?
Universities don't pay for research - and departments usually don't pay for research either.
At the margin, a professor will prefer someone who has her own funding, but that person also needs to be competent, so I doubt the national schemes you are citing have made an impact on who gets into graduate school.
Can you provide a citation for this specific claim? I used to do admissions to a grad program in the US, and we ended up admitting mostly foreign students soley because very few US citizens actually applied (probably only 10% of apps). Whether that's because they were not qualified or couldn't afford it I do not know. But it's not because they were openly and actively discriminated against.
Bell, Wang, Fairchild, Intel, Sun...