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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the problems with this issue. People talking about it are pretty clueless and have no idea what they're talking about. They get whipped up into an ignorant frenzy about something they don't understand. H-1B has no requirement for advertising in newspapers.

>But for me, a larger concern is elite overproduction.

Props for finding incredibly niche and out-there theories to support your worldview. This is kind of nice about HN. Normally, people would just cite the great replacement theory or other leftist slop to support protectionism, but you found something even more bizarre. It reminds me of how Vance talks. He'll bring up latin incantations like ordo amoris to justify otherwise mundane cruelties.

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> They get whipped up into an ignorant frenzy they don't understand. H-1B has no requirement for advertising in newspapers.

Oh yes, yeesh, my bad, this is for green cards only, there's some hilariously low bar for H-1B yet it still exists. But let's just go back to my point that H-1B is used to lower wages. You can just search for it unless you think it's a conspiracy theory. For all your frothing hostility, I noticed you didn't try to defend lowered wages. What are you defending here? Corporate profits? Some kind of moral issue? Do you have evidence H-1B was vitally necessary?

> incredibly niche and out-there theories

It's a scientific theory.

> support protectionism

I think that misses the point if you mean trade protectionism. I am saying H-1B (also EB-2 and other degree to green card pipelines) presents a danger of destabilizing society. I already think that's obviously the case.

>H-1B is used to lower wages.

Everything is used to lower wages. Uber, waymo, doordash, LLMs, etc. all reduce wages. There is no requirement in the statute that it should not lower wages. Congress considered the tradeoff and decided that it was worth having the program. It is a minuscule number, btw. 85k per year, which given the size of the US economy should not even register anywhere in any discussions. In any case, these econ 101 discussions are beyond the scope here.

85k per year plus their families and all concentrated into specific sectors of the economy

Congress did that for when skilled jobs couldn't be filled. It wasn't primarily meant to just onboard people and fill jobs. I don't think ~85k per year is minuscule. I think that is substantial and the cap has regularly been exceeded and this is annually for decades.

That brings us to

    Americans are too dumb to get these jobs so we still need it:

If that's true, which I doubt, I am not sure why this isn't a higher priority problem of ours to solve.

    Americans are not too dumb but we need H-1B anyway for reasons:

>the cap has regularly been exceeded and this is annually for decades.

The cap is 85k, which is never exceeded, as that is a statutory limit. There are other cap exempt categories for non-profits and universities.

>That brings us to

It doesn't bring us to any of these conclusions. The vehicle for the change you seek is the legislature. Lobby Congress to change the law. You have a house rep and 2 state senators. Talk to them about your concerns.

Those are exactly the two conclusions it brings us to. If a skilled job can't be filled the question becomes why the skill gap exists or if it even exists at all and I have never seen someone suggest every single job given to a H-1B holder provably could not be filled by a citizen. There's almost no bar at all besides putting a notice in the lunch room or something equally frivolous. The LCA is easily gamed.

>the vehicle for change you seek is the legislature

I never argued the fee was legal for reference. And oop must've forgotten that Congress cared about my concerns, thanks for the tip!

You are building up hypotheses and theories in your head that have no basis in reality. There is no requirement that a job is opened up to H-1B if a citizen cannot do it. That does not exist. You are starting with this flawed assumption and then reaching some absurd conclusions. H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value. The fact that it may displace other citizens' jobs is fine too and permitted by the statute. Uber doesn't exist because no capable taxi drivers could ride a cab. Your grievance stems from a flawed premise. You wish there were protectionism, but there is no protectionism in the law. So again, talk to Congress. And Congress knows very well how to do protectionism. See Jones Act.

You know what? You might be right. The wording doesn't seem to specifically state anything about reasons indeed implying that "H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value". The lore about requirements doesn't appear. This means the law was never intended to fill shortages and the law isn't really being gamed because there's nothing dishonest about the intentions. This saddens me greatly. Truly the only fix is through Congress.

I don't know if protectionism is the right word.

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