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Comment by ytoawwhra92 | Hacker News Reader

The prevailing wage for H1B software engineers is a very good salary for most software engineers in the world.

It's common for the prevailing wage to be double what that person could earn in their country of origin.

That's the parent's argument. Prevailing wage in country A is X. Prevailing wage in country B is Y, and according to your numbers X > 2Y. Person from country B emigrates to country A and accepts wage 1.9Y, putting downward pressure on the jobs in country A at wage X.

Yeah, I'm agreeing.

You don't need the carrot of a green card or the stick of deportation to make a software engineer on an H1B accept a depressed wage, because it's not depressed relative to their alternatives.

And still exert downward pressure on wages. Just by virtue of having more people in the pool.

This would only make sense if there are a finite number of possible jobs and that more jobs are never added as an economy grows.

This would be interesting data to collect - given some field F, for each immigrant that enters the workforce, what is the delta between:

* The expected marginal increase in supply, from immigrants looking for jobs in F

* The expected marginal increase in demand, from immigrants (or non-immigrants identifying an opportunity) starting companies that need experts in F

And how strongly does that delta correlate with average salary in F?

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