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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

The reason why is the drafters of immigration law care a lot about US employers (as they are voters, donors and have a big lobby). US employers want to control the green card process so that they have leverage over their employees. If employees can get green cards without the company, they can leave or threaten to leave. If employees need their employer, they can't start the processes until the company assents, and can't leave while its in process. Depending on exact details that can give employers 5 or so more years where the employee is at their mercy.

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This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.

Your working conditions and salary would be substantially higher if those people weren’t in the country to begin with.

To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.

For tech especially I don't think that's necessarily true.

This flat claim only makes sense when you consider foreign employees to only participate in the US economy through their employment.

But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.

Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.

they also pay into taxes and social security without ever hoping to get that money back

Hahaha

As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.

Right, even if one starts from an aggrieved position of "They took our jerbs!" after it's happened you do not want to let those workers be underpaid or abused, because it will (A) only increase the incentives of employers to import pliant immigrant labor and (B) it'll ripple out to harm the bargaining position of all "locals" still in the same line of work.

P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.

Well, from the Gov's POV, they don't want to import wards of the state. If you arrive in a country, someone has to fund you. Tying it to an employeer guarentees that you're funded. Without that you're just filling up ERs and hostels, etc.

The parent was proposing tying permanent residency to taxes paid or something. If you've paid $1M in taxes, you've demonstrated that you're not likely to become a burden on the state.

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