Study: High-Skilled Immigrants Are Neither Better Nor Brighter Than U.S. Workers

  If you want real immigration reform, 
  make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years.

There are definitely disadvantages to be on H1B.

If an industry (like finance) routinely pays multiple times the compensation of another industry (say, engineering) that requires similar skillset, it's rational that more of the top graduates will choose finance over engineering.

If we are going to be pulling anecdotes from where the sun don't shine, I can also point at Silicon Valley with a huge number of south asian/chinese immigrants starting companies.

> If you're not well networked, but still working very well, you don't get a higher wage/promotions...

Erm... so ? This is life. Popularity and hard work are not necessarily correlated, learn how to network. It is a life skill. This is like a guy saying that he is a good guy but doesn't get any with a girl.

Second: other commenters have already pointed out that your comment about being "well-networked", while true, has nothing to do with racism. So don't confuse those things.

Third:

> *Can we talk about racism?

Maybe you're content to just vent your frustration, and throw blame around. Or maybe you want to have a meaningful conversation. I don't know you, I don't know your goals. But if your goal is to have a meaningful conversation about racism, or educate the privileged white people about their privilege, you're doing it wrong.

One of the facts of human nature is that people don't want to hear this shit. If you want to illuminate anyone, you have to make a very careful and thoughtful argument, because when you make sloppy mistakes, that gives people the excuse they need to let themselves off the hook. Just look at the replies you got: you said something that's true ("If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people") and then you said a few things that were dumb ("I've seen it with my own eyes...", and the thing about confusing not-wanting-to-network with ethnicity), and look at which part got the replies.

If you want to preach the uncomfortable truths, you've gotta be on your A game. And if you play a C game, you just distract the audience, which makes it harder for other people to explain the situation, which means that the racism will continue. As well as all the other forms of privilege, which I notice you didn't much care about (your "btw women" notwithstanding).

This is the part where you say that I don't have all the information, and maybe he was a terrible worker. That's also the part where I say that you likely don't have the full picture of the "company club" either. The cultural divide can be huge. My former coworker grew up in Punjab. He was very apprehensive when he tagged along with me on a roadtrip (he loved football) and my wife wanted to drive. He told me "the women in my family don't drive." This is the kind of stuff that makes it hard to get into the "company club."

For most middling to large companies in the bay, the "complicated and costly processes" are outsourced to law firms that are on a retainer. For them, the whole process brings a matter of calling a number. Furthermore, the processes are not that costly (Say around $10K for an H1B application ) compared to the benefits of having an employee who can be exploited. Now, I am not saying it happens consciously at the company level. However, I am pretty damn sure it can happen at the hiring manager level.

Scenario A Shareholder: $100,000, Native programmer: $100,000

Scenario B Shareholder: $150,000, Native programmer: $75,000, H1B programmer: $75,000

There are good reasons in a democracy to favor scenario A over scenario B. It just depends on the following premises:

1) the income of non-Americans is irrelevant to American policy;

2) we care more about the income of the median American than the aggregate GDP;

3) we don't not care about the standard deviation of income

Econ 101 or not, these are not unreasonable premises.