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Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

*Shortage of talent at the price you are willing to pay.

There are all sorts of legal work and questions I would love to have done if I could get a top-notch lawyer for $10/hr. That doesn't mean there is a shortage of top-notch lawyers, it means that I am priced out by the rest of the market who are offering them better wages. Sounds like you are priced out of the market, if you offer market wages, you will find people by definition of market wage i.e. the price that it costs to successfully hire people, not the price off of salary.com.

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One caveat is that "market wages" most likely will need to offer a risk premium depending on what kind of environment, stability, convenience, etc. you offer. It probably isn't going to be "the industry average for all companies (including the big boys) is $X, so I should need to just offer $X". X could be lower or higher, depending on who you manage to find and who you are.

I think there's actually a lot of caveats, all jobs are not equal, there isn't perfect information about all available jobs (hence the need for recruiting), etc.

But on the other hand, this 'shortage' is being used as a political tool to depress engineering salaries, even though if you applied the same logic to other professions you would find there are worse shortages there. Clearly it would be useful from a healthcare cost perspective if we had more doctors but we aren't expanding visa quotas there. Salary is a huge issue and most jobs want to pay engineers as little as possible. Of course they will rant about how competitive their pay is but if it was so competitive they would probably advertise it, instead of trying to use information asymmetry so they can negotiate them down lower. Then of course, they only hire the best, but salary negotiations inevitably revert to 'market wages', then after all this they can't hire people so they need more immigrants who get deported if they fire them.

For some reason, if you can't afford an accountant, you don't get an accountant, if you can't afford a private lawyer, you don't get a private lawyer, but if you can't afford a programmer, there is a talent shortage and we need more skilled immigrants and to subsidize more STEM graduates.

Not to mention the H1B hire -> underpay -> keep them underpaid and shackled with the H1B/Greencard combo.

You would quickly find yourself in trouble with the INS.

Sort of. Unless you can show that they make higher than the prevailing wage. This being regardless of what the H1B applicant could make if they transferred companies (something that's not typically in their best interest until they have a green card, at least from those I've talked to. Being a US citizen, I may be wrong). The prevailing wage, for many people, is not a competitive wage.

Even if/when they aren't underpaid, they are still shackled by the H1B visa.

I posted this above but that's not true at all. If you can find another employer to hire you at a competitive wage with a similar job classification you are free to transfer your H-1B. H-1B holders can even transfer jobs after applying for permanent residency if they follow a few basic guidelines thanks to AC21.

H-1B holders can transfer jobs even after applying for permanent residency. American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act allows for this specifically. There are provisions:

   New Employment must be the "same or similar" classification
   Form I-140 has been approved or is approvable when filed with I-485
   Form I-485 has been pending for at least 180 days

The employee needs to file a Form I-129 and will need to provide their new employer their original I-94, passport, and Form I-129 filing receipt to properly document work authorization.

Most HR departments fuck this up and many immigration attorneys fuck this up but it's completely possible.

The difference is that many occupations basically are zero sum games. No matter how many doctors you have, there won't be more sick patients. But, the more engineers you have, the bigger the pie becomes, unless there are no more innovations to be made. Many of the people behind SV success stories are immigrants.

No, this is totally wrong. Doctors create wealth too, contributing more healthcare to society is in no way zero sum. There are already plenty of sick patients left over, not everybody gets world class healthcare at affordable costs. If you had more of them healthcare costs would go down and so the capital saved could go to other endeavours. Secondly, you heal people who contribute more to the pie. Finally, healthiness IS the pie, it is itself a type of wealth, arguably one of the most important.

And yes, skilled immigrants create wealth. But the same reasonable arguments that can be made for bringing in skilled tech immigigrants (NOT on indebtured servant visas) could be made for bringing in skilled healthcare immigrants. The reason the former happens a lot more than the latter is because of political representation. Doctors have the AMA carefully controlling the supply of doctors, tech workers have Google and Microsoft doing the opposite.

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