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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to common belief (common meme?) a lot of H1B employees are not underpaid. Particularly at large companies like Facebook and Google.

Weird consulting shops in New Jersey, on the other hand...

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I just see this as somehow linking the manufactured labor shortage tech companies have been trying to whine about for years with the very real problem of illegal immigration and the social consequences that brings... consequences which I do not think anyone on that list of people cares about. They would have better luck creating this need out of no where when the country was closer to full employment, but the US is a long, long ways off from that.

Illegal immigration is such a hot-button issue in the us that is taints all immigration discussions.

It makes me sad and frustrated, but people cannot seem to understand the numerous important immigration issues which have nothing to do with Mexicans jumping over fences.

Personally I think the legal immigration nonsense is much more important, but the masses and the media disagree.

How do you figure that the labour shortage in tech is manufactured?

In any case, everyone has been fighting to separate skilled immigration from ilegal immigration- them being combined is what has held back reform. There's broad political agreement that skilled immigration needs reform, but until recently no politician has wanted to touch it for fear of being "soft on illegals".

After the dot-com bubble many people were not hired again. We are not even five years out from the greatest recession in many decades. Many of these people have fundamental technical skills. They might know more perl than most and not have much love for ruby hipsters, but they understand the permanent aspects of programming and related disciplines, like the logic behind it. I think a lot of this comes down to Silicon Valley's ageism problem (you know the one no one here ever talks about). There are many technical workers who people think are outdated, despite being responsible for the first P.C. and later internet revolution. For the record, I am 24, and such things do not affect me. But I think opinion here might be skewed on an age basis.

I'm not sure what ties these people to the USA. They could set up shop in any of a dozen places and import whoever they want.

They have narrow elitist interests and don't seem to care about the American society at large. If they did they wouldn't be so tone deaf on an issue like mass immigration, which an overwhelming majority of the population deeply opposes.

Even if H1B employees are not underpaid, artificially increasing the supply of highly-demanded technical talent prevents tech giants from needing to raise compensation across the board. Artificially seems to be a justifiable characterization for a number of reasons.

1. At least intuitively, raising wages should attract educated/intellectually capable people from other industries domestically. The corporations have already been reprimanded by the DoJ for instituting anti-competitive practices regarding poaching.

2. Attracting technical talent from other countries would seem to decrease the supply of talent in those places, which may have relatively less resources than the U.S. to train and retain technically skilled workers; what would be the consequences in the source countries?

3. Finally, attracting highly educated workers to a specific industry and specific corporations with hefty resources concentrates a relatively/currently inelastic supply of skilled workers. More explicitly stated, the question might be: how much social good/utility does a company like Facebook or LinkedIn really produce and what would be the result of concentrating highly-educated talent there?

As someone who worked at a weird consulting shop in Fremont, I can affirm that underpaid H1B employees exist.

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