Slowing The Exodus Of Skilled Foreigners
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
I think there are two extremes, and the US is inconsistently taking pieces of each.
In the United Arab Emirates (UAE, which contains Dubai, ...), there is a fairly open work visa policy for anyone with either enough capital ($50-100k) to set up his own business, or with a job offer paying at least $1-2k/mo for white collar positions (there is also the borderline-slavery $100-500/mo construction industry, but I think that is basically a separate issue). There is no pretense, outside banking and government, that local nationals need to be given first shot at a job.
Then, you have countries with citizenship or permanent residency-track-only immigration programs. (I think Canada's program is like this, and some other commonwealth nations.) You don't NEED to become a PR or citizen if you qualify, but almost all work visas qualify toward the PR/C process.
The main downside of the UAE system is that skilled people feel very little long-term attachment to the place. e.g. there are non-resident indian families who have lived for generations in UAE, but who are not permanent residents, although they control important businesses.
The US has a weird hybrid system, where most green cards, allocated by country and with preference toward reuniting families, go to people who have external reasons to want to stay in the US permanently (family, where they came from was worse, etc), and are generally economically non-productive. We give temporary L1/H1B/etc. visas to the economically productive, disincenting them to stay long term.
Basically, the US system is backward -- we should be trying to keep the people who are economically valuable, as they bring net value into the economy, and would allow us to increase the number of immigrants. We should have liberal short and medium term visit visas, etc. for family and tourist and other non-productive immigrants.
The main reasons seem to include being so far away from family and being in an alien culture. Further, jobs for PhDs are increasingly available in their home countries-- this seems to seal the deal. The tough immigration stance contributes to the discouragement since foreign workers have to "pause" their lives until they get their green card.
That is a serious mismatch of policies.
Said another way, it's a form of foreign aid. Looked at from this point of view, you wouldn't let anyone stay unless there was really a special need.
Why are they kicked out afterwards? Maybe because most of them are no longer necessary? Skills such as writing research papers and grant proposal are not in high demand in industry...
My question at this point is: how many people reading this are encountering a variant of this post for the first time? Are we all just gathering for a well-worn argument.
Part of the problem here is the concept of "news priming". This is done by PR departments and political groups - prior to a lobbying or legislative initiative, they'll try to frame the issue in the public mind. This is why the proponents of the H1B tried to get it termed the "innovation visa" (and probably weren't happy when India's minister of commerce called it the "outsourcing visa.")
And of course, many people here are passionate about the issue - on both sides, of course, so we jump in to make sure we are part of the "priming." But I am curious - how many people here are surprised with anything in my post? I'm starting to suspect that most people on hacker news are pretty well informed about this by now.
The median household income in the US about $50k, men's medial income is 45K and women's is 35K. If you assume a two income family with median earners their income will be approx $80k. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...)
Salaries in the tech industry (even at very low positions) are much higher than this (i.e., than 50k, 45k, 35k). This is now when salaries are supposedly low due to immigration.
I do see that Americans respond to economic incentives in other professions. During the real estate bubble a HUGE number of people passed the realtor exams and got into the real estate business.
Programming/computer skills are the easiest skills to pick up (no need for expensive equipment). I'm actually very puzzled that there aren't more Americans in engineering/programming.
I'm unconvinced that fear of immigration-induced salary decreases is the reason why Americans don't want to go into engineering.
So you're comparing someone who was talented enough in high school to hit the ground running with Calculus at university. This student then sleeps very few hours struggling with advanced calculus, differential equations, stochastic processes, nonlinear optimization, compiler design, chemistry, and physics. He scores well enough on the GRE (and perhaps the subject test) to get into a PhD program, and makes it through 6 years + a dissertation.
You compare that to the median. Seriously?
Meanwhile, his fellow lawyers in training breeze through a Poly Sci major. It's tough to get into a top law school, but no harder than getting into a top engineering program (because you don't have to compete with foreign nationals to get into law school in the US on anything near the scale you do in engineering). 3 years of law school or 2 of an MBA program are no picnic, but virtually all students at these programs obtain their degress (which is hardly the case at PhD programs, I know this from personal experience at Berkeley).
Salaries would have to be as high or higher than Law/MBA to convince Americans to do this. Instead, engineering salaries can lag way behind, because it's easy to get foreigners, especially from countries without much economic opportunity, to sign up for this as a way of gaining a path toward US residency and citizenship.
While salaries might not be actively lowered, they almost certainly place a limit on wage growth. When this happens over decades (and wages aren't similarly controlled in other fields where Law and MBA students are hired), you'll start to see a huge wage differential.
To me, this has clearly happened - and now Americans have no interest in signing up for such an intensely rigorous path with rewards that are, quite frankly, much lower than in other professions.
I don't have the link handy, but NY Times had a great graphic with salaries of different professions. Lawyers are paid more than computer people, but the delta is not a multiple (iirc it was about 50% more). So it's not even clear to me that lawyers are paid significanty more (considering the criticality of their work).
Also it's not clear to me why you bring in PhD and master's. Most engineers in tech don't have those degrees.
My point is that it doesn't make sense to compare a skillset like engineering to the median. You'd need to compare it to the kind of salary someone capable of engineering would be able to earn in another field. Salaries for a field can be higher than the median and still be lower than they would be in the absence of an H1B program.
<Then why aren't people scrambling to become engineers like they did to become realtors or at least encouraging their children to become engineers?>
I didn't notice anyone scrambling to get their kids into the real estate business. But maybe the reason they don't encourage their kids into engineering is that they've seen that a similar or lesser effort in other fields would have a bigger payout?
<Also it's not clear to me why you bring in PhD and master's. Most engineers in tech don't have those degrees.>
I brought this up because it was used in the original article that promoted this thread. It is often used to justify the need for an H1B program.
Instead of hiring a junior/mid-level American expert as an assistant, for example, they get a highly qualified foreign expert at the same price.
Also, as far as I know countries do not "encourage" their citizens to go to US. Individuals choose to go to US on their own. It's not like they're embarking on a government-funded trip.