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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

H1B throws all that much more friction into an already unequal relationship, tossing power further to employers.

My preferred reform would be for H1B to be fully unrestricted. If you're going to allow labor into the country, let it compete on fully equal footing with domestic labor. For the reasons Smith articulates and you've either failed to read or are intentionally choosing to ignore, employers already have the upper hand.

A better balance of power would be to repeal anti-unionization laws such as the Orwellian (100th anniversary of his death by the way) doublespeak "right to work" (really: "right to fire, and disrupt organization attempts") and ensure that labor has the same access to collusive collective action and mobility as capital and finance.

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real changes that need to be made to h1b are the fact that they need to prioritize the h1bs to foreigners who graduate from US universities. Every year thousands of foreign PhD students graduate and go back to their home country not because they want to but because they could not get an H1B visa mostly because they wont work at the cut rate a person fresh from their home country would work for. These PhDs are trained with public funds because no PhD student pays their own way through school they receive public grants from the schools or other public entities that fund their research and their study. Americans just dont want to enter graduate school in the same numbers that chinese and indians want to and there is no problem with that as long as these people are not being trained just to go back to their country. They use US public funds to be trained so it is beneficial for them to stay in the US and boost the US work force

Is this true? I am from India and want to do a PhD in US. I thought the work opportunities of PhD gards is good.

It is very variable depending on your subject and research focus.

Teaching opportunities are not good; there are far too many PhDs awarded compared to job openings for university positions.

It may be a benefit for private industry work, but remember that a PhD is primarily about showing you can perform rigorous scientific research, and compared to a Masters, matters less (or not at all) in jobs where research is not the focus.

Read about "post doctoral treadmill" and adjunct gigs, which are like second tier faculty. If you get a phd in some programming related field, like compilers, programming languages, networking, yes, you can work for some valley firms. Yes, you can get green card easy, too. But there is no 'secure' employment like the phd grads of 1970s

They do pay for their own education. They pay for it through substandard wages for the work they perform. If their department didn't pay for their tuition then there is no way those students would work for the peanuts they currently do. The net cost/income to the school would be the same but the current arrangement has less transactional friction and makes it very hard for the student to leave once they've started.

That is another element of possible reform, yes. I've watched the changes of the past 14 years with increasing gloom.

I also saw the effects of the liberalization of immigration regulations in the 1960s which saw floods of foreign students, many Indian, Chinese, African, and others, which had profound influences on US academic institutions, the communities around them, and, to be honest, on their home countries, one of which was a brain drain.

On that last point: one of the arguments for increased global wealth and/or population is that it would increase the number of geniuses and intellectuals (along with the rest of the population, one might suppose). That's possibly true, but I strongly suspect that the existing mechanisms for recognizing and promoting talent have already encroached on much of those possible gains. Not all, but a considerable fraction. Which means that the additional benefit would be smaller than a naive estimate would suggest.

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