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Comment by xcntktn | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, he's got his own strategy to keep programmers' salaries down:

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...

If all he wanted to do was keep programmers' salaries down, he could just as easily open offices in India and China and employ people over there and pay them even less than he would have to pay them if they immigrated to the US. And as a large company that's an advantage Facebook has and their prospective competitors lack. I'm sorry you feel insecure that more immigration might threaten your ability to single-handedly earn three times as much as the median American family, but literally every other human being other than native-born American programmers is better off with this kind of immigration reform.

That would mean Facebook would get the same quality of engineers in India vs. grad students from India that are studying in US. Frankly, this is far from the case. In fact, most grad students from India studying in the US are by far of a higher quality than just a regular engineer in India.

From what you've written, you're equating engineers as commodities (as in they are no different from each other), which is quite insulting to the actual engineers here from India and China. They are just better and Facebook knows this. They want the better quality and they are willing to pay more (than those in India) for it, but they won't go so far as to greatly inflate the salary of the entire software engineering occupation in America.

My point is that, for Facebook's interests alone, they would rather hire the same engineer in India than in the US because after they move to the US you have to pay them more than if they stayed in India. The effect of immigration reform is that more engineers will move to the US, which is against Facebook's interests.

"Most grad students from India studying in the US are by far of a higher quality" --- This is completely wrong. The one who go to study abroad are definitely are the TOP 10% at all in terms are talent and quality. It is only that their parents were able to send them to additional tuitions (private coach session apart from school time) and was educated and have money send them. I myself know at least 100s students who are far better than those who go to college in USA or other countries. Please note that exceptions are the one who go to Stanford, Berkley and few top notch ones but even they only get students who have money not the one who have passed excellent scores.

The companies paying low wages to H1Bs are outsourcing companies like Wipro and CTS who bring over employees from countries like India. I can tell you for certain that all my friends working in tech are making 120k+ from the big guys and many of us are Indians straight out of a Masters program.

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