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Comment by bitJericho | Hacker News Reader

Why did the author have to hire someone abroad to come in? We have so much talent sitting right here in the US.

For example, I live in a small town with 3 high end customer service call centers that I know about (there's probably more I don't), and the rates they pay are well below national average because the cost of living is low here. In my area one could build a team of world-class customer service reps in a matter of weeks, pay them better than any place in the area, and have an experienced and high quality staff immediately available when more staff are needed.

Of course I'm not knocking Santiago; having the ability and the qualities necessary to build a quality customer service team is extremely valuable no matter where you are.

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> Why did the author have to hire someone abroad to come in? We have so much talent sitting right here in the US.

Have to is the wrong way to look at it. He hired this person because he thought he would be the best at the job. Why should he have to prefer the talent in the US?

Isn't that what US labor and immigration laws are intended for? To promote hiring US citizens or legal residents?

Taking a bit more radical view:

Why should we discriminate against someone who is poorer and better skilled in favor of someone who is richer, privileged, and less skilled, just because of the quirk of geographic origin?

Morally I find that abhorrent, and personally it drives me insane that I don't get to work with the best people in the world.

I get that there are political barriers to following that moral claim to its logical conclusion, but they shouldn't mean we discard that moral claim; we should try to remove the political obstacles.

No. The US labor and immigration laws are intended to make sure immigrant labor doesn't pose an unfair competition to US labor. In theory, this should protect both immigrants (from being exploited) and US citizens (from unfair competition).

Unfortunately, this doesn't work as well in practice: the fact that the H-1B is completely tied to a particular employer makes it the modern equivalent of indentured servitude and the H-4 makes things worse by not allowing your family members to work.

http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-transfer.html

Here's an excerpt from your link:

Therefore, when people say "H1 transfer", it is actually just a new H-1B petition, all over again, without the restriction of the H-1B cap.

So the only thing this allows you is to skip the cap. Every other bit of bureaucracy is still there.

You forgot to mention the excerpts that describe how the previous employer doesn't have to intervene in any way and that the employee may start working for the new employer as soon as they get the receipt notice.

Granted there is some bureaucracy (which is largely handled by lawyers hired by the new employer, as it should be), and as with any bureaucratic system there is always a (low) probability of (unwarranted) rejection.

The H-1B is a far cry from "the modern equivalent of indentured servitude". I wonder how many "free men" wouldn't love to be "modern indentured servants" while getting paid 6 figures (and unlike the 18th century version, without being subject to physical punishment and having the opportunity to leave whenever they desire).

I agree wholeheartedly with your statement about the H-4, that's just sad.

I've heard from some people on H1Bs it was easy to transfer from one company to another.

Not sure how it happened, but maybe it's not so hard after all (especially if they lawyer up)

But note that what happened was that the whole team ended up being built in Columbia, so that didn't work out so well as an incentive. And generally protectionism is a great way to strangle your competitiveness and watch jobs leave. And that's just the practical side; my point was really against the "you should hire Americans instead of foreigners if you can" ethic that motivates laws like that in the first place. This sense of job entitlement we have is absurd.

You're god damn right I feel entitled to my national government looking out for the interests of its current citizens over foreigners.

Think of it this way: the talent will make its way to create a product, in or outside of the US. If the US immigration insist that the country doesn't need the talent, they just create a competition in another country.

Promoting US citizens just because they are US citizens may work for a while, but I doubt that it is a good long-term strategy.

I guess I'm of the opinion that for some things, surely not everything, but for some things, there's more than one person in the world that can do the job.

The freedom lover inside me gets your point though.

You may be right, and further he may have even been able to find far better people in the US, or maybe in, say, Ghana. But that's just us criticizing the degree to which he optimized his hiring, not a principled complaint about the citizenship of the person he ended up with. What I'm after is that I don't think he has some special moral or ethical responsibility to consider the candidate's nationality in making hiring decisions. (He may, in applying for certain visas, have such a legal responsibility, but then I think that's poor immigration policy on our part.)

I feel for your town and I hope everyone there gets a good job; I just don't think "but we're American!" is the advantage that should get them there.

In my area, we have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. We're also some of the hardest working according to statistics taken all over the country. I can guarantee you a call center here is every bit as good as anywhere else in the world. I'd say if you're American and hiring Columbians to do a job we could do for the same price, you're acting not in the interests of your own country. Seems very strange to me not to support your own countrymen. One day the shoe may be on the other foot.

Having a low unemployment rate actually suggests it would be harder to hire a team there.

But on your bigger point, remember this guy was going to move to the US to do this work until he was told no by our government. I want him to work here instead of in Columbia because I care about the US economy and I want it to do well [1]. The question is really about whether this job in San Francisco should go to someone who was born in the US or elsewhere (with, like you said, everything else being equal). I find it really hard to have a pro-natural-born-American job bias when my (and I'm guessing your) ancestors also came here from other countries seeking work, and more generally, I just don't think foreigners are less deserving of good things than people who happen to have been born here. I guess you'd say that's not supporting my own countrymen, and if so, I'm OK with that.

[1] Wait, why do I care about the US economy more than the Colombian economy? I'm not sure, and I struggle with this. Selfishness, I suspect--I live in the US.

It seems strange to you that people are moving beyond silly patriotism/nationalism?

Hardest doesn't equal most productive. Furthermore, there were less obstacles to him hiring Columbians. I don't see what the problem is here.

Well going a bit off topic, a story a manager of a local manufacturing company told me. They had built a new factory on another side of the country, state of the art, huge. They ended up shutting it down a year later when they found the employees just wouldn't show up to work. This is a business that has operated in my local area for years without any problems like that.

Anyway, silly patriotism? Nah, real patriotism. There's more to being an American than paying your taxes. That said, I'm not some patriotic radical. I can see why it would be better to hire a team abroad. Just not in this case.

Thinking about this more, it's not even that he hired a team abroad. They're friends, you can tell, and sometimes friendship knows no bounds. Or maybe he has some affinity with Columbians and specifically wants to help out the local people; that's honorable too.

My issue is how the article's framed, like it's somehow America's fault! I don't buy it!

Because he already knew a guy, and he knew the guy was good, and he wanted to work with that guy. And "why did he have to hire someone from abroad" is a question that makes no more sense than "why should he have to hire someone local?"

The title says a team, suggesting that you can't build any team at all in US. But the evidence presented shows that he couldn't build a specific team: there exists a team he couldn't build in US.

This nitpicking is 100% accurate, but its relevance to the underlying immigration and employment policies involved is far more limited.

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