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Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

If someone is smart and wants to work in the US there should be no barriers to doing so. I don't deserve any job or salary if someone else can do it better or cheaper. We are all human beings in the sense of our right to fair work and wage.

Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"?

PG is right that most programmers are not all that bright. This limits the state of the art in our industry far more than most people realize.

[edit]: I can't believe this thread is getting hijacked by people who oppose PG's view on this and are downvoting comments in support of it!

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It is amazing to me how the same group of people can rail against rent seekers in a thread about uber or airbandb and then turn around in a thread on immigration and act like their own rent seeking is pure and good and right. I guess it is all a matter of whose ox is being gored.

Exactly. What those people don't understand is how much this hampers the kind of ambition and projects that can get built.

Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor).

> Unlike Musk's HyperLoop, the barrier for software is not materials and resources, it's simply minds. If you're working on a crappy, bloated codebase it's because some business person likely accurately assumes that a rewrite would be risky and slow (b/c of the supply and quality of labor). <

No, the business person knows it will cost money to rewrite and simply doesn't want to commit the resources. It almost certainly has nothing to do with the supply and quality of labor.

Also: the economy is not a zero-sum game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

I guess it's just the fact that I've lived abroad for a while, but I see people as, well, people, and don't care too much about where they happen to have been born. I think it's unconscionable to subject law-abiding people to a life of poverty if they're willing to work.

The problem with the way you're conceptualizing the problem is that while no one 'deserves' anything, the real effect here will be to allow the owners of businesses to play people with no negotiating power off each other to lower their costs.

So while you don't 'deserve' any guarantees, why do you think the owner of a business 'deserves' to be able to hire a captive employee? (They're deported if they quit, and they make less money than an equivalent employee without that handicap)

If anyone with the power and podium wants to be honest about this topic, they need to champion immigration reform in terms of 1) allowing immigrants to quit or switch jobs while staying in the states. 2) Require that immigrants are paid the exact same wages as an American with the same title in the company.

"(They're deported if they quit, and they make less money than an equivalent employee without that handicap)"

a) Neither PG's essay not your parent comment mentioned current system as the solution. Quite the opposite in fact. The current system is the problem that we're trying to solve. b) Even in the current h1b system, employees are free to quit and find another job. H1b transfers are quite easy in fact as long as the employee can find another company to employ them.

Your entire second paragraph about "power and podium to be honest... " stuff is written under the mistaken assumption that an extension of the current system is being proposed.

>Who wants to wake up in the morning and think "thank goodness some lawmaker is forcing someone smarter/better than me to live in poverty so I can have this cushy job"?

The amount of people in this thread who seem fine with that kind of thinking is really disheartening. So many programmers whose salary seems to be their guiding moral principle.

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