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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

As an H1-B I can say that I'm paid the local market salary for my skillset. And so is my wife.

When supply goes up price goes down. Logic 101 says that H1-B immigrants lower "the local market salary".

Only for fungible types of workers. Programmers, software engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, etc aren't like farm or construction laborers. These skills aren't commodities.

That's not how management sees talent like programmers and engineers. Management sees them like another commodity labor resource.

Specifically, they all fall under "Human Resources". While I suspect some issues even for CEOs might fall under HR, I also suspect that large company CEOs may also have unique employment contracts not available to the myriad software engineers at the same company.

That's exactly how Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and most other big companies view software engineers. Engineers go through standard interview process (3-5 technical interviews, 1 behaviour interview) and then companies assume that everyone above the hiring bar can be assigned to pretty much any project at the company. Companies use this process because it works - engineers are mostly fungible.

The above is not true for exceptional talent (Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, etc). I will vote in heartbeat for visas for people with total comp >$300k. If you are truly that valuable, you should be paid more than average Sr. Software Engineer at Google.

Considering how Apple and Google tried to fix the salaries of software engineers to stay low, maybe even that isn't an option in big companies.

Therefore we shouldn't allow in immigrants? By that logic we should close down our schools too, those new graduates are also lowering salaries.

Another thing that would lower salaries is the movement of the jobs themselves. If companies can't get enough workers here, at affordable salaries, they'll just move to a country that likes immigration, like Canada. In fact, this has already started: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/vancouver-we...

We already bring in 1,200,000 immigrants per year.

Limiting the number of new graduates is exactly what doctors and engineers have done to keep their wages high.

Only a fool would destroy his own livelihood. VCs would never, ever support a policy that would threaten their oligopoly on the good deals, for example.

Don't be a sucker. No one is looking out for tech workers but ourselves.

P.S. If these companies can successfully relocate to Vancouver it totally torpedoes the VC-sponsored idea that San Francisco is somehow essential. Limiting all the jobs to one city is NOT good for tech workers. Silicon Valley is not a good place to make money because the cost of living is stupid. I would go so far to say that the Silicon Valley anti-density and anti-development culture and government make Silicon Valley a shit place to start a company, and companies should be moving.

I would rather work in Vancouver or San Diego or most any other urban center than get raped by rent-seeking landowners in SV.

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