Comment by digitaltrees
7 hours ago
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
Outsourcing happens but larger firms repeatedly run into the issue that management, admin, and local talent provides diminishing returns. Most of the larger US-based firms have standards that are built on decades of developed industry practices, something that can sometimes be missing from outsourced workforces on a cultural level. Hiring in domestically at least plants folks in environments where they can learn those processes over time. I suspect this is one (amongst many) reasons why US work visas are so single-employer contingent - you don't want talent you trained from the ground up to be able to easily leave for another role somewhere.
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Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date. you cannot seriously think that visa are the only reason why they didn't to date, or do you?
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The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
I own a home health care agency in 15 states, software company, roofing company and real estate. I see the broad range of employment. My father was an immigrant. My mother is a descendant of the mayflower.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
European auto sector didn't loose because they didn't flood the country with enough low wage workers (which they did anyway since 2015) to compete with China on labor costs. They lost precisely because they gave up investing in local labor that made all the pricy high-end innovations like electronic brakes, self-driving and EV-tech, and entered in the race to the bottom to boost shareholder value while cutting the expensive innovation R&D. This strategy did wonders for EU auto shareholders for about ~10 years while the badge prestige carried a lot of inertia, especially in markets like Russia, US and China, but it lost most momentum in the last couple of years, as EU cars are now seen as dated, overpriced, cheaply made, expensive to fix and underwhelming compared to the new players from US and China. Nothing to do with lack of cheap immigrant labor.
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
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> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Foreign labor helped build the very successful companies that have paid me extremely well.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
They can help their own country with their talent, we don't "need" it to live.
You hear that a lot in third world countries where people nonlonger wanna go work.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
Well if you would have read just the title, these restrictions are for corporations, not academia.
I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
I assume they're comparing them in terms of employment value not effort required
Well if you have a liberal arts degree you might have learned something applicable to a world beyond computer programming
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
>In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional.
I never said they're bad at their job, I said they're just doing the same jobs the locals can do, nothing exceptional.
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> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
> There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
Then let Americans create unions. If this is abuse of asymmetric power then balance it. It’s not about that though it’s about nativism, racism, and punishment of liberal elites.
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I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
That's not supported by economic data or wage trends. Blocking unionization is a far bigger driver than immigration. That's why Steve jobs was trying to form a nonhiring cartel before he died.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
Many do. Look at the ranks of founders, context level execs, all made up of a disproportionate share of immigrants. That's also not necessary to justify the proposition that immigration doesn't reduce market wages if it increases demand. It is possible that the demand for software far exceeds software developers and we could 10x or 100x employment and demand would still keep wages the same. You need to show why the fact of salary levels and directional trends are causally linked.
> Many do.
Every one of them should have at least double the salary if there's any truth in claims of their superiority to domestic workers and any truth to the claims of a shortage of talent.
The world's top athletes and artists all have salaries in 10x - 100x of the average worker in their field. And what more: Their own countries are usually world leading in those fields also. But when it comes to migrant workers, somehow they are exceptionally talented beyond what any domestic worker could even compare to, yet their own countries aren't leading in their field. Hmmmmm....