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Does it matter? Of course, otherwise this wouldn't be the contentious issue that it is. If you are the Disney programmer telling your wife and kids that you a

Does it matter? Of course, otherwise this wouldn't be the contentious issue that it is. If you are the Disney programmer telling your wife and kids that you are unemployed, I assure you, it matters. To say it doesn't matter if there are 0 H1-Bs or 250,000 H1-Bs is ... Your "high paid H1-B worker" most likely isn't (see data contained in the referenced article). Outside of a small percentage of very rare individuals or specialists every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen, who would pay the same taxes or more, is far more likely to buy real estate than rent a nearby apartment for a couple of years, and will almost assuredly un-employ some American than hopefully employ one.

ksk 11y ago
>every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen There is no evidence to support this assertion.
- sosuke 11y ago
  How would you define that as being a true assertion? I've often seen it as "I trained my H1-B replacement"
  - ksk 11y ago
    Yes, and all such violations should be reported and dealt with. However, using a fact from a local scope to make an automatic "winning" argument in a larger, more global scope is disingenuous.
    - sosuke 11y ago
      I wasn't asserting in either direction. How big does local need to be to assert true then for you? The recent Disney accusations seem rather large. I remember reading recently about migrant workers and the job postings being listed in other states to prevent having local applicants. I guess this isn't a black and white scenario. One H1-B can be taking away an existing local job while another instance in another area might not be. "H1-Bs can take away local jobs" would be a true statement if that local scope fact is true but if you're suggesting that "no local jobs are lost to H1-Bs" then you're wrong. Local scope can invalidate a global scope. Saying "every" as the GP did was wrong. But the argument is which is greater the number of by the book H1-Bs or the the number of H1-Bs that take local jobs. Is there an acceptable level of lost local jobs that makes the gain worth it? I feel like it is the conflict of setting a guilty man free to never convict and innocent man. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" but not everyone agrees with that. They would rather catch the ten guilty persons and would be okay with the one innocent suffering. The greater good maybe? I'm not sure either way.
    - CoryAmber 11y ago
      Given as fact that H1-Bs are dominated by the 3 or 4 large outsourcing body shops from India (Tata, TCS, Cognizant, et al) which simply flood the system with tons of names into a glorified lottery, I don't see how the charade that they are all the handpicked highest of the high, unique and rare technical specialist all, can be believed. Sure there may very well be some Optical Physics Software specialist brought in by MagicLeap on an H1-B or some AI wunderkind by Google or Facebook. Far and away the H1-Bs stockpiled by the outsourcing body shops are bread and butter general skilled folk capable of filling basic roles, Linux admins, Oracle DBAs, Java Webdevs, HTML/CSS/JS, IBM MQ admins, backup operators, IT support staff and what have you. Most of it is coding camp stuff, or basic training on particular appliances that could be done in a few weeks. The diversity in IT camp should be going crazy that these sort of basic entry level opportunities are not being offered to folks that really really need it. C'mon Jesse Jackson get a clue here. There are many, many, many Disney situations happening everywhere. e.g. Google "Southern California Edison outsource". In S. Fla an ex-fortune 500 corp outsourced many IT positions with same "train your replacement approach" and replaced with H1-Bs and they are not alone. It is rampant in the industry. You don't hear about many of these cases because of non-disparagement clauses in the layoff packages. Amazingly Disney's lawyers (should have outsourced the Corporate Lawyer Department to TCS there Big Mouse) neglected to add this standard clause to muzzle the displaced (fired) employees. A huge proportion if H1-Bs are used to directly display existent IT workers. Period. Far more the rule than the exception.
- CoryAmber 11y ago
  Please, read the article under discussion which contains a link to the Center Of Immigration studies. The article under discussion does provide evidence. You may not agree with it, or question its strength, but really hard to deny the article, the statistics it provides and the studies it references provide no evidence. If the facts quoted in the study do not suffice, let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Assuming H1-Bs do occupy job positions, i.e. are employed. Then either the job is only opened if and only if there are H1-Bs around, which doesn't make sense, or not a single qualified US citizen can fill the job. Give the working age population of the US is 204 million[1] this also seems highly unlikely. [1]https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
  - ksk 11y ago
    Your argument is flawed in several obvious, basic ways. STEM is not a nebulous concept whereby an electrical engineer is the same as a software engineer. All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions. Also there isn't a global consciousness through which STEM grads get immediately notified of all open positions. Not every position is advertised on every single jobs board. And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there. Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen. >let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Yes, let "us" do that.
    - CoryAmber 11y ago
      > All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions. What does this tautology offer to the topic? Common sense obvious true, not every STEM graduate is universally qualified for every open position. So ... ??? > And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there. Again, common sense true. So ... ??? > Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. OK, true. So ... ??? Is your assumption then that they would have to wait indefinitely and that no candidate would ever show up? cited evidence of this is appreciated. Links to studies, large amounts of unfulfillable postings are welcomed. > Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen. So ...? Nothing stated above bears any light to the argument (flawed or otherwise), it's just a sequence of common sense things that one can say about a labour market. This topic's referenced article is specific in its position in claiming there is no shortage of STEM qualified applicants and presents cited statistics and studies. If you have counter data and studies, please present their facts and cite links.
- throwaway_exer 11y ago
  The evidence is flat wages in the past 20 years.
  - ksk 11y ago
    That applies to pretty much all working class professionals.
    - ap3 11y ago
      Supply and demand law mandates a wage increase if there is a shortage of workers
dominotw 11y ago
only other option is close all immigration except family based immigration down.
- davidw 11y ago
  Which is already the vast majority of immigration.
  - dominotw 11y ago
    everything else would just be perceived as "taking someone's job"
    - davidw 11y ago
      In a world where there were only a fixed number of jobs, family members immigrating would also 'take jobs', so if people really believe that, they should aim to keep out family members too, since they are way more of them than people in the H1B program. For that matter, they should also get nervous about people who have lots of children, as those children will (in theory) grow up to take more than their parents 2 jobs. Of course there are not a fixed number of jobs, and keeping families apart is generally viewed as cruel.
      - dominotw 11y ago
        thats the thing about immigration. everyone wants the door shut behind them, even recent immigrants.
welder 11y ago
> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? Get off your high horse and see you are no more different than other people around the world!
- levelist_com 11y ago
  In America? Yes. Globally, absolutely not.
- skylan_q 11y ago
  Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? The original article stated that the prof. didn't understand why american politicians were trying to get more STEM-educated/skilled people into the US. 1) Rubio is bought by Microsoft. They're his biggest donor. (or 2nd biggest depending on how you dice the numbers) MS' profit margins would benefit from driving wages down. 2) The job of the politicians of the United States is to make life better for American citizens, not people abroad.
  - davidw 11y ago
    Importing highly skilled, hard working people most certainly does make our lives better.
    - SudoNhim 11y ago
      It goes both ways though. I feel pretty terrible about finishing my government sponsored education in New Zealand then ditching for better prospects here in the US. Where the size of the tech sector is limited by the number of engineers, every engineer lost to an H1B is lost exports, lost jobs, lost taxes....
      - davidw 11y ago
        Plenty of people go off to work somewhere else and then return home with a pile of money and skills. So it's not like you get on a boat, never to see home again. The economies of some countries (poorer ones) benefit greatly from remittances.
maerF0x0 11y ago
I believe all of your claimed issues are false: >pay the same taxes or more Resident aliens pay the same tax rate, but do not qualify for many of the tax benefit tools (as an eg 401k is effectively useless because it becomes taxable income as soon as the person no longer resides in the US). Additionally one should consider that resident aliens pay significant tax with little hope of ever claiming a benefit, we do not get social security if unemployed (infact we get deportation), medicaid for our senior family members (they have no right to be here) etc. > is far more likely to buy real estate This is due to immigration rules. One cannot reasonably buy real estate unless they have some assurance of being able to stay in the time that buying makes sense. That timeline is 5-10 yrs at a minimum. H1Bs and other visas have 3 yr limits on them and can be revoked at any time. > assuredly un-employ some American You have little to no proof of this. I would argue the cost of bringing an H1B into the country (>= $10k) should make the existing American employee quite attractive. I hope you can see that the deck is actually stacked in the local American's favor, and that a protectionist policy just drives jobs out of the country where they cannot be taxed at all.
- liopleurodon 11y ago
  Not sure if this is what GP was getting at, but H1Bs by some estimates make significantly less than non-H1Bs and thus would pay less income tax
- troebr 11y ago
  Even ignoring the cost, H1B candidates need to file their paperwork 6/7 months before starting, which means interviewing 7/8 months before October. And then you get a 50% chance that the application is going to be rejected by the initial lottery. This doesn't apply to companies "cheating the system" (looking at the consulting companies that apply for most of the h1bs w/ a lower salary), but most real companies that apply for real h1bs would much rather find a similarly qualified US person.
gorkemyurt 11y ago
But if the H1-B worker can actually do the same work, what stops Disney from moving all the development to a more immigrant friendly country? Other countries would even give Disney tax benefits to do so..
davidw 11y ago
> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen This is the lump of labor fallacy at its worst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy How did the US manage to grow from 100 million people to more than 300 million without massive unemployment if the number of jobs to go around was fixed?
- cndhdjxndb 11y ago
  The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy. It arbitrarily assumes that any person can work any job just as easily as the next, without retraining. It fails to account for the effects of downward pressure on wages, among other things. Please stop using it.
  - davidw 11y ago
    There are nuances to it, but it's a heck of a lot closer to 'the truth' than "every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen", which is egregiously wrong.
    - CoryAmber 11y ago
      Egregiously wrong can be back of the envelope quantified here. Image the following thought experiment. Assume that tomorrow morning every H1-B worker poof vanished. Then, on the assumption of egregiously wrong, zero of those positions in this hypothetical world could or would be filled by a single individual of the 204 million working population of US. If egregiously wrong then 60K to 85K good well paying middle class salaried positions would sit begging, unfulfilled and unfillable. If egregiously correct, than most of those positions would be filled. Care to quantify your belief of "egregious wrongness" by stating how many of those positions you in fact believe can not and will not get filled?
      - davidw 11y ago
        Some of the companies that depend on those people would fail due to the sudden departure of key employees, leaving a slew of people unemployed! Some of those positions would be filled - eventually. Some of the jobs would be farmed out to other countries. Also, the people that depend on the custom of those workers (say a bunch of them are from India and eat at a local Indian restaurant as a simple thought experiment) would suffer as well. The economy is not a zero-sum game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg

ksk 11y ago

>every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen There is no evidence to support this assertion.

sosuke 11y ago
How would you define that as being a true assertion? I've often seen it as "I trained my H1-B replacement"
- ksk 11y ago
  Yes, and all such violations should be reported and dealt with. However, using a fact from a local scope to make an automatic "winning" argument in a larger, more global scope is disingenuous.
  - sosuke 11y ago
    I wasn't asserting in either direction. How big does local need to be to assert true then for you? The recent Disney accusations seem rather large. I remember reading recently about migrant workers and the job postings being listed in other states to prevent having local applicants. I guess this isn't a black and white scenario. One H1-B can be taking away an existing local job while another instance in another area might not be. "H1-Bs can take away local jobs" would be a true statement if that local scope fact is true but if you're suggesting that "no local jobs are lost to H1-Bs" then you're wrong. Local scope can invalidate a global scope. Saying "every" as the GP did was wrong. But the argument is which is greater the number of by the book H1-Bs or the the number of H1-Bs that take local jobs. Is there an acceptable level of lost local jobs that makes the gain worth it? I feel like it is the conflict of setting a guilty man free to never convict and innocent man. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" but not everyone agrees with that. They would rather catch the ten guilty persons and would be okay with the one innocent suffering. The greater good maybe? I'm not sure either way.
  - CoryAmber 11y ago
    Given as fact that H1-Bs are dominated by the 3 or 4 large outsourcing body shops from India (Tata, TCS, Cognizant, et al) which simply flood the system with tons of names into a glorified lottery, I don't see how the charade that they are all the handpicked highest of the high, unique and rare technical specialist all, can be believed. Sure there may very well be some Optical Physics Software specialist brought in by MagicLeap on an H1-B or some AI wunderkind by Google or Facebook. Far and away the H1-Bs stockpiled by the outsourcing body shops are bread and butter general skilled folk capable of filling basic roles, Linux admins, Oracle DBAs, Java Webdevs, HTML/CSS/JS, IBM MQ admins, backup operators, IT support staff and what have you. Most of it is coding camp stuff, or basic training on particular appliances that could be done in a few weeks. The diversity in IT camp should be going crazy that these sort of basic entry level opportunities are not being offered to folks that really really need it. C'mon Jesse Jackson get a clue here. There are many, many, many Disney situations happening everywhere. e.g. Google "Southern California Edison outsource". In S. Fla an ex-fortune 500 corp outsourced many IT positions with same "train your replacement approach" and replaced with H1-Bs and they are not alone. It is rampant in the industry. You don't hear about many of these cases because of non-disparagement clauses in the layoff packages. Amazingly Disney's lawyers (should have outsourced the Corporate Lawyer Department to TCS there Big Mouse) neglected to add this standard clause to muzzle the displaced (fired) employees. A huge proportion if H1-Bs are used to directly display existent IT workers. Period. Far more the rule than the exception.
CoryAmber 11y ago
Please, read the article under discussion which contains a link to the Center Of Immigration studies. The article under discussion does provide evidence. You may not agree with it, or question its strength, but really hard to deny the article, the statistics it provides and the studies it references provide no evidence. If the facts quoted in the study do not suffice, let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Assuming H1-Bs do occupy job positions, i.e. are employed. Then either the job is only opened if and only if there are H1-Bs around, which doesn't make sense, or not a single qualified US citizen can fill the job. Give the working age population of the US is 204 million[1] this also seems highly unlikely. [1]https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
- ksk 11y ago
  Your argument is flawed in several obvious, basic ways. STEM is not a nebulous concept whereby an electrical engineer is the same as a software engineer. All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions. Also there isn't a global consciousness through which STEM grads get immediately notified of all open positions. Not every position is advertised on every single jobs board. And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there. Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen. >let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Yes, let "us" do that.
  - CoryAmber 11y ago
    > All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions. What does this tautology offer to the topic? Common sense obvious true, not every STEM graduate is universally qualified for every open position. So ... ??? > And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there. Again, common sense true. So ... ??? > Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. OK, true. So ... ??? Is your assumption then that they would have to wait indefinitely and that no candidate would ever show up? cited evidence of this is appreciated. Links to studies, large amounts of unfulfillable postings are welcomed. > Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen. So ...? Nothing stated above bears any light to the argument (flawed or otherwise), it's just a sequence of common sense things that one can say about a labour market. This topic's referenced article is specific in its position in claiming there is no shortage of STEM qualified applicants and presents cited statistics and studies. If you have counter data and studies, please present their facts and cite links.
throwaway_exer 11y ago
The evidence is flat wages in the past 20 years.
- ksk 11y ago
  That applies to pretty much all working class professionals.
  - ap3 11y ago
    Supply and demand law mandates a wage increase if there is a shortage of workers

dominotw 11y ago

only other option is close all immigration except family based immigration down.

davidw 11y ago
Which is already the vast majority of immigration.
- dominotw 11y ago
  everything else would just be perceived as "taking someone's job"
  - davidw 11y ago
    In a world where there were only a fixed number of jobs, family members immigrating would also 'take jobs', so if people really believe that, they should aim to keep out family members too, since they are way more of them than people in the H1B program. For that matter, they should also get nervous about people who have lots of children, as those children will (in theory) grow up to take more than their parents 2 jobs. Of course there are not a fixed number of jobs, and keeping families apart is generally viewed as cruel.
    - dominotw 11y ago
      thats the thing about immigration. everyone wants the door shut behind them, even recent immigrants.

welder 11y ago

> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? Get off your high horse and see you are no more different than other people around the world!

levelist_com 11y ago
In America? Yes. Globally, absolutely not.
skylan_q 11y ago
Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? The original article stated that the prof. didn't understand why american politicians were trying to get more STEM-educated/skilled people into the US. 1) Rubio is bought by Microsoft. They're his biggest donor. (or 2nd biggest depending on how you dice the numbers) MS' profit margins would benefit from driving wages down. 2) The job of the politicians of the United States is to make life better for American citizens, not people abroad.
- davidw 11y ago
  Importing highly skilled, hard working people most certainly does make our lives better.
  - SudoNhim 11y ago
    It goes both ways though. I feel pretty terrible about finishing my government sponsored education in New Zealand then ditching for better prospects here in the US. Where the size of the tech sector is limited by the number of engineers, every engineer lost to an H1B is lost exports, lost jobs, lost taxes....
    - davidw 11y ago
      Plenty of people go off to work somewhere else and then return home with a pile of money and skills. So it's not like you get on a boat, never to see home again. The economies of some countries (poorer ones) benefit greatly from remittances.

maerF0x0 11y ago

I believe all of your claimed issues are false: >pay the same taxes or more Resident aliens pay the same tax rate, but do not qualify for many of the tax benefit tools (as an eg 401k is effectively useless because it becomes taxable income as soon as the person no longer resides in the US). Additionally one should consider that resident aliens pay significant tax with little hope of ever claiming a benefit, we do not get social security if unemployed (infact we get deportation), medicaid for our senior family members (they have no right to be here) etc. > is far more likely to buy real estate This is due to immigration rules. One cannot reasonably buy real estate unless they have some assurance of being able to stay in the time that buying makes sense. That timeline is 5-10 yrs at a minimum. H1Bs and other visas have 3 yr limits on them and can be revoked at any time. > assuredly un-employ some American You have little to no proof of this. I would argue the cost of bringing an H1B into the country (>= $10k) should make the existing American employee quite attractive. I hope you can see that the deck is actually stacked in the local American's favor, and that a protectionist policy just drives jobs out of the country where they cannot be taxed at all.

liopleurodon 11y ago
Not sure if this is what GP was getting at, but H1Bs by some estimates make significantly less than non-H1Bs and thus would pay less income tax
troebr 11y ago
Even ignoring the cost, H1B candidates need to file their paperwork 6/7 months before starting, which means interviewing 7/8 months before October. And then you get a 50% chance that the application is going to be rejected by the initial lottery. This doesn't apply to companies "cheating the system" (looking at the consulting companies that apply for most of the h1bs w/ a lower salary), but most real companies that apply for real h1bs would much rather find a similarly qualified US person.

gorkemyurt 11y ago

But if the H1-B worker can actually do the same work, what stops Disney from moving all the development to a more immigrant friendly country? Other countries would even give Disney tax benefits to do so..

davidw 11y ago

> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen This is the lump of labor fallacy at its worst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy How did the US manage to grow from 100 million people to more than 300 million without massive unemployment if the number of jobs to go around was fixed?

cndhdjxndb 11y ago
The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy. It arbitrarily assumes that any person can work any job just as easily as the next, without retraining. It fails to account for the effects of downward pressure on wages, among other things. Please stop using it.
- davidw 11y ago
  There are nuances to it, but it's a heck of a lot closer to 'the truth' than "every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen", which is egregiously wrong.
  - CoryAmber 11y ago
    Egregiously wrong can be back of the envelope quantified here. Image the following thought experiment. Assume that tomorrow morning every H1-B worker poof vanished. Then, on the assumption of egregiously wrong, zero of those positions in this hypothetical world could or would be filled by a single individual of the 204 million working population of US. If egregiously wrong then 60K to 85K good well paying middle class salaried positions would sit begging, unfulfilled and unfillable. If egregiously correct, than most of those positions would be filled. Care to quantify your belief of "egregious wrongness" by stating how many of those positions you in fact believe can not and will not get filled?
    - davidw 11y ago
      Some of the companies that depend on those people would fail due to the sudden departure of key employees, leaving a slew of people unemployed! Some of those positions would be filled - eventually. Some of the jobs would be farmed out to other countries. Also, the people that depend on the custom of those workers (say a bunch of them are from India and eat at a local Indian restaurant as a simple thought experiment) would suffer as well. The economy is not a zero-sum game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg