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You are saying that the additional price for local talent has to be infinite? Because otherwise I don't totally understand this position. You could almost alway
by x1798DE 10y ago
You are saying that the additional price for local talent has to be infinite? Because otherwise I don't totally understand this position. You could almost always find local talent, at prohibitively high costs. Pay enough and people will retrain, too. This sort of thing is dynamic, and what doesn't exist at one price point does at another.
Of course, I also don't think forcing higher costs on everyone in the name of favoring certain groups of people over others is a particularly laudable goal.
- evgen 10y agoThis is called supply and demand. The most flagrant abusers of the H1-B system use it to artificially increase supply of workers to depress costs. If the costs rise to the point where retraining is considered an appealing option I don't see how that is a problem.
- icebraining 10y agoI'd say the supply of workers is artificially being kept low; there's nothing "natural" about immigration restrictions. Of course, I also don't agree with the use of "artificial" as a synonym for bad (or good).
- rayiner 10y agoSure it's natural. Just about the first thing any social mammals do is figure out how to control group membership and access to shared resources.
- icebraining 10y agoIn the abstract, sure, but the whole edifice of legislation of citizenship, visas, etc is as artificial as it gets.
- rayiner 10y agoThat's like saying that eating is artificial because we do it at Chipotle. The mechanism is highly artificial, but the basic function is natural.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoAnother thing which is natural is killing the men of the outgroup (typically defined as "those folks who look different than us"), raping their women and stealing their resources.
- rayiner 10y agoWhich would be a relevant point if we were discussing whether it's "good" because it's "natural." But here the point is simply that it's "not artificial" because its "natural."
- davidivadavid 10y agoThat point sounds like a tautology.
- evgen 10y agoActually, since control of one's borders is one of the core principles in the definition of sovereignty, it seems that immigration restrictions are quite natural to how we have organized our societies. Like it or not, we define our societies and nations around very simple us/them constructs and eliminating the desires of the bulk of the population to control what portion of "them" gets to become "us" is not going to change any time soon.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Avshalom 10y agoWe can restrict H1-B visas and increase other visas or make the citizenship path shorter/easier.
- riskable 10y ago> Of course, I also don't think forcing higher costs on everyone in the name of favoring certain groups of people over others is a particularly laudable goal. Isn't that the point of sovereignty though? To favor the locals over foreigners? It's why we have governments and borders. It's ethical too: Because the locals are your (long-term) tax base. It's better to pay locals a higher wage than to import temporary cheap labor in most situations because the gains from the cheap labor wouldn't necessarily make their way (i.e. "trickle down") back to the locality. Especially not in a global economy and especially not with virtual goods like software and IT services.