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America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away
- rhexs 8y agoA Harvard business school professor who doesn't want borders as a way to unlock that final piece of mythical economic gain? What a shocker.
- sodosopa 8y agoSince you offered no alternative, where should economic and business research happen?
- kibwen 8y agoThe book appears to concern skilled immigration, not eradicating borders. There seem to be an unusual number of people jumping to unfounded conclusions. Immigration is a competitive advantage of the US, and we don't need to attempt to muddy the waters by conflating any degree of immigration with completely unchecked immigration.
- spamizbad 8y agoBecause they know arguing against skilled immigration is a loser so you just prop up an "open borders" strawman. Take that, scarecrow!
- riyadparvez 8y agoI think the reason is some political party deliberately erases the line between legal and illegal immigration, then uses skilled immigration as an argument for causes like open border or illegal immigration, while not fixing the broken immigration policy. This harms the legal immigrants, but paves the way for illegal immigration. Some legal immigrants feel duped because they have jumped through all the hoops in this broken system only to find someone else cut in the line illegally. That's why many legal immigrants do not necessarily trust the motivation of articles like this. Is this actually proposing a fix of broken immigration system or a veiled propagnda piece to promote illegal immigration? FWIW, I am a skilled legal immigrant, currently residing in Canada.
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Most of all on divisive topics.
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- ReptileMan 8y agoHave we tried something radical? Increasing salaries and training homegrown talent. It is we weird we need foreign programmers, but not foreign managers and vc-s...
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- kibwen 8y agoTo whom is this replying? The linked article takes pains to ensure that nobody attempts to interpret this as advocacy for completely open borders: "This does not mean open borders but a smart and lawful methodology for determining who should be allowed entry."
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- tomp 8y agoThis article wouldn't even need to be written if the people/media/politicians didn't conflate "skilled immigration" with "unlimited immigration"/"open borders".
- mixmastamyk 8y agoNot sure I understand. "Open border" folks don't vote, as I once noted lining up at a polling place near downtown Los Angeles.
- learc83 8y agoNo mainstream politician is pushing for completely open borders. That's a complete straw man. The closest quote I can find from a national politician calling for open borders is Donald Trump in 2013. "We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability."
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- lenkite 8y agoAFAIK this is not a "complete straw man". Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison (Minnesota) is strongly in favor of open borders, goes around wearing T-shirts saying the same. He has even been quoted saying that "America’s national borders create an injustice by keeping Mexican workers from traveling to the United States to look for higher-paying jobs". Maybe he has a point, however he does not share that opinion alone.
- Kephael 8y agoThe supply of technical workers is artificially limited by Leetcode style interviews. There doesn't seem to be an actual supply side limitation, especially not at the entry level.
- thwy12321 8y agoThis. If there was a real piece of missing demand these companies would change their interview process, but things are only moving in the opposite direction. The shortage is a myth to flood the software engineering job market with cheap workers. It needs to stop
- protonfish 8y agoThat and a complete unwillingness to educate and mentor your workforce. I don't understand why the government should step in to help employers because they want training to be somebody else's problem.
- enraged_camel 8y agoCompanies don't train their workforce because said workforce then leaves and joins another company, which then benefits from that training. ...that's how it was explained to me by an executive at my former job (a big part of the reason why it's my former job).
- Apocryphon 8y agoCalifornia is an at-will state and all that, but surely executives and business consultants can structure some sort of incentive package to cause workers to stay for at least some minimum duration?
- dorchadas 8y agoIf a company was willing to train me and provide me decent salary and benefits, I'd totally stay. If there was room to move up in the company, and they kept offering good salary and benefits, I'd probably never seriously consider leaving unless I hated the job or just got an amazing offer (barring events like needing to take care of parents, etc, of course). I feel like a lot of people would prefer the stability, even, especially if the company is investing in them.
- spaceman1331 8y agothis is very sick telling the American people they aren't good enough is sick bloomberg is just being a bully and insulting Americans for no reason other than > midterm politics
- firedrakerage 8y agoI do not typically post, but these suggestions seem like genuine improvements to the existing system: "Kerr suggests allocating H-1Bs not by lottery as they are now, but by salary — the more that a company is willing to pay for a foreign worker, the quicker they can get a visa." "A second change would be to allow H-1B workers to apply for permanent residency green cards on their own, without having to be sponsored by their employers." Both of these would ensure that we can get smart and talented individuals from outside the US and would drastically improve the ability for the US to compete while continuing to provide broad-based wage increases.
- rrggrr 8y ago"Kerr suggests allocating H-1Bs not by lottery as they are now, but by salary — the more that a company is willing to pay for a foreign worker, the quicker they can get a visa." Would need to be artfully worded so that sign-on bonuses and short-term employment is not used to game the system by permitting averaging down over time.
- KirinDave 8y agoI think I agree with you (although I bet for different reasons) but, Why? What do you think is actually is the problem if highly compensated employment is used as a fast track to immigration and perhaps even citizenship?
- sbr464 8y agoA side benefit that I hadn’t really considered but seems obvious; By taking in skilled workers from other countries, it’s like poaching talent from another company. Then they aren’t contributing to or building companies in their former country. Not sure the scale you would need to make a dent, but is there a name for this?
- wdewind 8y agoBrain Drain.
- jonathanyc 8y agoHuman capital flight a.k.a brain drain/gain.
- mLuby 8y agoBrain Drain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
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- antisthenes 8y agoA side benefit? It's been USA's primary competitive advantage for decades - brain draining the cream of the crop from a 5 billion population. It's incredibly naive to think it was ever unintentional.
- ivl 8y agoThe beneficiary of pretty much every brain drain for the last 100 years. No wonder such a strong economy came of it.
- gumby 8y agoInteresting: according to Kerr, recent restrictions on immigration shouldmindeed help they US be encouraging bright workers to go elsewhere and send remittances back to the US. Hmm.
- giardini 8y agoEmphasis on "skilled" and add "legal", please. We don't need more chicken pluckers - there's a machine that does that faster and cheaper.
- gotocake 8y agoBut not a machine to affordably and accurately pick strawberries or citrus, or clean your house and office park. Let’s not pretend that the demand for relatively unskilled work isn’t very high, because the work is perceived to be beneath the dignity or price range or natives. It would be nice if we could benefit from the immigrants willing and able to do this hard and unpleasant work, without also castigating them for doing it.
- ericdykstra 8y agoYou'll find Americans to do the work if you pay them enough. Why undercut their wage demands with scabs from foreign countries?
- ska 8y agoBecause when they do that Americans on average won't buy the produce, and opt instead for cheaper imports. You can make such a system work of course but you have to convince or force (e.g. via import duties) Americans to accept paying more for food - quite a bit more.
- chrisbennet 8y agoThat seems obvious and makes intuitive sense - but it turns out its wrong. "GIVING THE 3.5 million workers picking produce on American farms a raise to match the $15 an hour many fast food workers are fighting for sounds unaffordable, right? Not really. According to University of California-Davis agricultural labor economist Philip Martin, the likely additional cost to American shoppers of that wage hike would be about $20 a year." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2016/03/31/can-we-afford-to-pay-u-s-farmworkers-more/?user.testname=photogallery:3 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
- malandrew 8y agoOne thing that is incorrect here is how the Republican position on immigration is portrayed. They want comprehensive immigration reform that specifically allows skilled immigrants to come to the US, do away with the lottery system and eliminate exemptions for those that broke immigration laws. Basically, most Republicans would prefer a system that is more like Canada's or Switzerland's, where you need to earn your way in. Here's one site that better explains the Republican position: https://www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-immigration/ https://www.republicanviews.org/republican-views-on-immigrat... "Republicans believe that family and skill should be prioritized when granting citizenship to those who go through the proper legal channels to enter the country. Priority should be given to children and spouses of immigrants that are already legally in the country. They believe the government should emphasize the skills that our economy needs most when determining eligibility, and that the Labor Certification Program should be overhauled. These two measures together would help match qualified workers with work that is in urgent need of filling positions in the country. Despite accusations of being anti-immigration, Republicans do understand the value that immigrants bring to this country, when entering via legal methods. In the Republican Platform adopted at the 2000 GOP convention, the Republican Party declared that it supports increasing the number of H-1B visas, to ensure that high-tech workers are provided to specialized positions, as well as expanding the H-2A program for temporary agricultural workers."
- ojbyrne 8y agoThat page references John Boehner and Mitt Romney, who don’t have any influence in Republican policy anymore. The current administration has repeatedly demonstrated their antipathy to legal immigration.
- malandrew 8y agoThe current administration as far as I can tell is trying to force Democrats to the table to get comprehensive immigration reform that includes the things I listed above.
- jki275 8y agoCite please. The current administration has never done anything to show antipathy to legal immigration, the first lady is a legal immigrant as are her parents.
- jmpman 8y agoThis still seems like a waste of resources. If the H1Bs are willing to come over for $40k, why should a bidding war result in them being paid $100k? Have the companies bid on slots. That money is a tax that should be used to train US workers for that same job. Pay the H1B $40k, pay a tax of $60k, and in 4 years you have a newly minted US College graduate qualified to do that job, with no college debt, and they’ll be willing to take the job for $80k.
- dkhenry 8y agoI have a modest proposal to help with the need for skilled labor. Reject all skilled applicants for visa's. Only accept the unskilled and uneducated. If you have an advanced degree and specialty skills you are not allowed in and have to remain in your country of origin. If you get a visa to study in the US you have to return to be employed in your home country. I think this will have two primary effects. 1. It will create a huge shortage of skilled professionals in America and will significantly drive up their costs and salary. This will result in more people choosing to enter those fields. 2. It will increase the global support of skilled persons as those who remain in their country of origin will be able to train and support more professionals. My basis for this is looking at number of engineers per capita, the developed world produces an order of magnitude more engineers and doctors and scientists then the developing world, but then we take the few they do produce which inhibits future growth.
- ivl 8y ago> This will result in more people choosing to enter those fields. I think for skilled labor in the US there are way better ways to accomplish this. Lower the cost of education, and work to improve education on the whole. But your idea is punitive of people in poor countries who have skills, yet are limited in how much they can improve their lot in life due to lack of demand for them.
- magicnubs 8y agoI don't see any country adopting these policies, considering they want more and less expensive skilled workers, and depriving another country of their skilled workers isn't a deterrent (and may even be viewed as a positive, depending on if they view the global economy as a zero-sum game).
- belltaco 8y agoIt will also lead to a lot more hiring in other countries, which means less money into the US economy. Countries like Canada are already making it easier for immigrants from other countries to work. With similar timezones and standard of living, this will just ensure that many more jobs will just move overseas leading to a reduction in payroll taxes, income taxes, social security, local economy and spending.
- ALittleLight 8y agoMy intuition is that H1B and similar programs hurt my personal compensation as a domestic provider of skilled labor. My reasoning is that less supply of skilled labor should result in increased cost - which gets paid to me. I understand it's better for the companies and perhaps the economy as a whole to import labor, but it seems worse for me. Is there research on this subject or something I'm missing?
- sjg007 8y agoLess H1Bs could also mean less innovation and higher costs for software products. Or in the best case, transferred overseas. It could also mean more competition for the fewer jobs in your local economy.
- damnyou 8y agoThe flaw in your intuition is that it believes there's a fixed demand. It's normal for your intuition to think that way — humans are notoriously bad at analyzing higher-order effects. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
- iguy 8y agoThinking that demand is fixed would indeed be a flaw. But the right wikipedia link here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand : demand curves slope downwards. More sellers (of a given kind of labour) means does mean higher volumes, but also lower prices (wages). GP's intuition is correct. I don't have links handy but it's my understanding that serious studies reliably back this up. There are other effects too of course. Letting in Sergey Brin may have competed down CEO wages (as per theory) but arguably more importantly drove up demand for engineers. Letting in lots of H1B engineers no doubt drives up demand for gardeners & house-cleaners.
- landryraccoon 8y agoThis intuition only holds as long as you believe there is zero chance of new large competitors arising in other countries. If protectionism causes a rival to Google to be viable in other countries, that could hurt your salary prospects back home quite a bit.
- jorblumesea 8y agoThe biggest problem with the H1B visa system is that it's mainly an outsourcing tool. Cognizant, Infosys etc are just offshoring companies and spam the system. The really talented engineers go to the FANGs but these represent a small proportion of visas used.
- let_var 8y agoI support a point-based H1B and Green Card system allowing individuals to apply for their own green card. Salary should take precedence over lottery any day. Someone mentioned about making it industry specific, but that's just opening a loophole. Something like this might improve domestic salaries across sectors.
- tabtab 8y agoThe H-1B topic strikes a personal tone with me. After the dot-com crash in the early 2000's, IT jobs in California were hard to come by. I almost got one job, but the company decided to go with an H-1B worker instead. I had a new young family, but had to go out of state to find work, leaving my family behind. I'm NOT summarily against H-1B's but wish to insist they be used ONLY to fill in true skill shortages instead of those manufactured via job ad word-smithing.
- qaq 8y agoI think it will not change anything to be honest. I work for a relatively large US company we have offices in CA, VA, NC, Ireland, Germany, India. If it becomes harder to higher in US they will just grow teams in other offices.
- tabtab 8y agoBut not every organization is internationally distributed like that. If physical location of employee really didn't matter, then your org would have most of its IT staff in India, because the labor rates are lower and that's the largest pool of English-speaking IT talent. I agree there is some fluidity to IT labor, but there is a limit to it also. Besides, the stated on-paper purpose of H-1B visas is to fill (alleged) skills shortages. After the dot-com crash there was a big surplus of labor in the area, yet us citizens were competing with H-1B's still. The stated goal was missing the target during that time.
- qaq 8y agoI'd say the ones employing majority of programmers are and that will affect the market at large.
- gdilla 8y agoDon't mean to sound harsh but anyone who can't compete with an H1B to the extent they can't find a job in the entire state of CA should take a hard look at their skills and expectations and change one or both.
- kvhdude 8y agoWhile H1B debate is ongoing, vmware invests $2b in india
- geff82 8y agoYou want good healthcare, good salary, the real Autobahns, good houses and you are talented, have at least a bachelor in IT and are willing to try something out? Come over to Germany. Honestly, no I other country I know of has such a fast and well thought out way to permanent residence for foreign talent than Germany. If you are interested in working here, drop me a message to eriklistserve at gmail dot com.
- dunpeal 8y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, a friend of mine who looked into it, all he could get in Berlin was less than half his American salary, while his taxes were very substantially higher. His take-home would have been slashed by about 70%, so he gave up the idea. Have things changed since then?
- geff82 8y agoBerlin is the worst place if you want to have a good paying job. If you only want to work for startups, then Berlin is the place to go. But if you are open to work in Big Enterprise IT, then there are many places where you can work and earn very good salaries (especially Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg where Enterprise IT usually pays between 80k$-140k$ depending on your role). While taxes and contributions for singles are quite high, it also includes health insurance, retirement money and unemployment insurance. For food, Germany is one of the cheapest places in the world. Property taxes are REALLY low compared to the US (I mean, in the US or in Germany, you as a renter pay them, so rent is also cheaper here, even in the hubs). In big cities, many people do not need a car as public transportation is very affordable and available everywhere (so that money gets saved for some). The biggest challenge: to stay here for longer, try to learn German well. It is not that difficult if you take your time.
- shados 8y ago> 80k$-140k$ Thats the problem. You used the dollar symbol, but even if its euros, the upper range you gave is 160k. That's way, way too low for an upper range if someone's thinking of salaries on one of the US' coasts (especially west, but also east). Insurance is mostly for if you lose your job...as long as you have one, its a pretty tiny part of the paychecks, retirement matching is pretty common, food isn't that expense (I dunno about Germany, but compared to other countries Ive lived in, its cheap). After the difference in taxes, the delta in the upper range is a significant factor. Im curious about the property taxes part though. Do you have some examples? Real numbers are hard to google.
- calvinbhai 8y agoI agree with what Kerr is suggesting. It makes a lot of sense. I also agree with a many Americans who are anti-H1b that it suppresses wages, hence makes it attractive to higher foreign workers, quite often for jobs that are not truly state of the art, but do require the technical know how. This is why it makes sense for the H1-B to be a highest paid gets first kind of a visa. That way there's a strong incentive to not hire lowest paid employees. In fact, I think a better way would be to give two 3-year temporary green cards. if at the end of 6th year if the person still has job, it becomes a permanent job. This removes any control that an employer has to depress the wages, and be fair to the American as well as immigrant labour. Such a system can be made available to at least the undergrad/grad/doctoral degree holders from the US universities. By limiting the immigrant talent, US has already ensure China is taking a huge leap in terms of tech advances. India will figure out how to make the leap soon. All the while, Canada is making the most of USA's anti high skilled immigrant situation, but inviting them in droves. We'll see a different Canada in the next 5-10 years, mainly due to the huge number of tech immigrants (of Chinese or Indian origin) moving to Canada.
- enraged_camel 8y ago>>In fact, I think a better way would be to give two 3-year temporary green cards. if at the end of 6th year if the person still has job, it becomes a permanent job. No, the entire reason companies get away with paying H1Bs below market rate is because the visa is tied to employment. It needs to be decoupled so that visa holders can freely and easily switch jobs without worrying about losing their status.
- x0x0 8y agoOr both? ie grant them to people being paid the highest wages first, and limit the h1b holder to mandatory 1 year employment with the sponsoring company then 5 years of free to switch at will. We'd still be willing to sponsor as we aren't keeping h1bs via the visa; we keep employees because they want to work here. The pain with sponsoring isn't the cost; it's the time and uncertainty. Sponsoring costs compare favorably to the standard 25% a contingency recruiter charges.
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- seshagiric 8y agoWouldn't this favor large companies? e.g. someone like Google, Amazon may pay the top $ to get talent from abroad but startups or small companies are not able to? While the pay gap between companies exist even today, the difference is today small & medium companies can afford the foreign labor.
- hackermeows 8y agoIf you are born in India H1b = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude You pay all the taxes with no hope of ever getting any of the benefits, your employee pretty much owns you, if get disabled or sick you need to go back to your country. Does not matter what position and what company you worked for, it does not matter how much taxes you have paid. Greencard backlogs for H1b is also enabling Indian run sweat shop consultancies(crooks) that cram 20-30 immigrant fresh grads in a New Jersey home and apply for all and every IT every job out there. They blatantly make their indentured servants lie in the resume, they basically own them by controlling their h1b visas. This is driving down wages for everyone. Indentured servants don't ask for a raise Americas need for immigrants isn't going away nor is it's abuse of Immigrants
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- colechristensen 8y agoImmigration is a complex topic. Putting all other issues aside positive and negative, if you turned off the foreign immigration tap, the people in power (corporations) would be screaming at Washington to fix American education system so they could actually find qualified candidates. In that would be a lot of value.
- slothtrop 8y agoHire graduates and train them, problem solved. Cheap immigrant labor is a case of employers having their cake and eating it too. The vast majority of these jobs aren't that challenging, hence the immigrants. They're mostly looking for monkeys, not 10x devs.
- thedaemon 8y agoIt's always lunacy to me when junior job positions require X amount of years experience. That's just not possible.
- fraudsyndrome 8y agoLate reply. But in Australia this is seen as 'okay' as generally the entry level job is to go the graduate role route which requires zero experience.
- jws 8y agoThis doesn't work for widely usable skills with a mobile workforce. Consider… Company A hires a worker and invests in training them, then before they can get their value back out of the education the worker changes to a higher paying job at Company B which doesn't have the training expenses to recoup. Our example worker and Company B are both making their best possible rational decisions. There are solutions to making this work: • It could be unlawful for the worker to use their skills, paid for by Company A, with another company until they had 'paid off' their training. Effective non-competes based on skills. Not a PR win for Company A. Also, you never want a judge to cite the Emancipation Proclamation to you in court. • Company A could train a worker and have the worker incur unavoidable debt so that should they switch companies Company A will still be reimbursed for their training costs. This combines student loans with for profit workplace training. The conflicts of interest are huge and the optics are horrible for Company A. Again, you don't want a judge to say "indentured servant" to you in court. • The worker could independently train themselves in something they feel might be advantageous in the work place, incurring any costs themselves in the hope of recouping that investment. This is the usual method in the US, there are some problems with workers making bad investments and incurring lifelong financial burdens. • Both Company A and Company B could shoulder the cost of training/educating workers and have access to the resulting workers. This is known as taxation and state sponsored education. Workers still may make bad decisions in their training selections. This is the paragraph where I espouse the best way to move forward. I've got nothing. I like the fourth one, but when you add in educational institutions with their own interests and some desire to steer the educational funding to studies which are in demand it gets very complicated.
- coldtea 8y ago>America’s Need for Skilled Immigrants Isn’t Going Away Really? Why? It can't find enough people to educate among 350 existing million?
- cwperkins 8y agoAs when any immigration topic comes up on here, I am in full support of getting the best talent from anywhere in the world to help create the next innovation or invention that makes people lives easier, better and richer. I just ask, because I know there are many immigrants on this forum, that if the American people are given a referendum on what they think is proper on how to handle immigration (whether it be legal or illegal) that you respect the vote of the electorate. With that being said I wish anyone that wants to immigrate to America has a good experience with the people here, works hard and achieves the American dream for themselves and their offspring.
- thedaemon 8y agoWe could recover from needing skilled immigrants if we would educate our population for free like most of the world. We still only allow rich or lucky people to receive high level educations. How can we complain about skilled labor when we make no effort to create said skilled laborers?
- merpnderp 8y agoWhy would you think only rich or lucky people can go to college in the US? With grants and student loans pretty much anyone can go to college that wants to. And at my local state university, where tuition is a mere $5k/year, lower income kids make up over 90% of the student body. Yet my area has a gross shortage of skilled trade labor. Want an electrician, prepare to wait 6 months. Need concrete poured at your house? Zero chance of getting a legitimate contractor, you'll be hiring someone doing it illegally. And you'd better treat your plumber like your best friend and not grouch when they pad the bill by a couple of hours.
- thedaemon 8y agoBecause it has been my experience. I personally was able to do 2 years of college but the student loans killed me after I wasn't able to get a high paying job. I love when they take money out of my paycheck. Most people have to work for a living, especially poor people. They cannot afford to not have an income, to just go to school... You are talking about lower middle class kids, not poor people. If you've never been poor don't assume you know anything about it. Also a student loan is how you claim the poor can go to college. But I stated that most countries have free schooling. Being poor then immediately adding debt doesn't help yourself at all. Perhaps you should go hang out with some poor people and hear it straight from the source. Not trying to be rude or anything, as you make good points about skilled labor.
- NTDF9 8y agoMy god! The amount of discussion here is nuts. Skilled immigration is already a settled case. Just look at how Canada and Australia does it. America has the whole idea of skilled temporary immigration completely backwards. You want the equivalent of Ivy leaguers from other countries but want to treat them like slaves with a ton of documentation and constant fear of deportation? That is not a life Ivy-League level folks of any country want to live. Just look at other developed countries. America has really not kept pace.
- gnulinux 8y agoEven worse, you study in a true Ivy League in the US, be successful, work for years, but still be treated like a slave with tons of bureaucracy. I'm not trying to be an asshole, and I understand I'm somewhat of an "outsider" because I'm not a citizen, so I don't have the same rights, but having lived in the US for years and learned everything technical I know here, it's really harsh that my existence here is debated every other week. Understandable but depressing.
- _iyig 8y agoWhat is the difference between this headline and one that might read, “Americans’ Access to Affordable, High-quality STEM Education Needs to Improve?” I’ve know too many friends and relatives, all American-born, who got into tech despite of rather than because of their state-funded primary and secondary education.
- petermcneeley 8y agoI think Eric Weinstein covers this question in a relatively academic way in his article: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-government-universities-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-high-tech-workers https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove... "During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs."
- throwingay5556 8y agoThe option that isn't being discussed is the one that would align the interests of the working class in America and the immigrant population. Namely, a federal job guarantee for everyone in the country with a minimum standard of living and the requirement that everyone be treated the same. If the buisness community can't stomach that, then maybe they shouldn't get any desperate immigrants that essentially function like scabs because of the way they engineered the system. Our true enemy is the elites and the business community. Immigrants are just ordinary and often desperate people who deserve our kindness. Rise up!
- affinity100 8y agoIt's strange to see contrasting responses(read: not unequivocally welcome) from programmers to increasing H1B visas when most(not all, but a significant fraction) of these same programmers call for practically limitless immigration from south of the border for low skilled jobs. So virtue signalling even at the cost of your fellow citizens but skepticism to immigration when it comes to your own job.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI'm not defending what you are attacking, but one sees that attitude consistently in the farm arena, those people who own/manage farms want to have more border security and less immigration from abroad (whatever that means but what the GOP is running upon nationally) and they also want access to the undocumented workers that supply the labor for their farms. From dairy farms in the midwest to livestock farming around the country to central California to border areas along Mexico, that is the one thing that stuck out in coverage on all news sources from local papers to radio that interviews farmers that hire immigrants. It seems like the epitome of doublethink, but it's a pretty widely held viewpoint.
- affinity100 8y agoIs it any surprise that most of the country is beginning to see right through this duplicity and virtue signalling and the democrat party is not looking so hot?
- nimbius 8y agoTheres a ton of talk about skilled immigrants and the american education system, and as a blue-collar automotive mechanic, I have no problem with immigrant doctors and engineers. Where I see the real problem is unskilled immigrants. Take for example a job posting I had up for more than 3 months. I needed a solid mid-level mechanic. oil/air/tires/suspension and electrical a plus. I dont want my apprentices doing this work because theyre learning to do manifold rebuilds and such. And i dont want my old timers doing it because it will cost a fortune and i need them on harder problems. So for weeks on end, I get at least 3 interviews a day from grossly unqualified immigrants. Why immigrants? nobody wants a kid who grows up to be a successful mechanic i guess. Everyone "goes to college" now. just ask my alignment tech with a masters in english. - Ive had a slew of random tourists from europe backpacking around in the US who want a job, and cant seem to understand the gravity of a visa violation. They all want three times what I'm paying and health insurance. - Ive got college drop-outs from china, russia, you name it, who either blew through all their money or were never qualified for college in the first place, and need something to keep afloat while they fake college. - and finally, perhaps most controversially, I have central and south americans. Theyre either trapped here because of american immigration policy, or theyre fresh off the boat with a slip of paper written by a friend dictating what they will work for in cash. Most of them speak about 8 words of english. They are radioactive as far as im concerned; you would be insane to hire them. We're always going to need doctors and engineers. not everyone grows up to be a rocket scientist, and thats okay. But im frustrated at how Americans have turned trade jobs (plumbing, auto work, electricians, linemen, pipefitters, etc...) into some kind of field that no kid can ever enter lest they be disowned. update: I should clarify. These applicants are upset they must wait 90 days for benefits. we do provide health/dental/401k, just not on day one.
- StevePerkins 8y agoI respect everything you're saying, but you kinda lost me at, "They all want ... health insurance". Yes, indeed... as long as a soul-crushing job sitting in a chair and staring at a screen comes with health coverage, and a job in the trades does not, then my hope as a father is that my kids will take the health coverage route. Until we fix our crazy system, blue collar work it is a very frightening prospect.
- sid- 8y agoI think we should have a world without borders and countries, only states. People should be able to live and work wherever they want to irrespective of where they are born. Most of the problems arise because we have divided the world into countries. This is really something the world needs rather than immigration reform
- AngryData 8y agoThat is what happens when you put meaningful education behind a wall of private business.
- collyw 8y agoCouldn't they skill up non immigrants? That would improve inequality ad seems clear from Trump being elected that not everyone is happy with immigrants.