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The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly vei

The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia. Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.

youeseh 8y ago
Yes. There's value in being able to change jobs as you see please. That value is about 1.3 to 1.5x of not having the freedom to do so.
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  Workers under H1B transfer jobs less often, but its not impossible or even uncommon, except under the Trump administration.
acdha 8y ago
Look at it from the other direction: large companies have fought giving H1-B workers better protections. They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t profiting from workers with less negotiating ability. That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  Agreed — more freedom, not less, is the ideal solution here.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- austincheney 8y ago
  You replied to a comment arguing against positions made from speculation without data by supplying more speculation without data.
  - acdha 8y ago
    There's some data out there but it's also hard to compare reliably since you need to account for differences in skill level when comparing salaries. My point was that the large companies which have the best data, and whole teams of people doing the math on this issue, have consistently fought to preserve the old ways of doing it and since they're for-profit corporations it seems unlikely that they're doing this for any reason other than the econ 101 explanation that they profit from workers who can't negotiate as well.
briandear 8y ago
Any data they aren’t? We have at least one, highly publicized case at Disney that suggests that’s exactly what happens. Otherwise, why fire experienced workers and force them to train people who didn’t know the job? That makes no sense unless cost was the motivator. It certainly wasn’t about higher skill levels.
fxfan 8y ago
> Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better. Is this supported by data? If it isn't, this is just thinly veiled parroting of propaganda. I'm not against any color but blindly saying a star trek bar is better than a more homogeneous bar is just parroting
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  There’s a huge difference between stating my personal opinion and making factual claims. My opinion is that more diversity is good and makes the world better. Also: > I’m not against any color but... lol.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    Personal opinion- I think homogeneous societies cooperate much better and I personally believe that so-called forced diversity of racial backgrounds is an effort to lower the camaraderie in a team and keep the loyalty to the firm and not the team members and thus bringing down wages by competition. I am all for diversity of ideas and background. Something which would make a companies more productive at the same wage. I also believe that no race is superior to another- everybody has different goals. And so long as one doens't try and interfere in another's society, the world would be a very smooth place.
    - raz32dust 8y ago
      Homogeneity is good only if you are moving towards the optimal goal. Diversity is good to bring in new ideas which helps adjust the goal and keep the society robust against failure. Like autocracy vs democracy. If you have a benevolent godly dictator, that's perfect. But we accept that no such ideal exists, so democracy is the compromise. Diversity in the workplace exerts the same goal. It lowers efficiency, but efficiency is pointless, even counter-productive if it is towards the wrong goal.
      - fxfan 8y ago
        I don't see what you added to my comment. I already said diversity of ideas and background is good- diversity purely based on color to make a star trek movie is not.
ajxs 8y ago
However anecdotal this claim may be, it seems fairly intuitive given the basic economic model of supply and demand. Can you explain how greatly increasing the supply of developers by importing them from overseas will not affect the demand, and therefore negatively affect the cost of labour?
- aeontech 8y ago
  Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand. Ask anyone that has to do recruiting for their teams. Source: personal experience
  - Pinckney 8y ago
    Talking about demand exceeding supply is somewhat nonsensical without reference to a price. What you're saying is "at the price my company is willing to pay, we're unable to find qualified candidates." That means you can either pay more to attract qualified candidates, or do without. Alternatively, we can raise the supply curve, which has the affect of lowering wages, and might allow your company to attract talent without paying more.
    - aeontech 8y ago
      Ok, fair enough, my comment was perhaps flippant. My company pays at least market rate and can afford to go higher if the candidate negotiates, so I don't think that's the issue. At least, we never had a candidate refuse a position due to money concerns. The skills we look for are not that specialized either, it's not like I'm looking for ML PhD's with a background in medicine. Anecdotally, it just feels like almost everyone who is already good, is already happily employed. So either we need to head-hunt candidates, hope to coincidentally catch them while they're between jobs, or hire very junior candidates and train them up. Of course, the issue might also be just that we need better recruiters to populate the candidate pool :)
    - mavelikara 8y ago
      I don't know which market you are hiring in, but for jobs which pay well into 300K+ (many multiples of median household income across the country), where engineers are pampered with free meals and massages, there are shortages in qualified supply.
jlarocco 8y ago
I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim. That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unlikely anybody can be more specific than "increased labor supply decreases wages".
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  Software engineers are being hired at much higher rates than any other profession in the US and that has been going up for decades. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    And so has our pay. But, like I said, there are million other variables besides the size of the labor pool that affect salaries. In general, though, more candidates available for a position means a lower salary. And there are more serious problems with H1B than just lowering salaries. It's very difficult for H1B workers to switch jobs once they're here, and employers (especially contracting shops) use that as leverage against them. And don't even get me started on H2B workers, who often make minimum wage, have to live in employee housing, and have even less recourse than H1B workers because they make far less money. We need better immigration policies, and I don't think tying immigration status to job status is the best way forward.
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    You understand that the predictions for industry growth on those pages are virtually the same as the number of CS bachelor's degree graduates every year. We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
stevenwoo 8y ago
Norm Matloff at UC Davis has blogged about this for a decade. A sampling of one paper has several references about the bias toward much younger and cheaper H1-B candidates in academia and professional workforce. He also argues diversity is better. https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/reforming-h-1b-and-related-visas-what-needs-to-be-done/ https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/reforming-h-1b-a...
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. It looks like he wrote for U of M Journal of Law Reform on this topic: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf. Until I read through it and cross check his sources I can't judge the validity of course, but after reading over the first two pages his arguments seem compelling. A link to a 2000 profile in Salon on him: https://web.archive.org/web/20150307053811/http://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/matloff https://web.archive.org/web/20150307053811/http://www.salon....
zjaffee 8y ago
From an economics perspective, unless the hiring of more software engineers results in an increased demand for software engineers (i.e. there being a significant latent demand), H1B absolutely then lowers the earnings potential of engineers. Especially those earning more towards the middle and bottom of the market. I'd also add that BLS data suggests that this induced demand isn't true. As the projected employment growth for engineers between 2016 and 2026 is 600,000 where there are around 60,000 people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US and even more getting masters or doing bootcamps.
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  There aren't 60k people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US from any source I can find: https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/ https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/. And the projections are for 300k, not 600: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.h.... where are you getting your data from?
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    There are more job codes for software engineers than just the one listed on that fact table. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... Additionally, you can see what degrees people are graduating with here https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 So yes my numbers are correct if not lower than they should be for both.
luckydata 8y ago
Every time we have this conversation we have to do this silly song and dance routine instead of, you know, doing a quick google search. WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-programs-impact-on-american-workers-1489483811 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro... Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/ http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/ Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-visas-suppress-wages http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi... I particularly appreciate the part where you passively-aggressively calle me a xenophobe not knowing I'm an immigrant too. Classy move.
- spangry 8y ago
  That paper discussed in Science Magazine is very interesting. Here's part of the abstract from 'The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from Visa Lotteries' (2016) - https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd... "We compare winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on U.S. firms, and to approved U.S. patents. Winning additional H-1B visas causes at most a moderate increase in firms’ overall employment, and these H-1Bs therefore substantially crowd out firms’ employment of other workers. Additional H-1Bs generally have insignificant and at most modest effects on firms’ patenting and use of the research and experimentation tax credit. There is some evidence that additional H-1Bs lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits."

youeseh 8y ago

Yes. There's value in being able to change jobs as you see please. That value is about 1.3 to 1.5x of not having the freedom to do so.

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
Workers under H1B transfer jobs less often, but its not impossible or even uncommon, except under the Trump administration.

acdha 8y ago

Look at it from the other direction: large companies have fought giving H1-B workers better protections. They wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t profiting from workers with less negotiating ability. That’s also my position: don’t ban them, give them flexibility to switch jobs like everyone else so companies can’t hold the threat of deportation over them if they want a better deal.

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
Agreed — more freedom, not less, is the ideal solution here.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
austincheney 8y ago
You replied to a comment arguing against positions made from speculation without data by supplying more speculation without data.
- acdha 8y ago
  There's some data out there but it's also hard to compare reliably since you need to account for differences in skill level when comparing salaries. My point was that the large companies which have the best data, and whole teams of people doing the math on this issue, have consistently fought to preserve the old ways of doing it and since they're for-profit corporations it seems unlikely that they're doing this for any reason other than the econ 101 explanation that they profit from workers who can't negotiate as well.

briandear 8y ago

Any data they aren’t? We have at least one, highly publicized case at Disney that suggests that’s exactly what happens. Otherwise, why fire experienced workers and force them to train people who didn’t know the job? That makes no sense unless cost was the motivator. It certainly wasn’t about higher skill levels.

fxfan 8y ago

> Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better. Is this supported by data? If it isn't, this is just thinly veiled parroting of propaganda. I'm not against any color but blindly saying a star trek bar is better than a more homogeneous bar is just parroting

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
There’s a huge difference between stating my personal opinion and making factual claims. My opinion is that more diversity is good and makes the world better. Also: > I’m not against any color but... lol.
- fxfan 8y ago
  Personal opinion- I think homogeneous societies cooperate much better and I personally believe that so-called forced diversity of racial backgrounds is an effort to lower the camaraderie in a team and keep the loyalty to the firm and not the team members and thus bringing down wages by competition. I am all for diversity of ideas and background. Something which would make a companies more productive at the same wage. I also believe that no race is superior to another- everybody has different goals. And so long as one doens't try and interfere in another's society, the world would be a very smooth place.
  - raz32dust 8y ago
    Homogeneity is good only if you are moving towards the optimal goal. Diversity is good to bring in new ideas which helps adjust the goal and keep the society robust against failure. Like autocracy vs democracy. If you have a benevolent godly dictator, that's perfect. But we accept that no such ideal exists, so democracy is the compromise. Diversity in the workplace exerts the same goal. It lowers efficiency, but efficiency is pointless, even counter-productive if it is towards the wrong goal.
    - fxfan 8y ago
      I don't see what you added to my comment. I already said diversity of ideas and background is good- diversity purely based on color to make a star trek movie is not.

ajxs 8y ago

However anecdotal this claim may be, it seems fairly intuitive given the basic economic model of supply and demand. Can you explain how greatly increasing the supply of developers by importing them from overseas will not affect the demand, and therefore negatively affect the cost of labour?

aeontech 8y ago
Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand. Ask anyone that has to do recruiting for their teams. Source: personal experience
- Pinckney 8y ago
  Talking about demand exceeding supply is somewhat nonsensical without reference to a price. What you're saying is "at the price my company is willing to pay, we're unable to find qualified candidates." That means you can either pay more to attract qualified candidates, or do without. Alternatively, we can raise the supply curve, which has the affect of lowering wages, and might allow your company to attract talent without paying more.
  - aeontech 8y ago
    Ok, fair enough, my comment was perhaps flippant. My company pays at least market rate and can afford to go higher if the candidate negotiates, so I don't think that's the issue. At least, we never had a candidate refuse a position due to money concerns. The skills we look for are not that specialized either, it's not like I'm looking for ML PhD's with a background in medicine. Anecdotally, it just feels like almost everyone who is already good, is already happily employed. So either we need to head-hunt candidates, hope to coincidentally catch them while they're between jobs, or hire very junior candidates and train them up. Of course, the issue might also be just that we need better recruiters to populate the candidate pool :)
  - mavelikara 8y ago
    I don't know which market you are hiring in, but for jobs which pay well into 300K+ (many multiples of median household income across the country), where engineers are pampered with free meals and massages, there are shortages in qualified supply.

jlarocco 8y ago

I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim. That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unlikely anybody can be more specific than "increased labor supply decreases wages".

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
Software engineers are being hired at much higher rates than any other profession in the US and that has been going up for decades. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- jlarocco 8y ago
  And so has our pay. But, like I said, there are million other variables besides the size of the labor pool that affect salaries. In general, though, more candidates available for a position means a lower salary. And there are more serious problems with H1B than just lowering salaries. It's very difficult for H1B workers to switch jobs once they're here, and employers (especially contracting shops) use that as leverage against them. And don't even get me started on H2B workers, who often make minimum wage, have to live in employee housing, and have even less recourse than H1B workers because they make far less money. We need better immigration policies, and I don't think tying immigration status to job status is the best way forward.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  You understand that the predictions for industry growth on those pages are virtually the same as the number of CS bachelor's degree graduates every year. We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).

stevenwoo 8y ago

Norm Matloff at UC Davis has blogged about this for a decade. A sampling of one paper has several references about the bias toward much younger and cheaper H1-B candidates in academia and professional workforce. He also argues diversity is better. https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/reforming-h-1b-and-related-visas-what-needs-to-be-done/ https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/reforming-h-1b-a...

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
Thanks for the link. It looks like he wrote for U of M Journal of Law Reform on this topic: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf. Until I read through it and cross check his sources I can't judge the validity of course, but after reading over the first two pages his arguments seem compelling. A link to a 2000 profile in Salon on him: https://web.archive.org/web/20150307053811/http://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/matloff https://web.archive.org/web/20150307053811/http://www.salon....

zjaffee 8y ago

From an economics perspective, unless the hiring of more software engineers results in an increased demand for software engineers (i.e. there being a significant latent demand), H1B absolutely then lowers the earnings potential of engineers. Especially those earning more towards the middle and bottom of the market. I'd also add that BLS data suggests that this induced demand isn't true. As the projected employment growth for engineers between 2016 and 2026 is 600,000 where there are around 60,000 people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US and even more getting masters or doing bootcamps.

femiagbabiaka 8y ago
There aren't 60k people graduating with computer science bachelor's degrees every year in the US from any source I can find: https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/ https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/. And the projections are for 300k, not 600: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.h.... where are you getting your data from?
- zjaffee 8y ago
  There are more job codes for software engineers than just the one listed on that fact table. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... Additionally, you can see what degrees people are graduating with here https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 So yes my numbers are correct if not lower than they should be for both.

luckydata 8y ago

Every time we have this conversation we have to do this silly song and dance routine instead of, you know, doing a quick google search. WSJ > https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-programs-impact-on-american-workers-1489483811 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro... Fortune > http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/ http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/h1-b-silicon-valley-wages/ Science Magazine > http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-visas-suppress-wages http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi... I particularly appreciate the part where you passively-aggressively calle me a xenophobe not knowing I'm an immigrant too. Classy move.

spangry 8y ago
That paper discussed in Science Magazine is very interesting. Here's part of the abstract from 'The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from Visa Lotteries' (2016) - https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/h1b.pd... "We compare winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 lotteries for H-1B visas, matching administrative data on these lotteries to administrative tax data on U.S. firms, and to approved U.S. patents. Winning additional H-1B visas causes at most a moderate increase in firms’ overall employment, and these H-1Bs therefore substantially crowd out firms’ employment of other workers. Additional H-1Bs generally have insignificant and at most modest effects on firms’ patenting and use of the research and experimentation tax credit. There is some evidence that additional H-1Bs lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits."