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I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after

• ttul 8y ago
  Stewart is still pretty Canadian... His primary residence is in Vancouver last I checked. I mean, the whole city would probably start crying if he permanently left.
• ones_and_zeros 8y ago
  A great improvement would be to give them citizenship if they want it. The economic impact of immigrants is not under debate, however your examples are poor choices as I don't think any of those people came to the US on an H1B visa. If anything it's an argument against H1B.
  • joshe 8y ago
    Yep, totally where I was going with that. One H1-B guy I worked with did in fact become a founder of a small successful firm, but that was after he got a green card. I think we've lost out on a few billion dollar startups and awesome inventions by locking people to the H1-B job they got hired for.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • mc32 8y ago
    I’d say we reciprocate what their gov would do for our workers. Their gov makes easy for Americans, we make it easy for them. They make it hard on Americans trying to work in their country, we make it hard on them. Fair is fair.
    • arcticbull 8y ago
      See your argument is short sighted, as these people provide economic benefit, it’s in your interest to allow as many as you can in while the other countries aren’t interested in taking your best and brightest. It’s why Canada’s tech sector stands to gain hugely while America squanders its lead. Canada’s letting in anyone smart and technical and the US is telling them no. What were arguing for is being unfair in America’s favor.
      • mc32 8y ago
        Countries should do what makes sense for them. Canada is behind, they want to jump start their tech sector. They’re not a challenge to the US, China, Japan or even Russia. So good on them. We have a need for some specialists and we have a need for many low skills laborers. We need a system to evaluate need, address it appropriately and manage the foreign workforce to the advantage of Americans. Panama is free to invite all the high skilled labor if they want and become a tech power too. Let them. I encourage it.
        • arcticbull 8y ago
          Don’t you want America to stay ahead? I’m getting dizzy from all these moving goalposts.
          • mc32 8y ago
            Canada is just about a tenth of our pop. Worrying about them is like worrying about Japan taking over the world in 1990. It’s not possible due to population realities. Let them succeed a little.
  • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    H1B's are immigrant visas, they terminate in greencards after one renewal. The only problem is that a few countries have long lines (India, China, Philippines) on how many greencards can be granted this way per year. That should be done away with.
    • vilhelm_s 8y ago
      There is nothing in the H1B that entitles you to a green card. You can only renew the H1B once, so after that you need to either somehow get a green card or leave the U.S.
      • lloydde 8y ago
        Although the previous comment is very incorrect, this information is also not correct. The greencard process is a multi step, often many year process. If you are from a country with per country limits you can be approved for a green card, which will allow your H1B to be renewed indefinitely, but you still have the alien conditions including needing to maintain the same/similar employment.
    • what_ever 8y ago
      They don't "terminate" in GC but rest of your comment is correct.
      • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        They terminate in a GC or you go home. Only one renewal, not like the work visa I had in China that could be renewed indefinitely with no path to permanent residency.
        • scarejunba 8y ago
          This is false. Once you're past a certain point in the GC process, you will renew your status each year.
          • 8y ago
  • godelmachine 8y ago
    >>A great improvement would be to give them citizenship if they want it. All H1B holders are more than eager to become citizens and currently there is already a pathway defined but the system is a nightmare. Especially countries like India which are enormously backlogged.
  • jperras 8y ago
    H-1B visas fall under the doctrine of dual intent, though, so isn't that already the case? Having the H-1B does not preclude someone from seeking out a green card. Or am I misunderstanding your first statement?
    • ones_and_zeros 8y ago
      You are. If they are skilled, lawful and desire to become citizens they should be given a green card after 1 year on the spot.
  • refurb 8y ago
    I don't think any of those people came to the US on an H1B visa H1-B is one of the main ways people get a green card and citizenship since you can have immigrant intent on H1-B, something you can't on a lot of other visas.
  • bluedino 8y ago
    It’s like saying some retaurants are started by immigrants so don’t complain that every kitchen is staffed by undocumented workers
• thesausageking 8y ago
  H1-B holders can change jobs. The employer you're going to has to sponsor you and then you can just do an H1-B transfer.
  • darkestloud 8y ago
    The process is a nightmare. I've changed 3 jobs under H1B.
    • joshe 8y ago
      Both great points, I'll edit to say "change jobs easily".
    • doingmyting 8y ago
      Not to mention if you are applying for a green card you get bumped to the back of the line with every job change unless your i-485 approved
      • winter_blue 8y ago
        No, you get to keep your priority date. The priority date is whenever the labor certification ("PERM") was filed.
    • firstplacelast 8y ago
      Can't have been that bad then. General employment is a nightmare, I've only changed jobs once in the last 8 years because it's so many BS hoops to jump through.
      • what_ever 8y ago
        The difference is person in H1B faces same issues as you but there are more issues which are frankly more complicated and time consuming due to visa related things.
• briandear 8y ago
  When H1s are used to displace American workers at a lower cost, I am not sure “cheering all immigrants” is warranted. Some, but definitely not all. The Disney firings happened. And it has happened in many other places that aren’t as famous. When Disney has H1s displacing Americans who were already doing the job, that isn’t a “shortage,” which is the single purpose for which H1B was created. I am not disputing the value of some H1Bs, but “cheering” for all of them? No way. Also Sergey and Elon were not H1Bs. Including them in a discussion of H1Bs is intellectually dishonest, neither one was an H1B but instead entered the US via other programs — programs that aren’t under serious debate.
  • niyazpk 8y ago
    I am wondering how not having H1B could have helped the Disney employees though. If Disney wants to cut costs and hire cheaper labor (presumably why they hired H1Bs? I don't know), they could as well move the jobs offshore. Now the US is losing out on much more than just the jobs. What am I missing here?
    • treis 8y ago
      The options aren't immigrants or offshore. Yes, some jobs will be lost to offshore but some won't. From the perspective of American workers, even if 90% go offshore it's better than 100% going to immigrants.
    • maximente 8y ago
      the whole idea of "just moving the jobs offshore" doesn't really come out to be as simple as you have equated here. there's often time zone differences, cultural difference, a simple inability to do work (e.g. anything requiring access to physical infrastructure, any client-facing meetings, etc.) it's not like you can flip a switch and get a fully functioning setup, even with something like development. we've seen this charade with foxconn, amazon, etc. turns out that the whole "highest bidder competitions" turn out to be not-so-thinly veiled con jobs where basically everyone but the corp loses aside from some marginal people like property holders.
• treis 8y ago
  >just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1] From your own cite: >Immigrant workers can either be substitutes for native-born workers or complements to them. When immigrant workers are substitutes for native-born workers, they compete for similar jobs. Using a simple supply and demand model, an influx of substitutable workers constitutes an increase in the supply of labor, causing wages to fall for workers with similar skills. Because many immigrants are low-skilled workers, economic studies have found that an influx of immigrants depresses wages for low-skilled native-born workers in the short run.6 And, because many immigrants are also high-skilled, a similar substitution effect occurs for some high-skilled workers. It goes on to talk about complementary workers: >. For example, consider that immigrant workers account for 22 percent of the construction workforce. They tend to pursue jobs in the construction industry that require less training and education but are areas where the industry has its largest labor shortages—such as painters, drywall installers, and construction laborers.7 This supply of immigrant labor has decreased the cost and presumably increased the number of homes produced and sold over time. The increase in housing construction has increased the demand for higher-skilled construction workers such as contractors, electricians, and plumbers While that's a nice thought, it isn't comforting to those that aren't contractors, electricians, or plumbers. They need those low skill positions in order to gain the experience to move into higher skilled ones. The hardest job for a programmer to get is their first one. Especially those that don't come from a traditional CS background. This is really where the H1B visa hurts American workers. Companies would much rather go for an immigrant on an H1B visa than train Americans to do the work.
  • cptskippy 8y ago
    At my organization we don't have any junior devs, we're all leads and they bring in H1B contractors that are less than or equal to junior devs in EXP but far cheaper, we use them for a bit until we complain loud enough, and then management ends their contract. I like the contractors as people but not as coworkers. It's always mixed feelings when they go, part relief and part sorrow. Occasionally we do get a good one and we beg for them to hire them but our Talent Strategies department (i.e. HR eyeroll) won't sponsor them.
  • joshe 8y ago
• tossaccount123 8y ago
  >To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages. You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right? Coincidentally during that same time period the income gap exploded because the wealthy had plentiful cheap labor and were able to pocket the productivity gains as pure profit because workers had no leverage to demand higher wages because there were 0 labor shortages. American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-... I support high skilled immigration because it benefits the country but let's be real, if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Wages would drop massively because it would be a buyer's market for tech companies, they could pick and choose the most talented for pennies
  • femiagbabiaka 8y ago
    Software engineering isn’t most professions. Salaries have been going up more than a decade accounting for inflation. If 10 million software engineers dropped in Silicon Valley, a lot of things would happen (for one there’s nowhere for them to live). But that’s not what’s happening.
    • tossaccount123 8y ago
      It was hyperbole to show the effect of supply and demand More and more I notice how similar software engineers are beginning to sound like the "Made in America" factory workers who said China could never do their job. Never take the present comfy situation for granted
      • femiagbabiaka 8y ago
        Software engineer salaries have been rising in a globalized market. Companies can already hire wherever they want. Many do. I have no doubt that if companies can pay workers less then they will. But that’s not what’s happening.
• maximente 8y ago
  i'm sorry but this comment reads like a puff piece. the red flag for me was when you simultaneously claimed that economics is complicated and then almost immediately... make an economic claim? look, i get that you want to signal positive sentiment towards immigrants. that's great. but it's not at all clear what you're saying is true - one would need to factor in inflation, minimum wage growth, purchasing power, and things of that nature. there's also the other (darker?) side of the coin, which indicates that in the US, there isn't nearly enough opportunity for US citizens to bridge the gap between where they are and to get prepared for these jobs. that's a black eye on our education system mostly, but it should be emphasized every time something like this is under discussion - given the incredible demand for these roles and the incredible amount of people not in the labor force who actually want a job, we really, really ought to be focusing on education here so as to fill these roles with US citizens.
  • devereaux 8y ago
    Dude, just … no. It's not about signaling or positive sentiments. All human beings are equal. Being born in one place doesn't make you special or entitles you to a job. US citizen or whatever-country citizen, all that matters is what you can do. Meritocracy, you know. If someone else can do the job better than you or me, they should be hired. Being born in the US or gender or anything else you can think about shouldn't play a role. Only raw performance should matter, because anything else is discriminatory. Just saying, because that's how I see the world, and I hope more people will keep seeing the world that way instead of thinking they're special and worth some unique privilege because of circumstance of their birth.
    • myegorov 8y ago
      By way of a thought experiment: If all human beings are equal, is this a necessary and sufficient condition to let a homeless person stay with you for a night? Assuming this is an option for a relative or friend. Why not willingly give up your job now? Surely someone can lay claim to your job on some merit basis. If you have children, do you distribute your time and affection in proportion to merit? I don't see why I should give up my hard won comfort -- won collectively by my ancestors, neighbors, compatriots, myself -- to strangers. It's natural to accord special status to yourself, then to some close kin, ..., then to fellow citizens, then to the rest of humanity.
• humbleMouse 8y ago
  > I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. To counter your anecdote, I've worked with countless H1-B's over the years, and while a handful have been awesome most of them are absolutely terrible.
  • bg4 8y ago
    Agree 100%. A handful are awesome. Many are doing software for the wrong reasons and most are generating mountains of shit code.
    • yesenadam 8y ago
      >A handful are awesome. Many are doing software for the wrong reasons and most are generating mountains of shit code. (I know nothing about this topic but) Wouldn't that also be true of the general US population, and programmers in other countries? and etc... i.e. Sturgeon's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
      • ahartmetz 8y ago
        The difference is that software isn't such a unique get out of poverty ticket in rich countries. People in rich countries who are ambitious and no good at development and / or don't care about it can just do something else to earn a good living.
  • fipple 8y ago
    In Silicon Valley? I've observed that the H-1Bs in Silicon Valley are extraordinarily high skill while the Infosys bodyshoppers are out in Des Moines and Cleveland.
    • gnahckire 8y ago
      I have. Worked at a large networking company that is rampant w/ low-skilled H-1Bs IMO.
• hnaccy 8y ago
  Pure ideology.
• defen 8y ago
  > To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages. That is not at all obvious. How would you respond to Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap"?
  • OurBoysGirls1st 8y ago
    Thanks for bringing up this point. Anyone who has grown up in the US knows well how far down wages have gone. My father was an accountant. He could afford a house and raised a family of 5 on his salary at age 40, earning ~60k/yr. I'm an experienced developer. I make $200k/yr. I'm raising a family of 4 on my salary and i'm 40. I cant afford a house. Heck, I cant even afford more than a 2br apt. To me, it is completely meaningless that i earn 3x+ than my dad, the wages have not kept up with inflation. My 200k/yr doesnt buy me as much as 60k did a generation ago. How is this "no loss in jobs or lowering of wages". If anything this demonstrates that Increasing supply lowers wages. Who knew, economics was right all along!
    • rswail 8y ago
      It's not that wages haven't kept up with general inflation, it's that wages have not kept up with asset inflation. So your 200K/year (accounting for inflation) probably buys roughly the same amount in goods and services as your father, but it can't buy real estate, because that has been inflated in an asset bubble. These asset bubbles (stocks, real estate) are driven by the fact that owners of capital have been able to depress taxation on capital growth, while increasing (in proportion) taxation on income. They have also been able to use the US national debt to let the Fed maintain their asset bubbles. Not to mention that in your father's day, inflation ate away at debt, much to the chagrin of the debt holders (ie suppliers of capital). Funnily enough, low inflation has meant that lenders do much better than borrowers.
      • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        That was always one of the advantages of a mortgage that was commonly mentioned and promoted. That your monthly payment would be effectively pennies after 20 years. Sustained low inflation meant that never came to pass. It was also one of the reasons for the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation. They started trying to inflate away some of the Versailles war reparations. Which got out of control, and then some.
• Consultant32452 8y ago
  How do you feel about the broader high skilled worker market? I'm not personally familiar with it, but the internet™ makes it sound pretty abysmal. Low wages for most science careers, horrible working conditions and pay for graduate positions, professorships replaced by adjunct positions, fewer and fewer tenure track positions offered. It appears as though the high skilled worker market has really taken it in the pants the past few decades.
• OurBoysGirls1st 8y ago
  >> They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. We've had the H1B program for 25+yrs. We accept 65+20k workers a year. That is 8520+ workers who have entered the country on this program. Lets round down and say 2million workers. These are 2million jobs that didn't go to local graduates, but instead to overseas graduates. Of those 2 million workers, could anyone cite any significant companies started by the H1b workers which created jobs?* I mean, not a dozen jobs here or there, but serious job creation that would offset the 2 million local workers who were displaced? There is this myth that H1b workers create more jobs than they take, but where are these jobs? Oh, please dont mention Google or Tesla, as those founders didnt come in on H1bs.
  • pfhayes 8y ago
    H1-B workers are (by the nature of their visa) prohibited from creating companies Founding a company is not the only way to create jobs
  • rswail 8y ago
    An alternative argument is that the US has imported expensive technical education without having to pay for it. This advantages the US and disadvantages the country where the technical education was delivered. The question is whether the benefit to the US is distributed properly within the US.
  • mavelikara 8y ago
    > Of those 2 million workers, could anyone cite any significant companies started by the H1b workers which created jobs?* I mean, not a dozen jobs here or there, but serious job creation that would offset the 2 million local workers who were displaced? Jyoti Bansal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Bansal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Bansal Dheeraj Pandey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpandey/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpandey/ And many others like them. Go to the website of any of the top VCs in the Valley. On their list of partners, you will find many Indian names. Most of these people, before becoming VCs, were founders of successful startups. A large number of these people first came to US on H-1B. Likewise, take a look of influential papers like, say DynamoDB one. You will find many Indian names in the list of authors, and most of them also worked on H-1B. The work of these people end up creating entire new fields of employment coast-to-coast.
• nameisu 8y ago
  but they are brown
• mdorazio 8y ago
  And if you're in IT consulting like me instead of a software engineer, you absolutely should not cheer every immigrant. Many people wrongly assume that most H1B visas go to truly high-skilled individuals working at large tech companies. This is not the case. Take a look at the numbers in [1]. The top 5 companies bringing H1B workers are doing so specifically to outsource IT functions at lower cost than US workers. These H1B workers are absolutely taking away jobs and higher salaries from Americans who would like to do this work if it paid more. What we need is to revamp the H1B system to be bid-based rather than lottery-based so it can actually fulfill its intent of bringing in workers that are truly needed rather than workers that are convenient. [1] http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/ http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/
  • mpweiher 8y ago
    > The top 5 companies bringing H1B workers are doing so specifically to outsource IT functions at lower cost And this is the part I don't quite understand. According to the rules, this shouldn't be possible. So either (a) the rules are broken, and need to be fixed or (b) the rules are not being enforced. And since we have the numbers, and the companies, it shouldn't be that hard to see how they are getting past either the regulations or the intent of the regulations or both. As a former H1B visa holder who definitely did not lower wages (-g-) and whose employers were, AFAICT, meticulous about following the rules, it annoys me to no end that all H1B visa holders are tarred with the brush of the ones violating the rules.
    • mdorazio 8y ago
      Here's how it works. A company like Cognizant gets as many H1Bs as it can via an army of applicants and subsidiaries in India to game the lottery system. Meanwhile, companies in the US that want to pay less for IT functions create job descriptions that are tailored specifically to H1B applicants (if you've ever wondered why there are mandatory requirements for a very specific set of systems experience and education, this is often why), then post those jobs only where they are unlikely to be found and tell American applicants who do manage to find them that the position only pays [20% below real market rate]. Now you've got a US company that can legally say they just can't find any qualified domestic applicants, an H1B-focused staffing company that has tons of people it can bring in and rotate through regularly, and wages that are depressed. Net result: IT departments at large companies that are 40%+ staffed by H1B contractors. I've seen this happen repeatedly at clients you've definitely heard of and it creates a situation where there are plenty of Americans who would work these jobs, but the salary/benefits being offered just aren't competitive.
• BadassFractal 8y ago
  > To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages. Is that actually true though? I remember reading / hearing in podcasts that now it takes two people working full time to get the same lifestyle we had when only one member in the household was expected to work.
• me45 8y ago
  I am not against H1Bs, but the minimum pay should be raised to 100k. They should be able to switch jobs after 1 year so they are not slaves to their sponsor. And every h1B application should be posted on a easily searchable site where American applicants can review and apply for that position if they meet the job criteria.
  • legalpad 8y ago
    Every H1B application (or rather, the LCA that preceeeds the H-1B petition) does appear in a government database and multiple public-facing sites that you can search. You can see the job title, company, location, wage being paid, and many many other pieces of information.
• baybal2 8y ago
  > A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs. Josh, what's needed in US is a simple plain work visa, without any pretence of "high levelness" - something that was common in all Western countries before immigration alarmisms became a such a severe thing. For the society to accept immigrant workforce, it needs to become more open and less xenophobic again. The primary reason for messed up immigration systems across the Western nations has nothing to do with the labour market, but plain closet racism of unwashed masses that uses all arguments above as a cover.
• calahad 8y ago
  H1-B mandates a lower than competitive wage that the recipient's get stuck in, this isn't the same situation as women / minorities gaining access to the workplace unless their access came at a mandatory much lower salary.
  • winter_blue 8y ago
    Do you just enjoy spewing lies incessantly? The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers. Also, the LCA often lists a lower salary than what people earn. At my last company, my base salary was close to 140k, but the H-1B LCA on file listed 95k or something. With bonuses, I've made over 200k in a single year in the past. My tax return and the H-1B LCA paint two very different pictures. Based on the public LCA records, one would think I was paid 95k. And, of course, the dedicated haters and liars here on HN will probably say the company violated immigration and labor law, and paid less than what the LCA required. They'd probably suggest I was paid 30k. Of course, the truth doesn't matter to these haters. They're filled with a disgusting hatred of immigrants, along with a repugnant and shameless love of dishonesty.
    • conanbatt 8y ago
      > The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers. This is a typical bureaucrat solution. An an immigrant you dont have the power to leverage salary, so there is no chance you will get the same results as an american, adjusted for everything else. First of all, there is a legal cost of the visa, which is and will always be paid by the employee. Second, you can adjust salary in 20 ways the bureaucrat cant see: PTO, stock grants, chances of advances, bonuses, etc. And finally, if you as an employee cant go into your bosses office saying a competing company wants to pay you 20%, because you cant do that with an H1B, your long term income is also affected.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
• hatmatrix 8y ago
  > A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). Aren't their visas sponsored by a specific company? Incentives aren't structured for this to happen. One way to look at is is that the US government are letting companies serve as "scouts" to bring talent in, and the companies' commission is to retain their exclusive employment for a period of time.
• ataturk 8y ago
  Sure, except the bill rate for my services hasn't changed since like 1998. It sucks, dude. Reading through the comments, people already said it all, but I came back to vent. After 20 years in this shitty business I can vent if I want to. I currently work in the US Midwest with a lot of foreign colleagues. They're pretty good people, OVERALL, but the ones that aren't are super-shitty, but that's true of the pastey-white native born Americans, too. But when the going gets tough, and when you need to be creative, the folks from, let's call it "that other place" just don't have any solutions. Many of the people I work with wait for me to build a solution, then they literally copy and paste it into their project whether or not the design suitably fits their problem. A lot of projects here are a mess because of this "square peg in round hole" behavior. Worse, many of those guys get promoted above their mental capacity and now they're calling the shots and making horrific decisions because they networked with each other and shut out the truly competent people. This is the tippy top of the Fortune 500 here I'm talking about, btw. This is not some Mom & Pop podunk shop and the stakes are high. And so if this constitutes "best and brightest" we're in deep doodoo.
  • say-vagnes 8y ago
    Your copy & paste comment really resonated with my experiences. Our services are a cobbled together mess of pasted solutions from other services, and members of the team often say something is impossible because they can't find an example of the exact same problem being solved somewhere else in the code base. Amazingly, they are just as aggressive as the competent people when it comes to pursuing promotions and responsibility, despite not being able to write a function in the main language of the company after working in it for multiple years. I don't know how things got this absurd, but here we are.
• JaceLightning 8y ago
  It's not the jobs I'm worried about; it's the housing. Where are we going to put all these people? SF already has the median home of around $1,000,000. Pro immigration policies will just make it worse.
• mbrumlow 8y ago
  > I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. I see your point, but you can't group all H1-B holders in the same boat. The ones you worked were awesome, but I am sure many have worked with ones that were not awesome. I will note, I have worked with a few awesome H1-B holders too, but I won't fall for ALL being the same. > If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. It's hard for me to read this without thinking you are just virtue signalling. This is because across the board you can hear about skilled US engineers not getting the job, but yet find the companies that opted not to hire a US engineer has a ton of H1-B visas. You can't have a tech shortage, and at the same time have skilled workers in the same country struggling to get a good paying job in tech. This is also coupled with huge swaths of tech jobs being shipped overseas to the same places we are getting flooded with H1-B holders. You could say -- well maybe the H1-B holders were more skilled? Maybe... But even if they were it is still a disservice to the US employees as they will not be given the opportunity to improve and hone their skills. I also feel that people overlook the extra value a company has for hiring a H1-B over a citizen, even if they have the same skill and are paid the same. They get stickiness. There is a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stress moving from job to job. So often H1-B holders stay longer at companies when working conditions change for the worse. > And if you are in SV consider that more than half of public tech companies were created by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. 1st generation founders include Sergey Brin, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Stewart Butterfield, Sebastion Thrun, and Patrick and John Collison. I don't think it is a good idea to conflate immigrants to H1-B holders. While many of them do stay and become permanent residence, many of them also go back to the country they hailed from. I don't have the time right this second, but I do wonder how many of the immigrants on your list were in H1-B programs vs other routes of immigration.
  • mywittyname 8y ago
    It's much harder to get an H1-B anymore. The people who manage to get one are mostly top-tier talent that are either battle-tested (rose through the ranks at a consulting firm) or are very good, domain experts. It's like saying, not every former Google developer is awesome. It might be true, but the bar to get a job there is so high that the person is very likely to be awesome.
• LMYahooTFY 8y ago
  I must ardently oppose this, it is completely wrong. "If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should cheer every immigrant. They aren't competitors, they are complements and create more jobs. Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, but just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1]" Whether you realize it or not, the absolute position you're taking is exploitative and false. It's the equivalent of asking if one supports a soldier on the battlefield in order to pressure their position on the war i.e."support the troops". Furthermore, your source doesn't say what you cherry picked out of it. It says immigrants can be complements OR substitutes, and proceeds to lend some supporting data while remaining inconclusive, which is typical of fed publications. Your conclusion is your own. "To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages." As someone else pointed out, this very simply false. If you think that immigrants are a net-job +, by all means, do that math, but what the St. Louis FED has done is far from conclusive.
• mywittyname 8y ago
  > Economics is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive, In our case, it's pretty intuitive: more software in the world increases the demand for software engineers. You need people to maintain software; profitable software packages spurs reinvestment into new features; the improved efficiency of companies will drive competitors to also invest in software. The downside is that easy-to-use software displaces low-end engineers. So demand may continue to grow, but so too will the educational requirements. When I started, I rarely used math beyond arithmetic in my job, but today, I'm often doing calculus.
• winter_blue 8y ago
  Thank you for your comment , joshe, and for being a small light in the darkness. There's so much hatred in here. I'm on an H-1B, and I've never worked for a low-paying or shitty company, and I've been very well-paid. At my last company, I was the highest paid person in my team. And, I've on one occasion made over $200,000 in a single year. I've never met one of underpaid immigrant engineers. Every immigrant I've known in NYC makes over $140,000. Of course, the facts don't matter--as we live in a "post-truth" age. Reading the comments here, makes one feel hated, and like a Jew in Nazi Germany. Of course, the immigrant-haters in here have zero respect or regard for the truth. Like the antisemitic canard[1], they try to draw this picture of people like me being "slaves" and being underpaid. A picture that is totally alien to me. It's useless to engage with the people here--the only thing they understand is hatred for immigrants. Sometimes, I wish their ancestors would have never been allowed to immigrate (they certainly would not have succeeded in moving here, under the law today). Not acknowledging this country has among the worst and least-welcoming laws for skilled workers in the whole world: https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8823349/immigration-system-broken https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8823349/immigration-system-bro... The dedicated haters on this thread want to eliminate the tiny trickle of skilled immigrants that this 330+ million country lets in. To be precise, that's about 0.02% of the population[2]. It's a joke (the quota). I've lived here since mid-2007, have all my friends and relationships and community here, but the majority of people on this HN thread would love to see my life destroyed. They would love to see my forced out of the country by ICE at gunpoint. They're filled with nothing but vile hatred and darkness. A hatred whose consequence is real violence. And to be clear, Americans are generally warm, welcoming, and friendly people, but the ones in this thread are among the worst specimens. They remind me of the bunch of angry men with Tiki torches at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The people here are screaming to destroy my life. Who knew many in Silicon Valley and Hacker News would hold the most repugnant alt-right views when it came to immigrants and of protecting their basic human dignity? It's a disgrace. This whole thread is disgusting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard [2] About 65k principal EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 green cards are granted annually. (Principal here means non-derivative, ie. not spouses or children.) That's about 5% of the 1.2 million total green cards issued. The remaining 95% of greencards are granted on the basis of a family relationship or on a humanitarian claim.
• rsync 8y ago
  " ... consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages ..." I am not sure that is true ... in fact, while I cannot provide a reference or citation, I believe I have seen well-received research and academic studies that suggest this increase in the workforce was a key component of weakening unions and depressing real, inflation adjusted earnings over just the period you cite. In fact, I think it is Elizabeth Warren's work in a related area (the fragility of two-income households) that has been more recently discussed and overlaps this discussion. I am genuinely interested to see how the intersection of liberal immigration policies and support of unions and workers' rights is supposed to be implemented. I note with interest that Ralph Nader believes it cannot be done.[1] I also note with interest that corporate interests, which are assumed to be "reactionary" and "conservative" are very supportive of liberal immigration policies. I personally believe that the US is, and should continue to be a "nation of immigrants" - especially those coming from countries that we broke. Given that first world workers literally rioted in the streets over a very minor increase in fuel taxes[2], I am skeptical that any real reckoning of the costs and trade-offs involved would be acceptable to the US workforce. [1] http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Ralph_Nader_Immigration.htm http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Ralph_Nader_Immigration.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement
• hart_russell 8y ago
  Correlation is not causation. As another poster pointed out, wages are stagnant even though GDP has skyrocketed.
• jgalt212 8y ago
  > A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily Yes, that would be great for the workers, but not great for the companies who want a cheap and captive labor force and bribe the politicians to get their H1-B slots.