7 ms·

David Bier needs to talk to American workers who have been displaced by Infosys or TCS. His ivory tower view sounds great in academia papers, but my experience

by jmpman 6y ago

David Bier needs to talk to American workers who have been displaced by Infosys or TCS. His ivory tower view sounds great in academia papers, but my experience says that the system isn’t considering US citizens like it’s supposed to.

davidw 6y ago
The US has done just fine by itself by welcoming immigrants. How many Fortune 500 companies were founded by them or their children? You can't know ahead of time which ones will go on to be successful, or maybe have a kid who is. The solution to people in the US going through tough times is to help them directly, not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU.
- linksnapzz 6y ago
  By that logic, it is imperative to bring in all seven billion humans not currently inside the US. We don't know which of those seven billion might suddenly start a Fortune 500 company ex nihilo where we can't take advantage of it. I volunteer your neighborhood to host the first 500,000; do you have a pull-out bed or a few spare cots we can use?
  - esoterica 6y ago
    You know immigrants pay rent and buy houses just like everyone else right? The government doesn't force people to host them in their bedrooms.
    - linksnapzz 6y ago
      A substantial % of the maximum number of immigrants ppl. want to let in can't afford the median rent in my area, unless they are staying at 2-3x the occupancy of a listed apartment. Landlords will undoubtedly turn a blind eye to this, as the rent money is in their hands today, and the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc. not met by the increasing population is a bill due in the abstract future. As for the ones who can afford their own houses, I think the market for real estate has increased here at at least 3x the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, we certainly don't need more buyers.
      - esoterica 6y ago
        > A substantial % of the maximum number of immigrants ppl. want to let in can't afford the median rent in my area, unless they are staying at 2-3x the occupancy of a listed apartment. The legal minimum H-1B salary is substantially higher than the median American salary, and of course, the average salary is in turn higher than the legal minimum. They are better equipped to afford the median rent than the average resident of your area. > the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc Are you under the impression that immigrants don't pay taxes or something? Skilled immigrants are higher income than average and pay far, far more into the system than they take out of it.
        linksnapzz 6y ago
        davidw didn't say H1-Bs. He said "immigrants". But, since you bring it up... The legal minimum H1-B salary is based on 'prevailing wage' standards, of which there are many to choose from. Sufficiently so, such that one employer I know was hiring PhD statisticians with 20 years of experience in bioinformatics for 90K/yr. In downtown Cambridge, a block from MIT. Doesn't that sound like a princely salary for today's senior scientist with a family in Massachusetts to support? Maybe they'll throw in a gym membership at Planet Fitness. Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story.
        esoterica 6y ago
        > Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story. The median American worker makes something like 30k+/year. So yes, the person making $90k is paying far more into the system than they take out, even if you account for the fact that the current system is not quite fully funded. Skilled immigrants are also less likely to be on disability, be unemployed, end up in prison, etc, or otherwise end up in a position where they are extracting more resources than they put in.
- randompwd 6y ago
  > not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU. Opening offices in Canada and EU directly correlates to the sales of their products and services in those markets. Not quite sure what your point is. Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of US workers(~330 million) is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength. No skills in use that can't be learnt/trained.
  - davidw 6y ago
    > Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of workers is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength. Except that this is a myopic view of the economy as a zero-sum game that is not supported by actual... well, evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent-going-take-job https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent... The point about Canada and the EU is that companies can and will move operations to places with more liberal immigration systems. Taxes, innovation and many other benefits will accrue to those places, rather than the US.
  - conanbatt 6y ago
    If a software engineer is hired by a US firm, or his products purchased by Americans, do you want that engineer to be in the US or outside the US?
bobdole12345 6y ago
So, make those folks who are good enough to work and pay taxes in the US into citizens? No longer a problem, unless the problem was really that they're not "american" enough all along?
- jmpman 6y ago
  My view is that the system should be beneficial to American citizens. If that means that US companies are unable to hire US citizens because of a lack of capable applicants, then bring in people from outside the US to perform that work. But, notice that the premise is that the skills aren’t available in the US. That means that there should be more funding for US scholarships in whatever field is demanding these immigrants. I think there should be a tax on the immigrants, which is used to fund education for US citizens to perform this work. Once the US citizen graduates, their salary demands will be less than the immigrants salary + tax. In an efficient system, the company would replace the immigrant with the US citizen. It will result in free college for US citizens who want to pursue job fields in high demand, which is what we really want to happen. The problem is that they’re not “American”, and my politicians shouldn’t be making laws to put its citizens at a disadvantage when they could be making laws that help pull up lower socioeconomic Americans to participate in these higher paying jobs. Once these immigrants become citizens, they’re as “American” as me.
  - bobdole12345 6y ago
    So, you understand that there are hundreds of thousands of people who have good paying jobs, who wait decades to become citizens right? That whole time they're paying taxes like a citizen, but without most of the rights and benefits, and no representation. So, there's a whole pile of people that your government is effectively disenfranchising, and harassing with this kind of activity. And it's disproportionally towards folks who have brown skin. Oh wait, it's racism, and this is working as intended.
    - jmpman 6y ago
      They can choose to come here or not. They can stay in their current country, get paid, vote, build a life. Why does America owe them anything?
shuckles 6y ago
Can you tell me more about these American workers being displaced by IT consulting shops?
- jfim 6y ago
  It was in the news a few years ago. Here's an example that was in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
  - shuckles 6y ago
    That article describes a violation of the terms of an H1-B visa which could be pursued by the executive without scrapping the program entirely. Why has the administration decided to proceed with the latter instead of the former?
    - newfriend 6y ago
      Because they want to? Why do they have to do what you want them to do? They are free to scrap the entire thing if they so choose. H1-B has been massively abused for decades. Any attempt to reign this in should be welcomed by American workers, who are the ones this abuse affects most.
      - xxpor 6y ago
        You're making the normative assumption that Americans are entitled to these jobs more than anyone else. You're also making the economic assumption that Americans are a perfect substitute and this is at worst a net 0 loss for the economy. I think neither is true.
        jmeister 6y ago
        > Americans.. more than anyone else You must have missed what happened in 2016
esoterica 6y ago
And how many American workers work for companies founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants? Or work on projects and inventions that are the brainchild of immigrants? The job market is not a zero sum game. The US has 5% of the world population but is responsible for a very disproportionate amount of the world's technological output because it attracts a disproportionate fraction of inventors and engineers from all over the world. Why do you think the most immigrant rich cities in America like SF and NYC also have the highest incomes? If immigrants drove wages down and stole jobs from Americans, you would expect places like rural West Virginia to have higher incomes than SF. Spoiler: they don't. If you have 1 million jobs held by Americans and 1 million jobs held by immigrants, and you kick out the 1 million immigrants, you do not get 2 million jobs held by Americans. You get 500k jobs held by Americans and 1.5 million extra jobs in China, India, the EU, and other any other regions that are less keen on punching themselves in the face with self-destructive industrial policy.
m0zg 6y ago
He's not going to: CATO is the Koch Brothers think tank. It used to be called the Koch Foundation. It's in their interest to have as cheap a labor force as possible. They're in favor of unlimited unskilled labor from Mexico as well, US working poor be damned. Why anyone would carry water for them on this site is a mystery to me.
jedberg 6y ago
The people who are being displaced are victims of companies violating the rules of the H1-B. Instead of scraping the program, they should increase the funding so they can step up enforcement. Used property, the H1-B program brings in new talent and contributes positively to the American economy through both innovation and actual tax payments by the immigrants who can't even get all the benefits their taxes pay for (making them greater net contributors than US citizens).
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  They're violating the intent of the rules of the H1-B, but it's not clear that they're violating the actual rules. If you're a software company who: * builds a bad work culture * hires all candidates who pass the coding interview * sets interview standards that require more than just local applicants to reach your staffing needs it can easily be true both that you've never rejected a qualified US citizen and that you're deliberately seeking to hire H1-Bs.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > They're violating the intent of the rules of the H1-B I think they are violating the public justification more than the actual intent.
  - rmk 6y ago
    * hires all candidates who pass the coding interview I agree on this one in particular. It is quite transparently a process that has morphed into a way to reject older candidates. The older you are (relative to a fresh college graduate), the harder it becomes to jump through the various algorithmic hoops (even if you studied Computer Science in college). That's exactly what the majority of the large tech companies want --- hire large numbers of folks who have no life outside of work so that they can work them more / pay them less. You can always claim 'but he/she did not make the cut' and appear impartial, while selecting for young kids just out of school. It would have been interesting to see how this would have affected fall hiring, but for the confounding effect of the recession.

by jmpman 6y ago

davidw 6y ago

The US has done just fine by itself by welcoming immigrants. How many Fortune 500 companies were founded by them or their children? You can't know ahead of time which ones will go on to be successful, or maybe have a kid who is. The solution to people in the US going through tough times is to help them directly, not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU.

linksnapzz 6y ago
By that logic, it is imperative to bring in all seven billion humans not currently inside the US. We don't know which of those seven billion might suddenly start a Fortune 500 company ex nihilo where we can't take advantage of it. I volunteer your neighborhood to host the first 500,000; do you have a pull-out bed or a few spare cots we can use?
- esoterica 6y ago
  You know immigrants pay rent and buy houses just like everyone else right? The government doesn't force people to host them in their bedrooms.
  - linksnapzz 6y ago
    A substantial % of the maximum number of immigrants ppl. want to let in can't afford the median rent in my area, unless they are staying at 2-3x the occupancy of a listed apartment. Landlords will undoubtedly turn a blind eye to this, as the rent money is in their hands today, and the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc. not met by the increasing population is a bill due in the abstract future. As for the ones who can afford their own houses, I think the market for real estate has increased here at at least 3x the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, we certainly don't need more buyers.
    - esoterica 6y ago
      > A substantial % of the maximum number of immigrants ppl. want to let in can't afford the median rent in my area, unless they are staying at 2-3x the occupancy of a listed apartment. The legal minimum H-1B salary is substantially higher than the median American salary, and of course, the average salary is in turn higher than the legal minimum. They are better equipped to afford the median rent than the average resident of your area. > the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc Are you under the impression that immigrants don't pay taxes or something? Skilled immigrants are higher income than average and pay far, far more into the system than they take out of it.
      - linksnapzz 6y ago
        davidw didn't say H1-Bs. He said "immigrants". But, since you bring it up... The legal minimum H1-B salary is based on 'prevailing wage' standards, of which there are many to choose from. Sufficiently so, such that one employer I know was hiring PhD statisticians with 20 years of experience in bioinformatics for 90K/yr. In downtown Cambridge, a block from MIT. Doesn't that sound like a princely salary for today's senior scientist with a family in Massachusetts to support? Maybe they'll throw in a gym membership at Planet Fitness. Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story.
        esoterica 6y ago
        > Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story. The median American worker makes something like 30k+/year. So yes, the person making $90k is paying far more into the system than they take out, even if you account for the fact that the current system is not quite fully funded. Skilled immigrants are also less likely to be on disability, be unemployed, end up in prison, etc, or otherwise end up in a position where they are extracting more resources than they put in.
randompwd 6y ago
> not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU. Opening offices in Canada and EU directly correlates to the sales of their products and services in those markets. Not quite sure what your point is. Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of US workers(~330 million) is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength. No skills in use that can't be learnt/trained.
- davidw 6y ago
  > Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of workers is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength. Except that this is a myopic view of the economy as a zero-sum game that is not supported by actual... well, evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent-going-take-job https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent... The point about Canada and the EU is that companies can and will move operations to places with more liberal immigration systems. Taxes, innovation and many other benefits will accrue to those places, rather than the US.
- conanbatt 6y ago
  If a software engineer is hired by a US firm, or his products purchased by Americans, do you want that engineer to be in the US or outside the US?

bobdole12345 6y ago

So, make those folks who are good enough to work and pay taxes in the US into citizens? No longer a problem, unless the problem was really that they're not "american" enough all along?

jmpman 6y ago
My view is that the system should be beneficial to American citizens. If that means that US companies are unable to hire US citizens because of a lack of capable applicants, then bring in people from outside the US to perform that work. But, notice that the premise is that the skills aren’t available in the US. That means that there should be more funding for US scholarships in whatever field is demanding these immigrants. I think there should be a tax on the immigrants, which is used to fund education for US citizens to perform this work. Once the US citizen graduates, their salary demands will be less than the immigrants salary + tax. In an efficient system, the company would replace the immigrant with the US citizen. It will result in free college for US citizens who want to pursue job fields in high demand, which is what we really want to happen. The problem is that they’re not “American”, and my politicians shouldn’t be making laws to put its citizens at a disadvantage when they could be making laws that help pull up lower socioeconomic Americans to participate in these higher paying jobs. Once these immigrants become citizens, they’re as “American” as me.
- bobdole12345 6y ago
  So, you understand that there are hundreds of thousands of people who have good paying jobs, who wait decades to become citizens right? That whole time they're paying taxes like a citizen, but without most of the rights and benefits, and no representation. So, there's a whole pile of people that your government is effectively disenfranchising, and harassing with this kind of activity. And it's disproportionally towards folks who have brown skin. Oh wait, it's racism, and this is working as intended.
  - jmpman 6y ago
    They can choose to come here or not. They can stay in their current country, get paid, vote, build a life. Why does America owe them anything?

shuckles 6y ago

Can you tell me more about these American workers being displaced by IT consulting shops?

jfim 6y ago
It was in the news a few years ago. Here's an example that was in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
- shuckles 6y ago
  That article describes a violation of the terms of an H1-B visa which could be pursued by the executive without scrapping the program entirely. Why has the administration decided to proceed with the latter instead of the former?
  - newfriend 6y ago
    Because they want to? Why do they have to do what you want them to do? They are free to scrap the entire thing if they so choose. H1-B has been massively abused for decades. Any attempt to reign this in should be welcomed by American workers, who are the ones this abuse affects most.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      You're making the normative assumption that Americans are entitled to these jobs more than anyone else. You're also making the economic assumption that Americans are a perfect substitute and this is at worst a net 0 loss for the economy. I think neither is true.
      - jmeister 6y ago
        > Americans.. more than anyone else You must have missed what happened in 2016

esoterica 6y ago

And how many American workers work for companies founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants? Or work on projects and inventions that are the brainchild of immigrants? The job market is not a zero sum game. The US has 5% of the world population but is responsible for a very disproportionate amount of the world's technological output because it attracts a disproportionate fraction of inventors and engineers from all over the world. Why do you think the most immigrant rich cities in America like SF and NYC also have the highest incomes? If immigrants drove wages down and stole jobs from Americans, you would expect places like rural West Virginia to have higher incomes than SF. Spoiler: they don't. If you have 1 million jobs held by Americans and 1 million jobs held by immigrants, and you kick out the 1 million immigrants, you do not get 2 million jobs held by Americans. You get 500k jobs held by Americans and 1.5 million extra jobs in China, India, the EU, and other any other regions that are less keen on punching themselves in the face with self-destructive industrial policy.

m0zg 6y ago

He's not going to: CATO is the Koch Brothers think tank. It used to be called the Koch Foundation. It's in their interest to have as cheap a labor force as possible. They're in favor of unlimited unskilled labor from Mexico as well, US working poor be damned. Why anyone would carry water for them on this site is a mystery to me.

jedberg 6y ago

The people who are being displaced are victims of companies violating the rules of the H1-B. Instead of scraping the program, they should increase the funding so they can step up enforcement. Used property, the H1-B program brings in new talent and contributes positively to the American economy through both innovation and actual tax payments by the immigrants who can't even get all the benefits their taxes pay for (making them greater net contributors than US citizens).

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
They're violating the intent of the rules of the H1-B, but it's not clear that they're violating the actual rules. If you're a software company who: * builds a bad work culture * hires all candidates who pass the coding interview * sets interview standards that require more than just local applicants to reach your staffing needs it can easily be true both that you've never rejected a qualified US citizen and that you're deliberately seeking to hire H1-Bs.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > They're violating the intent of the rules of the H1-B I think they are violating the public justification more than the actual intent.
- rmk 6y ago
  * hires all candidates who pass the coding interview I agree on this one in particular. It is quite transparently a process that has morphed into a way to reject older candidates. The older you are (relative to a fresh college graduate), the harder it becomes to jump through the various algorithmic hoops (even if you studied Computer Science in college). That's exactly what the majority of the large tech companies want --- hire large numbers of folks who have no life outside of work so that they can work them more / pay them less. You can always claim 'but he/she did not make the cut' and appear impartial, while selecting for young kids just out of school. It would have been interesting to see how this would have affected fall hiring, but for the confounding effect of the recession.