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Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people

Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.

nrmitchi 6y ago
I'm not an American, but I fully understand your point. Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies. The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please". It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at. At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high. After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October. It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone. It is not _easy_ to get an H1B. If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  > then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process. Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    You're right. My initial comment that spawned this thread addressed exactly this. I'm copying it here for reference, because it is pretty high up the thread at this point: """ I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status. If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it. """
- addicted 6y ago
  If that is the case isn't the simple solution to eliminate the mechanisms that allow employers to threaten the employees instead of increasing the burden on the employee and therefore the power the employer has on them? Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. That was the point that I made at the very top of this thread.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    It is. But people will make the (disingenuous) argument that you can transfer the H-1B to another employer... The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending. But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special. It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.
addicted 6y ago
Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules. I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.
- aksss 6y ago
  Canada has more restrictive immigration policies than the US.
  - sg47 6y ago
    For the kinds of jobs being moved, their merit-based points system grants permanent residency immediately and citizenship in 3 years. In the US, if you are from India, you can find yourself waiting for up to 20 years of indentured labor to get your green card.
    - aksss 6y ago
      Yeah, getting through a merit-based point system being the key. Perhaps US should adopt an immigration-on-merit system?
tylerhou 6y ago
> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services. One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.) More reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_borders_a_gimmick_not_a_solution_or_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b... https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_left_case_against_open_borders/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
- jb775 6y ago
  I think this is true when we're talking about a large number of immigrants in general, where a significant percentage of them don't have advanced skills (akin to any large sample-size of humans). The dynamic changes entirely when the sample size is comprised mostly of immigrants with advanced skills. If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    I have a couple things wrong with this statement. 1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument. 2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1. 3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens. Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.
umanwizard 6y ago
> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries. Why?
handydandy 6y ago
I've read study that shows automation has a much more significant impact on the job loss than immigrants.
bluedino 6y ago
I wish my fellow Americans would push themselves in training and schooling, and explore more opportunities
jupp0r 6y ago
> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.
- throw93 6y ago
  +1 I was never asked about my immigration status before me accepting the offer. I had interviewer training afterwards and there was no mention of immigration status in interviewer guidelines as well. This was 20000+ employee company. It doesn’t seem logical from company’s perspective to hire a direct employee who’s gonna be with them for many years, just on basis of their immigration status.
- hnaccy 6y ago
  I interviewed at a bay area tech firm and out of 30 candidates there were maybe 3-4 Americans including myself. I know multiple Americans who are good software developers with good credentials who would be qualified for that job and similar but never got them.
  - jupp0r 6y ago
    And they didn’t get them because companies are paying H1B workers lower wages? It seems to me that you are advocating for hiring less qualified candidates here.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  Most people in STEM outside of CS (including regular engineering) get a degree, never get a good first job (or any job at all in their field), and switch field entirely. An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...
- unishark 6y ago
  > How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.
teolandon 6y ago
Why the preference for Americans?
- kelnos 6y ago
  This is actually an insightful question (or at least has the potential to be one), and it's a shame it's being downvoted. Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs". There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region. Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
  - refurb 6y ago
    It’s only an insightful comment if you just discard the entire notion of a state and citizenship which most of the world has been structured around for the past several hundred years. Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
  - cyberdrunk 6y ago
    It's because you want the people who already live here and are your neighbours, your co-taxpayers, your co-voters to thrive. The alternative (lots of miserable and frustrated Americans) can lead to a shitty living environment even for those who are doing fine. Also, as the history has shown, such situation in extreme can lead to end of democracy.
Consultant32452 6y ago
The whole purpose of the H1B visa program, according to the economists who designed it, is to stifle wages of American workers. All the other stuff you hear about it is revisionist history. 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...
jzymbaluk 6y ago
Not at all. If you import workers, they might fill a slot for one job, but they are also consumers. They need food, and mattresses and haircuts and everything else it takes to live in America. Immigration helps fill the demand for talented workers, and bringing in those talented workers increases the demand for every other type of good and service.

Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.

nrmitchi 6y ago

I'm not an American, but I fully understand your point. Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies. The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please". It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at. At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high. After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October. It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone. It is not _easy_ to get an H1B. If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.

claudeganon 6y ago
> then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process. Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  You're right. My initial comment that spawned this thread addressed exactly this. I'm copying it here for reference, because it is pretty high up the thread at this point: """ I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status. If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it. """
addicted 6y ago
If that is the case isn't the simple solution to eliminate the mechanisms that allow employers to threaten the employees instead of increasing the burden on the employee and therefore the power the employer has on them? Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. That was the point that I made at the very top of this thread.
- labcomputer 6y ago
  It is. But people will make the (disingenuous) argument that you can transfer the H-1B to another employer... The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending. But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special. It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.

addicted 6y ago

Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules. I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.

aksss 6y ago
Canada has more restrictive immigration policies than the US.
- sg47 6y ago
  For the kinds of jobs being moved, their merit-based points system grants permanent residency immediately and citizenship in 3 years. In the US, if you are from India, you can find yourself waiting for up to 20 years of indentured labor to get your green card.
  - aksss 6y ago
    Yeah, getting through a merit-based point system being the key. Perhaps US should adopt an immigration-on-merit system?

tylerhou 6y ago

> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services. One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.) More reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_borders_a_gimmick_not_a_solution_or_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b... https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_left_case_against_open_borders/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

jb775 6y ago
I think this is true when we're talking about a large number of immigrants in general, where a significant percentage of them don't have advanced skills (akin to any large sample-size of humans). The dynamic changes entirely when the sample size is comprised mostly of immigrants with advanced skills. If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  I have a couple things wrong with this statement. 1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument. 2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1. 3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens. Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.

umanwizard 6y ago

> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries. Why?

handydandy 6y ago

I've read study that shows automation has a much more significant impact on the job loss than immigrants.

bluedino 6y ago

I wish my fellow Americans would push themselves in training and schooling, and explore more opportunities

jupp0r 6y ago

> As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.

throw93 6y ago
+1 I was never asked about my immigration status before me accepting the offer. I had interviewer training afterwards and there was no mention of immigration status in interviewer guidelines as well. This was 20000+ employee company. It doesn’t seem logical from company’s perspective to hire a direct employee who’s gonna be with them for many years, just on basis of their immigration status.
hnaccy 6y ago
I interviewed at a bay area tech firm and out of 30 candidates there were maybe 3-4 Americans including myself. I know multiple Americans who are good software developers with good credentials who would be qualified for that job and similar but never got them.
- jupp0r 6y ago
  And they didn’t get them because companies are paying H1B workers lower wages? It seems to me that you are advocating for hiring less qualified candidates here.
dasudasu 6y ago
Most people in STEM outside of CS (including regular engineering) get a degree, never get a good first job (or any job at all in their field), and switch field entirely. An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...
unishark 6y ago
> How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.

teolandon 6y ago

Why the preference for Americans?

kelnos 6y ago
This is actually an insightful question (or at least has the potential to be one), and it's a shame it's being downvoted. Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs". There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region. Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
- refurb 6y ago
  It’s only an insightful comment if you just discard the entire notion of a state and citizenship which most of the world has been structured around for the past several hundred years. Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  It's because you want the people who already live here and are your neighbours, your co-taxpayers, your co-voters to thrive. The alternative (lots of miserable and frustrated Americans) can lead to a shitty living environment even for those who are doing fine. Also, as the history has shown, such situation in extreme can lead to end of democracy.

Consultant32452 6y ago

The whole purpose of the H1B visa program, according to the economists who designed it, is to stifle wages of American workers. All the other stuff you hear about it is revisionist history. 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...

jzymbaluk 6y ago

Not at all. If you import workers, they might fill a slot for one job, but they are also consumers. They need food, and mattresses and haircuts and everything else it takes to live in America. Immigration helps fill the demand for talented workers, and bringing in those talented workers increases the demand for every other type of good and service.