> At the scale Facebook operates at and the number of employees they hire it makes a huge material advantage for them to hire cheaper foreigners for the same ta

> At the scale Facebook operates at and the number of employees they hire it makes a huge material advantage for them to hire cheaper foreigners for the same task. It is rational behavior. Foreigners are always cheaper for the same task at hand. In this case though the foreign workers are getting green cards that make it much easier for them to work somewhere else. > The only way to eliminate foreigners undercutting American salaries is to eliminate the foreign labor supply competition. Isn't this the 'lump of labor' fallacy? Immigration also creates demand in the countries immigrants move to. The evidence seems to be fairly clear that it doesn't depress wages on average: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-wages https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red... > STEM jobs are the ones foreigners can compete in and depress the salaries of Americans in SV. The jobs that are not at as much risk are the ones that require command of the culture and language and the lay of the land like enterprise sales and marketing functions. Yet it's these same SV engineering jobs that have seen enormous wage increases over the past decade. I do think there is potential for restrictive immigration schemes to depress wages by making it hard for people on those schemes to change jobs. That was certainly my experience on a cap-exempt academic H1B where I was ineligible to transfer to a commercial employer as cap-subject H1B employees are allowed to do. The solution to that is to make sure such immigrants get green cards relatively quickly so they can't be exploited by employers.