5 ms·

Our immigration system seems like such an incredible squandering of human talent. So many people struggling to through complex bureaucracy just to winnow down t

Our immigration system seems like such an incredible squandering of human talent. So many people struggling to through complex bureaucracy just to winnow down the number of immigrants. I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come. Immigration is the US‘s main sources of national strength, yet we waste it.

hello_moto 3y ago
> If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come. Make sure your infrastructure can handle it. Make sure there's enough housing and regulations to handle it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  We did fine for a century without any of that.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Did we? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville > Hoovervilles served as a common ground for many different nationalities and ethnicities. Economic disparity in the United States during the 1930s was not limited to American born individuals. Migrant workers and immigrants greatly suffered from the lack of work and made up a large portion of the Hoovervilles across the country
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      Hoovervilles aren't a story of a lack of infrastructure, housing or regulation. They're the outcome of an economic depression. You're not going to anti-immigrate out of recessions or depressions. Modern immigration controls grew out of racist impulse. That's not all they are today. But many of them fail the Chesterton's fence test.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        All I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available. Otherwise the cost of rent skyrockets because demand outmatches supply. Similarly, when you have a lot of low-skilled labor coming in, the salaries for those jobs plummets / competition becomes tougher which pushes out locals. That all can combine to make the homeless problem and political problem worse (immigrants don't get to vote). Now high skilled labor, that's OK. The salaries are already sufficiently high that down-pressure because of immigrants isn't an issue - it's skilled labor so you should be upleveling your skills such that you're not competing with "common" skills that are shared by more people.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available This isn't the story of Hoovervilles! There was enough housing. People couldn't afford anything because there wasn't work. (I agree with your take on skilled and unskilled labour, broadly, though with significant caveats, given how little we understand about those labor markets. Skyrocketing housing is an explicit American policy choice. We could change it any time, but we prefer to be wealthier and the "feel" of our neighborhoods.)
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Not having enough work is what you’d have with an influx in unskilled labor. Again. I’m not trying to say that immigration will cause Hoovervilles or that it’ll cause a similar situation. You’re correct - the Great Depression was a very different situation. I’m just trying to bring an analogy of a situation with some of the same structural similarities. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s meant to highlight the risk of laissez faire immigration (which I’m generally more in favor of) coupled with poor planning / bad policies on the infrastructure side. I think we’re in agreement that there are structural risks at opening up the border in certain ways at the same time as we have a clearly bad housing situation and matching political crises.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    That was when we still built housing.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    A century largely without government provided social benefits and with minimal taxation. The local, state, and federal tax in 1910 was $380 per capita (adjusted for inflation!) compared to >$20,000 per capita today. Government revenue has increased from 7% of 500B in 1910, to 35% of 20 trillion in 2020 in inflation adjusted dollars. This means that real, inflation adjusted taxes have increased ~200X.
  - phd514 3y ago
    > We did fine for a century without any of that. Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation. I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >We did fine for a century without any of that. That's completely wrong. As phd514's comment accurately alludes, every single person who came through Ellis Island * was a legal immigrant * had passed a medical inspection * had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same * was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US. PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  I mean, nothing legally prevents Americans from moving from one state to another. States can’t close their border “until our infrastructure can handle it.”
jeremyjh 3y ago
You could have caps and still decide via market if you had to bid for salary you are willing to pay and the highest ones are accepted.
- davidw 3y ago
  > caps How do you get a number for that based on some version of reality though, and not an arbitrary, magic round number picked by some congressional committee?
medellin 3y ago
It is and it effects the families going through it as well. It took me a year to get back to normal productivity after the stress of my wife going through the process and it took her longer than that to start being able to sleep well again. The current system is a drain on the US workforce and intentionally dehumanizing
- mahidol 3y ago
  Not eliciting sympathy or anything - I've been in this country since the age of 12, but don't qualify for a green card since I turned 21 before my parents could get theirs. Even that's fine. I've been here for 14 years, I went to school here, I worked hard to get a job and be where I'm today. However, I got screwed on the H-1B lottery these last 3 years (when over 50% of the applications are fraud, what else can you say). I wake up every day to face the rather realistic prospect of leaving everything behind - my family, my girlfriend of 3-4 years (who happens to be from a different country herself), my pet dog, my entire social network, my professional career/network. I know I'm not entitled to being here, but I'm frightened at the prospect of returning to a country where I cannot speak the local language or understand the local working culture. I just don't know any other place in the world better than I know the United States. I love this country from the bottom of my heart for everything it's given me in my life, and it hurts to see that nothing has changed, and seems like nothing will. I've paid my taxes dutifully, and I'll be willing to give back in any way, shape or form. But I don't get to make that choice :')
  - amf12 3y ago
    I know someone like you who had to leave. It sucks. Hope it works out for you. I don't understand how people like you are ignored when politicians support DACA, and similar programs, for people are in exactly the same situation as you, but came here illegally. FWIW, I support those programs, but wish it included both legal and illegal immigrants.
throwntoday 3y ago
[dead]
davidw 3y ago
Immigration has always been a 'superpower' of the US that other countries struggled to keep up with. Having lots of hard working, talented people moving to your country benefits everyone.
- FredPret 3y ago
  US Immigration is fuelled by the immense drawcard of becoming an American, not by any great achievement in it’s immigration policies. You’d get much more & better candidates with a logical system. Source: I’m an immigrant. I ended up in Canada for unrelated reasons, but the system in Canada is much better. Tough, but fair, mostly transparent, and even kind in some ways. In the US it’s so byzantine by comparison.
  - davidw 3y ago
    Agree completely: the people coming here are the strength, whereas our janky system gets in the way of that.
  - manojlds 3y ago
    > drawcard of becoming an American Which is what the person you are replying to meant anyway.
- FpUser 3y ago
  Immigration to many other countries is not that much prettier
  - aeyes 3y ago
    In what way exactly? In most countries the only requirement is to have a work contract. No higher education, no rules that employers must show that they can't find local talent for the position, no limitations on the number of immigrants per year. I am an immigrant myself (not in the US), the only paper I needed was a work contract. After a year of working I got permanent residence with no further requirements attached, it's no longer tied to having a work contract.
munk-a 3y ago
I certainly brain-drained myself out of the US because moving to Canada was far far easier than trying to move myself to the US. I could afford to start the process, sure - and hire a lawyer to make things go smoothly... but instead I spent a total of about $500 and just self-filed some paperwork and I'm now a Canadian citizen. And, at the end of the day, I'm much happier with my current citizenship because the far reduced healthcare risk exposure and egalitarian working conditions are just much nicer to live in - there's still a significant wealth gap but wealth at least isn't glorified up here.
- spamlettuce 3y ago
  There is a reason that tech salaries in Canada are much less than the States.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Care to elaborate?
  - munk-a 3y ago
    Tech salaries in Canada are in line with other highly paid professionals - I make as much up here as a lawyer... it is true that I'm not looking at the 600k+options job postings you'd see in the SF bubble but I certainly make enough that daily costs aren't a stressor. Canada is probably about due for a major wage correction though - the PSAC strikes are a pretty good indicator that it's time to either seriously consider 32/hr weeks or starting to claw back corporate excess... that's sort of an international issue though.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Tech salaries in Canada are similar to tech salaries in US backwaters. My hypothesis is that the primary reason is there is some virtuous cycle of access to capital bringing more tech workers to California which cause more tech companies to be created, which suck in more workers from elsewhere, which increase capital availability and the number of new companies created. If immigration policy reduces the amount of workers that can be pulled in too severely, this will slowly grind to a halt.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
meroes 3y ago
My sister’s immigrating fiancé isn’t legally allowed to work leading up to the wedding or for several months after. It’s total nonsense. High skilled labor who’s not allowed to work for months while here indefinitely legally.
- zb1plus 3y ago
  Yep, it's absolute nonsense. I am a US citizen and this is one of the many reasons I am planning on moving overseas and renouncing my US citizenship. It just isn't worth the hassle of spending thousands of dollars and waiting over a year of her being in a limbo state to live in an unsafe and deeply flawed society when we can take our skills to other parts of the world. We need to go back to the days of Ellis island. Staple a green card to the back of the every diploma issued by a regionally accredited university in the US. Allow anybody with a special talent the US legitimately lacks a easy path to obtaining a work permit for themselves and their families, and partners of US citizens should be able to get a Green Card and work permit within 30 days of marriage.
  - meroes 3y ago
    Ya it's taken 2 years for the government's published estimate of 6-10 months. People can't plan lives around this, or only the increasingly wealthy can. Wish you the best of luck. There's nothing in the US worth having you can't get in other countries (and probably much easier).
willcipriano 3y ago
If we can't have a free enough market to do things like buy drugs from Canada at a tenth of the price, I see no reason to make it easy for corporations to import labor from abroad. Protectionism for me and a free market for thee.
- zb1plus 3y ago
  Free markets and free borders are the way. Border controls only serve the elites, I should be able to import whatever (within reason) I want from any country without interference.
  - greenfield1 3y ago
    Then say goodbye to all consumer protection regulations, safety standards, environmental rules, etc.
    - zb1plus 3y ago
      You can still regulate domestic vendors to prevent them from reselling products without disclosing they are noncompliant with safety standards or environmental rules (which you personally would face liability for the pollution caused by your usage of a noncompliant product) or other means of having the same effect as current regulations. Currently, we have people dying due to being unable to afford life saving medicine in the US due to its artificially high domestic cost.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come. Other than people banned from entry for personal reasons rather than numerical caps (crime, etc.), I agree, thet should have a free choice to come. Regulate quantity to mitigate impact via fees in place of caps (for the visa categories that currently have caps), with a share of the fees going to states and localities in proportion to the resident alien population settled there, with lower fees in the “higher preference” categories. And have a catch-all immigrant visa category (lowest preference/highest fee) for anyone not banned but not in any other immigrant category. (I’d probably also eliminate H-1B and several other visa categories entirely, because they would no longer be necessary.)
nerdchum 3y ago
Not a good take in my opinion. Why aren't other countries as desirable to immigrate as European countries, USA, Canada, and Australia? Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to? The same thing applies to neighborhoods which are sort of a microcosm of countries.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  > Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to? GDP? Imperialism which raided the rest of the globe's wealth?
  - nerdchum 3y ago
    Did they raid the wealth? Or did they show up and teach stone age countries how to use their resources?? Like they're still doing to this day.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
We have a gigantic amount of unrealized talent in the US who never get to utilize their full potential because it's cheaper to hire H1s who have already been trained than to invest in US citizens. I will never lament losing out on a few H1s here and there as long as US citizens continue to get the short end of the stick.
- onetimeusename 3y ago
  yes, in some sense US citizens are second-tier. Businesses want to lower salaries and universities want to charge higher fees. So US citizens miss out on higher salaries and placement at universities in their own country because we create this myth that we need to keep bringing in more immigrants to continue to thrive. There's no evidence given that diversity/immigration is our greatest strength either but you're not allowed to question it. There's plenty of evidence we and other countries do fine without it.
- petsormeat 3y ago
  If companies were truly desperate for developers, they'd strive to retain the older, experienced ones already in the business, who usually offer the benefit of uncomplicated legal status.

hello_moto 3y ago

> If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come. Make sure your infrastructure can handle it. Make sure there's enough housing and regulations to handle it.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
We did fine for a century without any of that.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Did we? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville > Hoovervilles served as a common ground for many different nationalities and ethnicities. Economic disparity in the United States during the 1930s was not limited to American born individuals. Migrant workers and immigrants greatly suffered from the lack of work and made up a large portion of the Hoovervilles across the country
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    Hoovervilles aren't a story of a lack of infrastructure, housing or regulation. They're the outcome of an economic depression. You're not going to anti-immigrate out of recessions or depressions. Modern immigration controls grew out of racist impulse. That's not all they are today. But many of them fail the Chesterton's fence test.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      All I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available. Otherwise the cost of rent skyrockets because demand outmatches supply. Similarly, when you have a lot of low-skilled labor coming in, the salaries for those jobs plummets / competition becomes tougher which pushes out locals. That all can combine to make the homeless problem and political problem worse (immigrants don't get to vote). Now high skilled labor, that's OK. The salaries are already sufficiently high that down-pressure because of immigrants isn't an issue - it's skilled labor so you should be upleveling your skills such that you're not competing with "common" skills that are shared by more people.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available This isn't the story of Hoovervilles! There was enough housing. People couldn't afford anything because there wasn't work. (I agree with your take on skilled and unskilled labour, broadly, though with significant caveats, given how little we understand about those labor markets. Skyrocketing housing is an explicit American policy choice. We could change it any time, but we prefer to be wealthier and the "feel" of our neighborhoods.)
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Not having enough work is what you’d have with an influx in unskilled labor. Again. I’m not trying to say that immigration will cause Hoovervilles or that it’ll cause a similar situation. You’re correct - the Great Depression was a very different situation. I’m just trying to bring an analogy of a situation with some of the same structural similarities. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s meant to highlight the risk of laissez faire immigration (which I’m generally more in favor of) coupled with poor planning / bad policies on the infrastructure side. I think we’re in agreement that there are structural risks at opening up the border in certain ways at the same time as we have a clearly bad housing situation and matching political crises.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  That was when we still built housing.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  A century largely without government provided social benefits and with minimal taxation. The local, state, and federal tax in 1910 was $380 per capita (adjusted for inflation!) compared to >$20,000 per capita today. Government revenue has increased from 7% of 500B in 1910, to 35% of 20 trillion in 2020 in inflation adjusted dollars. This means that real, inflation adjusted taxes have increased ~200X.
- phd514 3y ago
  > We did fine for a century without any of that. Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation. I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >We did fine for a century without any of that. That's completely wrong. As phd514's comment accurately alludes, every single person who came through Ellis Island * was a legal immigrant * had passed a medical inspection * had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same * was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US. PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.
tshaddox 3y ago
I mean, nothing legally prevents Americans from moving from one state to another. States can’t close their border “until our infrastructure can handle it.”

jeremyjh 3y ago

You could have caps and still decide via market if you had to bid for salary you are willing to pay and the highest ones are accepted.

davidw 3y ago
> caps How do you get a number for that based on some version of reality though, and not an arbitrary, magic round number picked by some congressional committee?

medellin 3y ago

It is and it effects the families going through it as well. It took me a year to get back to normal productivity after the stress of my wife going through the process and it took her longer than that to start being able to sleep well again. The current system is a drain on the US workforce and intentionally dehumanizing

mahidol 3y ago
Not eliciting sympathy or anything - I've been in this country since the age of 12, but don't qualify for a green card since I turned 21 before my parents could get theirs. Even that's fine. I've been here for 14 years, I went to school here, I worked hard to get a job and be where I'm today. However, I got screwed on the H-1B lottery these last 3 years (when over 50% of the applications are fraud, what else can you say). I wake up every day to face the rather realistic prospect of leaving everything behind - my family, my girlfriend of 3-4 years (who happens to be from a different country herself), my pet dog, my entire social network, my professional career/network. I know I'm not entitled to being here, but I'm frightened at the prospect of returning to a country where I cannot speak the local language or understand the local working culture. I just don't know any other place in the world better than I know the United States. I love this country from the bottom of my heart for everything it's given me in my life, and it hurts to see that nothing has changed, and seems like nothing will. I've paid my taxes dutifully, and I'll be willing to give back in any way, shape or form. But I don't get to make that choice :')
- amf12 3y ago
  I know someone like you who had to leave. It sucks. Hope it works out for you. I don't understand how people like you are ignored when politicians support DACA, and similar programs, for people are in exactly the same situation as you, but came here illegally. FWIW, I support those programs, but wish it included both legal and illegal immigrants.

throwntoday 3y ago

[dead]

davidw 3y ago

Immigration has always been a 'superpower' of the US that other countries struggled to keep up with. Having lots of hard working, talented people moving to your country benefits everyone.

FredPret 3y ago
US Immigration is fuelled by the immense drawcard of becoming an American, not by any great achievement in it’s immigration policies. You’d get much more & better candidates with a logical system. Source: I’m an immigrant. I ended up in Canada for unrelated reasons, but the system in Canada is much better. Tough, but fair, mostly transparent, and even kind in some ways. In the US it’s so byzantine by comparison.
- davidw 3y ago
  Agree completely: the people coming here are the strength, whereas our janky system gets in the way of that.
- manojlds 3y ago
  > drawcard of becoming an American Which is what the person you are replying to meant anyway.
FpUser 3y ago
Immigration to many other countries is not that much prettier
- aeyes 3y ago
  In what way exactly? In most countries the only requirement is to have a work contract. No higher education, no rules that employers must show that they can't find local talent for the position, no limitations on the number of immigrants per year. I am an immigrant myself (not in the US), the only paper I needed was a work contract. After a year of working I got permanent residence with no further requirements attached, it's no longer tied to having a work contract.

munk-a 3y ago

I certainly brain-drained myself out of the US because moving to Canada was far far easier than trying to move myself to the US. I could afford to start the process, sure - and hire a lawyer to make things go smoothly... but instead I spent a total of about $500 and just self-filed some paperwork and I'm now a Canadian citizen. And, at the end of the day, I'm much happier with my current citizenship because the far reduced healthcare risk exposure and egalitarian working conditions are just much nicer to live in - there's still a significant wealth gap but wealth at least isn't glorified up here.

spamlettuce 3y ago
There is a reason that tech salaries in Canada are much less than the States.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Care to elaborate?
- munk-a 3y ago
  Tech salaries in Canada are in line with other highly paid professionals - I make as much up here as a lawyer... it is true that I'm not looking at the 600k+options job postings you'd see in the SF bubble but I certainly make enough that daily costs aren't a stressor. Canada is probably about due for a major wage correction though - the PSAC strikes are a pretty good indicator that it's time to either seriously consider 32/hr weeks or starting to claw back corporate excess... that's sort of an international issue though.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  Tech salaries in Canada are similar to tech salaries in US backwaters. My hypothesis is that the primary reason is there is some virtuous cycle of access to capital bringing more tech workers to California which cause more tech companies to be created, which suck in more workers from elsewhere, which increase capital availability and the number of new companies created. If immigration policy reduces the amount of workers that can be pulled in too severely, this will slowly grind to a halt.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

meroes 3y ago

My sister’s immigrating fiancé isn’t legally allowed to work leading up to the wedding or for several months after. It’s total nonsense. High skilled labor who’s not allowed to work for months while here indefinitely legally.

zb1plus 3y ago
Yep, it's absolute nonsense. I am a US citizen and this is one of the many reasons I am planning on moving overseas and renouncing my US citizenship. It just isn't worth the hassle of spending thousands of dollars and waiting over a year of her being in a limbo state to live in an unsafe and deeply flawed society when we can take our skills to other parts of the world. We need to go back to the days of Ellis island. Staple a green card to the back of the every diploma issued by a regionally accredited university in the US. Allow anybody with a special talent the US legitimately lacks a easy path to obtaining a work permit for themselves and their families, and partners of US citizens should be able to get a Green Card and work permit within 30 days of marriage.
- meroes 3y ago
  Ya it's taken 2 years for the government's published estimate of 6-10 months. People can't plan lives around this, or only the increasingly wealthy can. Wish you the best of luck. There's nothing in the US worth having you can't get in other countries (and probably much easier).

willcipriano 3y ago

If we can't have a free enough market to do things like buy drugs from Canada at a tenth of the price, I see no reason to make it easy for corporations to import labor from abroad. Protectionism for me and a free market for thee.

zb1plus 3y ago
Free markets and free borders are the way. Border controls only serve the elites, I should be able to import whatever (within reason) I want from any country without interference.
- greenfield1 3y ago
  Then say goodbye to all consumer protection regulations, safety standards, environmental rules, etc.
  - zb1plus 3y ago
    You can still regulate domestic vendors to prevent them from reselling products without disclosing they are noncompliant with safety standards or environmental rules (which you personally would face liability for the pollution caused by your usage of a noncompliant product) or other means of having the same effect as current regulations. Currently, we have people dying due to being unable to afford life saving medicine in the US due to its artificially high domestic cost.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come. Other than people banned from entry for personal reasons rather than numerical caps (crime, etc.), I agree, thet should have a free choice to come. Regulate quantity to mitigate impact via fees in place of caps (for the visa categories that currently have caps), with a share of the fees going to states and localities in proportion to the resident alien population settled there, with lower fees in the “higher preference” categories. And have a catch-all immigrant visa category (lowest preference/highest fee) for anyone not banned but not in any other immigrant category. (I’d probably also eliminate H-1B and several other visa categories entirely, because they would no longer be necessary.)

nerdchum 3y ago

Not a good take in my opinion. Why aren't other countries as desirable to immigrate as European countries, USA, Canada, and Australia? Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to? The same thing applies to neighborhoods which are sort of a microcosm of countries.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
> Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to? GDP? Imperialism which raided the rest of the globe's wealth?
- nerdchum 3y ago
  Did they raid the wealth? Or did they show up and teach stone age countries how to use their resources?? Like they're still doing to this day.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

We have a gigantic amount of unrealized talent in the US who never get to utilize their full potential because it's cheaper to hire H1s who have already been trained than to invest in US citizens. I will never lament losing out on a few H1s here and there as long as US citizens continue to get the short end of the stick.

onetimeusename 3y ago
yes, in some sense US citizens are second-tier. Businesses want to lower salaries and universities want to charge higher fees. So US citizens miss out on higher salaries and placement at universities in their own country because we create this myth that we need to keep bringing in more immigrants to continue to thrive. There's no evidence given that diversity/immigration is our greatest strength either but you're not allowed to question it. There's plenty of evidence we and other countries do fine without it.
petsormeat 3y ago
If companies were truly desperate for developers, they'd strive to retain the older, experienced ones already in the business, who usually offer the benefit of uncomplicated legal status.