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In the skilled fields, the justification for immigration is the lack of qualified local workers. However when I look at women and minority participation in STEM
by jmpman 3y ago
In the skilled fields, the justification for immigration is the lack of qualified local workers. However when I look at women and minority participation in STEM fields, they’re highly underrepresented. So, there’s plenty of people who can be invested in, to fill these jobs, and our government fails to act. They could impose a huge tax on the H1B, and use that money to subsidize programming education. With the added tax, the H1Bs would not be as lucrative compared to domestic employees. By not implementing this type of system, it’s clear that our government isn’t trying to do anything but feed cheap labor to industry, which ultimately just drives up real estate prices in tech hubs. If H1Bs were taxed at 50%, Silicon Valley rental rates would plummet.
As for agriculture, again, we already have a system for temporary migrant workers, who should return to their home countries at the end of the farming season.
However there are jobs which US citizens would like, in the construction trades, which are currently paid too little due to the foreign labor. These foreign workers aren’t being vetted for the right to work in the US, and their employers continue to get away with this. Again, the government could enforce this, like is happening in Florida, but they opt against it. The people who are competing against these foreign laborers are typically US citizens with a HS degree or less, and over represented by the minority population.
- andromeduck 3y agoReal estate prices wouldn't be skyrocketing if local governments woud let the markets fulfil the demand for more housing. Harder stem jobs are largely being filled by foreign talent because american schools are underfunded because of low property taxes and american students would rather be influencers and activists than engineers but for the salaries afforded. Even in engineering, the lower level and more mathy/technical you go, the more it is dominated by immigrants, neurodivergents and those hailing from rurual or working class backgrounds. Math and programming are all topics that don't require much money to teach or to learn. There's no shortage of free and accessible resorucrs put there. There are many of us, from working class backgrounds and non tech parents, who picked up entire subjects entirely without instruction by just hanging out in a library because we had nothing better to do, nothing for us at home. I know a few people learned how to code by messing with game cheats, or just screwing around with JavaScript on library computers - all 60 minutes at a time bc w/ deep freeze and daily quotas. I personally picked up programming by from LYAH and stuff like geeks for geeks. Took a programming course in Gr 12 but our teacher was a contractor that basically just pointed you to a bunch of pre written lessons and auto graded problem sets while he worked a side gig all day.