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I am sure anyone who work in STEM can attest: immigrants do a lot of the work. Look to your left and look to your right of your work desk, chances are there is

I am sure anyone who work in STEM can attest: immigrants do a lot of the work. Look to your left and look to your right of your work desk, chances are there is an immigrant in one of the directions you look. And yet many of those immigrants are on borrowed time. One layoff and they risk losing decades of their life and deported back home. That kind of treatment isn't fair. Especially when these are highly productive, extremely capable, and very educated demographics. They are the ideal and model citizens for any kind of country. Yet they are treated like disposables. What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years?

lotsofpulp 3y ago
They should be handed a permanent resident card with their doctorate. Maybe even Masters degrees, at least in STEM.
- sgc 3y ago
  Canada has an immigration system that prioritizes educated people who speak their languages. It is a much saner model.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    Proportionally they also take in 10x as many permanent residents each year. They also don't have per country limits.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    I'd interject here that America has no official national language, and I think it's prudent to keep it that way. In other words, language requirements are not something we should copy from Canadian immigration policy.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      If you can't communicate effectively in one of your host country's main languages, you're not going to be able to support yourself and survive.
      - koshergweilo 3y ago
        That's just not true. Ever been to San Diego? Little Saigon? Chinatown?
        midoridensha 3y ago
        Right, that's called "ghettoization". It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. You really think things will work out great if you bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants in one little part of a city? I guess it worked "ok" for America historically because America abused and exploited so many immigrants for so long (go read "The Jungle"), but I don't think that's really something to emulate.
        Terr_ 3y ago
        > Right, [San Diego / Little Saigon / Chinatown is] called "ghettoization". Just because a geographic concentration originated from forced-segregation policies over a century ago does not automatically mean those bad policies and pejorative status continues today. > It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. [...] exploited so many immigrants Hold up, I think the goalposts are moving a bit here: Earlier you said it was about "supporting themselves" economically. However now it sounds like no amount of economic-self-sufficiency is enough--you're saying those people ought to be blocked/deported unless they can satisfy some ill-defined requirement about where they live and who they socialize with. > bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants I am doubtful that millions of people who *checks comment-thread* have doctorate degrees and PhDs will be arriving to work for the rest of their lives in restaurants. If they do... well, then they're probably choosing it to escape something crappy enough that we should be letting them in for humanitarian reasons anyway.
  - tutorialmanager 3y ago
    The US prioritises an ability to swim through a river, climb a small fence, and/or trudge across some desert.
    - Clent 3y ago
      Most immigrants do not arrive via the southern border.
      - fakedang 3y ago
        The prioritized ones seem to.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      It started with surviving a cruise over ocean... So I don't think that is much different in that sense.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    It's much the same in Japan, though education, work experience, and salary count for more than the language.
- tomohelix 3y ago
  There was a bill like that where PhDs would be exempted from visa limits and such. But it was discarded because the House considered it would cost the US 1 billion dollars over 10 years. Don't know who or what kind of analysis they did to pull that 1 billion number. It just shows how inane and stupid the entire US immigration and laws are. Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-immigration-measure-removed-new-immigrant-visa-lawsuit-filed/?sh=613948d36166 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-i...
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    It's stupider than that. For some reasons they couldn't just add a processing fee to offset the cost.
  - tho2i34u23o432 3y ago
    Ironically, every PhD in the US costs nearly ~$1M in funding. People who graduate are stuck in a weird love-hate relationship. You can't hate it because of the generous funding; you can't not hate it because of the insane politics behind immigration that tied to all sorts of historical notions of racial supremacy and so on.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  Why not in anthropology? Why not in literature? Because those degrees are not "needed"? Not "useful"? Or are there too many US citizens with those degrees already? Curious. I believe highly trained individuals in any field should be welcome and treated with respect and equal opportunity. Almost every field supplement each other and the society in some war or the other. I'd urge everyone to look at the declining quality of teachers everywhere. And what it results in? Go figure.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    It makes sense that if the primary motivation for offering an easier route to immigration is to ease shortages in certain critical areas, the route should only be offered to those areas. So, yes, if there are enough citizens and permanent residents meeting the current requirements and enough in school to meet projected demand, there's no need to offer a faster route in those fields.
  - remarkEon 3y ago
    They are not useful, sorry. They are vanity professions. All of the anthropologists in the United States could be abducted by aliens from Alpha Centauri tonight and we wouldn’t notice a difference in the morning. If all of the semiconductor professionals disappeared in the same manner we’d have serious problems. I’ve got nothing against anthropology as a field or anthropologists themselves, but they wouldn’t even show up on the tech tree. You don’t need a PhD to be a school teacher and, frankly, we would be a lot better off if instruction was done by practitioners instead.
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  Yeah, I mean, then you'll see even more master mills (which are already a thing) and PHD mills.
soligern 3y ago
It’s not just that, immigrants are massive job creators. Out of the top 500 billion+ dollar unicorns in the US, 51% were started with by an immigrant. 66 of those 500 companies had atleast one Indian cofounder.
- CodeSgt 3y ago
  Wow! I wonder what the reason behind this is?
  - Thorrez 3y ago
    People who are really motivated to start a company are also really motivated to move to the best place to do it.
nitwit005 3y ago
Because the consequence of filling every labor gap with immigrants is to suppress everyone's wages. You're increasing the supply. And if it really is a critical industry, being dependant on available foreign labor is quite the risk. There's not really any guarantee they'll want to keep moving here.
- reverius42 3y ago
  Ok, then give them citizenship so they’re not foreign anymore. And besides, I thought we were facing a problematic population decline?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - probelm 3y ago
    [dead]
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      That's not the reason population decline is a big problem. The real reasons are: 1) social systems can't handle it. You can't have a pension system where more retired people are drawing from it than young workers paying into it. It won't mathematically work. 2) a society with an aging population (where most of the people are old) is usually a society in decline. In a democratic society, it has the big problem where all the old people vote for their own interests, and don't know or don't care about young peoples' interests. So you get laws and policies which basically penalize not being old, plus you get old leadership that can't adapt to modern conditions. Elon and Xitter suck, I agree, but that really has nothing to do with why an inverted population pyramid is so problematic. As for Xitter, that (and his idiotic behavior there) wouldn't be a problem if everyone just stopped using it, and let it wither away and die.
      - probelm 3y ago
        So we change the social system. “What!! Impossible!!” Yet in the US we do not identify as British, don’t speak Latin, and <50% believe in god now, down from 80% around 2000, Ai/Ml are threatening copyright regimes, wfh/abandonment of obligation to prop up the war era normalization of industrialization of everything to crank out tanks, and canned food… Your problem is solving itself. It’s just one of those problems that takes time; which is a euphemism for generational churn Google “French debt restructuring”. Google Reaganomics looting pensions to deflate the… erm… exiting generation to invest in the kids There’s plenty of historical examples where humans rethink the social contract without violence
tho2i34u23o432 3y ago
[flagged]
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Correct, perhaps it's why racial grievance is pushed so much in the US, to avoid the collective lower and middle classes from forming a consciousness against exploitation.
  - tho2i34u23o432 3y ago
    [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jayd16 3y ago
> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Protectionism of course. The fear is that companies are looking for cheaper foreign labor. Ironically, when allowing some visas with many strings you end up with indentured servants that push labor prices down, not up. A train of thought is that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, only employers unwilling to pay for labor. Of course it's all very complicated. Attracting top talent is also good. It's not easy to know what the perfect policy is but there are lots of arguments to sort through.
- dudus 3y ago
  And yet there are plenty of companies that openly exploit the visa system to bring cheap labor. Just check the top companies with the most H1Bs and you'll see a lot of consulting firms.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    I remember when I was just out of college looking at jobs. I forget which H1B consulting farm it was that emailed me(a citizen), but they were advertising a "Full-time salary job" doing software engineering in NYC, $39k/year. Yea...no shit they won't get any takers and will use that as evidence to hire H1Bs.
throaway_943265 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pid-1 3y ago
> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years? Those folks don't vote nor have enough money to create significant lobbies.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

They should be handed a permanent resident card with their doctorate. Maybe even Masters degrees, at least in STEM.

sgc 3y ago
Canada has an immigration system that prioritizes educated people who speak their languages. It is a much saner model.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  Proportionally they also take in 10x as many permanent residents each year. They also don't have per country limits.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I'd interject here that America has no official national language, and I think it's prudent to keep it that way. In other words, language requirements are not something we should copy from Canadian immigration policy.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    If you can't communicate effectively in one of your host country's main languages, you're not going to be able to support yourself and survive.
    - koshergweilo 3y ago
      That's just not true. Ever been to San Diego? Little Saigon? Chinatown?
      - midoridensha 3y ago
        Right, that's called "ghettoization". It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. You really think things will work out great if you bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants in one little part of a city? I guess it worked "ok" for America historically because America abused and exploited so many immigrants for so long (go read "The Jungle"), but I don't think that's really something to emulate.
        Terr_ 3y ago
        > Right, [San Diego / Little Saigon / Chinatown is] called "ghettoization". Just because a geographic concentration originated from forced-segregation policies over a century ago does not automatically mean those bad policies and pejorative status continues today. > It's not really a good recipe for a safe, prosperous nation. [...] exploited so many immigrants Hold up, I think the goalposts are moving a bit here: Earlier you said it was about "supporting themselves" economically. However now it sounds like no amount of economic-self-sufficiency is enough--you're saying those people ought to be blocked/deported unless they can satisfy some ill-defined requirement about where they live and who they socialize with. > bring in millions of people and all they can do is work as exploited workers in restaurants I am doubtful that millions of people who *checks comment-thread* have doctorate degrees and PhDs will be arriving to work for the rest of their lives in restaurants. If they do... well, then they're probably choosing it to escape something crappy enough that we should be letting them in for humanitarian reasons anyway.
- tutorialmanager 3y ago
  The US prioritises an ability to swim through a river, climb a small fence, and/or trudge across some desert.
  - Clent 3y ago
    Most immigrants do not arrive via the southern border.
    - fakedang 3y ago
      The prioritized ones seem to.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    It started with surviving a cruise over ocean... So I don't think that is much different in that sense.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  It's much the same in Japan, though education, work experience, and salary count for more than the language.
tomohelix 3y ago
There was a bill like that where PhDs would be exempted from visa limits and such. But it was discarded because the House considered it would cost the US 1 billion dollars over 10 years. Don't know who or what kind of analysis they did to pull that 1 billion number. It just shows how inane and stupid the entire US immigration and laws are. Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-immigration-measure-removed-new-immigrant-visa-lawsuit-filed/?sh=613948d36166 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/14/phd-i...
- HWR_14 3y ago
  It's stupider than that. For some reasons they couldn't just add a processing fee to offset the cost.
- tho2i34u23o432 3y ago
  Ironically, every PhD in the US costs nearly ~$1M in funding. People who graduate are stuck in a weird love-hate relationship. You can't hate it because of the generous funding; you can't not hate it because of the insane politics behind immigration that tied to all sorts of historical notions of racial supremacy and so on.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
Why not in anthropology? Why not in literature? Because those degrees are not "needed"? Not "useful"? Or are there too many US citizens with those degrees already? Curious. I believe highly trained individuals in any field should be welcome and treated with respect and equal opportunity. Almost every field supplement each other and the society in some war or the other. I'd urge everyone to look at the declining quality of teachers everywhere. And what it results in? Go figure.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  It makes sense that if the primary motivation for offering an easier route to immigration is to ease shortages in certain critical areas, the route should only be offered to those areas. So, yes, if there are enough citizens and permanent residents meeting the current requirements and enough in school to meet projected demand, there's no need to offer a faster route in those fields.
- remarkEon 3y ago
  They are not useful, sorry. They are vanity professions. All of the anthropologists in the United States could be abducted by aliens from Alpha Centauri tonight and we wouldn’t notice a difference in the morning. If all of the semiconductor professionals disappeared in the same manner we’d have serious problems. I’ve got nothing against anthropology as a field or anthropologists themselves, but they wouldn’t even show up on the tech tree. You don’t need a PhD to be a school teacher and, frankly, we would be a lot better off if instruction was done by practitioners instead.
thatfrenchguy 3y ago
Yeah, I mean, then you'll see even more master mills (which are already a thing) and PHD mills.

soligern 3y ago

It’s not just that, immigrants are massive job creators. Out of the top 500 billion+ dollar unicorns in the US, 51% were started with by an immigrant. 66 of those 500 companies had atleast one Indian cofounder.

CodeSgt 3y ago
Wow! I wonder what the reason behind this is?
- Thorrez 3y ago
  People who are really motivated to start a company are also really motivated to move to the best place to do it.

nitwit005 3y ago

Because the consequence of filling every labor gap with immigrants is to suppress everyone's wages. You're increasing the supply. And if it really is a critical industry, being dependant on available foreign labor is quite the risk. There's not really any guarantee they'll want to keep moving here.

reverius42 3y ago
Ok, then give them citizenship so they’re not foreign anymore. And besides, I thought we were facing a problematic population decline?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- probelm 3y ago
  [dead]
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    That's not the reason population decline is a big problem. The real reasons are: 1) social systems can't handle it. You can't have a pension system where more retired people are drawing from it than young workers paying into it. It won't mathematically work. 2) a society with an aging population (where most of the people are old) is usually a society in decline. In a democratic society, it has the big problem where all the old people vote for their own interests, and don't know or don't care about young peoples' interests. So you get laws and policies which basically penalize not being old, plus you get old leadership that can't adapt to modern conditions. Elon and Xitter suck, I agree, but that really has nothing to do with why an inverted population pyramid is so problematic. As for Xitter, that (and his idiotic behavior there) wouldn't be a problem if everyone just stopped using it, and let it wither away and die.
    - probelm 3y ago
      So we change the social system. “What!! Impossible!!” Yet in the US we do not identify as British, don’t speak Latin, and <50% believe in god now, down from 80% around 2000, Ai/Ml are threatening copyright regimes, wfh/abandonment of obligation to prop up the war era normalization of industrialization of everything to crank out tanks, and canned food… Your problem is solving itself. It’s just one of those problems that takes time; which is a euphemism for generational churn Google “French debt restructuring”. Google Reaganomics looting pensions to deflate the… erm… exiting generation to invest in the kids There’s plenty of historical examples where humans rethink the social contract without violence

tho2i34u23o432 3y ago

[flagged]

atleastoptimal 3y ago
Correct, perhaps it's why racial grievance is pushed so much in the US, to avoid the collective lower and middle classes from forming a consciousness against exploitation.
- tho2i34u23o432 3y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jayd16 3y ago

> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Protectionism of course. The fear is that companies are looking for cheaper foreign labor. Ironically, when allowing some visas with many strings you end up with indentured servants that push labor prices down, not up. A train of thought is that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, only employers unwilling to pay for labor. Of course it's all very complicated. Attracting top talent is also good. It's not easy to know what the perfect policy is but there are lots of arguments to sort through.

dudus 3y ago
And yet there are plenty of companies that openly exploit the visa system to bring cheap labor. Just check the top companies with the most H1Bs and you'll see a lot of consulting firms.
- delfinom 3y ago
  I remember when I was just out of college looking at jobs. I forget which H1B consulting farm it was that emailed me(a citizen), but they were advertising a "Full-time salary job" doing software engineering in NYC, $39k/year. Yea...no shit they won't get any takers and will use that as evidence to hire H1Bs.

throaway_943265 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pid-1 3y ago

> What reasons are there to decline a visa to a PhD employed in a critical industry? Because they were born in a country with a visa backlog of 10 years? Those folks don't vote nor have enough money to create significant lobbies.