9 ms·

This is very similar to an idea proposed by the late economist William Vickrey. He suggested having an auction for visas, and distributing the revenue generated

This is very similar to an idea proposed by the late economist William Vickrey. He suggested having an auction for visas, and distributing the revenue generated by the auction evenly between every citizen. This would somewhat align the incentives between citizens and immigrants without introducing feel-good steps like scholarship subsidies. Realistically, there's not very many Americans who could get become an engineer if only they had a little more scholarship money. Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. If you have any empirical data that contradicts this I'd be interested in seeing it.

sharemywin 3y ago
Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
asu_thomas 3y ago
What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?
jmpman 3y ago
My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean. I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.
- btilly 3y ago
  You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector. https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.
    - btilly 3y ago
      Everyone agrees that they face systemic issues. People don't agree on what those systemic issues are. As an example, the California math curriculum is being organized around more extreme versions of the idea of keeping grades together, even though some have not learned previous material. They point to the fact that blacks wind up staying in class to higher grade levels. Troglodytes like myself point out that if someone is missing key concepts in math, it is absolutely essential that this not be glossed over. You have to go back and fix the foundation before trying to go on. Systemically not even trying to do this allows only the pretense of an education. People like me then point to poor test scores and adult outcomes as evidence that pretending people failed to learn doesn't work. We need to have more rigorous standards, offer more support, and be willing to go more slowly at first until people "get" concepts. When you look at states by black/white disparities in the prison population, progressive states dominate the bad end of the spectrum, and conservative states dominate the better end. (No state is actually very good, but some are less bad than others.) My opinion is this. Conservative states do a lot that's obviously bad. What progressive states do is not as obviously bad, but generates worse results. Rigid ideological lectures around equity don't change that. Most people think that we live in a more progressive and tolerant society than we did under Reagan. But black/white wealth disparities have been increasing, not decreasing. Not because of old problems like redlining. Which was banned in 1968. But because CURRENT policies passed since 1980 are bad. So what would I change? First I would end the drug war. It was always a race war. Second, I would bring back school bussing. Data showed that it really worked.
- vkou 3y ago
  You don't think that the South's centuries of chattel slavery, and then a century of formal apartheid, and now a kind of less formal apartheid doesn't have a lot more to do with why black Americans face barriers to entry to middle-upper-class professions? No, it's the immigrants' fault... (I wonder who you blame for lack of black Americans in C-level positions, doctors, lawyers, politicians, various millionaires and billionaires, etc. Not that many folks from India in any of those, so immigration from Asia can't be it...)
  - jmpman 3y ago
    There’s plenty of reasons why black American’s fail to succeed, but in IT, the availability of cheap H1B is absolutely a factor. I worked in a Fortune 500 company who hired a ton of engineers from historically black colleges and universities. Probably 30 engineers in our group of around 200. After 4 years many weren’t working out and were let go. Of the 30, I believe just 4 remain. Since then, the company has hired almost exclusively H1B for those positions. Was there a competitive problem with those newly minted engineers, yes. But, they were effectively replaced by H1Bs.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  Your logic doesn’t follow. Is there more?
- jmpman 3y ago
  Additionally, there should be a feedback loop when the economy slows. The Visa cap should be reduced, maintaining the yearly rate. Btw, I don’t envision this visa fee to be a few thousand dollars a year, but in the 10s to 100k per year. Right now, there are American engineers who aren’t being hired, while H1B are being forced back into the office.
winter_blue 3y ago
This amounts to imposing a higher tax. One could go the Canadian route instead--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens and fully integrate), and not treat immigrants languish on temporary visas, which IMO is belies viewing immigrants (i.e. new permanent residents) with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt. Also, Canada rapidly (like in one year) transitions most temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US. Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status which is quintessentially discriminatory, and IMO treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - winter_blue 3y ago
    I'm just going to quote dang to you here: Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here! If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - miroljub 3y ago
    I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult. In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better. It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.
    - linuxftw 3y ago
      I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder. Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.
gwbas1c 3y ago
Maybe not evidence exactly, but the stereotype of the barista with a fancy degree and lots of loans comes to mind. > Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. The flaw in that kind of logic is: 1: Many people who enter college can't graduate, for many different reasons. 2: Many people who graduate are incapable of working in the field they studied for, again for many different reasons. In my experience, I went to an expensive school that had a high dropout rate. A lot of the dropouts were people who either had poor study habits, or simply weren't able to understand the material. Unfortunately, everyone who took out loans and then dropped out still had to pay back the loans.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  That's why all the smart people became home contractors and started their own business.
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    Well, that was some of the best advice I heard in high school. I went to a religious "prep" school, and one of the best teachers I had pointed out that fact to us. He basically said that, if you're planning on working in a field that does not need a college degree, it's not "worth it" to go to college. In 4 years, you'll be making more money then someone graduating, and have no debt, and have savings. It was "sacreligous" on his part because the school had a 99% college acceptance rate; but years later I bumped into an alumn from my class who went the contractor / no college route, and was doing well and very happy. Edit: > That's why all the smart people became home contractors That's not a job for everyone, which is why college is also needed. I'd really hate being a home contractor, for many, many reasons. College was the right path for me, but I'm under no illusion that it's the right path for everyone.
WinLychee 3y ago
IMO there are many Americans who would work in IT/Tech if you paid them to do it, but the risk calculation doesn't currently make sense. If you're an adult making $25-35/hour in your current job, just meeting rent/utilities/obligations, it's hard to accept going back to school for several years to complete a Bachelor's degree, with zero guarantee of employment, but a definite guarantee of debt on the order of ~60K (taking a cheaper option). This is also true for those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, whose parents are not going to pay for them to go to school. We've seen the result of making student loans widely available, there are many under-employed Americans in debt. Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.
- rnk 3y ago
  I don't know how many typical hourly workers are going to be able to be reasonably trained for it, but there are some. The vast demand for it and tech workers should pull them in. But it doesn't, cost is one reason, but a bigger reason is it's hard or they think they can't do it or are actively dis-interested. One way to see this is that a million people every year who are already in college choose not to study cs or it type things. They could do it as part of regular college but they don't. Then they get out and can't get a job.
- TimPC 3y ago
  The debt load is worth the risk for someone who's wanted to be an engineer all their life and has seen signs in their schooling they are likely to be good at it. I think the debt load is very questionable, for someone who is at the margin between being an engineer and not being an engineer, has no indicators they would be good at it. Plenty of engineers (especially outside big cities) end up peaking at $80k/year which isn't worth taking a huge amount of debt for especially if their alternative is earning $60k/year already.

sharemywin 3y ago

Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

asu_thomas 3y ago

What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?

jmpman 3y ago

My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean. I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.

btilly 3y ago
You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector. https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.
  - btilly 3y ago
    Everyone agrees that they face systemic issues. People don't agree on what those systemic issues are. As an example, the California math curriculum is being organized around more extreme versions of the idea of keeping grades together, even though some have not learned previous material. They point to the fact that blacks wind up staying in class to higher grade levels. Troglodytes like myself point out that if someone is missing key concepts in math, it is absolutely essential that this not be glossed over. You have to go back and fix the foundation before trying to go on. Systemically not even trying to do this allows only the pretense of an education. People like me then point to poor test scores and adult outcomes as evidence that pretending people failed to learn doesn't work. We need to have more rigorous standards, offer more support, and be willing to go more slowly at first until people "get" concepts. When you look at states by black/white disparities in the prison population, progressive states dominate the bad end of the spectrum, and conservative states dominate the better end. (No state is actually very good, but some are less bad than others.) My opinion is this. Conservative states do a lot that's obviously bad. What progressive states do is not as obviously bad, but generates worse results. Rigid ideological lectures around equity don't change that. Most people think that we live in a more progressive and tolerant society than we did under Reagan. But black/white wealth disparities have been increasing, not decreasing. Not because of old problems like redlining. Which was banned in 1968. But because CURRENT policies passed since 1980 are bad. So what would I change? First I would end the drug war. It was always a race war. Second, I would bring back school bussing. Data showed that it really worked.
vkou 3y ago
You don't think that the South's centuries of chattel slavery, and then a century of formal apartheid, and now a kind of less formal apartheid doesn't have a lot more to do with why black Americans face barriers to entry to middle-upper-class professions? No, it's the immigrants' fault... (I wonder who you blame for lack of black Americans in C-level positions, doctors, lawyers, politicians, various millionaires and billionaires, etc. Not that many folks from India in any of those, so immigration from Asia can't be it...)
- jmpman 3y ago
  There’s plenty of reasons why black American’s fail to succeed, but in IT, the availability of cheap H1B is absolutely a factor. I worked in a Fortune 500 company who hired a ton of engineers from historically black colleges and universities. Probably 30 engineers in our group of around 200. After 4 years many weren’t working out and were let go. Of the 30, I believe just 4 remain. Since then, the company has hired almost exclusively H1B for those positions. Was there a competitive problem with those newly minted engineers, yes. But, they were effectively replaced by H1Bs.
flappyeagle 3y ago
Your logic doesn’t follow. Is there more?
jmpman 3y ago
Additionally, there should be a feedback loop when the economy slows. The Visa cap should be reduced, maintaining the yearly rate. Btw, I don’t envision this visa fee to be a few thousand dollars a year, but in the 10s to 100k per year. Right now, there are American engineers who aren’t being hired, while H1B are being forced back into the office.

winter_blue 3y ago

This amounts to imposing a higher tax. One could go the Canadian route instead--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens and fully integrate), and not treat immigrants languish on temporary visas, which IMO is belies viewing immigrants (i.e. new permanent residents) with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt. Also, Canada rapidly (like in one year) transitions most temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US. Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status which is quintessentially discriminatory, and IMO treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

linuxftw 3y ago
[flagged]
- winter_blue 3y ago
  I'm just going to quote dang to you here: Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here! If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- miroljub 3y ago
  I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult. In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better. It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder. Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.

gwbas1c 3y ago

Maybe not evidence exactly, but the stereotype of the barista with a fancy degree and lots of loans comes to mind. > Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. The flaw in that kind of logic is: 1: Many people who enter college can't graduate, for many different reasons. 2: Many people who graduate are incapable of working in the field they studied for, again for many different reasons. In my experience, I went to an expensive school that had a high dropout rate. A lot of the dropouts were people who either had poor study habits, or simply weren't able to understand the material. Unfortunately, everyone who took out loans and then dropped out still had to pay back the loans.

sharemywin 3y ago
That's why all the smart people became home contractors and started their own business.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  Well, that was some of the best advice I heard in high school. I went to a religious "prep" school, and one of the best teachers I had pointed out that fact to us. He basically said that, if you're planning on working in a field that does not need a college degree, it's not "worth it" to go to college. In 4 years, you'll be making more money then someone graduating, and have no debt, and have savings. It was "sacreligous" on his part because the school had a 99% college acceptance rate; but years later I bumped into an alumn from my class who went the contractor / no college route, and was doing well and very happy. Edit: > That's why all the smart people became home contractors That's not a job for everyone, which is why college is also needed. I'd really hate being a home contractor, for many, many reasons. College was the right path for me, but I'm under no illusion that it's the right path for everyone.

WinLychee 3y ago

IMO there are many Americans who would work in IT/Tech if you paid them to do it, but the risk calculation doesn't currently make sense. If you're an adult making $25-35/hour in your current job, just meeting rent/utilities/obligations, it's hard to accept going back to school for several years to complete a Bachelor's degree, with zero guarantee of employment, but a definite guarantee of debt on the order of ~60K (taking a cheaper option). This is also true for those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, whose parents are not going to pay for them to go to school. We've seen the result of making student loans widely available, there are many under-employed Americans in debt. Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.

rnk 3y ago
I don't know how many typical hourly workers are going to be able to be reasonably trained for it, but there are some. The vast demand for it and tech workers should pull them in. But it doesn't, cost is one reason, but a bigger reason is it's hard or they think they can't do it or are actively dis-interested. One way to see this is that a million people every year who are already in college choose not to study cs or it type things. They could do it as part of regular college but they don't. Then they get out and can't get a job.
TimPC 3y ago
The debt load is worth the risk for someone who's wanted to be an engineer all their life and has seen signs in their schooling they are likely to be good at it. I think the debt load is very questionable, for someone who is at the margin between being an engineer and not being an engineer, has no indicators they would be good at it. Plenty of engineers (especially outside big cities) end up peaking at $80k/year which isn't worth taking a huge amount of debt for especially if their alternative is earning $60k/year already.