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why is ycombinator promoting immigration thru H1B when so many US born CS grads are finding it hard to get job. In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 ci

by kappi 1y ago

why is ycombinator promoting immigration thru H1B when so many US born CS grads are finding it hard to get job. In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma. https://ifspp.substack.com/p/data-on-how-america-sold-out-its https://ifspp.substack.com/p/data-on-how-america-sold-out-it...

mertleee 1y ago
It's disgusting. Many VC firms outside of YC flagrantly promote what is basically fraud. There are literally YC companies that provide pseudo visa fraud as a service. Following the law and having respect for the immigration system is simply seen as an "inconvenient challenge" to these people. I myself am a person of color, but in the cohort I was in (of 30) maybe three individuals were native born Americans of any race. The rest were exclusively Canadian immigrants largely from India and China (not actually born in Canada). It's also quite common in the US for people to work on visitor VISA's while applying for O1s. To name a few... https://extraordinary.com/ https://extraordinary.com/ (promulgated by https://x.com/0xsigil?lang=en https://x.com/0xsigil?lang=en) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gale https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gale https://www.deel.com/paid-lp/immigration/ https://www.deel.com/paid-lp/immigration/
- ge96 1y ago
  On my LinkedIn saw some guy saying "Hit me up if you want EB-1 I know a guy" not sure what it entails but was weird to promote that. Guy is a hustler/grinder though in general.
  - mertleee 1y ago
    Some of these "visa as a service" startups offer incentives and pseudo cash (or even cash) referral incentives. Which is actually illegal both in CA and Federally.
quixoticaxolotl 1y ago
That's not an apples to apples comparison. You don't know if the foreign workers were senior-level employees, for example, or whether there were specialized requirements they might have been hired against that entry-level grads won't qualify for. I agree there should be more entry-level roles. But this is not an indictment of the system. You should ask what percentage of those foreign workers were hired into entry-level roles.
- quixoticaxolotl 1y ago
  I'll also point out that it's actually harder for entry-level foreign workers (read: international students) to get jobs in general. F1 visa students are limited to one year of OPT, unless they have a STEM degree, in which case they can work for two more years for an e-Verified employer only in a field related to their major. There are significantly fewer e-Verified employers in the country. So you have a concentrated labour pool vying for a much smaller fraction of jobs than the general population - remember, we can't even be employed at McDonald's on STEM OPT. Another factor that complicates the analysis is that foreign students do not necessarily represent the same cross-section as US students. The high cost of US education tends to bifurcate the sample size into a bimodal distribution: you have rich foreign students who can afford tuition rates, or you have scholarship students who earned their scholarship quite fairly thanks to merit. Neither population can be fairly compared against the average US citizen in terms of hiring likelihood - either you're pitting the top 1% of someone in the home country to the median US student, or you're comparing someone who's got the resources to find opportunities in ways US students can't. Finally, it's been my experience, seeing others though the F1 -> H1B pipeline, that most people pursue that pipeline through a master's degree rather than a bachelor's degree. This is because both immigration law and tuition rates incentivise shorter programs for advanced education. If you're comparing the hiring rates of master's students to bachelor's students, naturally you're going to get a revealed preference for master's students. tl;dr the simple statistic cited needs critical questioning.

by kappi 1y ago

mertleee 1y ago

It's disgusting. Many VC firms outside of YC flagrantly promote what is basically fraud. There are literally YC companies that provide pseudo visa fraud as a service. Following the law and having respect for the immigration system is simply seen as an "inconvenient challenge" to these people. I myself am a person of color, but in the cohort I was in (of 30) maybe three individuals were native born Americans of any race. The rest were exclusively Canadian immigrants largely from India and China (not actually born in Canada). It's also quite common in the US for people to work on visitor VISA's while applying for O1s. To name a few... https://extraordinary.com/ https://extraordinary.com/ (promulgated by https://x.com/0xsigil?lang=en https://x.com/0xsigil?lang=en) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gale https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gale https://www.deel.com/paid-lp/immigration/ https://www.deel.com/paid-lp/immigration/

ge96 1y ago
On my LinkedIn saw some guy saying "Hit me up if you want EB-1 I know a guy" not sure what it entails but was weird to promote that. Guy is a hustler/grinder though in general.
- mertleee 1y ago
  Some of these "visa as a service" startups offer incentives and pseudo cash (or even cash) referral incentives. Which is actually illegal both in CA and Federally.

quixoticaxolotl 1y ago

That's not an apples to apples comparison. You don't know if the foreign workers were senior-level employees, for example, or whether there were specialized requirements they might have been hired against that entry-level grads won't qualify for. I agree there should be more entry-level roles. But this is not an indictment of the system. You should ask what percentage of those foreign workers were hired into entry-level roles.

quixoticaxolotl 1y ago
I'll also point out that it's actually harder for entry-level foreign workers (read: international students) to get jobs in general. F1 visa students are limited to one year of OPT, unless they have a STEM degree, in which case they can work for two more years for an e-Verified employer only in a field related to their major. There are significantly fewer e-Verified employers in the country. So you have a concentrated labour pool vying for a much smaller fraction of jobs than the general population - remember, we can't even be employed at McDonald's on STEM OPT. Another factor that complicates the analysis is that foreign students do not necessarily represent the same cross-section as US students. The high cost of US education tends to bifurcate the sample size into a bimodal distribution: you have rich foreign students who can afford tuition rates, or you have scholarship students who earned their scholarship quite fairly thanks to merit. Neither population can be fairly compared against the average US citizen in terms of hiring likelihood - either you're pitting the top 1% of someone in the home country to the median US student, or you're comparing someone who's got the resources to find opportunities in ways US students can't. Finally, it's been my experience, seeing others though the F1 -> H1B pipeline, that most people pursue that pipeline through a master's degree rather than a bachelor's degree. This is because both immigration law and tuition rates incentivise shorter programs for advanced education. If you're comparing the hiring rates of master's students to bachelor's students, naturally you're going to get a revealed preference for master's students. tl;dr the simple statistic cited needs critical questioning.