60 ms·

Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing.

by dgrin91 1y ago

xnx 1y ago
> everyone else gets nothing More revenue for the treasury and efficient allocation of resources
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources". It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
pyb 1y ago
As the meme goes: "You don't need to sell it to me, I was already convinced!"
some_random 1y ago
Would they? I know that they've engaged in a ton of wage suppression historically but deliberately paying out the nose for H1B visas seems like it wouldn't be worth it.
- _mlbt 1y ago
  It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead. Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    > Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare. You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      >is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor? Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself. The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them. So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        [flagged]
        _mlbt 1y ago
        The issue isn’t race. Typical Americans would be just as against illegal immigration if it were white Europeans flooding into our country. The uncomfortable reality is that illegal immigration is a net negative for society, particularly when it reaches the numbers it did under the Biden administration.
stackskipton 1y ago
I mean, would big tech really buy them all? The argument against H-1B is it's being used to replace American workers with cheaper workers who are locked into their employer. If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Has someone mentioned above, you would have to work hard to make sure that a few companies did not want to applies the H-1B auction.
nine_k 1y ago
It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense. It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper. If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  I've been a proponent of levying an excise tax on H1-B visas equal to the salary amount paid to the person on that visa (including benefits, if any). If you really need the lower salary worker then sure, you can have them, but it will cost you. I would also make the company sponsoring the H1-B visa responsible for all relocation costs when they fire someone on the visa.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    That really incentives you to under pay the H1-B though. The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.
riku_iki 1y ago
> Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing. and whats wrong about this? Humans funneled into area with higher added value.
conscion 1y ago
I see this brought up as an issue every time distributing H1-Bs by salary is brought up. What is the issue with big tech "buying them all"?
- kccqzy 1y ago
  It depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are just optimizing for making the numbers go up, the yes letting big tech hiring all the available foreign workers so that they can do even more big tech stuff, increase their revenue, lift their share price, produce GDP, increase tax revenue etc. But what if you care about the diversity of the foreign workers in terms of field or specialty? What if for example you have a "Made in America" slogan and want to hire manufacturing workers so that we can have a renaissance in manufacturing? The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
- bubblethink 1y ago
  The issue is that people opposing it don't have a coherent view of what they want. They don't want a free market solution; they don't like the socialist position where the government picks the people; they don't like the lottery either. They want their preferred type of people to get the visa in a manner not too different from quotas/dei/affirmative action etc., which is impossible to engineer. It ultimately ends up creating a compromise brokered by lobbyists and politicians, kind of like how we do everything else in the country.
aprilthird2021 1y ago
That is an argument that the supply of visas is too limited (which it probably is), not against the idea of auctioning
Izikiel43 1y ago
But do all the big tech positions need 85K visas? MSFT I think requested less than 3k this year. Edit: Saw somewhere else in this post it was around 9k, after layoffs, so I stand corrected
horns4lyfe 1y ago
Oh no they’ll have to hire and train American college grads!!

Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing.

xnx 1y ago

> everyone else gets nothing More revenue for the treasury and efficient allocation of resources

dghlsakjg 1y ago
Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources". It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).

pyb 1y ago

As the meme goes: "You don't need to sell it to me, I was already convinced!"

some_random 1y ago

Would they? I know that they've engaged in a ton of wage suppression historically but deliberately paying out the nose for H1B visas seems like it wouldn't be worth it.

_mlbt 1y ago
It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead. Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare. You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor? Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself. The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them. So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - _mlbt 1y ago
        The issue isn’t race. Typical Americans would be just as against illegal immigration if it were white Europeans flooding into our country. The uncomfortable reality is that illegal immigration is a net negative for society, particularly when it reaches the numbers it did under the Biden administration.

stackskipton 1y ago

I mean, would big tech really buy them all? The argument against H-1B is it's being used to replace American workers with cheaper workers who are locked into their employer. If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.

readthenotes1 1y ago
Has someone mentioned above, you would have to work hard to make sure that a few companies did not want to applies the H-1B auction.

nine_k 1y ago

It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense. It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper. If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.

DrillShopper 1y ago
I've been a proponent of levying an excise tax on H1-B visas equal to the salary amount paid to the person on that visa (including benefits, if any). If you really need the lower salary worker then sure, you can have them, but it will cost you. I would also make the company sponsoring the H1-B visa responsible for all relocation costs when they fire someone on the visa.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  That really incentives you to under pay the H1-B though. The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.

riku_iki 1y ago

> Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing. and whats wrong about this? Humans funneled into area with higher added value.

conscion 1y ago

I see this brought up as an issue every time distributing H1-Bs by salary is brought up. What is the issue with big tech "buying them all"?

kccqzy 1y ago
It depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are just optimizing for making the numbers go up, the yes letting big tech hiring all the available foreign workers so that they can do even more big tech stuff, increase their revenue, lift their share price, produce GDP, increase tax revenue etc. But what if you care about the diversity of the foreign workers in terms of field or specialty? What if for example you have a "Made in America" slogan and want to hire manufacturing workers so that we can have a renaissance in manufacturing? The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
bubblethink 1y ago
The issue is that people opposing it don't have a coherent view of what they want. They don't want a free market solution; they don't like the socialist position where the government picks the people; they don't like the lottery either. They want their preferred type of people to get the visa in a manner not too different from quotas/dei/affirmative action etc., which is impossible to engineer. It ultimately ends up creating a compromise brokered by lobbyists and politicians, kind of like how we do everything else in the country.

aprilthird2021 1y ago

That is an argument that the supply of visas is too limited (which it probably is), not against the idea of auctioning

Izikiel43 1y ago

But do all the big tech positions need 85K visas? MSFT I think requested less than 3k this year. Edit: Saw somewhere else in this post it was around 9k, after layoffs, so I stand corrected

horns4lyfe 1y ago

Oh no they’ll have to hire and train American college grads!!