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If you do an HN search for "shortage" you'll see many links, to things like: http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-facebooks-19-billion-acqu
by dalke 12y ago
If you do an HN search for "shortage" you'll see many links, to things like:
http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-facebooks-19-billion-acquisition-of-whatsapp/ http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... - which points out that it's not "difficult for employers and potential employees", giving an example of how Facebook decided to not employ the people who became the founders of WhatsApp, then paid $19 billion for their company a few years later.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth... - titled "The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage: And what it should mean for immigration reform."
If you want the economic details, you might look at at http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis.pdf http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-... , which (among many things) points out that two people get a STEM degree for each STEM job available.
The general conclusion is that there is no shortage, and that complaints by various large businesses about a lack of trained people is a strategy to pay lower wages and spend less on training. This has been known for over a decade. Eg, http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back1305.html http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130... concludes """Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted.
Many in industry have called for an increase in the number of H-1B visas, citing the early exhaustion of the cap as reflective of widespread need for skilled workers. However, the fact that very few H-1B workers are earning salaries as high as U.S. workers in the same profession would seem to refute that claim, and should make lawmakers wary of increasing the H-1B quota. The exhaustion of the H-1B quota may reflect employers' interest in lowering labor costs or widespread fraud rather than an insufficient number of visas."""
HN comments include those of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 and more .. again, search HN for "shortage".
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoH1Bs are used not only to pay lower wages, but to enable employers to treat their employees poorly without fear that they will leave. As a US Citizen, not only can I work for any US employer, I can reside here as well, even if I don't have a job. If I work for someone who treats me poorly, or who I regard as unethical, I will resign. One time I just walked right off the job - I left on a Friday, then never returned, due to an ethical lapse on the part of my employer. I gave no notice at all. By contrast, a close friend who was a UK citizen, who worked with me on an H1B, was treated quite poorly by our employer. He was given a far heavier load, he was never given any help when he asked for it, in general he was taken advantage of. Really he was a far more skilled coder than I was at the time, but I was treated far better than he was. I myself have no objection to foreign workers. If someone comes to the US hoping to make a better life for themselves than they are able to do in their Mother Country, I say more power to them. I know from hard experience that it totally sucks to be poor. But I do feel they should be paid as much as a US Citizen would be.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- glesica 12y agoA possible solution here is for countries to treat labor the way they have started to treat capital and goods and services. Start signing reciprocal free-labor agreements. If country Y is willing to allow anyone who can legally live and work in country X to legally live and work in country Y, then country X will do the same for people who can legally live and work in country Y. In my mind, if companies were serious about this shortage (and not just trying to hire more people they can abuse as you described) they would be pushing for far more than a few more H1Bs. But we haven't really seen that, at least that I know of.
- dalke 12y agoSuch exists between many countries in the EU. It's not so simple though. Free movement of labor also requires a correspondence in the national health care and retirement programs, so for example totalization agreements to eliminate dual Social Security coverage. The US has such agreements with only a score or so countries (see http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html ). It gives an example of a 66% tax rate when such an agreement does not exist. As it stands now, there is no such agreement between the US and, say, New Zealand. A NZ citizen working in the US for 8 years before returning to NZ would pay US Social Security taxes for those 8 years, but receive no benefits.