Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 207 posts

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#71

Post by sien »

tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

Technically the title is a little misleading.

The Australian E3 visa has not been filled. If you need skilled engineers think of seeing if you can recruit some Australians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-3_visa

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#72

Post by ollysb »

ebiester wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

As a developer you can live anywhere that has a decent internet connection. That's a pretty large portion of the planet these days...

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#73

Post by lolwutf »

ebiester wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

With the advent of remote work upon us, I find it hard that you'd be limited to those countries.

In fact, literally the ENTIRE WORLD is your oyster, assuming you can reliably, regularly find power, wifi, and a team that'll work with you on your timezone's timeframe.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#75

Post by ycskyspeak »

conanbatt wrote: post #47
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

I can speak for Argentina in this case: first and foremost, an average entry-level programmer in argentina might make 600 dollars a month. There is no consideration for your degree in that regard. Second but not least, because ARgentina grows so much on outsourcing contracts, the quality of the job to do is poor and uncommitted. Product management in Argentina is almost non-existent. This means that the most likely j…

It makes sense to compare the purchasing power parity and not just the dollar amount. Argentina is an up and coming destination for tech folk but the standard of living and opportunities offered are not at par with the US (specifically the valley)

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#76

Post by SavvyGuard »

crazypyro wrote: post #53
JOnAgain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just rank em by salary/comp. More skilled people => more valuable to the economy => receive higher salary => more likely to get visa (=> pay more in taxes).

Wouldn't this create the obvious problem of companies artificially increasing comp.? How do you judge that? Seems like its asking for trouble. They already do this a little bit with advanced degrees.

Why is that a problem? They wouldn't bring in H1Bs unless there was an obvious benefit. Your "problem" just reduces the gap between value produced and compensation.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#77

Post by thmcmahon »

ebiester wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

There are only a few really good places to live for an educated worker. Japan, Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Canada, and the US. I will operationalize "good" as "an intelligent worker can make an exceptional living relative to their country of origin." Each of these places only take a limited amount of immigrants each year. Some are more difficult based on the national language -- learning Danish isn't more…

Australia has an uncapped temporary migration program for skilled workers (http://www.immi.gov.au/Visas/Pages/457.aspx), the situation described in this article can not happen in Australia.

On a permanent level, Australia has a permanent program of around 180,000 places a year in a country with only 22 million people.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#78

Post by ericd »

firstOrder wrote: post #5

> Does turning away highly skilled and educated people due to an artificial cap on visas sound silly? This is a false way of framing things on many levels. First, as Norm Matloff has extensively documented, they are not all "highly skilled and educated people". Secondly, they can be given green cards and other such things, why is this specific visa necessary? Also, if there's a shortage of talent, then the Silicon Va…

From an economic competitiveness aspect, as a country, we should be trying to get as many IIT graduates to be American citizens as we can.

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#79

Post by hatu »

johngalt wrote: post #49
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

A good friend of mine works in the US under a high-Skill visa - as a tenured professor at Cornell, with oh, the Presidents medal for something very clever. I think high skilled is a term that we coders are happy to apply to themselves, but really folks we are not compared to a genuine elite. The future will be invented by a very small number of brilliant people - the rest if us are just here to fill in the gaps behin…

Exactly. Sure some H1-b visas might be used to just increase programmer supply, but many are like the professor you're talking about. Even catching a few geniuses in an extremely broad net is an invaluable boon to our country. Our concerns should be that we are missing some.

There is a visa for that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa

Re: US burns through all high-skill visas for 2015 in less than a week

#80

Post by photon137 »

tokenadult wrote: post #26

What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?) (I'm genuinely curious about this…

Great universities.

English as the primary language (great learning resources available for it all across the globe).

Real economic mobility - you can really make it big if you're smart, persevering and slightly lucky. Who you know matters to a certain extent in all countries, but the significance of that factor is less in the US as compared to the other countries, in my opinion (others may disagree, of course).

Post reply on HN