301–310 of 339 posts
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Are you assuming BrainInAJar is a man and the mentioned spouse is his wife, and not vice versa?
I'm not assuming anything: It's the same response both ways round. It should be the couples decision on how to organize their life and their child-rearing duties.
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All right, they are only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than an available US citizen per unit work. And you can't say "there are no US citizens available". Of course there are... for the right price. Now you've got a question. Is the price excessive because there are too few US citizen workers available in that field? Or are the companies just being cheap and trying to drive down the price of skilled workers…
> For the right price Sure, if you attract them away from their current job. Then what happens to the company that had their employee taken away? My point is that an immigrant isn't necessarily cheaper. I'm one of those immigrants on an H1B working in the US that isn't cheaper than an equivalent US worker.
As a hiring manager? that is not my concern. But from a societal perspective, there are a few things the company that is outbid can do.
1. they can raise their own wages.
Note, this does increase the availability of workers through several mechanisms. most obviously, more people will enter the field as wages go up, but that takes a while. More immediately? you have people that have the skills who can also do another job.
For example, my partner does embedded linux development, mostly on arm. But, my partner could also do my job (I'm a SysAdmin) - and usually do it rather better than I am. Right now, the embedded stuff pays about 10% more than the sort of sysadmin gigs I can get, reflecting the required skills. But if there were suddenly more demand for SysAdmins? if you paid enough, I'm sure you could get my partner to take a SysAdmin job.
This is an important part of how Capitalisim allocates labor efficiently. Yeah, I could work as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic. I'm probably pretty good, I mean, for an apprentice. I'm not at journeyman level yet. If being a motorcycle mechanic paid better than being a SysAdmin? I'd probably spend the time and effort to get my motorcycle repair skills up to snuff.
2. they can train.
This increases the pool of workers rather more quickly than increasing wages. This is what I do when I need to hire technical people, and I can't afford market rates. Find people that you think have the attributes to do the job, once they have some help and practice.
From a corporate perspective, both of these things are just a matter of money. And so is going through the work to get a H1B.
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All right, they are only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than an available US citizen per unit work. And you can't say "there are no US citizens available". Of course there are... for the right price. Now you've got a question. Is the price excessive because there are too few US citizen workers available in that field? Or are the companies just being cheap and trying to drive down the price of skilled workers…
> For the right price Sure, if you attract them away from their current job. Then what happens to the company that had their employee taken away? My point is that an immigrant isn't necessarily cheaper. I'm one of those immigrants on an H1B working in the US that isn't cheaper than an equivalent US worker.
Yeah, this hasn't been my experience. My experience is that outside of the contracting houses[1] or teams where you have a bunch of H1B types from the same place - if the same people that hired the Americans hire a single H1B on to a team of Americans, either the H1B is technically better, or he or she is willing to work a lot harder under worse conditions, or he or she is willing to take less money. Otherwise putting up with the paperwork and language barrier is not worth it.
It makes sense that someone working under a H1B would be willing to work harder; My understanding is that if you are fired, you have 15 days to find a new job or leave the country. Regardless of your financial ability, that sounds like a real pain in the ass.
[1]The only rational explanation for the high price and low quality of contracting houses that I can see is that someone is getting pretty huge kickbacks.
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I'm not assuming anything: It's the same response both ways round. It should be the couples decision on how to organize their life and their child-rearing duties.
I agree with your general sentiment, but either you were assuming that the husband was working and the wife staying home, or your statement "just promotes the gender inequality" makes no sense.
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>there is a cap and one reason is probably because opening the gates wide open will skew the job market in US. Maybe. One of the factors evaluated for h1b approval is whether or not the immigrant's salary is higher than the mean wages for U.S. citizens working in the same SOC category in the same area. "Opening the floodgates" would only serve to skew the average salary upwards for citizens, which is good for skilled…
>One of the factors evaluated for h1b approval is whether or not the immigrant's salary is higher than the mean wages for U.S. citizens working in the same SOC category in the same area. You can make many valid arguments for loosening the American immigration laws; but driving up the average wage because that's what the government mandate assumes that companies are irrational. A profit-maximizing company is only goin…
Many skilled positions have scarcity, and employers are willing to pay more for an immigrant if their skillset is a better fit and/or can fill the position immediately.
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I agree with your general sentiment, but either you were assuming that the husband was working and the wife staying home, or your statement "just promotes the gender inequality" makes no sense.
No, gender equality is if both sides can choose to pursue a career. Just flipping that around and defaulting to "male partner cannot work because he has to raise some kids" is inequal as well. In any case, that already assumes it's a male-female couple.
Like I said before, I agree with you general sentiment that the couple should be able to make that decision.
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It's not so bad if you spend some of that time raising children :)
Try to raise children on one salary living in a high-cost city like San Francisco/Bay Area when the spouse can't work for six years. Then try to find a job after six years out of work. I have friends whose marriage broke because of similar situations.
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> if you ask those in US they might say for worse. Rather than ask J Random Dude in the US, you should probably ask someone with a modicum of expertise in the matter, such as an economist, who will tell you that adding people is generally a net positive, rather than a negative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy 60% of the largest high tech companies were founded by immigrants or their children: http…
Right, however this is where the details start to muddy the conclusion. The fact is the H1-B visa program is completely abused in order to bring in cheaper employees at the expense of the rest of the community. These H1-B employees have little recourse, limited career potential and supress wages. The uncertainty of their immigration status means they don't buy houses, start families, or participate in the community.…
Because for an employer to sponser an h1b immigrant, they need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for their job in the area, which is a combination of salary, benefits, and other factors.
And how is it ruining higher education? Isn't the point to have a better educated workforce?
If a public school accepts so many international students for their CS Masters program, isn't that a problem with the state school, not the immigration system?
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With an auction system like that, basically every small business will be out of the picture then.
The more I think about it, the more I like the auction system. The big companies that need highly skilled employees can afford to pay en masse. Now if you are a US based small business and you found a dream employee in say Australia. Either this employee is so valuable that you would be willing to shell out something like 50-100k to bring him/her over, or what is more likely you become flexible and let him/her work r…
A small business that's small because it's a niche can afford to have a dream employee work remotely. A small business that's small because it's not-yet-large in a fast-changing market will be slowed down dramatically by the timezone differences, and probably lose out to competitors that colocate all their people.
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Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay. I would have made substantially less at Google if it weren't for all of the foreigners making the company a success :) I agree that H1B transfer restrictions are bad though. If people are good enough to let into the country, then they should be free to switch jobs just like anyone else.
> Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay. I'm not stating the "more people" == "less pay". I'm stating that foreign workers are willing get paid less money, regardless of what the job pool is. They have fewer options available to them, so they accept "worse" pay for what maybe essentially the same job. Also, the amount of jobs…