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Immigration is about talent, not costs

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Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#51

Post by bokonist »

bradleybuda wrote: post #43
bokonist wrote: post #12

Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…

The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc. This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are…

Yes, that is the premise. In my comment, I take the assumption of restricted immigration as a given, and then propose how the quota can be most sensibly allocated. There is a completely separate debate over how high or low that quota should be, or if there should be a quota at all. But that would deserve its own long thread.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#52

Post by DrJokepu »

selmnoo wrote: post #25
lmg643 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's strange to read these kinds of articles. The author doesn't seem to realize that he is describing his own personal preferences, and not anything about society at large. All you need to do is look at the top recipients of visas and you will understand what the game is.

This brings up an interesting question. The reasoning for bringing talent over from abroad, does it make sense ethically? I'm greatly irked by the idea of a young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian guy or girl coming here to... optimize ad targeting at Facebook, he/she should stay in India or Nigeria, because by golly Nigeria NEEDS that person much more than us. We can do fine with Facebook advertising alg…

An argument to make that it should be the "young and ambitious Indian/Nigerian/Chinese/Russian" choice whether they want to leave their country or not. It's up to America to decide whether they're welcome in America or not, but telling people that they can't move to America because, according to America, their home country needs them more is way too patronizing.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#54

Post by selmnoo »

teacup50 wrote: post #34
drivingmenuts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely on the informative side: why are these people called "interns" when it looks more like they're straight-up "contractors" or "employees"? Is this just a convenient fiction?

Most of them are worthless; of any given intern class at a first tier technology company (e.g., Apple), only ~1-5% will actually be offered a full time job. Those 1% are worth every penny, but you simply don't know who they are until you give the entire intern class the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.

> Most of them are worthless

They are almost never worthless. Small startups who are not experienced with interviewing may get a few bad apples, but companies like Quora (and the others on the list in submission article) don't make those mistakes. Sure, they may not all be Alex "Im-a-core-dev-for-Pypy" Gaynor's, but generally they'll be worth every penny of that 90k and another 90k more.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#55

Post by dashboardfront »

selmnoo wrote: post #3

> Just a few hours later, Vox published an article titled These tech interns are probably making more than you are where they shared a tweet showcasing candid salaries at various tech companies, some larger, some smaller: That is a kind of a bullshit argument though isn't it, that "hey look, the interns (supposedly half-able, incompetent newbies) are getting paid so high!! We have such wonderful salaries in tech!" It…

> When you're "making 90k" in the valley you have the quality of life worth 30k in a midwestern city.

Not true at all, yet this is constantly repeated like it's fact.

Look up indifference curves and consumption bundles. You're ignoring microeconomics. For anyone that doesn't assign excessively high utility towards housing size, 90k in the valley is a much better quality of life than 30k in a midwestern city.

This is where cost of living calculators fail as well. You can't compare the same basket of goods everywhere you go. People will adjust their basket of goods depending on relative prices; it doesn't mean that their utility has dropped. It's income effect vs substitution effect.

Edit: The number above has been changed to 60k~. I'd say this is probably a more reasonable argument. As for the suburban argument, I don't really know the numbers and I can't argue there. As a person in my 20s who grew up in San Jose, the suburbs are like a bad dream that continuously haunts me.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#56

Post by cryoshon »

mavelikara wrote: post #47
bokonist wrote: post #12

Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…

Along similar lines, the cost of sponsoring H-1Bs should grow exponentially with the fraction of the company's workforce that is on H-1B, beyond a small threshold.

I like this idea. It allows for the super-talented to succeed across international lines while preventing cost-cutting at the expense of the locals.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#57

Post by nichochar »

As an H1B person, who has incredibly talented (french, actually) friends who did not get the lottery, I can back up the veracity of this article 100%.

And it is very upsetting to me that this lottery even takes place. How does it even make sense? This system was designed for the world of 20 years ago, when people barely ever travelled outside of their country.

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#58

Post by trurl »

ethbro wrote: post #33
bokonist wrote: post #12

Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free…

Seems fair enough. However, this would also mean that startups would likely find it impossible to earn H1-B's in competitive fields, as a fair amount of the compensation is future-loaded. Or, to put it another way: who's going to win a bidding war for Employee X, Microsoft or {Startup Working to Become Microsoft}?

Maybe there is something I'm missing due to having little knowledge about all the legal subtitles. It seems like startups could come out ahead by realizing that in the modern world, there is no reason for a talented developer to be on-site 365 days of the year. They could save money by not getting on getting an H1B by having the developer work remotely and only need to obtain more limited visas for occasional on-site visits?

Re: Immigration is about talent, not costs

#60

Post by ethbro »

blfr wrote: post #40
ethbro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems fair enough. However, this would also mean that startups would likely find it impossible to earn H1-B's in competitive fields, as a fair amount of the compensation is future-loaded. Or, to put it another way: who's going to win a bidding war for Employee X, Microsoft or {Startup Working to Become Microsoft}?

Smaller companies benefit later, after the initial five years, when an employee brought in by Microsoft is free to join a startup. And also indirectly due to generally increased supply.

Personally, if I were Microsoft, I'd kill for the opportunity to limit foreign startup talent hires to a five year perked timetable.

Over time, yes, engineers are engineers, and those perking will be a continuous opportunity for startups to hire. However, it doesn't help at all if you want to hire the world's top talent in {insert new technology that didn't exist 2 years ago}. And isn't that ideally what this is about?

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