Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.

> most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) [...] sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.

Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?

> the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry [...] Almost all the H-1Bs are young

Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.

And this is just from the first page. I feel like the author is just throwing every possible argument against the H1B, instead of making one good coherent point. =/

In the last three places (including my current employer) there were huge swaths of H1-B's from India. After some long lunches and happy hours, I found out that a) they're being paid significantly less than I was and b) two of the three companies wouldn't sponsor them to stay at the company and come on as an FTE.

This meant several trips and back and forth between the states and Bangalore to get a new visa, then turn around and try and find a new gig somewhere. For the developers who were single it wasn't a problem. Those workers with families, it was quite stressful to have their families moving back and forth on a regular basis and not having the stability of knowing they had a gig lined up or not.

Toss in the fact getting these visa's are incredibly competitive and I can only imagine the stress involved.

Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs.

> Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?

I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer.

> Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.

If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students.

You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.

It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.