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

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

#181

Post by Analemma_ »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #157
myf01d wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radical islam is the real danger on the west, I come from a middle eastern country and as an ex-muslim I know very well the danger of the islamization that has been going on in western Europe throughout the past 3 decades.

Well, I'm sure that won't stop many "enlightened" individuals from lecturing you. Unfortunately.

The flu kills more people every week than "radical Islam" has killed in the last decade; but yes, keep telling us how much of an existential threat to Western civilization it is. Us "enlightened individuals" are lecturing you because you are terrible at evaluating risk and are afraid of your own shadow.

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

#182

Post by projectramo »

tzs wrote: post #167
projectramo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been many studies on this. Conservatives usually use the phrase "at best, the impact is nil" Liberals usually use the phrase "at worst, the impact is nil" Because the study shows there is negligible impact. Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor. If you believe in the mainstream economic theory, more jobs are produced for the ones that are "taken." You…

> Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor. What about laborers who send most of their earnings back to family in their home country?

Good point. I am not sure how that would work. (Any economists reading HN?)

There are two things to be said from the studies:

1. So far that doesn't seem to be significant, although I don't know if, in theory, it could get worse.

2. I wonder if that country consumes a lot of US goods, it might still end up netting a positive. (Not sure about this).

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

#183

Post by davidf18 »

t1o5 wrote: post #29

ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do abou…

Of all of the political candidates, only Trump and Sanders spoke out against H1-B visa abuse used to depress wages. (Former) Presidential Candidate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida wanted to triple the number of H1-B visas to 250,000 from 85,000 and accepted $2 million donation from Disney.

Disney of Florida had recently replaced 250 US IT workers with foreigners on H1-B. Trump especially spoke out against this move. Clinton was silent.

Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks. Wall Street banks like Goldman hire lots of high tech computer programmers and it is in their interest to depress wages as well as those firms in Silicon Valley. Trump was right that Clinton was bought off (she could have donated the $675,000 for charity as President Obama did with his Nobel Peace Prize Award money).

Incidentally, HP head and Republican Meg Whitman came out against Trump and she mentioned other reasons, but her true motivation is that HP would have to start paying market wages for all of its high tech workers if Trump won.

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

#184

Post by kamaal »

dominotw wrote: post #155
pscsbs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be joking about the infrastructure. Moving even a few kilometers can take hours due to all the traffic and lack of public transportation.

>can take hours Bunch of my friends suffer from a chronic cough and throat irritation from being exposed to traffic everyday. Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work. There is no way to escape constant air and sound pollution.

>>Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.

I doubt this is because of pollution, noise or dust. Most people are stressed for the same reasons why any millennial traveling between Mountain View and SF is stressed- Rents, High home prices, Home expenses etc etc.

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

#185

Post by projectramo »

spoiledtechie wrote: post #151
projectramo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been many studies on this. Conservatives usually use the phrase "at best, the impact is nil" Liberals usually use the phrase "at worst, the impact is nil" Because the study shows there is negligible impact. Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor. If you believe in the mainstream economic theory, more jobs are produced for the ones that are "taken." You…

Every job taken from Americans is another American taking from the system. Taking tax money. So its not as easy as you would think either.

Oh, that is true.

The unhired foreigner would not end up taking taxes.

I wonder how the math works.

If the company has to pay the extra tax hit when laying off the American, that might let the company decide if it is worth it.

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

#186

Post by mcguire »

t1o5 wrote: post #152
bayer_rggb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you hire a lawyer to do the paperwork or did you do it yourself ?

No lawyers needed. Its a simple online system. If you have the skills and you can prove it( IELTS,work experience,your degrees), the system awards you the points. No employers needed, no lawyers needed, you are totally in control of your visa. This is the beauty of this system. There is no place for bad apples like the H1B in this skills based system. You cannot fake it. "May the skilled ones win"

Out of curiosity, which language test did you take?

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

#187

Post by doingmyting »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #24
zzleeper wrote: post #12

> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false 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…

The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field. I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply. The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It…

The irony of tech interviews is that after a couple years most of the engineers on the other side of the fence would never pass their own tech interview without studying for months. The average guy doesn't know the difference between all the sorting algorithms off the top of his head, or how to balance a red-black tree if you corner him out of the blue one day.

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

#188

Post by valuearb »

When the SuperCollider project shut down I was fortunate enough to be able to use H1B hire a japanese physicist who worked on it. Cost $20K IIRC. One of best hires I ever made, his work ended up creating about 20 high paid permanent jobs in our company.

I would have happily given him citizenship, was just glad he didn't end up working for our over-seas competitors.

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

#189

Post by thewhitetulip »

chuckcode wrote: post #100

My experience has been that my H1-B coworkers don't get paid as well as US counterparts sand that there is significant friction for them to change companies or even get a big promotion if they are in process of applying for green card. Rather than adding more rules to an already difficult process though I think the best solution would be to allow people with H1-B to easily change jobs after some period of time at the…

True, I read somewhere that majority of scientists are immigrants, heck, even Donald Trump's grandpa was a German Immigrant!

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

#190

Post by Bartweiss »

anjc wrote: post #150
Bartweiss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers. This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS gr…

It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage? Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.

I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains.

My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming.

There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details.

(I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)

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