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27 years later.
I don’t follow. Parents who are on H1B can leverage their wards citizenship by birth to get their own citizenship by naturalization. And by no stretch of imagination do they need to wait for 27 long years!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/20/th...
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See your argument is short sighted, as these people provide economic benefit, it’s in your interest to allow as many as you can in while the other countries aren’t interested in taking your best and brightest. It’s why Canada’s tech sector stands to gain hugely while America squanders its lead. Canada’s letting in anyone smart and technical and the US is telling them no. What were arguing for is being unfair in Ameri…
Countries should do what makes sense for them. Canada is behind, they want to jump start their tech sector. They’re not a challenge to the US, China, Japan or even Russia. So good on them. We have a need for some specialists and we have a need for many low skills laborers. We need a system to evaluate need, address it appropriately and manage the foreign workforce to the advantage of Americans. Panama is free to invi…
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Chili sounds spicy. I’m not pro jus soli but to characterize birth tourism as a big problem is crazy. A conservative think tank estimated it at 40,000 births per year out of 4.3 million (0.9%) — the average delivery costs $32,000 for an economic benefit of $1.28B per year. Then those poor kids are going to have to pay US income taxes for the rest of their natural lives no matter where they live. We can expect the fir…
It’s not a problem in and of itself but it’s illustrative of our lax policy.
I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. A great improvement would be to allow H1B holders to change jobs easily (maybe after a year). It's too easy for them to get stuck in not great situations. It would be great for everyone if they could move to better fitting jobs, especially for startups who have trouble running H1-B programs. If you are, like me, a software engineer, you should…
>To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages. You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right? Coincidentally during that same time period the income gap exploded because the wealthy had plentiful cheap labor and were able to pocket the produ…
Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so I don't know how to tease this out.
Heath care does go up from 5% of gdp in 1960 to 18.2% today, maybe most compensation gain is going there? Plus retirement benefits.
But... from 1960 to 2000 the civilian labor force increased from 70 million to 141 million [1]. With all those new workers, by your link, compensation didn't actually shrink. That's weird huh? Also real median family income grew from $41K to $72K [2].
And sure 10 million software engineers added to SV tomorrow would lower wages. But maybe not long term? If it was 10 million countrywide? What would an economist or a careful wage survey say? Anyway we're talking about 85,000 jobs all over the country.
The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages. They usually conclude that for specific wage markets too.
Maybe we can't rely on some anecdotes in the media to refute their conclusions?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf (table 5)
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I think when you're contesting a well known economic principle (increased supply tends to decrease prices given equal demand) the impetus is on you to prove the claim. That said, this would be difficult to demonstrate with data because the effect manifests as salaries growing slower than they would without H1Bs. Obviously, there are a million other variables involved, so without some kind of controlled study it's unl…
Software engineers are being hired at much higher rates than any other profession in the US and that has been going up for decades. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
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The idea that those on H1B visas are bringing wages down for software engineers is a popular one. Is it supported by data? If it isn’t, this is just thinly veiled xenophobia. Personally, I think the more diverse groups have an opportunity to come to America legally, the better.
From an economics perspective, unless the hiring of more software engineers results in an increased demand for software engineers (i.e. there being a significant latent demand), H1B absolutely then lowers the earnings potential of engineers. Especially those earning more towards the middle and bottom of the market. I'd also add that BLS data suggests that this induced demand isn't true. As the projected employment gr…
And the projections are for 300k, not 600: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.h....
where are you getting your data from?
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> I've worked with a few H1-B holders in Silicon Valley and they're awesome. To counter your anecdote, I've worked with countless H1-B's over the years, and while a handful have been awesome most of them are absolutely terrible.
Agree 100%. A handful are awesome. Many are doing software for the wrong reasons and most are generating mountains of shit code.
(I know nothing about this topic but) Wouldn't that also be true of the general US population, and programmers in other countries? and etc...
i.e. Sturgeon's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
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However anecdotal this claim may be, it seems fairly intuitive given the basic economic model of supply and demand. Can you explain how greatly increasing the supply of developers by importing them from overseas will not affect the demand, and therefore negatively affect the cost of labour?
Qualified supply is nowhere close to matching demand. Ask anyone that has to do recruiting for their teams. Source: personal experience
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Software engineers are being hired at much higher rates than any other profession in the US and that has been going up for decades. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
You understand that the predictions for industry growth on those pages are virtually the same as the number of CS bachelor's degree graduates every year. We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
they're not...
> We don't need to important more labor that that which is getting educated inside of the United States short of those who demonstrate extraordinary ability (i.e. those who come into the country on EB1 rather than on H1B).
We can't produce enough internally, so we do.