U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#251

Post by StillBored » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:19 AM UTC

firstplacelast wrote: post #124

skybrian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegetable and dairy farmers would go out of business, if prices can't be raised due to competition from imports. You'd need tariffs as well, and people would need to put up with significant price increases at the grocery store. There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benef…

LOL. This is so incredibly offensive to Americans. I am the grandson of butchers, farmers, and miners. In the middle of the US, there are lots of (white) Americans that work in these jobs. Many are very proud of their profession. Next time you want to go on a trip to "expand your horizons", go to a podunk town in a fly-over state and get to know your fellow Americans.

Beyond that, to imagine that maintaining a medium sized farm or ranch isn't a skilled position is pure ignorance. There is a reason why a bunch of schools in the midwest were called agricultural schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agricultural_universit...

And its not just the owners, it goes right down to a lot of the year round labor.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#252

Post by joshe » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:20 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #180

joshe wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the section where they acknowledge that, yes, people lose jobs to immigrants. They go on to say that actually more people gain jobs at higher wages because of immigrants. There's a section on high tech jobs to read too, take a look. Most people believe that immigrants generally lower wages and take jobs. They almost never do. Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found tha…

>Also in the paper? "... how does immigration affect the average American?...annual economic gains to the native-born population to be between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of gross domestic product". This is an astonishingly large benefit. That is $50-150 per year for a household with a median income. It's not an astonishingly large benefit. And the GDP is entirely the wrong thing to look at. In the last two decades the U.S.…

GDP per capita is $59,531. So .1-.3% of that is $60-179. For every man, woman, and child in the United States. $19-58 billion per year. This is value created, money from thin air, you don't have to tax anyone to give $120 to everyone in the United States every single year.

If you know something else that good, you should let us all know. Economists and policy makers scrounge around for stuff that's not a tenth as good as that. 333-1000 things this size make up every single dollar anyone in the United States has ever had. That's all the light bulbs, car makers, services and food you've ever seen.

GDP is the perfect thing to look at, it's our national income.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#253

Post by OurBoysGirls1st » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:21 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #30

luckydata wrote: post #13

Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.

No way. Fewer H1 visas means that instead of having foreign workers here on visas performing work, the functions will move elsewhere. If the government was setting up a program to fund boot camps for ERP and other big boring tech like what is done in India and elsewhere, that would be different. But we’re not doing that.

If the function could move overseas, it would have. Why assume companies are acting irrationally and paying higher US wages when they can hire inexpensively overseas? Companies hire locally because many jobs cant be moved overseas cost effectively.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#254

Post by raz32dust » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:21 AM UTC

xtreme wrote: post #243

GreaterFool wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is also what a lot of other countries do As an expat for the bigger part of my life I can't think of a country that would prioritize their own institutions when applying for a visa. Generally there's simply a category for advanced degree holders.

Canada's Express Entry system for skilled immigrants gives you more points if you attended college in Canada. Giving priority to people who have already integrated into the society makes perfect sense to me.

You can give priority to people who have integrated into the society in several other, more obvious ways. In this case, they are making the explicit argument that they want "more skilled" workers, and using a US-based degree as the criteria. If they had a points system, and a Masters degree would get you X points, and every year spent in US would give you additional Y points, then this would make sense.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#255

Post by raz32dust » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC

gedy wrote: post #74

raz32dust wrote: post #58

It would have been a positive change if they did not have the restriction that the Masters must be from a US university. What's wrong with non-US universities? I don't see why degree even matters. Like someone suggested in a previous similar thread, just sorting by pay and giving higher wages more priority (perhaps with some sort of normalization to compensate for cost of living and the field of work) is much better.

A handout to university tuitions and desperate researchers.

The cynic in me believes this is the real reason. Use foreign students to fund US universities in the name of immigration.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#256

Post by Buge » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

tossaccount123 wrote: post #167

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering isn’t most professions. Salaries have been going up more than a decade accounting for inflation. If 10 million software engineers dropped in Silicon Valley, a lot of things would happen (for one there’s nowhere for them to live). But that’s not what’s happening.

It was hyperbole to show the effect of supply and demand More and more I notice how similar software engineers are beginning to sound like the "Made in America" factory workers who said China could never do their job. Never take the present comfy situation for granted

If we want stuff to be made in America instead of China, we should increase the number of skilled immigrants allowed in.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#257

Post by TylerE » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

joshe wrote: post #215

tossaccount123 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now. 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…

The population grew from 179M to 281M so the workforce didn’t really double. More like a 50% increase

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#258

Post by abakker » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

joshgachnang wrote: post #241

joshe wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now. 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 generally agree with what you say, but the median family income growing seems like it would be due to most households moving from one to two workers. Looking at it that way, it makes wages look even flatter over the time period.

Yes, this is right. Large increases in the workforce have increased the supply, reducing real wage growth, household earning has grown by adding a second earner. More work is getting done to get the same economic outcome. Put one way, this is terrible for wage earners, out another it is excellent for spenders since the thing you can buy have gotten cheaper through plentiful labor.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#259

Post by ltbarcly3 » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #229

luckydata wrote: post #13

Honestly this is a good thing. Right now the H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley. A change is sorely needed, this is not big enough but it's definitely a step.

I've posted that before, I'll repost that here From Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of th…

>> The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries

This has been debunked so many times. Even if you take the data at face value, this statement cannot be backed up. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/us-students-are-laggi...

Yes, we are behind a lot of countries. A lot of (VERY) small and (VERY) wealthy European countries for the most part, but also a handful of small Asian countries. But wait, we are ahead of Sweden in science? Is Sweden in the middle of some kind of crisis in their inability to educate their children? What about Norway and Denmark? What about Belgium and Austria and France? They all score about the same as the US in science, are they producing a "generation of dummy"?

What about this: https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-the-results-of-pisa-student-a...

If you don't just include the rich countries, Europe is doing terribly compared to the US. Of course when the US average is calculated, they don't just take the scores from the rich states separately.

Re: U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

#260

Post by OurBoysGirls1st » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #151

ajxs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Software engineers have a habit of assuming problems are more intuitive than they actually are. Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies. BLS estimates that the number of employed software engineers will go up 24% next year, that’s insane. Also, I’m not seeing this supposed depression in salaries. The median salary for a software engineer is 103k a ye…

>> Even with H1B, there are literally not enough engineers in the Valley to saturate the demand from companies.

By "not enough engineers" I'm assuming you mean not enough engineers willing to work for so little they are forced to bunk with 3 roommates?

I know plenty of engineers. Most dont want to work as SWEs because the median salary barely affords a studio apartment, especially after California taxes.

Also, what about the 40+yr olds who are oddly purged from the workforce regularly. If there were a shortage, elderly workers would be retained, not purged in favor of cheaper, younger workers.

Tons of engineers go into consulting, real estate, finance, etc because engineers simply dont make enough, especially given the SF/SV center-of-gravity of jobs. There isnt some magical shortage of workers. There is a shortage of workers willing to work for near subsistence wages [in SF/SV prices]