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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

#271

Post by anonymoushn »

rhapsodic wrote: post #210
wnevets wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did provide it, attempting to kill an industry that is already dying is hardly acting tough on that industry

>I did provide it, attempting to kill an industry that is already dying is hardly acting tough on that industry. Tell that to an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia with 5 kids and no other marketable skills. And the point that I was making, and that you did not refute, is that the Democrats have done much more than send strongly worded letters.

How many people other than the coal miner should we kill by burning coal for electricity so that the coal miner can remain employed?

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

#272

Post by tkahnoski »

danenania wrote: post #247
_wp3r wrote: post #222

H-1B and J-1 consulting and labor firms are far more nefarious than people probably think. Most of my personal experience is with J-1 pimps. These "firms" import seasonal labor and directly collect wages from the hiring company. The catch is as old as markets, as they usually debit housing, food, and fees that are grossly outside of true cost, but allow for just enough origin country adjusted income to still make sen…

How about simply allowing H-1Bs to change jobs if they get an offer from another company, and giving them a sufficient window to find something new if they leave their current company? The no-recourse indentured servitude relationship that makes people dependent on a company for their residency takes away all the employee's negotiating power. If we could change this, I expect that wages would begin to even out.

They can. It's just painful and depending on the competency of both companies legal counsel, it can take months. We've had employees accept offers with a start date, only the visa transfers weren't finished yet so they started MONTHS after the expected start date.

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

#273

Post by valuearb »

Chris2048 wrote: post #266
valuearb wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "depressing wages" point is dumb. These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors. And HP can still hire them, do you want them to just open up more space in Bangalore, or would you rather those wages go to US based locations? And it's not a zero sum game. One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company.…

> One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company Can you give details so it can be judged if this is true, and if so how common/relevant it is?

He was a japanese physicist, lost his job when Supercollider project canceled. Instead of going back to Japan, I was able to hire him as lead graphics engineer on a Macintosh imaging product, he was super creative in developing unique graphics effects and his product became our biggest and most profitable. The company grew to 140 employees, his team was 20, but it's reasonable to think about a quarter of the workforce was tied to it given it was about a quarter of our revenues.

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

#274

Post by shas3 »

omouse wrote: post #123
shas3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly s…

The fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.

Yes, everyone wants to keep their costs low. Especially software companies because most of their expenditure is on personnel. However, in meat-space companies like pharma, chemicals, etc. plant, hard goods, etc. cost more than personnel. A senior-level manager often cannot pay $30k extra just to match Si valley salaries in an auction because they don't have so much room on personnel.

These norms are not set by individuals, but by a system of financial analysts, shareholders (think large pension funds, etc.), etc.

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

#275

Post by throwawaydbfif »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #61
jarsin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total BS. I have seen this first hand both as a hiring manager and as an applicant. I have been rejected from jobs based on totally insane interview questions that have nothing to do with the job. In one case I interviewed at 2 competitors. One gave me nothing but trick whiteboard questions, the other emphasized my experience and gave me a real world interview. I was rejected by the whiteboard company and hired by th…

You bring up another reason why 90% of applications might be rejected: false negatives. Consider a hiring filter which rejects 90% of good applicants and 99% of bad applicants. In such a world, consider a population of 10 good applicants. These 10 applicants will go on 100 interviews, be rejected on 90 of them and each will find a job. So in this world where every applicant finds a job , you still get 9/10 applicatio…

This is exactly what happens. The hiring bar is so arbitrarily high that companies can say there's a shortage when they reject 5-10 good applicants for every position.

In a true labor shortage this would be completely unsustainable. Trying to justify rejecting 90% of your good applicants to avoid "false negatives" and extending that logic to say that there's a shortage... Obviously retarded if you think about it.

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

#276

Post by shas3 »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #267
shas3 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vast majority" still excludes tens of thousands of people. These are real people with real families and real jobs in real companies, not just some statistical data points.

So a fix for 90% of the problem is out because it's bad for a small percentage? Everything is a trade-off, a solutions for the vast majority of cases outweighs the inconvenience on a small minority

Uh ok. You can slice up 90% in many ways. But why choose to cut it such that you lose 100% of other industries? That sounds quite effed up.

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

#277

Post by valuearb »

douche wrote: post #255
valuearb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shareholders are us, our 401ks, our pensions, etc. Overall, higher margins are good for us. Walmart should not sell higher cost products just to have them made in this country. The ability to specialize is why free trade makes both parties wealthier, if we can't make bicycles as well as the chinese, then let them make the bikes and we'll sell them smartphones and apps. If you were a lawyer making $300 an hour and…

> The shareholders are us, our 401ks, our pensions, etc. Overall, higher margins are good for us. The people working shit jobs at Walmart don't have 401ks or pensions. Or maybe they did, back when there were some good manufacturing jobs that produced goods locally, instead of being outsourced to the other side of the world.

Running a cash register isn't a high skill job, do you think they'd get paid more if the goods were american, because they wouldn't.

But the savings passed to consumers is spent on lots of things, like apps. And app developers are doing pretty good.

The economy is much more fluid that you seem to understand.

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

#278

Post by Chris2048 »

Cheap labor isn't the only issue here.

Wage theft in the form of capping competition is the big issue.

Assume the rate of salary change dS(t)/dt is propotional-to/a-function-of (average_labor_demand - average_labor_supply)

Now, if you keep topping up supply from overseas, salary never increases as much as it might, as such it is limited - as such, salary rate increase is also capped; and it's not employees can have any relief from a lack of demand, other than maybe fewer visas, but I doubt there would be many lobbyists for that... complaints about unemployment or lack of jobs falls on deaf ears - ears stuffed full of money by happy employers...

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

#279

Post by yummyfajitas »

unprepare wrote: post #260
yummyfajitas wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would an unemployed person move? security deposit/down payment, moving costs, etc all cost real money, and without an income, I'm not sure how you would expect someone to move across the country. Strangely, illegal Mexicans seem to have solved this problem. In fact, they solved it so well that we plan to build a wall to keep them out. This is why I say we need to import a better working class. Our own lei…

Have you ever met an illegal immigrant? been to their home? asked them about their experience coming to the US? Its interesting to see you assume so much about illegal immigrants, when you clearly dont have even a foundational understanding of their lives here or in mexico.

Do you have a substantive argument, or merely the vague supposition that somewhere out there there must be some personal anecdote that invalidates what I said?

Could you clarify what "assume so much" refers to? I'm pretty sure that the only assumption I made is that most illegal immigrants are not non-workers collecting benefits.

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

#280

Post by Chris2048 »

valuearb wrote: post #273
Chris2048 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company Can you give details so it can be judged if this is true, and if so how common/relevant it is?

He was a japanese physicist, lost his job when Supercollider project canceled. Instead of going back to Japan, I was able to hire him as lead graphics engineer on a Macintosh imaging product, he was super creative in developing unique graphics effects and his product became our biggest and most profitable. The company grew to 140 employees, his team was 20, but it's reasonable to think about a quarter of the workforc…

Sounds like an excellent use of H1B; but I'm sure it's not a common one.
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