301–310 of 637 posts
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…
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Lots of countries contend with this: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Britain, etc. People adapt. Perhaps we grow to appreciate our food and throw out less waste.
Even at wages closing in on 3x minimum wage, we cannot get enough farm labor[1] - obviously low skilled American labor still doesn't want the job. What's the solution? [1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
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.
Even if we assume your assessment of the problem ("H1B is a bullshit immigration program for cheap engineers from India and China designed to depress wages in silicon valley.") is correct, how is this step taking us towards a solution?
Education level seems really arbitrary and exploitable. Maybe auction work visas for income tax bonds. Pay interest so that new grads can bid for them through lenders.
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.
Umm.. I'm on H1b and I make a lot.
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Personal opinion- I think homogeneous societies cooperate much better and I personally believe that so-called forced diversity of racial backgrounds is an effort to lower the camaraderie in a team and keep the loyalty to the firm and not the team members and thus bringing down wages by competition. I am all for diversity of ideas and background. Something which would make a companies more productive at the same wage.…
Homogeneity is good only if you are moving towards the optimal goal. Diversity is good to bring in new ideas which helps adjust the goal and keep the society robust against failure. Like autocracy vs democracy. If you have a benevolent godly dictator, that's perfect. But we accept that no such ideal exists, so democracy is the compromise. Diversity in the workplace exerts the same goal. It lowers efficiency, but effi…
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>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…
From 1974 to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1]. The graph is useful to look at.
I do think some of the story is that most compensation gains went to benefits, especially our crazy expensive health care (again 5% to 18.2% of gdp). So the hourly wages stayed the same, but benefits went up. I think the original point, that more workers did not lower income, still holds.
Really I can't do an Econ Phd to respond to this thread. So I'll outsource to economists, who say more workers do not lower income.
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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…
> "You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born." That number sounded really high to me and I went looking for information to refute it. Turns out 50% may be a rather modest estimate today: Foreign Students and Graduate STEM Enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign... > The report found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engine…
Maybe getting a PhD in the US is a huge waste of time because there's fierce competition for most academic jobs and scarce employment prospects?
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…
However, Silicon Valley can pay handsome money because many companies located there run well and outperform their competitors for a fertile global market. And those companies can beat their competitors because (at least part of the reasons) they have the best talents available. If the skilled engineers from China, European, India all went back to their home countries, would the competitiveness of those SV companies be no different relative to their foreign competitors? If companies in SV were losing its advantage to another tech hub outside the united states, would they still be able to pay so well? I doubt that.
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>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 go…