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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

#381

Post by lowbloodsugar »

valuearb wrote: post #264
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are only being paid fair market value because the H-1Bs are suppressing the fair market value. Without the H-1Bs you would have had to pay more, and that "more" would have been the fair market value. You say "matching Netflix offers is very expensive": again, no, matching Netflix offers is the fair market rate, and without H-1Bs, the rate would be higher. Indeed, unless you are a well known company, you should e…

The market rate is a mix of factors. Including the cost of shipping the work overseas. Would you rather have the same engineer work in Bangalore or California? I'm an engineer and don't think my wages should be artificially increased by keeping smart immigrants that would benefit this country out.

Its not that your wages are artificially increased, its that an H1B worker's wages are artificially decreased because they are trapped in the job and are unable to negotiate at market rate. They can't leave their job, so they can't negotiate a fair salary. The green-card costs the company $5k, but gives them a worker who can't leave for years.

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

#382

Post by strainer »

Chris2048 wrote: post #278

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 a…

By way of an unrealistic formalisation there you actually assumed that salaries are determined exclusively by labour supply and far more predictably and linearly than possible. The complexity of the economy, greatly confounds simplistic formulas.

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

#383

Post by anjc »

mcguire wrote: post #369
anjc wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see what you mean in the Table. I can only see 30% of people who had no work experience in the year in question. I presume that you aren't adding up both years. And I presume that you also noticed that ~15% have a disability. Yeah I'm sure middle class people in India would love to live "as well" as the American poor do. I was talking about the firmly developed world. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU…

Take the number of poor between 18 and 64, divide by the number of poor between 18 and 64 who did not work, and you get 61.7% Of course, the question of whether they "choose" not to work, "choose" to be poor, or if they are "lazy" are judgements not supported by the numbers. (More worrying is the 40% of the poor who did work.)

Oh yeah I see now, thanks. I was misinterpreting the first column.

Obviously it's impossible to glean motivations from a table, but it's telling to me that among the general population the majority of workers work full time, whereas among the poor it's the opposite, with most working part time for the entire year.

These people would probably be called the 'working poor' in my country; they're trying to work, but unfavourable economic and employment conditions make it difficult to maintain stable/consistent/quality employment. But in comparison to other developed countries, the proportion of workers (in that table) for a poor demographic is relatively high. Which would also signal to me that not only is the demographic not choosing NOT to work, but that they're choosing to work in higher numbers than in other countries despite their poverty (or maybe because of it).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/Pov_crossnatl...

I still maintain that people don't choose not to work en-masse for extended periods, evidenced by the fact that the US has had full employment for many periods.

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

#384

Post by mywittyname »

chrishacken wrote: post #315
garyfirestorm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is amazing! However I would like to point out, H1B is not only for Silicon Valley. There are many automotive companies which require foreign talent in specialized fields. Very smart people with multi-disciplinary knowledge are nowhere to be found in auto sector. Signal Processing and vibrations and programming and control systems understanding etc. is required to deal with things like active noise control which…

I believe the proposed solution to the H1B issue was to simply increase the minimum wage for H1B's to $140k. If a company is bringing over top-talent that is irreplaceable; surely that salary is justified. Otherwise, they probably don't need you as bad as they say they do.

Raising wages combats the symptoms (wage depression) but not the cause (lack of mobility).

The only way to truly solve the issue is to tie the H1B to the person and let them work freely in the US after a short time.

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

#385

Post by chrishacken »

mywittyname wrote: post #384
chrishacken wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the proposed solution to the H1B issue was to simply increase the minimum wage for H1B's to $140k. If a company is bringing over top-talent that is irreplaceable; surely that salary is justified. Otherwise, they probably don't need you as bad as they say they do.

Raising wages combats the symptoms (wage depression) but not the cause (lack of mobility). The only way to truly solve the issue is to tie the H1B to the person and let them work freely in the US after a short time.

How would that solve the symptoms? And why is that the cause? I think the actual issue is that there aren't enough top-talent individuals in the country already; meaning the real cause is actually our broken education system.

Opening the flood gates might solve the issues of select individuals and some companies, but it doesn't solve wage depression.

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

#386

Post by diebir »

Anecdotally, as a former H1-B worker, I would not say I was underpaid or the employer ever exploited the fact that I was on H1-B. From my standpoint it has always been a fair deal.

Okay, the gist of the article is that H1-B should require higher salaries (in the 75th percentile). This would have the effect of cutting off younger and less experienced workers. The problem here is that more experienced and older people are less likely to want to move. In other words, this would mean that the US tech would lose out on the potential talent. Again anecdotally my current tech org is 60-80% foreign born. It is also one of the most selective places around. Would it be like it is without H1-B program? I doubt it.

So perhaps the system needs tweaking, specifically in the area of making the system work faster and being less arcane. I highly doubt this is what's going to happen. Ten years from now we'll be having the same conversation, as we were ten years ago (I have been watching this since '99).

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

#387

Post by nostrademons »

Akkuma wrote: post #352
nostrademons wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies? Google at least has a policy that promotions & annual raises normalize to level-defined salary bands, i.e. if you have a higher salary coming in relative to your coworkers of equal skill, you will get smaller raises until your salaries equalize.

Google also had artificially lower salary bands by colluding with other tech companies to not fight for talent.

Well, true, and I'm not exactly happy about that...but that cartel was eventually broken when Facebook refused to play ball.

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

#388

Post by throw2016 »

valuearb wrote: post #246
myf01d wrote: post #107

Trump asks the right questions: the danger of globalism, incredibly high global debt, the danger of radical islam, the overestimation of Russia's danger on the US and EU, the questionable usefulness of NATO, the economic manipulation by China, he just has the wrong answers.

Trump forgot that the USSR once had a massive superiority in military forces in the European theatre (over 2-1 vs. NATO). The breakup of the USSR made Europe tremendously safer. Now Trump is going to let Putin recapture the Ukraine and restore much of his missing military edge, while undercutting NATO. It's like he's inviting Putin to just invade Poland. How is that going to end?

This is like saying the breakup of the USA will make the rest of Americas safer. Maybe but military strength does not directly translate to 'threat' without intent. Some states by their geography, history and technology are naturally more 'powerful'. Does that automatically translate into a threat or the idea that they should be broken up. Who gets to decide this?

This is like positioning Russia creating a SATO with South American States to defend against 'US aggresiveness' and trying to actively break up the US as a 'defensive action'.

Yet this is the kind of foreign policy routinely adopted by the US and 'the west' and yet it's others that are 'aggressive'.

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

#389

Post by lern_too_spel »

davidf18 wrote: post #183
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. C…

Clinton proposed automatically giving H1Bs a green card, which would have removed them from indentured servitude. Your narrative ignores the actual policy.

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

#390

Post by solutionyogi »

nostrademons wrote: post #387
Akkuma wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also had artificially lower salary bands by colluding with other tech companies to not fight for talent.

Well, true, and I'm not exactly happy about that...but that cartel was eventually broken when Facebook refused to play ball.

The point is that Google purposefully tried to keep the wages low. If not for FB, they would have never changed the practice. I have zero trust in Google for doing the right thing regarding salaries.
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