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Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

thehill.com

401–410 of 571 posts

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#401
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.

So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.

There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#402
post #398
post #392

Freedom of movement of labour is the principal reason unions and the British labour party had significant brexit support: the view was that EU labour migration was designed to reduce bargaining power. I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened. If you…

That tension between protecting labor rights and promoting open markets is real

Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.

All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.

Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.

I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#403

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically a…

H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card. Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely. I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and…

> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.

Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#404
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates. I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested pre…

Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.

The O-1 visa exists.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#405
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.

There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.

>Those are nonsense hypotheticals.

In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.

I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#406
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.

Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?

Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".

A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.

Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#407
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI to anyone reading this, this is not what wage theft means. Wage theft is an employer not paying wages they owe to an employee.

Yup and it's also worth mentioning that wage theft is the largest source of theft in the United States. Employers steal more wages from employees than shoplifting or basically any other form of theft, combined. Wage theft makes up 4x more theft than the next largest, which is larceny. Americans are waaaay too corporation friendly.

the fact that you can imprison people, but the most you can do to a corporation is fine them, is evidence enough that america supports profit over humans

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#408

So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface. It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in parti…

> anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.

Re: Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card. Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely. I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and…

> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.

Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
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