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

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

#421

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:27 AM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #340

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…

By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works. > if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Guess what, we'd get a lot more overseas clients as they wrestled with the labor shortage abroad. (Although, the real problem would be the humanitarian crisis in housing 10m more in SV overnight, ha)

> By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works.

Yes, this logic is perfectly sound. Increase in productivity has both good and bad impacts on a system within which it happens - the whole difficulty of managing a system (like a job market) is to find ways to pocket the good, and mitigate the bad.

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

#422

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:27 AM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #340

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…

By this logic, any increase in productivity is bad because it reduces labor scarcity. That's just not how it works. > if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Guess what, we'd get a lot more overseas clients as they wrestled with the labor shortage abroad. (Although, the real problem would be the humanitarian crisis in housing 10m more in SV overnight, ha)

[deleted]

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

#423

Post by metttalica » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

myegorov wrote: post #294

devereaux wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, just … no. It's not about signaling or positive sentiments. All human beings are equal. Being born in one place doesn't make you special or entitles you to a job. US citizen or whatever-country citizen, all that matters is what you can do. Meritocracy, you know. If someone else can do the job better than you or me, they should be hired. Being born in the US or gender or anything else you can think about shouldn…

By way of a thought experiment: If all human beings are equal, is this a necessary and sufficient condition to let a homeless person stay with you for a night? Assuming this is an option for a relative or friend. Why not willingly give up your job now? Surely someone can lay claim to your job on some merit basis. If you have children, do you distribute your time and affection in proportion to merit? I don't see why I…

Here the cult of HN shows its true face ... As JWZ says :-

A DDOS made of finance obsessed Man-children and brogrammers

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/02/an-annotated-digest-of-the-...

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

#424

Post by dalbasal » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:35 AM UTC

Honestly, I have a hard time with the norms around "worker visas," internationally including the US.

I can't understand the liberal (both right and left) preferance for something that seems (to me) at odds with freedom (as in speech).

On one end of the spectrum we have thingslike middle east guest workers, almost an indentured service arrangment. On the other end, we have SV tech workers and similar elswhere.

What protects the higher earning workers is their higher earnings, which gives them more options and leverage.

Regardless most are bound to an employer, one way or another. They inarguably have much less freedom. They can't make the same choices (eg. work part time, career break). Other choices require bureaucratic approval (change job, start a business, go to uni).

If citizens were subjected to these sorts of restrictions, it would be considered a liberal travesty. Since when is liberty subject to citizenship?

To be clear, I'm not against skilled migration. In practice, i think there would be almost no negatives to allowing skilled migrants (same criteria) their freedom.

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

#425

Post by Firadeoclus » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:36 AM UTC

joshe wrote: post #252

treis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

GDP measures paid activity but not wellbeing, i.e. "value".

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

#426

Post by makeset » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

peferron wrote: post #213

H-4 holders (spouses of H-1B, for the uninitiated) should be allowed to work. That they don't is inhuman and de facto hurts women, since the overwhelming majority of H-1B holders (at least in the Valley) are men. It's forcing women into a stay-at-home role as if it were the 50s. It's especially hard for H-4s because they are newcomers to the USA who may not have local friends or family. My wife went through it for a…

Same thing with F-2 holders (spouses of F-1 student visas). In contrast, J-2 holders (spouses of J-1 exchange students) are allowed to work.

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

#427

Post by roselan » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:40 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.

With children staying with their parents into adulthood and earning a wage, we might even speak of 3 wages per household.

This might be compensated my the raise of monoparental households.

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

#428

Post by ben_w » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

AYBABTME wrote: post #359

emiliobumachar wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be aware that Silicon Valley is an extreme global outlier in real estate prices.

Not really, there's cities all over the world with conditions that lead to crazy high real estate/housing costs. Most every metropolis ends up with a similar situation. Slightly different settings that all sum up to "high demand low supplies". NYC, London, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Tokyo, ...

SF is an outlier compared to London. From expatistan.com:

Monthly rent for 85 m2 (900 Sqft) furnished accommodation in NORMAL area:

SF: $3,663 (£2,789) London: £1,766 Difference: 58%

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

#429

Post by reissbaker » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:44 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #322

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, wealth inequality increased because we stopped taxing rich people.

Wealth inequality has increased mostly due to the massive expansion of the global economy, which was a large benefit to capital owners and was a detriment to US labor (whose wages were artifically very high in the post WW2 decades). Global labor competed, capital benefited. Federal Reserve policies since ~1970 have also overwhelmingly favored capital, asset holders, and not workers. The US tax code has gotten more pr…

> The US tax code has gotten more progressive over time, not less. The very high tax rates from the past were quite narrow in scope, they covered few taxpayers.

That's not how that works. The U.S. has become massively more disparate in income and wealth, which alone would explain why more taxpayers fall into high tax brackets: the middle class is evaporating, leaving a somewhat larger upper class (more high-income taxpayers paying a lot!) and a massively larger lower class (also more low-income taxpayers paying very little), thus shifting the balance of how much the wealthy pay for the poor: with less of a middle class, the wealthier are the originators of a higher percentage of the tax revenue just by mathematics. That's not the tax code becoming "more progressive over time," that's the US having more inequality over time.

But it didn't happen alone. It also happened under repeated tax cuts for the wealthy. The U.S. tax code has become demonstrably less progressive over time, just as the U.S. has become demonstrably less economically equal.

> The US spends the equivalent of 20% of its GDP on social welfare programs. That's higher than Canada and Australia, just slightly behind the UK at 22%.

Right, but that's because the health care system of "no preventative care for the poor, but massive spending on medical procedures once you're already dying" is incredibly inefficient. Single-payer healthcare is cheaper than what we have, demonstrated by almost every large country with it spending less (while often getting better results). It's not because the tax system is progressive, or because the social safety net is somehow better or larger than countries with free healthcare and cheap higher education.

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

#430

Post by PedroBatista » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 11:46 AM UTC

gesman wrote: post #277

Buge wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Import tax on crap would solve it.

If they did the same, US exports would tank.