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

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

#441
post #329
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If labor/labour supply doubled wages would drop for most of the market.

That assumes the demand and the supply are independent variables. More people would mean smaller pieces if the size of the pie held constant. But what if there are also fewer people making the pie? In reality, it's even more complicated in that the contribution of the pie making is not proportional to the headcounts either.

> That assumes the demand and the supply are independent variables.

When the argument is that an increase in supply causes lower wages your counter argument doesn't make any sense at all. For wages to rise the demand has to grow faster than the oversupply. The primary way to increase demand is by lowering the price of a service aka workers get paid less. In other words it is possible that even with an extreme amount of immigration everyone still gets a decently paying job but in the end wages across the market have fallen.

Whatever pie analogy you're trying to pull doesn't matter. I don't know why people keep getting nerdsniped by that word and often even use their own hyper specific definition of it which doesn't match the definition of the other person. There is no law that says people always benefit from a growing economy and there is no law that says people can never benefit from a shrinking economy.

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

#442
post #159
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just because "immigrants lower wages" is "common knowledge" doesn't make it true. [1] From your own cite: >Immigrant workers can either be substitutes for native-born workers or complements to them. When immigrant workers are substitutes for native-born workers, they compete for similar jobs. Using a simple supply and demand model, an influx of substitutable workers constitutes an increase in the supply of labor, ca…

That's the section where they acknowledge that, yes, people lose jobs to immigrants. They go on to say that actually more people gain jobs at higher wages because of immigrants. There's a section on high tech jobs to read too, take a look. Most people believe that immigrants generally lower wages and take jobs. They almost never do. Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found tha…

>Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found that immigrants create more jobs and raise wages in most cases.

Except of course the low skilled jobs that the immigrants are now doing. Those jobs see decreased wages. Seriously why do you think companies are hiring them if there were no economic gains and in the end they have to pay more to workers? They might not take jobs overall but claiming they increase wages even in the sectors that they are working in? Now that is what I call delusional.

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

#443
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right This also coincides with the end of the gold standard ('68) and subsequently cheaper interest rates and (thereby) access to much more and cheaper capital for those who already have enough capital to begin with. Also, lower interest rates beget higher inflation.

Standard of living arguably continues to increase as well.

Technological advance is a confounding factor for basically any empirical discussion about economics and standard of living.

Any smooth annual negative impact below the rate of technological advance is very hard to detect due to this.

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

#444
My parents are immigrants. I wish we would just let in a random sample of the global population instead of having selection factors. Or maybe not let in any immigrants at all.

The purpose of these kinds of requirements is to bring in workers for rich American CEOs. It's not because we enjoy the company of immigrants or want to learn their culture. Artificial selection for master degrees just creates stereotypes and leads to things like "the model minority". Imagine if we only let in strong physical laborers and the type of stereotypes and race dynamics that would create. The kind of cultural displacement you feel as an immigrant that is toiling away in a lab to try to serve some rich CEO while you're away from all your like-minded friends/family is depressing.

I haven't read literature on this, it's just my gut feeling.

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

#445

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 pr…

> Since when is liberty subject to citizenship? Since citizenship has existed, meaning pretty much when the first legal systems arose? Providing different sets of rights and duties is the entire point of separating citizens and non-citizens. Hell, the greek polis were mostly about duties, the rights were mostly implicit and incident to being active in running the the community's affairs.

I'm speaking within the context of liberalism, as a set of ideals.

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

#446

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 pr…

I think this is one of the unintended consequences of strong welfare states. If your government spends $xx,xxx per resident per year then someone who arrives and doesn't contribute at least $xx,xxx is a net drain on resources. At the VERY least, you need to ensure your population produces at least $xx,xxx per year in gov't revenue. While I am strongly in support of things like free healthcare, education, etc. I can a…

And you’re wrong. Population growth creates market growth. The humans that literally cannot contribute to the output directly create the broadest and often deepest demands. Babies need all sorts of things their parents wouldn’t otherwise purchase. Immigrants aren’t babies, necessarily, but they do increase market size. This is perhaps a very strong argument for UBI: empowering people with enough for the basics will ensure the contribution to market demand from population growth.

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

#447

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…

> American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids. I'm broadly sympathetic to your viewpoint, but this isn't accurate. Children are fundamentally not expensive. The problem is that couples believe they can't afford to have kids, not that they actually can't afford them.

Extra mouth to feed, extra room (bigger house), constantly changing wardrobe, yearly expenses on school materials and books, extra phone and computer, childcare, etc...

You must have a very weird definition of "cheap".

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

#448

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 pr…

I think this is one of the unintended consequences of strong welfare states. If your government spends $xx,xxx per resident per year then someone who arrives and doesn't contribute at least $xx,xxx is a net drain on resources. At the VERY least, you need to ensure your population produces at least $xx,xxx per year in gov't revenue. While I am strongly in support of things like free healthcare, education, etc. I can a…

That's definitely an argument that comes up, with purchase, in politics.

I don't really think it has much (if any) validity. Taken as a whole, skilled migrants ar just to unlikely to be net recipients of redistributive governance. Skilled migration usually means educated, healthy, employable young (I'd also note that I'm more comfortable (as a liberal) with denying migrants certain positive rights (eg unemployment payments) than basic freedoms.

I think the welfarist-natuonalist argument amounts to a kind of "optimising-in our-favour." Why not get an even better tax/expenditure ratio out of migrants.

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

#449
post #340

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)

The h1bs salary requirements allowed large companies to import cheap workers and compete with American labor.

It's not a coincidence that the biggest numbers of applications went to some of the big Indian IT companies.

It's a good thing they will be changed so that the cost get equalized rather than allowing big companies to import cheap and skilled labour. If it's skilled it should be paid the same of course not less.

This has been known for a long time to be a problem but was mostly ignored until recently.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...

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

#450
post #94

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…

Sure, except the bill rate for my services hasn't changed since like 1998. It sucks, dude.

Reading through the comments, people already said it all, but I came back to vent. After 20 years in this shitty business I can vent if I want to.

I currently work in the US Midwest with a lot of foreign colleagues. They're pretty good people, OVERALL, but the ones that aren't are super-shitty, but that's true of the pastey-white native born Americans, too. But when the going gets tough, and when you need to be creative, the folks from, let's call it "that other place" just don't have any solutions.

Many of the people I work with wait for me to build a solution, then they literally copy and paste it into their project whether or not the design suitably fits their problem. A lot of projects here are a mess because of this "square peg in round hole" behavior. Worse, many of those guys get promoted above their mental capacity and now they're calling the shots and making horrific decisions because they networked with each other and shut out the truly competent people. This is the tippy top of the Fortune 500 here I'm talking about, btw. This is not some Mom & Pop podunk shop and the stakes are high. And so if this constitutes "best and brightest" we're in deep doodoo.

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