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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

#501

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

reissbaker wrote: post #429
adventured wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

Are you saying that Medicaid doesn't cover preventative care?

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

#502

Post by dsfyu404ed »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #337
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…

> 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.

Children are more expensive now because of societal pressure to raise kids to a higher standard because people have less of them.

Imagine all the hand wringing that would ensue if at lunch with my colleagues (which is a rough approximation of the HN demographic) I mentioned that I got a 5yo hand-me-down car seat instead of buying the latest and greatest. Generalize that pressure to pretty much every child raising related expense.

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

#503

Post by nojvek »

notyourloops wrote: post #494

He campaigned on the opposite, didn't he?

Probably not the popular opinion here but the way I see trump is he was campaigning hard against “illegal immigration”.

He didn’t explicitly say he’s against highly skilled immigration.

Trump may be an idiot but it seems people incharge of immigration have their head straight and H1Bs are in sore need of a revamp.

I hope the trend continues. America works because hard working and talented people want to come here and make beautiful things people want and build their dreams.

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

#504

Post by ohithereyou »

mc32 wrote: post #60
wyldfire wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC employers avoid this liability by executing the fraud themselves. There's no e-verify violation because they use legitimate SSNs from a living person, fraudulently. The workers aren't the problem, the employers are. Legislators and govt executives look the other way in order to preserve competitive agriculture.

Some restauranteurs and other cash businesses try and pull fast ones on the IRS. So the IRS conducts audits and has agents case suspect establishments. No reason DHS/ICE, whatever cannot do the same and jail fraudsters. If they, the Feds, can jail Martha Stewart on unrelated technicalities, they can jail these fraudsters. Start at the top, target big ones and work your way down to the small ones (they'll get the news…

Martha Stewart, before she was a star, worked as a stockbroker and knew or should have known what she did was wrong.

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

#505

Post by mywittyname »

firstplacelast wrote: post #124
skybrian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegetable and dairy farmers would go out of business, if prices can't be raised due to competition from imports. You'd need tariffs as well, and people would need to put up with significant price increases at the grocery store. There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benef…

LOL. This is so incredibly offensive to Americans. I am the grandson of butchers, farmers, and miners. In the middle of the US, there are lots of (white) Americans that work in these jobs. Many are very proud of their profession. Next time you want to go on a trip to "expand your horizons", go to a podunk town in a fly-over state and get to know your fellow Americans.

I'm a white American who grew up harvesting tobacco on the side. It's not a gig Americans are willing to do. It sucks, it's dangerous, it doesn't pay all that well, and it's seasonal. For reference, I quit cutting tobacco in favor of cleaning out sand filters for sewage treatment plants. Which is to say, shoveling literal shit out of a hole in the ground is preferable to being a farmhand.

The American people you see doing this stuff are by-and-large the family of the land owner or teenagers whose backs are still functional (and have school duties during the off-season).

If you have a family, then you're going to need either a primary job, or an RV to move around. The only people making money farming are the land owners, and even then...

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

#506

Post by snikeris »

mberning wrote: post #471
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…

It is hard believe so many people still don’t “get it”. You cannot inflate the supply of labor, regardless of the means, and get a good result for the average working stiff.

Hmm...how about: inflate the supply of labor, price of goods goes down and better goods are invented, then average working stiff benefits when buying these goods?

I understand your point that the average working stiff might experience wage loss or lose their job altogether, but I'm not sure you're considering the benefits to consumers, which is another role of the average working stiff.

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

#507

Post by calvinbhai »

As an immigrant from India, who worked in the US on H1B, I welcome this change, because this increases the chances of weeding out the bad apples and increases the chances for the good ones to get an H1b visa.

This at least encourages genuine direct employers to hire those who have already contributed to the US economy (by paying out of state tuition which funds/subsidizes the university education of US resident/citizen students)

With this rule change, it certainly is better than what it was earlier.

How could this be made even better?

Make it such that those who studied in the US are not in the lottery. Meaning, give H1b to every applicant who has graduated in the US, and lottery with the remaining visas to those who didn't study in the US. That way, the downward trend of international student admissions will reduce, and help the universities and all the students.

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

#508

Post by winter_blue »

calahad wrote: post #378
joshe wrote: 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…

H1-B mandates a lower than competitive wage that the recipient's get stuck in, this isn't the same situation as women / minorities gaining access to the workplace unless their access came at a mandatory much lower salary.

Do you just enjoy spewing lies incessantly? The H-1B LCA requires visa holders be paid equivalent to or better than U.S. workers. Also, the LCA often lists a lower salary than what people earn. At my last company, my base salary was close to 140k, but the H-1B LCA on file listed 95k or something. With bonuses, I've made over 200k in a single year in the past. My tax return and the H-1B LCA paint two very different pictures. Based on the public LCA records, one would think I was paid 95k. And, of course, the dedicated haters and liars here on HN will probably say the company violated immigration and labor law, and paid less than what the LCA required. They'd probably suggest I was paid 30k. Of course, the truth doesn't matter to these haters. They're filled with a disgusting hatred of immigrants, along with a repugnant and shameless love of dishonesty.

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

#509

Post by calvinbhai »

t1o5 wrote: post #468
luckydata wrote: post #13

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.

Are you sure ? Increasing the masters quota for H1B will worsen things. Here is why. A majority of Masters degree holders in the US are those students who couldn't crack the basic campus recruitment in India for software companies during their Bachelors. So they take a stab at it once more by investing in a masters degree in US which increases their H1B lottery chances. I am not generalizing all the masters degree ho…

as an immigrant who got an MS degree in US and worked on H1b visa, what you say is quite a simplification of what it takes to move to a different country, get a master's degree and survive long enough to get a H1b visa.

A tiny chunk of them may do this, by going to so shady US universities. But that's a very small %age

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

#510

Post by tomatotomato37 »

arcseco wrote: post #473
ben_w wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either the work is done in your country, where you: * control minimum wage laws etc., * collect the taxes, * benefit from most of the money being spent locally, or it’s done abroad, where a foreign government collects all the benefits. Import duties don’t do much to fix that. And if you have most or all of the workforce, then you get to lobby against other nations’ import duties.

You don't really get to control min-wage laws, working standards or environmental regulations over the long term in a tariff free world. US trade deficits are growing and will inevitably have to be normalized. When that happens the US will have to become a lot more competitive with nations that don't have these standards in place. Stagnated wages are just the beginning and are borrowing time before labour standards a…

This is why we need to start including a tariff with labor or environmental regulations. The point of those regulations is that we as a nation are accepting a decrease in economic efficiency for a (hopeful) net gain in general quality of life; if companies are allowed to just offshore their shit to some place that doesn't care without compensating in some other way than you're stuck the economic disadvantage without the accompanying benefit.
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