Cisco ‘secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring US citizens’: report

Its not the immigrants you should be mad at, its the corporate interests. Like this article shows, the immigrants have an advantage over citizens precisely because companies get away with paying them less.

The US government has been bought & sold to the highest bidder for a long time now, in many, many areas - repealing net neutrality, healthcare no one can afford, skyrocketing CEO salaries while companies claim raising minimum-wage would bankrupt them, the list just goes on and on. Pharmaceutical companies hide results/push bad drugs and get a slap on the wrist. Google/Apple/Facebook got caught colluding in wage-fixing to keep salaries low and got a slap on the wrist.

Prisons are run for-profit and the few companies that control how prisoners send messages/make calls to the outside charge rates like $20 for a 20-minute call. A money order to send money outside costs $11.95. The prison facilities sometimes share in the revenue made by these companies, which gives them further incentive to gouge prisoners. No doubt the prisons kickback some money to police officers who get them more arrests too.

Like at what point is the government going to fucking step in and protect the people over the companies?

As long as that keeps happening the middle-class will continue to get f*ed. But immigrants are just a convenient scapegoat to blame, and screwing them will not really solve the problem. When you sell crucial nation-level functions to companies, set up a stock market that incentivizes revenue above all else, and the government is asleep at the wheel to correct the worst tendencies of revenue-maximizing, this is what happens.

The reality of the field is you've got to be good. Ain't no such thing as a free lunch. It isn't enough to be born somewhere. Need skills.

I think your argument is that the workers aren't available at any salary, and that you're communicating this sarcastically through the clearly false claim that if you raise salaries, the population of network engineers will magically increase overnight.

Right, no.

It does take a while. You can't make a network engineer right away. But putting aside "abiogenesis", it is as close to a well known fact as anything in labor markets that supply will rise in response to higher prices, and demand will fall, and that the market will eventually settle onto an equilibrium point. Certain events, like a new technical breakthrough or market shift that suddenly increases demand can lead to temporary "shortages", and it can take a while to get back to that equilibrium. In that case, it's tempting to interfere with a "short term" visa program.

But this is how short-term fixes can make the long term problem even worse. Because we suppressed the rapid wage growth that tends to happen in a "shortage" in order to get back to equilibrium (in this case through employer controlled visas bestowed on workers who aren't allowed to participate in free labor markets) we more or less made assured a chronic shortage. Now, instead of gradual wage increases that occur along with an increase in demand, we have a gap. We'd need to raise salaries considerably, and then wait a while, in order to get back to the kind of labor market you'd see in the absence of highly coercive programs (where tech employees decide who is allowed to live in the US and what jobs they're allowed to work if they want to stay here).

It's interesting, how the attempt to control labor markets often results in coercion at a human level (in this case, laws that severely curtail a large portion of the labor force's basic right to pursue a career in response to their own interests and abilities).

> I don’t believe Americans benefit from a level of migration that makes them a political minority in their own homeland though.

“Americans” can't be made a political minority through immigration, because naturalized immigrants and, a fortiori, their descendants are Americans (and are as much Americans as descendants of 18th C and earlier British and other European migrants.)

White Americans might become a political minority, but I don't see any reason anyone but racists would think that, in and of itself, is a bad (or good, for a different stripe of racist) thing.

> Although I admit to anticipating schadenfreude when the foreign majority votes themselves the baby boomer’s assets around 2040.

I'm not sure what you mean by “foreign majority”, but whatever you mean by it:

(1) it obviously includes a significant share of the Baby Boomers, and

(2) in 2040, there will be precious few Baby Boomers for any group to appropriate assets from, and

(3) I don't see any non-paranoid reason to believe this would happen, no matter what group you identify as the “foreign majority”.

"You are using a straw man"

Huh. I think this is a pretty good illustration of why sarcasm is often not constructive in complex and nuanced discussions.

My use of the phrase "magically increase overnight" was in direct response to a sarcastic use of "abiogenesis". So while I agree it's a straw man, it's not a straw man I was using, it was a straw man in the statement I as refuting, resulting from the kind of hyperbole you often find in sarcasm.

I do find it just a little odd you think this the statement I was making when it was in fact the statement I was refuting. But that may not have been clear, A this is a pretty good illustration of why sarcasm (not in your statement, in the one I responded to) and hyperbole often aren't useful in advancing an argument.

Sarcasm has its place, but it can also be a place where poorly considered arguments find a place to hide.