Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

Most of the work these companies are hired to produce is done in India. People on H1B are few and hired to delegate across time zones. It's hard without someone in the US connecting the bridge. This pandemic made it clear.

It's a possibility that this new policy has very little implication on the overall budget of projects.. unless the companies are financially strong enough to hire local employees at a high salary. When compared to an employee salary in a developing economy, local salaries look very high!

Smaller and mid-sized non-tech companies are hurt during this pandemic. These IT consulting companies work mostly with non-tech companies. Fiscal policy this year has failed to "really" provide loans or stimulus to small struggling companies. They all want tech and that means more work will go to these IT companies that can do at a lower cost.

International trade is done on the mutual-benefits equation. Historically the unwritten understanding is that India allows US companies to operate in its local market in return partly for labor market access to its people through a work visa. That these workers are not creating value is a myth looking at the financials of these IT consulting firms. Getting a grocery purchase order database implemented correctly has far more immediate influence than the work of a futuristic researcher.

Overall this new policy looks like an election stunt to appease a certain electoral audience given its timing and lackluster fiscal policy.

That's called election hacking.

Every economy specializes, influences international trade to that end. It's cheaper to manufacture in China, buy corn from the US, write computer programs in India. I feel just so sick to read comments here calling these companies bodyshops, sweatshops, cheap labor.. whatever word degrading in the context.

The right question is perhaps: how to help create locally employed IT consulting companies that can compete with Indian IT consulting companies... and the answer is more than bad-mouthing or volatile short-term regulations. Is it even in the country's interest to spend resources to become a leader in IT consulting?

Gobbledygook.

> The duty and role of a government is to act in the best interest of their citizens which that government represents.

Truism. The point of contention is around what constitutes "best interest."

> The interests of outsiders are simply not relevant to that

If this is so simple, why did it require an additional 500ish words to qualify it?

Your point seems to boil down to this:

In cases where there is a conflict between the perceived "best interest" of citizens and those of non-citizens, if the citizens haven't specifically directed the government to do otherwise, the government should act in the perceived "best interest" of its own citizens.

But it's reductive and short-sighted to say that humanitarian aid "hurts" one side and "helps" the other. For instance, the marginal impact of a U.S. dollar on a U.S. citizen's productivity is effectively nil. But that same dollar spent in a third-world country would have much higher marginal impact. The productivity of that other citizen allows them to specialize and trade, and then everyone benefits in the long term.

The hyper-nationalism perspective that your country should take whatever it can at the expense of other countries is exactly what led to both of the world wars.

I believe thats quite an overestimate. Both Amazon and Google exceed the minimum required wage in each level on average by 93% and 73% respectively.

Separately, that is precisely what the article is doing. Conflating the minimum with wages actually paid to infer that H1B workers at large tech companies are underpaid.

Source: p52 on https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...

From the p.o.v. of the person actually doing this, it takes years from the moment you apply to the moment you get the decision. This is what needs to change.

Whenever lower wage markets are open to higher wage markets, what happens is the higher wage markets lose - especially their up-and-coming developers who normally would get hired and trained, but instead get replaced.

This normally happens near the bottom, historically. Low wage workers come and work on farms and at other minimum wage jobs, they do actually have an effect on the labor market that is negative for American workers, but since there are usually many jobs on the bottom it doesn't have a large effect.

But at the top - where jobs are far more limited and scarce - it has a large effect.

Further, the companies using H1B are almost entirely large companies. Small businesses are not being hurt at all by a shortage of H1B's.

International trade is highly susceptible to imbalances. Lower wage workers will replace higher wage workers if not protected against, and it isn't always a win in terms of lower cost goods - it often can displace an entire industry that normally would have done well. Especially industries that are important for America to stay strong in, like manufacturing. It also is highly susceptible to distortionary trade policy - see subsidies in foreign nations designed to take over entire industries long term.

Finally, a note on hover governments should work. They should look out for their citizens. That is their modus operandi. There shouldn't be charity, unless the charity in some way truly helps our citizens. And especially, they should care about the average gal. H1B visas are literally taking out a big pool of well-paid jobs that otherwise we could easily be feeding with community college graduates and younger citizens.

This isn't even close to hacking anything, by any definition of the word. It's literally what he campaigned on years ago, if anything it's super long overdue.