Does it matter? Of course, otherwise this wouldn't be the contentious issue that it is. If you are the Disney programmer telling your wife and kids that you are unemployed, I assure you, it matters.

To say it doesn't matter if there are 0 H1-Bs or 250,000 H1-Bs is ...

Your "high paid H1-B worker" most likely isn't (see data contained in the referenced article). Outside of a small percentage of very rare individuals or specialists every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen, who would pay the same taxes or more, is far more likely to buy real estate than rent a nearby apartment for a couple of years, and will almost assuredly un-employ some American than hopefully employ one.

> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen

This is the lump of labor fallacy at its worst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

How did the US manage to grow from 100 million people to more than 300 million without massive unemployment if the number of jobs to go around was fixed?

The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy. It arbitrarily assumes that any person can work any job just as easily as the next, without retraining. It fails to account for the effects of downward pressure on wages, among other things.

Please stop using it.

There are nuances to it, but it's a heck of a lot closer to 'the truth' than "every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen", which is egregiously wrong.

Egregiously wrong can be back of the envelope quantified here.

Image the following thought experiment. Assume that tomorrow morning every H1-B worker poof vanished. Then, on the assumption of egregiously wrong, zero of those positions in this hypothetical world could or would be filled by a single individual of the 204 million working population of US. If egregiously wrong then 60K to 85K good well paying middle class salaried positions would sit begging, unfulfilled and unfillable.

If egregiously correct, than most of those positions would be filled. Care to quantify your belief of "egregious wrongness" by stating how many of those positions you in fact believe can not and will not get filled?

Some of the companies that depend on those people would fail due to the sudden departure of key employees, leaving a slew of people unemployed!

Some of those positions would be filled - eventually. Some of the jobs would be farmed out to other countries.

Also, the people that depend on the custom of those workers (say a bunch of them are from India and eat at a local Indian restaurant as a simple thought experiment) would suffer as well.

The economy is not a zero-sum game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHCT2bUjwg

The disconnect is in attributing second order effects as completely dominating the first order effects. In the thought experiment where poof the H1-Bs never happened and poof were filled by qualified US citizens, totally different conclusions.

The first order effect difference: I claim effectively all of those positions could and would be filled. The "this is egregiously wrong" position claims that effectively none of those well paid jobs would be filled. I know why people will proactively seek a well paying job. I am not able to follow the position that no one will bother to seek those positions at all. Seems at odds with basic human motives to me.

With regard to the alluded second order effects, multiplier effects.

Consider the Disney situation where "about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India."[1]

Sure the local Indian restaurant will prosper. But that is 250 households whose kids can longer afford to go to college. 250 home purchases vs 250 apartment rentals (folks on 2-3 yr visa rent not buy in general). So on and so forth.

On the surface, to me, 250 middle class families with well paying IT positions spins off far more positive effects than what we have now which is 250 US families with significant if not total household income loss, on unemployment etc. In no way is this compensated by having 250, lower paid, immigrants on temporary H1-B visas (again NYTimes phrasing). I see a net-net huge loss, others seem to see a net-net huge win.

[1] Quoted from NYTimes.

> But that is 250 households whose kids can longer afford to go to college. 250 home purchases vs 250 apartment rentals (folks on 2-3 yr visa rent not buy in general). So on and so forth.

Because it's completely impossible for any of these people to find another decent job?

Sorry, don't buy it. I've been through companies folding and so on, and I have a better job than I did then.

Get familiar with them first.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-c... http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-2015021...

Nobody suggested that the probability of at least one of these people getting a decent job down the road is zero.

A huge percentage of them in their 40s, 50s will not get anything even close. Please take some time to become familiar with ageism in the IT industry to understand why this is the case.

What is it that you don't buy? Exactly.

That they didn't really lose their jobs? That they were not really replaced that by the temporary immigrants on H1-B visas that they trained? That most of them didn't find better paying jobs within the week after being laid off? That many of these families will not suffer a huge drop in living standard?

I don't buy that there are no more jobs to be had. I certainly feel for them and don't discount that it's rough, but there's a good market for developers these days.

There's even a good market for developers over 40 - that includes me - even though there are some places where people prefer youth and energy to experience.

I believe all of your claimed issues are false:

>pay the same taxes or more

Resident aliens pay the same tax rate, but do not qualify for many of the tax benefit tools (as an eg 401k is effectively useless because it becomes taxable income as soon as the person no longer resides in the US). Additionally one should consider that resident aliens pay significant tax with little hope of ever claiming a benefit, we do not get social security if unemployed (infact we get deportation), medicaid for our senior family members (they have no right to be here) etc.

> is far more likely to buy real estate

This is due to immigration rules. One cannot reasonably buy real estate unless they have some assurance of being able to stay in the time that buying makes sense. That timeline is 5-10 yrs at a minimum. H1Bs and other visas have 3 yr limits on them and can be revoked at any time.

> assuredly un-employ some American

You have little to no proof of this. I would argue the cost of bringing an H1B into the country (>= $10k) should make the existing American employee quite attractive.

I hope you can see that the deck is actually stacked in the local American's favor, and that a protectionist policy just drives jobs out of the country where they cannot be taxed at all.

Even ignoring the cost, H1B candidates need to file their paperwork 6/7 months before starting, which means interviewing 7/8 months before October. And then you get a 50% chance that the application is going to be rejected by the initial lottery.

This doesn't apply to companies "cheating the system" (looking at the consulting companies that apply for most of the h1bs w/ a lower salary), but most real companies that apply for real h1bs would much rather find a similarly qualified US person.

Not sure if this is what GP was getting at, but H1Bs by some estimates make significantly less than non-H1Bs and thus would pay less income tax

> every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen

Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? Get off your high horse and see you are no more different than other people around the world!

Globalism is a political philosophy, not a moral imperative. Here in our country we [citizens] get first dibs on jobs. Our land, our laws. We have every right to enforce that. If the market punishes us for it perhaps we'll change.

Yes, US citizens deserve first crack at US jobs. No other country allows mass immigration of professional jobs - because their citizens wouldn't tolerate it.

Do US Citizens deserve a job more than a non-citizen? The original article stated that the prof. didn't understand why american politicians were trying to get more STEM-educated/skilled people into the US.

1) Rubio is bought by Microsoft. They're his biggest donor. (or 2nd biggest depending on how you dice the numbers) MS' profit margins would benefit from driving wages down. 2) The job of the politicians of the United States is to make life better for American citizens, not people abroad.

Importing highly skilled, hard working people most certainly does make our lives better.

It goes both ways though. I feel pretty terrible about finishing my government sponsored education in New Zealand then ditching for better prospects here in the US. Where the size of the tech sector is limited by the number of engineers, every engineer lost to an H1B is lost exports, lost jobs, lost taxes....

Plenty of people go off to work somewhere else and then return home with a pile of money and skills. So it's not like you get on a boat, never to see home again.

The economies of some countries (poorer ones) benefit greatly from remittances.

In America? Yes. Globally, absolutely not.

in US? yes.

when we will get to the "citizen of the world" equality it would be another issue. Right now we have distinct countries with their own citizens and their own support/taxes/infrastructure serving them and that's their own issues to work on.

At the same time, the US getting educated and skilled workers that it never had to pay a dime for to educate. If you look at European countries, a lot of them are trying hard to prevent their skilled workers from leaving for the US.

If anything, these people are coming, paying high taxes whilst receiving only a tiny fraction of the benefits (no medicare, no unemployment, no education cost) etc. They may or may not be driving salaries down (pretty sure if the law was enforced it wouldn't be the case), but you can't ignore the rest.

There's also a lot of statistics on immigrants and children of immigrants founding a disproportionate amount of companies compared to US natives.

There will still be immigrants without H1b - but H1b specifically targets tech employees with the fallacy that there are not enough tech workers

saving money on their education cost and getting taxes paid is fine, sure. in the same time you have a local citizen who is out of job. how much money will be spent on him/her (in)directly? from unemployment benefits at first to potential disability eventually, to cover expenses with healthcare or any other payments that would be defaulted.

What citizenry anywhere would say, "You, you over there. Disney programmer. Sorry, gotta put you, the wife and the kids on food stamps. Mortgage? Yea, well just leave keys on the kitchen table. Bank will take care of it. Oh, that goes for the rest of you as well. Yea, the whole department."

What citizenry anywhere would not prioritize their fellow citizens to a decent job, wage and life?

To answer your question, yea, yea they do.

You have changed the topic of discussion. I have not claimed some difference from other people or offered an opinion on deservedness, entitlement or anything. I just stated that (modulo special cases, point exceptions) that the bulk of H1-Bs occupy a position that could and would be filled by a US citizen.

But if the H1-B worker can actually do the same work, what stops Disney from moving all the development to a more immigrant friendly country? Other countries would even give Disney tax benefits to do so..

>every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen

There is no evidence to support this assertion.

Please, read the article under discussion which contains a link to the Center Of Immigration studies. The article under discussion does provide evidence. You may not agree with it, or question its strength, but really hard to deny the article, the statistics it provides and the studies it references provide no evidence.

If the facts quoted in the study do not suffice, let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning. Assuming H1-Bs do occupy job positions, i.e. are employed. Then either the job is only opened if and only if there are H1-Bs around, which doesn't make sense, or not a single qualified US citizen can fill the job. Give the working age population of the US is 204 million[1] this also seems highly unlikely.

[1]https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

Your argument is flawed in several obvious, basic ways. STEM is not a nebulous concept whereby an electrical engineer is the same as a software engineer. All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions.

Also there isn't a global consciousness through which STEM grads get immediately notified of all open positions. Not every position is advertised on every single jobs board. And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there.

Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up. Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen.

>let us try a dialogue of rational reasoning.

Yes, let "us" do that.

> All STEM graduates are not automatically qualified for all open positions.

What does this tautology offer to the topic? Common sense obvious true, not every STEM graduate is universally qualified for every open position. So ... ???

> And even then, STEM graduates are not automatically going to move to any random place in the US just because there is an open position there.

Again, common sense true. So ... ???

> Lastly, if an employer has an open position, they are not going to wait indefinitely for a candidate to show up.

OK, true. So ... ??? Is your assumption then that they would have to wait indefinitely and that no candidate would ever show up? cited evidence of this is appreciated. Links to studies, large amounts of unfulfillable postings are welcomed.

> Furthermore, because of the additional legal costs involved in hiring H1-B candidates, they can be more expensive than a local citizen.

So ...?

Nothing stated above bears any light to the argument (flawed or otherwise), it's just a sequence of common sense things that one can say about a labour market.

This topic's referenced article is specific in its position in claiming there is no shortage of STEM qualified applicants and presents cited statistics and studies. If you have counter data and studies, please present their facts and cite links.

You are confused as to the nature of this conversation. YOU are the one making the claim "every H1-B is taking a job from a US citizen". Nothing in either of the linked articles supports this claim. They all talk about shortages, but not about _qualified candidates_. They are not the same. Even so, I just explained to you how in obvious ways, even if there is no shortage, your assertion can be proven false.

If your argument was US citizens should always be given priority regardless of their skill, I might actually agree with your position.

Your direct quote of what I said is wrong, that is but a clause in a complete sentence. The actual sentence does allow that a small percentage of H1-Bs are being used as intended by the program, but bulk of H1-Bs are not and the H1-B program suffers from rampant abuse and is being used to replace US Workers.

I have asked several times in the overall discussion for anyone to provide any link to any data of any kind which even indicates to any degree that there is a massive shortage of qualified candidates. I have yet to see one.

Given that there is no shortage of STEM qualified people then ipso facto there is no shortage of qualified candidates.

Do you have any evidence at all that you can provide indicative that their is a massive shortage in qualified candidates? Links Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, showing 100's if not 1,000s of positions going begging with no qualified candidates, or HR studies, any published studies, Dept of Labour or Commerce published statistics ... any shred of evidence at all that you can provide a link to?

The evidence is flat wages in the past 20 years.

That applies to pretty much all working class professionals.

Supply and demand law mandates a wage increase if there is a shortage of workers

How would you define that as being a true assertion? I've often seen it as "I trained my H1-B replacement"

Yes, and all such violations should be reported and dealt with. However, using a fact from a local scope to make an automatic "winning" argument in a larger, more global scope is disingenuous.

I wasn't asserting in either direction.

How big does local need to be to assert true then for you? The recent Disney accusations seem rather large. I remember reading recently about migrant workers and the job postings being listed in other states to prevent having local applicants. I guess this isn't a black and white scenario. One H1-B can be taking away an existing local job while another instance in another area might not be. "H1-Bs can take away local jobs" would be a true statement if that local scope fact is true but if you're suggesting that "no local jobs are lost to H1-Bs" then you're wrong. Local scope can invalidate a global scope.

Saying "every" as the GP did was wrong. But the argument is which is greater the number of by the book H1-Bs or the the number of H1-Bs that take local jobs. Is there an acceptable level of lost local jobs that makes the gain worth it?

I feel like it is the conflict of setting a guilty man free to never convict and innocent man. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" but not everyone agrees with that. They would rather catch the ten guilty persons and would be okay with the one innocent suffering. The greater good maybe? I'm not sure either way.

Given as fact that H1-Bs are dominated by the 3 or 4 large outsourcing body shops from India (Tata, TCS, Cognizant, et al) which simply flood the system with tons of names into a glorified lottery, I don't see how the charade that they are all the handpicked highest of the high, unique and rare technical specialist all, can be believed.

Sure there may very well be some Optical Physics Software specialist brought in by MagicLeap on an H1-B or some AI wunderkind by Google or Facebook. Far and away the H1-Bs stockpiled by the outsourcing body shops are bread and butter general skilled folk capable of filling basic roles, Linux admins, Oracle DBAs, Java Webdevs, HTML/CSS/JS, IBM MQ admins, backup operators, IT support staff and what have you. Most of it is coding camp stuff, or basic training on particular appliances that could be done in a few weeks. The diversity in IT camp should be going crazy that these sort of basic entry level opportunities are not being offered to folks that really really need it. C'mon Jesse Jackson get a clue here.

There are many, many, many Disney situations happening everywhere. e.g. Google "Southern California Edison outsource". In S. Fla an ex-fortune 500 corp outsourced many IT positions with same "train your replacement approach" and replaced with H1-Bs and they are not alone. It is rampant in the industry. You don't hear about many of these cases because of non-disparagement clauses in the layoff packages. Amazingly Disney's lawyers (should have outsourced the Corporate Lawyer Department to TCS there Big Mouse) neglected to add this standard clause to muzzle the displaced (fired) employees.

A huge proportion if H1-Bs are used to directly display existent IT workers. Period. Far more the rule than the exception.

only other option is close all immigration except family based immigration down.

Which is already the vast majority of immigration.

everything else would just be perceived as "taking someone's job"

In a world where there were only a fixed number of jobs, family members immigrating would also 'take jobs', so if people really believe that, they should aim to keep out family members too, since they are way more of them than people in the H1B program. For that matter, they should also get nervous about people who have lots of children, as those children will (in theory) grow up to take more than their parents 2 jobs.

Of course there are not a fixed number of jobs, and keeping families apart is generally viewed as cruel.

thats the thing about immigration. everyone wants the door shut behind them, even recent immigrants.

And to be honest, if the choice is between accepting a whole bunch of highly paid Google/Facebook engineers into the country who will pay lots of money in taxes, and accepting a bunch of "economic immigrants" who will cost more money than they contribute, I would accepted the Google engineers in a heartbeat.

My solution? Let anyone into the country as long as they can prove that they are receiving a salary of > 125,000$ /year. Or perhaps just create a fast lane immigration track for companies, where if they really really want someone to be let into the country, then they send the US government a $50k check, to skip everything, and get their VISA automatically approved.

The H1-B issue is about pay and control. An H1-B to me is someone that is trapped because of the visa process and can't command better pay or work conditions. I'm not talking about sweatshop conditions, I'm just saying that it is harder to negotiate when you're under an H1-B visa.

I understand people are against "economic immigrants" right now, but last time I checked most of the people that passed through Ellis Island were poor and the United States managed to grow in the last 100 years.

The fantasy that the United States can just flourish with only highly educated people working in tech is not real. We also need people to cut our grass, work on our cars, and clean our hotel rooms.

Transferring your H1-B is much easier than getting one..

but it messes up you position in green card queue in many cases.

No, it doesn't.

You can apply to a new green card via the new employer (or any potential employer too). Once you get through to the I-140 stage of your second GC again - provided that the new job is one similar to your previous one - you can use your same place-in-line in the GC as before.

The green card application can get stuck in the bureaucratic backlog for any number of reasons - for years. These delays messes up with your peace of mind in ways you can probably imagine. Internet is full of horror stories about these things. This prevents people from changing jobs, or making any long term plans about buying a house etc.

It is a long-standing request from many people stuck in GC backlogs to not have them go through the _unpredictable_ re-application process, when they switch jobs. This was hinted as part of President Obama's Executive Action on immigration reform.

In a memo[1] dated 11/20/2014, Jeh Johnson (Secretary of Dept. of Homeland Security) stated:

  As you know, our employment-based immigration system is
  afflicted with extremely long waits for immigrant visas, or 
  "green cards," due to relatively low green card numerical limits 
  established by Congress 24 years ago in 1990.
  ...
  To correct this problem, I hereby direct USCIS to take several 
  steps to modernize and improve the immigrant visa process.

But USCIS has not done anything to improve this situation yet. There is currently a draft rule from USCIS titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [2] open for comments until Feb 29, 2016. I encourage everyone here to read and comment on this in the next few weeks. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [3].

[1] Executive Action: Support High-skilled Business and Workers - http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_...

[2] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul...

[3] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008

Sure you "can" do a lot of things, but a green card application requires sponsorship - not something you can do unilaterally

Main problem with H1b is low wages and lack of mobility - lose your job and you're out.

As jaded and crass as it feels to me as I consider it in my own head, I can't help thinking that the US ought to just let people jump forward in the immigration queue based on the amount of federal taxes they have paid.

If you're paying $30000 in income tax every year, which would be lost if you had to return to your home country, there's a really good reason to just hand you a green card. $30k is a significant chunk of a useless government sinecure, after all. And if you make it based on taxes, you can be reasonably certain that it will be recurring revenue, rather than a one-time windfall. And at that income level, you're likely to be a high-expectations parent to a child who will eventually speak English and want to stay forever. So bring the spouse and kids!

As a nation, wouldn't we want to encourage as much immigration as possible from people who will be net contributors to our society? Wouldn't we want to bring their families with them, so they wouldn't be remitting their earnings back to another country? Ignoring all the irrational racism, of course. That might still be a problem.

One side likes high skill immigrants but does not like low skilled immigrants. The other side likes low skilled immigrants and thinks high skilled immigrants are a-ok too. To try to get their way, the low-skilled side says we won't pass your high skilled stuff unless you pass our low-skilled stuff. The other one refuses and you have legislative deadlock that prevents changing much of anything.

That's what I've heard about the problem currently.

Also I wouldn't base it on federal taxes, because people with state taxes will pay less federal tax since the state tax is a federal tax deduction or similar. I would base it on total USA tax load.

>My solution? Let anyone into the country as long as they can prove that they are receiving a salary of > 125,000$ /year.

Perhaps the real solution would be to approve H1B visa applications for the top N salaries. You're clearly not experiencing a labor shortage if you're not willing to pay one of the top N salaries.

That works to! The lottery system is crazy stupid.

> 125,000$

What makes that number better than $124,000 ?

I feel like the immigration issue has been made about five hundred times more complicated than is really necessary. We need some high-paid engineers to redesign our laws from the ground up, in my opinion.

I wonder if you'd enjoy:

THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

...and...

HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW, AND FLUID DRIVE

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/ECM_PRO_060886.pd...

I did enjoy the first one, am looking forward to reading the second.

I would love to see git-diff type notation on the text of various laws - 'senator so-and-so added this', 'paralegal Y removed this clause' - with commit-messages for each.

a law engineer?

Yes. Exactly.

i think they are using Vancouver as staging area for eb1c green cards so that they don't have to deal with h1b visa.

Thats what my friend at MS told me, not sure how common it is though.

This may change with the Canadian dollar dropping down so low. A (very high by local standards) $150,000 CAD salary is only $100,000 USD. US employers would be wise to invest in Canadian offices. Especially near universities like University of Waterloo or University of Alberta that are some of the best engineering universities in North America.