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?
Please stop using it.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
The economies of some countries (poorer ones) benefit greatly from remittances.
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.
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.
What citizenry anywhere would not prioritize their fellow citizens to a decent job, wage and life?
To answer your question, yea, yea they do.
There is no evidence to support this assertion.
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
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.
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.
If your argument was US citizens should always be given priority regardless of their skill, I might actually agree with your position.
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?
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.
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.
Of course there are not a fixed number of jobs, and keeping families apart is generally viewed as cruel.
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.