Here's the thing. Think about this as an MVP slapped together in a weekend, about to hit the biggest batch of software testers around. They're going to find show stopping bugs. And every one of those bugs is going to be someone's life, uprooted.
Visa allocation changes _going_forward_ are certainly a reasonable thing. Fully within the realm of policy.
But I'm going to bet that these changes are going to be of a far wider scope than expected and include people on current visas, and I wouldn't bet against visas getting revoked and workers having to go home the next day or get deported.
As a software engineer on H1B (as is my fiancée) currently at Google, this scares the shit out of me.
I've lived my entire adult life in this country. I've got many amazing friends here, I've worked hard, built great products that I'm proud of, paid my taxes, and bought a home here with my fiancée. We're planning to get married and have a baby this year. This is our version of the American dream.
And all of that could be destroyed in an instant by an orange monster full of xenophobic rhetoric and wielding immense power. I'd trust a "normal" American president to not accidentally / maliciously destroy everything I've worked for over the past decade, but from the evidence this week, I'm scared. Really scared.
It's pretty similar to the disruption in the tech industry. "What do you mean you deploy bugs to production and then fix them after end users report them? Haven't you heard of QA?!!"
Without saying the election was rigged by Russia.
The problem more generally with that is that once you give that much power up with out an expiration date it will be very hard to restore back to a moderate position.
And even the proponents of banning muslims to cut back on terrorists entering should be upset at the implementation, because the ban hits none of the countries who have sent us actual real successful terrorists like Saudia Arabia or the UEA. So even if you think it's worth stretching out our democracy to get a no-nonsense strongman into fix border security, you should be upset that this ham handed approach hits the wrong countries, generates backlash, and will likely be repealed by federal judges, making it ineffective and worse than nothing at all.
As for electing someone because you don't believe they will follow through on their campaign promises, only to be disappointed when they try to do what they claimed they would, that is the culmination of a whole mess of other problems.
1. We look capricious and incompetent to international allies, especially Iraqis.
2. The federal judges decision to stay parts of the order is not being enforced in its entirety. CBP refused to allow lawyers to meet with those being detained, in Dulles and in LA, even with Members of Congress attempting to enforce it in Dulles. This confusion among the rank and file about what a federal court order means is really worrysome and shows the checks aren't as strong as they should be. Real people are being harmed as a result of not at least explaining it in full to people who have to enforce it before it took effect.
3. The underlying motivations for the rule include discrimination against Muslims, as evidenced by Rudy Guilloani's statements that they were instructed to write a legal "Muslim ban". The word is out that the president, who is also a symbolic head of state and not just an acting office, is anti-Muslim in policy as well as rhetoric. No longer can we claim to take the high ground against ISIS or other radical Islamic group. (Edit: wrt religious freedom. As a commentor points out this obviously does not make us equivalent to ISIS)
This order will be mostly rescinded, leaving nothing but backlash.
> No longer can we claim to take the high ground against ISIS or other radical Islamic group.
That's pretty grand claim. While Trump's order indeed caused a lot of trouble, I think trouble of being detained for a day or even sent back to the port of origin is not the same as trouble of being murdered, raped, sold to sexual slavery, having head cut off, burned alive, etc. which ISIS routinely does. The position of "is US government does something wrong they are the same of ISIS" is idiotic. Of course US government will do a lot of things wrong, they are as imperfect as huge bureaucracy composed of hundreds of thousands of imperfect people can be. It doesn't mean they are the same as terrorist death cult.
[1] http://www.redstate.com/sweetie15/2017/01/30/defense-secreta...
While a lot of people in US certainly think some aspects of current practices of some Muslims are problematic, there's no law in US that limits Muslim practices, exercise of their religion or any aspect of their life based on their religion. It's not even on the same planet with what ISIS does - where not only being a non-Muslim but even being a Muslim not devout enough by their standards means death sentence. You might compare it to Saudi Arabia maybe, which bans anybody who ever visited Israel from entering, it still would be way wrong and misguided, but at least it would be regular wrong, not insanely wrong.
In fact, I think this overblown rhetoric is exactly why immigration debate is getting so insane in the US - each time somebody says "ok, let's discuss how risky is to import people from Yemen or Syria and what precautions we may want to take so that good people get in and bad people stay out" people are screaming "you bigot, you hate Muslims, damn you, filthy Nazi!". So people start thinking "sigh, we can't really discuss it anymore in any sane way, so let's just elect Trump who would ban it altogether without discussing anything - at least it's more safe that way".
And the other side takes it as a confirmation that it's all plot to oppress Muslims. And so on. So the choice we get is between two insane extremums instead of a sensible policy in between. We need to get down from that tree and we need no more to see anti-Muslim bigot in each person that wants immigration to be more controlled than we need to see anti-Western terrorist in each Muslim. It just doesn't help anything.
> 7 countries targeted not because Muslims live there
This nonsense has got to stop. Those nations have sent us exactly 0 terrorists to my knowledge. Meanwhile plenty of nations like Saudia Arabia have clear links to terror groups and remain free to travel to the US. What they all have in common is they are convenient Muslim bogeymen without the ability to strike back internationally and with plausible deniability about this being a Muslim ban in some circles. [0]
It can be discrimination against a group without targeting the entire group if it disproportionately affects that group and if there aren't other reasonable explanations- this does fit that bill.
Trump also promised a shutdown of muslims entering the country on the campaign trail? Are you saying he just happened to sign this executive order based on other unrelated principles?
You use a false analogy to equate people calling Trumps policy bigoted with muslims being bigoted against westerners. We aren't painting an entire class of people as bigoted. Trump has said bigoted things about muslims. That is reason to believe that orders Trump gives mean exactly what he has said they would mean on the campaign trail. There is no extrapolation from a few to a whole group.
Furthermore Rudy Giuliani's description of how the ban came to be should put this point to bed. [1]
We can have immigration reform without people calling you a Nazi. Obama put into place some very strict immigration controls on those same countries without outright banning.
[0] conveniently also no Trump company interests in those states [1] http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/01/30/political-panel-on-t...
2. I'm fine with that. It's a work in progress, and the "harm" of travel delays that everyone in the world is aware of is pretty overstated. I think focus here is mostly a consequence of people being willing to place blame for harm caused by government action while giving harm caused by government inaction a free pass.
3. Same as 1. I'm pretty sure everyone already knew Trump, and by extension, the country, hated Muslims. As for ever having had the high ground, that's largely a delusion fueled by blind patriotism.
Your original argument even stated the courts functioning as a reason that things could continue like this.
Yes they fucking are.
> we knew that's how this candidate wanted to operate and voted for it anyway
Most didn't vote for him.
California and New York have different exports and interests than say, Wisconsin.
You would feel quite different about granting power to overpopulated areas if they were conservative rednecks, wouldn't you? Of course you would.
Here's an alternate proposal. Suppose it would cost $70k for the wrong type of people to provide labor, and $100k for the right type of person to provide labor.
Lets continue having labor sold by the lowest cost provider. But then lets engage in direct wealth transfers; we'll have the government directly send $30k to the high income software engineers who might have been able to do the same job less efficiently.
This is a more or less equivalent scheme to transfer wealth from taxpayers to high income people. Do you have any objection to this scheme? If so, why does your objection not apply equally well to your protectionist scheme?
You could argue that these secondary effects do not outweigh the higher cost, and I'm sure sometimes that would be true, but this is a much weaker and less general argument.
The money will still be spent in your own economy. The choices are threefold:
My preferred scheme (1): Low income taxpayers keep $30k and spend it themselves. Government pays for $70k from lowest bidding software engineer (possibly an Indian).
Fergie's preferred scheme (2): Low income taxpayers don't get to spend $30k on themselves. Government pays $100k to a non-Indian software engineer.
My alternate scheme (3): Low income taxpayers don't get to spend $30k on themselves. Government pays $70k to some Indian software engineer and then gives $30k to some random high income non-Indian person.
Your argument does not distinguish between (2) and (3). In both cases, money is transferred from taxpayers to high income colocated workers who will presumably spend it in the economy.
Finally, I take issue with your characterization of software engineers as 'high income' - as I understand it, compared to the cost of living, they don't make that much on average. But I would welcome statistics on this matter.
I agree that this reduces wages of high income workers. That's exactly why it reduces income inequality.
There are essentially no statistics in the US which adjust income for cost of living. Do you criticize all income inequality arguments on this ground, or just this one?
The majority of the money saved from those wages would be transferred to the managerial classes (execs, etc.) and shareholders, making income inequality worse:
http://www.forbes.com/2004/08/31/cx_da_0831topnews.html
Income inequality isn't high because people who work for a living are earning too much.
Also, you're ignoring the national security implications of the thing. We cannot afford to be dependent on a foreign country for high tech skills. That's one reason why protectionism makes sense. As a country, we're willing to pay extra for certain basic manufacturing/services to stay in the county, such as aerospace repair and steel manufacturing, in case we ever become hostile with some other country.
You're describing a scenario where the relationship between the countries becomes so hostile that we have to worry about what happens if one of us cuts off the flow of talent. But what we should really care about is making the flow of talent so voluminous and indispensable to both nations that relations cannot deteriorate to that point. That's real national security.
Relying on other nations is the exact opposite of national security and it's naive to think that they will be by our side when shit hits the fan. We've seen too much in the last hundred years to leave our most critical industries to chance.
Only importing immigrants who have political views that agree with yours? A country has a particular culture and set of views. Why would we want to import people from countries with inferior living conditions and follow the way they do things? There's a reason they left.
As for why let people in from poor countries, because we are siphoning off the most educated and ambitions people from that country, who bring their drive and good genes to our country. It's the same reason Asians, who consist of the top people in their home countries who chose to came here, do better in the US than blacks, who were brought here by slavers.
What part of the point "let people in from poor countries, but don't let them keep doing things the way they were doing them" is not clear? Sure they want to move here, don't let them turn this place into the place they left by making them learn the language and culture.
>It's the same reason Asians, who consist of the top people in their home countries who chose to came here
That is an incorrect statement. Most asians who first came to america were imported as cheap labor to compete against Irish unskilled labor. The Polish, Irish, and Italian who came to the states were definitely not the best and brightest, but because they assimilated and learned the culture prospered.
That has not happened in the history of mankind. Talent moving around is rather high on Maslov's hierarchy of needs. If your country is out of arable farmland, clean water, or minerals, you will start looking around for places to get those materials.
If they will not trade for them, generally you invade.
What does this have to do with anything? We're talking about resource wars. You can kidnap talent. Look at the origin of the term "shanghaied" and the British impressing American seamen.
> Today, that sounds like a much better option than a war of conquest.
You're not getting the point. Most nations can do without talent. Talent is willing to cross borders, depending on who's winning.
What nations cannot do without is food, minerals and water. Those are definitely zero sum games. Unless you're able to defend your goods with force or there is an abundance of them, they will be taken away from you.
One distinction is that many immigrant workers will be sending money back to their family in their home country, resulting in a net drain on the economy in which they're working.
I'm not saying this is a good reason to make life harder for them, but I do think it's a fair point.
The problem is that most American exports are luxury goods (even in agriculture) and when you come from a poor country where a few hundred dollars makes a huge difference, those exports will account for a tiny amount of the capital sent there. There are many long tail benefits but I doubt they are quantifiable enough to say that the drain from remittances is anywhere near break even.
Edited to add: my family doesn't even need the money, despite having health conditions that would economically cripple someone in the US without the best insurance. Salary + pensions + free education and healthcare are enough to survive so most of the money I send them are to give them breathing room and spending money. I think half of what I send them gets spent on spoiling the younger family members and the rest goes into a rainy day account. The only time they "spend" on American products is when one of us in the US buys them iPads/iPhones (on top of the remittance) as gifts on one of our visits and they buy a $5 game twice a year for the kids to play.
That said, if Americans knew how much of the >$100 billion remittance market went to buying little kids books, candy bars, sports equipment, and board games, they'd think the money was worth all the happiness it brings.
In other words you are valuing the $128 billion US remittance market at $0.
It's not equivalent at all. All taxpayers would now be on the hook for that 30k rather than just the corporations who pay for that labor.
You can't hand-wave away where this money comes from.
“This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, OK?”
You could break it. It's not immune to the hyperinflation that's hit other currencies.
Historically, the only other proposed option was the EU and much as been made about unsustainable financial policy there (many allege these issues are overblown to help discredit the notion of a strong Euro, but that's neither here nor there). But now we're starting to talk about creating to-order currencies with arbitrary properties, guaranteed supply limits and curiously popular ownership policies.
While governments will never give up the power to mint their own currency, it's not unimaginable that in 10 years some some countries will seriously consider participating in a digital reserve.
Foreign workers need full payment of competitive market rate wages as well as the ability to fully maneuver in the marketplace so that they can act in their own best interest. It's already hard enough for them coming to the US with less competitive skillsets, but if they could bargain freely, they could at least earn market-rate wages in their skill range and grow their careers organically.
I don't see how it is a bad thing, as an immigrant. It seems to me it's better to get a job (and relocation) to US at slightly lower rate than US-native professional, but still much higher than one I'd get in the origin country. Note that once you're in the US, you can build the network, find better job, apply for green card, then citizenship, etc. And, of course, for many to benefit from safer environment, higher quality of life, etc.
> When companies like Tata are fulfilling government contracts, they _should_ be filling those positions with local labour at local rates.
If local rates are significantly higher, I am not sure - why taxpayer dollars should be spent more abundantly than private investor's dollar? I don't care too much if Sergey Brin loses one of his billions, it's not like he's going to raise the price of Google searches, but if my city doesn't have enough money to fix the road because they spent too much on other stuff and now have to raise taxes, that hits me right in the wallet.
I am not sure how many proud Americans who would sign up for those positions.
Americans actually have a very strong affinity for authority. Most will put up with quite a bit especially for something they perceive as high paying.
Americans will put up with it even when they're not being paid. Probably more so. The security theater of the TSA is a perfect example of that.
No it isn't. It's not "lazy" to insist on working contracted hours. Americans are entitled to choose their workplace, and leave if it's bullshit; Having the economic success to be able to do this is another thing - that used to be handled through unions.
> We see similar arguments in the agriculture sector
It not the same argument, but in any case; How many agricultural workers have the insurance of going off and founding a startup?
In your mind, you are thinking of the 10-15% working in Silicon Valley as coders with people skills.
Also, are you talking about Americans, or workers on visas? It sounds like the latter, but I was talking about the former, i.e. American IT workers can keep wages/conditions up by choosing startups if things start to drop, in a way I doubt agriculture workers could.
I'm from Ghana, and from what I understand Ghana and a lot of other countries with these immigrants share the common theme that when people say they're "supporting their family/people back home", "family" is not the meaning that the IRS gives for a dependent, it's very literally everyone who's back home.
For example, decades after moving to the US parents still support dozens of family members back home, not just siblings, but their own parents, cousins, nephews, even people from the same village who aren't necessarily family. Of course on the flip side those are the people who rally together to get them to the US (at least that's how it was for my parents and some other family I've known). It's a support system where people who come to the US are then able to fund things like education that will bring the next generation closer to the standard of living they left to the US for in the first place.
I suspect to workers supporting "family" in that position who don't even have financial security for themselves wouldn't even dream of something like packing it all up living out of a van and bootstrapping their dream startup. In all the years it took my parents years to even get to something considered financially secure, they still had people counting on them back home, I can only imagine the position of those counting someone who just got here on a visa, often at considerable cost relative to what wages are where they come from, meaning they needed help from family.
Why they can't start a start up?
Well then there are reasons hard to understand unless you understand the socio-economic context in which a lot of people grow up in India. Not the kind of ones who you see come to US universities for higher education.
But there are a lot of other exceptionally brilliant people who come from poor families, to whom any opportunity is precious. Parents come from poor families typically from rural setting having worked often in hard conditions all their lives and made unbelievable sacrifices so that their kids can get some decent education and a shot at working at regular job that pays well. The kind of poverty I'm describing doesn't exist in US, so it will be hard for you to understand. Its not the $40K/year working-at-walmart/McD poverty. Its way worse.
Now when you look at this from the beginning to the end. Such people have to work on whatever opportunity they get, at whatever costs. No matter how hard they have to work. No matter how many extra hours/day they have to put, No matter how many weekends they have to show up at work. None of it matters. Because its all an opportunity so rare people before you didn't get.
Which is why I find names like 'yes-men' or the kinds used in some parent posts in this thread offensive. Unfortunately there are a lot of upper middle class Indian who themselves don't understand this.
Some people just don't have the luxury to make decisions they way others have.
If you are in a position to afford education in a US university, or quit your job and work on a start up. Or quit your job and do something else because your boss asked to you put in extra hours at work. You are already in a very different plane of luxury and will likely not understand why its not easy for others to do the same.
It most definitely does. In the US there is "working class poor" (the kind you describe with the $40k/yr McJob), and then there is _poverty_: lack of adequate housing (e.g. shanties with pest infestations), lack of adequate clean water (not just occasionally, either, but consistently), lack of adequate food ("food insecurity", which is a terrible description for "we go without one or more meals regularly during the week, and sometimes have to beg for charitable food from neighbors or food banks"), and so on. These folks also typically don't have access to anything like sufficient education. The notion that "third world style poverty doesn't exist in the US" is a great propaganda victory for the wealthy elite here, but it's just not true.
I think you misunderstand my post. I'm saying Americans can found start-ups more easily than immigrant workers.
This is a two sided coin where American companies have abused this and American workers see themselves as I've heard so many times: "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
Our country has become the equivalent of a second generation family where the kids are all spoiled and the parents threaten to give our toys away to the poor kids down the street every other week.
The danger of criticising this behaviour is that it is putting the onus on the employee to earn their money rather than the employer to pay their employees. Doing so is actually anti-employee, and given that most of us are employees - self-destructive.
While I fully agree people should have some self agency to earn their wage, it is naive to think companies don't hold most the power in the employee-employer dynamic wrt salaries. When they can't force competition amongst applicants to drive down salaries, they simply move their operations to foreign countries to use cheaper migrant work. The migrants are happy to work hard because they're seeing an effective pay-rise so it's a win for them. It's also a win for the employer as they're paying less for work.
So the loser here is the domestic worker. On a personal level, how would you feel if I told you to work harder at a pay cut? In most professions, this has happened - wage inflation has not kept up with the economy in both the US and UK so people have seen their effective quality of life eroded over the past 20-30 years. Governments exist to protect their citizens from precisely this kind of exploitation by business. But protectionism and regulation have become dirty words nowadays...
...at the slave wage being offered.
That's the part they never mention.
Regarding lazy and entitled - I am envious when poverty there is considered eating fast food and using safe, air conditioned bus.
If you are taking these pragmatic decisions at least have some self-deprecating humour with it.
I have. It really tweaks me when people compare poverty in America favorably to poverty elsewhere.
Like it or not, the statistics show that poor Americans don't work very much, they are well fed, and they have living conditions that are not drastically different from the rich and are much better than most of the world.
Feel free to try and prove me wrong. But I'm willing to gamble that all you've got is anecdotes, no stats.
> You haven't offered an argument to "prove wrong."
Prove the assertion wrong then. You're the one who atagonised originally:
> leads me to believe you haven't experienced poverty in America
What you do when you link like that is make a "shotgun bullet-point argument:" you're presenting a set of loose, possibly related facts as though they're all mutually reinforcing studies leading to the same conclusions. There's no "there" there.
?
The thing is, tech worker market is global and large companies always have the choice to outsource plain and simple.
The H-1B visa trick is a win-win between foreign worker and local companies (loss/draw for local worker and loss for foreign companies). Local companies get locked-in resources in a friendly timezone, foreign worker get US experience and higher than average salary. Without that trick, the large company will outsource which mean probably rising salaries in India or wherever (we are talking abuse here, you don't outsource for 1 guy in a odd position like what H-1B should be about, but for a team of generic tech resources, yes). Except for companies that were using H-1B for what it was actually designed, that's not going to change much in the US.
Now, the US government can add some trick to prevent outsourcing, Trump after all is a big fan of protectionist policies, with the usual caveats of such measures.
The tech worker market segment the body shops proliferate within in the US is one-way permeable: from developing to developed world markets. There is nowhere near the kind of market demand for developed world tech workers in developing world markets. Without that equivalency, claiming a "global" market omits key information, because everyone who makes that "global" claim is trying to advance the argument that the globalization status quo is a two-way street of equal opportunity, and US workers should therefore welcome this new normal. There is in actuality an arbitrage over standard of living, environmental conditions, rule of law, etc. that coupled with US immigration laws create the market opportunity. That arbitrage is an externality cost pushed onto US taxpayers.
When US economists for globalization move en masse to India for its obvious competitive advantages over the US cost of living, because it is so cheap to live like a local in India and an economist can "obviously" work from anywhere, then their academic prescriptions align with their personal creed, and I'm all-in on globalization again.
I think the suggestion from the parent was that if you prevent i.e. Google from bringing in H1B workers, they will simply hire them in their India office.
The market may not be global from an employee point of view, but that's an oxymoron, that has never been the case ever in any field. ( not saying it is a good thing )
Without any protectionist measure, it just remove one of the many resourcing options for the large US companies. It is unrealistic to think that the job will be automatically reassigned in the US when those companies are already spread all around the world.
All I'm trying to say is that suppressing H-1B is probably good because abuse is never good. However, I don't believe it will magically solve the problems of stagnating salaries without something else.
But software services flow the other way. Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc. are big players in India, and US employees benefit from increased revenue and profit from those populations.
You cannot arbitrarily pick and choose the aspects of globalization that hurt you vs. that benefit you.
US employees of "Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.", or US employees in aggregate?
These same people won't stay there if / when they decided to have children and educate them, though.
I have nothing against foreign workers, but if they are going to be allowed to work in the states they should be paid market rate or above. I consider this protectionism for my own livelihood and those of my US-citizen colleagues. The typical bill rate for software development work has not risen since 2000. Think about that.
My experience is more in line with the previous poster. The workers can be terribly treated, at the mercy of their sponsoring company, and underpaid. There is the constant threat that you can be sent back to India at any time if you don't tow the company line. Many of these folks have moved their lives and their families to the US for these jobs, so this is a very serious threat.
We had one extremely talented lead engineer from Wipro that was so overworked from 10-12 hour days in the office and then another 6-8 at home on calls w/his team in India that his hair literally started falling out from the stress and lack of sleep.
Let's not kid ourselves, H1B is a source of cheap(er) skilled labor that the tech firms love because they don't need to invest in training and can exercise a level of control over them. The company can reduce or eliminate the risk that the worker will quit for a better position, unlike if they took a US worker and spent the money to train their skills up. We all know salary is just a small part of the overall cost of recruiting and retaining talent.
Personally, I'm in favor of opening up the restrictions on immigration. I believe that immigration and growing a country's population is essential to the long term viability of a nation. From my personal experience, I've seen that the H1B program has been abused and distorted to the whims of the big consulting firms at the expense of the workers in the program.
The best scenario for U.S.: Hiring only locals
The worst scenario for U.S.: Offshore outsourcing
The base scenario for U.S.: Hiring H1Bs
If H1B is banned or becomes effectively useless, many companies will go for the worst scenario. Even now, big tech companies have been investing on their offshore dev centers. H1Bs pay taxes and spend their money here.
From the article: "The foreign work visas were originally established to help U.S. companies recruit from abroad when they couldn’t find qualified local workers. But in recent years, there have been allegations the programs have been abused to bring in cheaper workers from overseas to fill jobs that otherwise may go to Americans. The top recipients of the H-1B visas are outsourcers, primarily from India, who run the technology departments of large corporations with largely imported staff."
Outsourcing has come to be pretty racist, and is exploited by Big Consultancy in order to place a lower price on immigrant labour. That's a bad thing for everybody, not least the immigrants themselves.
When companies like Tata are fulfilling government contracts, they _should_ be filling those positions with local labour at local rates.
Meanwhile companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and MicroSoft should continue to be able to hire the experts they need from all over the world regardless of what passport they hold.