As someone on a work permit at Microsoft, I'm far from "cheap labor".

But you do lower the market value of people less competent than you, which is apparently a problem to such people.

How?

In theory, increasing the supply of labor lowers it's value.

In practice, I'm unconvinced. Tech companies succeed when they put quality over quantity, and demand for high-quality engineers simply exceeds the quantity put out by our universities.

We aren't hiring H1Bs for cheap labor, we're poaching the best from other countries. Hiring more lower-quality local talent is not equivalent.

There is a reason why these companies have international branches. Talent leaders are always monitoring international talent pools. If they cannot provide enough supply for an office - and another office has enough of it, granted the quality is high - they'll just move the next projects to the other office. And smaller companies are starting to embrace remote work. So, no more borders and visas.

Armchair economist here. More workers = less competition. Competition affects salary. Simple supply and demand? All of the companies who spoke out like Amazon, Apple, and Google NEED workers to fill those roles to run business, and rely on them heavily because there isn't enough data scientists, or engineers for example, in the U.S. or the world, for that matter.

Because the demand for good workers doesn't go away when the supply of good workers gets decreased. To be clear, I am supportive of immigrants working whatever jobs they want to work and that people will hire them for (and I'd argue that the free market is also supportive of this), I'm just noting that people have a financial motivation to keep people more competent than them out of the labor pool.

(Unless, of course, the replacement of competent workers with incompetent ones causes the economy to shrink, which now that I think about it is pretty likely.)

Because if they couldn't get me, they'd be forced to hire the next best person from my interview cohort. That would reduce the pool available to all the other companies.

Or move the entire department overseas.

Or keep looking until they find someone else. They aren't just going to hire someone unqualified. If they find someone qualified they will also try to find a place for them, because it's hard to find qualified people.

Ultimately they need people. At some point they will be forced to hire somebody. This happens today with C/C++ knowledge. Ideally somebody joining to work on a massive C++ code base would know the language. 10 years ago it was practically a requirement to get hired. But very few people are coming out of university with that knowledge these days.

Interview tip: Come in knowing C++ and your interviewer will be impressed (assuming the team uses it).

because apparently we (people on visas) are getting horribly underpaid. Trump supporters keep trumpeting this despite the fact that I don't remember showing any of them my pay stubs.

I'm sure Brin showing up in person at the protests was totally because a couple hundred google employees getting screwed is going to drastically raise salaries.

As for people less competent then me. Maybe they should focus more on improving their skills than on how they are getting fucked by immigrants. Guess what, you'll still be whiny losers if they toss out the H-1Bs tomorrow. You'll still be whiny losers if they start tossing out green card holders.

You know why? Because you whine instead of going out and figuring out what you actually need to do in order to get a job.

That was a nice comment. Just like rednecks yelling dumb immigrants fix your own country instead of coming here. In the end, all the people, left or right, are dumb ignorant, bigoted.

Except that it's quite not true that all people are dumb, ignorant, and bigoted. Dumbness (or more precisely intelligence) has a distribution over the population, and selective ignorance and bigotry in certain ways is correlated with politics.

In particular, eligibility for work visas actively selects for non-dumbness: you have to get hired for a job. Eligibility for birthright citizenship does not. So there are solid reasons to believe that immigrants to a country (any country) are statistically less dumb than native citizens.

Immigrants also necessarily have more life experiences and more personal knowledge of people of different backgrounds and origins, which makes them less likely to be ignorant and bigoted, too.

Statistically you can guess all sort of things, like whites are smarter than other races etc.

All I was saying is that the parent comment was racist.

How was it racist? At worst it was discriminatory, but then there is literally no way to hire without some degree of discrimination (even if the measure is a perfectly legitimate 'more qualified for the job').

Let's not abuse the term 'racism'.

Increasing the supply of labor, and accepting lower wages and worse working conditions than natives.

Edit because I hit the post limit, in response to a comment on the idea that they are mostly poaching top talent from other countries: In reality, most are either low pay low skill workers for contracting companies like Infosys (largest employers of H1Bs), or fresh grads that are cheaper and less risky to train (because they, in a sense, own them).

Edit edit for serge2k: If you're so great, then I'm sure they won't mind paying extra for you when the visa party is over.

I work for Microsoft and while I am not personally affected by this executive order, we all received an email which stated that there are a number of Microsoft employees who are.

So it's no surprise that Microsoft are coming out on the side of their employees, and indeed on the benefits of immigration in general - I know from being tangentially involved in some of the hiring process that it's exceedingly difficult to fill certain positions without looking abroad, as the talent is spread globally.

> it's exceedingly difficult to fill certain positions without looking abroad

Why not train people to fill those positions? That then creates a process for filling the positions again in the future, instead of having to constantly return to the job market.

It also gives employees a career track and aspirations, instead of having outsiders ( irrelvant whether from other companies or countries ) air-dropped into juicy positions.

You could have chosen to have a productive and civil conversation about the immigration restrictions and how they're related to actions taken by President Obama. Instead you chose to make blanket accusations, inane assumptions about everyone here, and resorted to unnecessary name-calling. Why?

I for one welcome economic interests on the side of right. Certainly doesn't make this order any less bad, and certainly makes it easier to fight with powerful allies.

The ACLU is in the forefront of the fight against these orders just like they were in 2015.

Meh. We were hiring people in US /AND/ abroad - when getting an H1b was easier and not connected to luck (= random lottery). Since H1b are hard to get now (= random lottery) we are only hiring abroad and remotely, but most likely not in US. I see more and more companies doing this.

Immigrants from these countries are not a significant source of labor in the tech industry. Moreover, while Obama set the framework in place, it was Trump that was responsible for the disasterous implementstion that excluded existing visa holders and green card holders with no process.

> If none of these companies hired non US citizen cheap-labor, would they still be suing? Would they still care?

what makes you assume "cheap"?