I don’t think it’s unpopular, it’s just an unfortunate reality.

An individual’s compensation is dependent on how much people with similar skills, backgrounds, and experiences will accept.

Is this fair?

Nope, and that’s why we have minimum wage. No matter how low the wage is, people will accept the job for the money.

It would be hard(if not impossible) to implement an effective universal minimum wage for international workers, but I don’t see any other solutions.

You don't need anything near as complex. You just need to give visa-holders (A) job mobility, (B) the right to stay in the country for some amount of time when not employed (this doesn't have to be unlimited...), and ideally (C) not lock the Visa to the employer beyond a year or two.

Some countries implement the above, some don't.

I'm curious about your thoughts on this article:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...

excerpt:

>That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

Given this view of H1-Bs and general immigration policy it seems quite obvious that they are not intended to have the same salaries as citizens, but rather to be used as a cudgel to keep the citizens in line and not be able to demand higher wages.

I want to be clear, I'm not arguing against your position of what might be fair or moral. I'm certainly not going to argue against equal pay for equal work. I just wanted to add some context along the lines of... I think it's working as intended.

it may be working as intended, I think its a disaster for those foreign employees, and the americans that supplant.

I love immigration, I think immigration is a good thing, I think however immigration policy that encourages lower payments to foreigners working in the united states is bad for everyone but the employers, corporations are not citizens, and shouldn't be the primary beneficiaries of laws like these.

I disagree with your assessment. Both corporations and foreign workers are helped the most from their previous state before these immigration policies were created. I will agree with you that the foreign worker is treated unfairly, but their lot is still greatly improved from their previous condition. The only party that has a net negative outcome is the citizens whose wages are suppressed by the increased supply.

I have a fairly libertarian view on both immigration and income inequality. I'm generally ok with both. I have a harder time understanding people who support fairly liberal immigration while also being concerned about domestic income inequality. You didn't mention the latter, but it seems to me these positions are incompatible.

I see income inequality as a related but differentiated problem from immigration - immigration may push wages down by say 5% - but market forces from a highly immobile labor market in my opinion do the rest.

If you look at the parts of the labor market with the greatest mobility (mostly affordability to relocate), you'll find the highest wages, and I'm reasonably certain this is a causation thing, not merely correlation. Labor mobility will go a long way to fix income inequality.

> If you look at the parts of the labor market with the greatest mobility (mostly affordability to relocate), you'll find the highest wages, and I'm reasonably certain this is a causation thing, not merely correlation.

Well, there is obviously a causal link from higher wages to greater ability to relocate; causation in the other direction is less clear. Intuitively, the employee pool being more free to relocate should create a broader geographic market with common prices, but that means small increases are more effective at drawing in more candidates just as much as it means small decreases will tend to dry up the pool. Assuming merit is easily determined in the field, it probably means wages nationally reflect merit better rather than geography, if merit can't be measured it probably means that wages reflect whatever rough-cut filters employers use to keep hiring manageable. But, still, I don't think it means industry wide better pay.

That is by the way how immigration law is written; is it really an unpopular opinion?

Everywhere I've worked, non-US persons (i.e. noncitizen and non-green-card) get paid the same or more than us persons. In fact they cost a lot more to hire not just because of the paperwork but all the damned time to get the paperwork processed. If you can find someone local who can start soon why would you choose anything else? FWIW this has all been H-1 and E3.

I understand there are various ways some big companies game the system (various schemes involving contracting out work to other companies in some way). But in 30 years of working in the Valley my experience has only been as I described above.

> unpopular

Actually, it's the law... but nobody bothers following it because nobody bothers enforcing it.

Oracle just got hit with a 400 million fine. We will see if it sticks, but it’s not fair to claim that nobody bothers enforcing it.