You literally have 1 side that demonizes a situation, and the other side doing pretty much all the can within the legal powers they have to improve the situation, but “both sides don’t really care”.

Democratic immigration policies always prioritize family based and undocumented immigration. They have clear electoral benefits from this (see AZ and TX). Reforming H1B and the high skilled immigration system is only an afterthought.

Republican policies have at least put forward some kind of points-based system. They however want to reduce family based immigration which is an absolute no-go for Democrats.

DACA kids go to school. They graduate from schools here. They serve in military. They pay taxes when they join the workforce.

The majority of Indians/Asians also vote for Democratic candidates. 80+% of Asians voted for Clinton in 2016.

Except they aren't. There is a clear 'caste' system when it comes to the immigration Democrats care about. Their primary focus is on immigration across the Mexican border (a lot of which is often technically or borderline 'illegal') which they want to make as legitimized as possible as the Hispanic community is a massive votebank for them. So we have all this noise about DACA and the like.

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of legal H1B pool is largely an afterthought for them because the Indian and Chinese community in America is not that politically assertive, plus the H1B types can't vote anyway, and are mostly concentrated in places like California / Washington so their friends etc would anyway vote Democrat so who cares.

By and large Democrats prioritize the most disadvantaged first, and that's poor immigrants, many of whom happen to be coming across from Mexico.

How about prioritizing the most disadvantaged _US citizens_ first instead of kicking the stool from underneath them by importing cheap labor?

I'm less worried about Mexicans spilling over into California than I am about jobs being off shored to the far east. Clinton lost in 2016 because she and Bill Clinton are poster childs for NAFTA and letting China into the world trade organization.

No, but the mega-corps that hire a lot of them are. Very much. And usually lean more towards supporting Democratic politicians to ensure their labor pipeline is kept in place.

Additionally, the focus on DACA and Hispanic immigration may be because of size: Indian and Chinese immigrants aren’t even 5% of the USA out together, while immigrants just from Mexico are a whopping 11% of the USA.

Silicon Valley itself wouldn't exist had it not been openly attracting talent from all over the world, and the difficulty in getting visas and residency over the last few years is already showing its effects as more and more major software companies are popping up outside the US.

Another problem with the study. "...the program enables employers to hire foreign workers when they cannot hire U.S. workers"

This is such a lie. My brother has looking for around a year and cannot get his first position. Past few months, looked like I might lose my job do to Covid. I spent a few months looking for a job, but couldn't find one. At the same time 70% of my coworkers are on h1b, often in their early/mid 20s. Absolutely no reason they couldn't hire a domestic worker to do the job. H1B is a scam.

I mean they have desperately tried to get more people into CS, but even that has had little results. Biggest bang for the buck is lobbying and marketing for more H1Bs. What's a couple hundred million here and there

What you're not taking into account is the relative efficiencies of scale. When there's more talent in a particular geography than somewhere else, high value global companies can grow in a way they can't elsewhere. A precondition of that is lots of raw material - people - who can be repurposed by the highest bidder. Limit the raw material, and the industry might not even be located on the West Coast.

If supply was enough to depress wages, the US would have the world's lowest cost developers. In fact, it has the most expensive, because of the valuable companies that are able to grow in SV, which each bid up wages.

Economics teaches us about winner effects. The best attract outsize rewards, far larger than their proportional increment in ability or effort. SV attracts the best of the best because it's the best place for such people to be rewarded. It's a virtuous circle in multiple, compounding dimensions.

People are a fixed cost in the economics of software development. That means scale is king; it's the divisor on those costs. Scale isn't just on the sales side, though; it's on the talent side too.

Reducing skilled immigration is the kind of shortsighted approach that kills the golden goose in the long term.

These "best and brightest" are unencumbered by student loans and voluntarily put themselves in a very bad position at the negotiating table for the salary. If that doesn't depress wages it's hard to say what would.

I can introduce you to someone who sells Eiffel towers and used bridges. You can trust him. He is my cousin.

In spite of their best efforts, most of the software development still occurs in the US. Think Microsoft hasn't tried to offshore as much as possible to India and China, building dev centers there? Or Google and FB?

Even then, just look at what kind of workers end up being imported through this programs. Not always the best and brightest. Many do entry level jobs not even in software development, for outsourcing companies.

I'm not saying outright ban immigration but better control is needed. (And saying this as a non-American living in the US). Something that struck me as particularly interesting and President Trump recently commented, is how about making companies bid for a fixed number of visa slots. Whoever pays the highest salary, gets the visa. This would certainly make companies be able to bring the brightest, while raising wages in general.

Anecdotes are not evidence. Maybe your brother is bad at interviewing. Getting the first position is always the hardest.

"An increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa within an occupation, on average, reduces the unemployment rate in that occupation. The results indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in the share of workers with an H-1B visa in an occupation reduces the unemployment rate by about 0.2 percentage points. The findings suggest the presence of H-1B visa holders boosts employment among other workers in an occupation. The results provide no evidence that the H-1B program has an adverse impact on labor market opportunities for U.S. workers"

There is nothing scientific about this. No experiment was performed. They simply looked at the data, saw there was lower unemployment in occupations with higher percentage of h1b, and then asserted that means there is no evidence that the program has an adverse impact on us workers. They are reversing cause and effect.

Do you have a study that shows the adverse impact of H1-B visas on American workers?

Soft sciences are harder than hard sciences to do.

> No experiment was performed. > This is not a double blind experiment

Do you really think experiments are a reasonable approach to political questions?

I too dislike wish-washy science, but there really isn’t much other choice for many real world situations.

For example, a few years Disney theme parks laid off all of their IT staff and immediately replaced them with HCL H1B workers for lower cost. Clearly in this case H1Bs were abused to lower salaries of American workers by bringing in low skill (defined by salary) labor.

Immigration isn't inherently bad but the H1B program is deeply flawed (allocations by country, dominance by outsourcing companies, workers being tied to employers)

or

A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop

my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?

Exactly why it should be easy, frictionless, and risk-free to tell on your employer for any labor violation as an H1-B. Make it abundantly clear to the visa holder that if their employer wrongs them in any way, they will pay big time and the visa holder will a. not face any punishment b. will be handsomely rewarded for coming forward.

This is what the unions should advocate for...

I don't know what makes something 'officially' a labor union but at least they call themselves that. There was also Washington state Tech Workers Union.

I am truly confused. How did you get the impression they have anything to do with being a union? I don't see the union part, or the members part, or the collective bargaining part; seems to me a union ought to have those components.