As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
More reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le...
If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.
1. You picked a profession which has a _shockingly low number_ of positions, and extreme requirements (including citizenship). This is basically a straw-man argument.
2. Astronauts have an incredibly high bar, and could come to the US if they wanted to anyways. Typically, astronauts have at least one (or multiple) PhDs. If you can get to the US as an astronaut, you are self-sponsor for a EB-1 or an O-1.
3. No, they wouldn't. Astronauts in the US must be (unless things have changed) US citizens.
Military astronaut candidates are U.S. citizens and commissioned officers with at least five years of active duty service.
And regardless, the point the parent was making is that even if it did, this would be ok, because the broader influx of immigrants would create more demand for all of these professions to the point where it'd be a wash.
How many of your fellow citizens do you know who have the skills to get a good job and don't get one because of foreign competition? All I know is companies having trouble hiring really good people.
I know multiple Americans who are good software developers with good credentials who would be qualified for that job and similar but never got them.
An oldie by now, but still relevant: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-...
It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. I certainly know people with skills to do what used to be good jobs, but aren't good jobs anymore due to foreign competition.
Hiring isn't a competition to find the smartest candidate, silly Google interviews notwithstanding. Companies want the "good enough" candidate they can get for the least pay. Otherwise all job ads would express a preference for principal engineers with doctorates, instead of the opposite which is far more common. So yes competition drives down pay, it doesn't drive up everyone's skills.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
Why do we automatically prioritize jobs for people who just randomly happen to live inside our borders, over people who don't? 110 years ago my great-grandparents moved to the US, and maybe I wouldn't exist today if the attitude then was "prioritize Americans at all costs".
There's nothing inherently special about someone who has the same passport as you when it comes to where they should be allowed to live and work. Our borders are mostly just arbitrary lines drawn based on who had the best military at a particularly pivotal time in history for that region.
Given the diversity of thought and values across the US, I expect I have more in common with a lot of people who are not US citizens, who live in other parts of the world, than huge swaths of America. Maybe I want more people in this country that share my values. I've never really thought about immigration in these terms before, but this question has prompted some tangential thoughts about it.
Sure, you could just say “anyone can come to the US to work”, but you’d also have to entirely overhaul the whole societal structure to accommodate that.
Why?
I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.
Let me provide some background. If you already know this, my apologies.
The process of getting an H1B is not the employer picking up the phone and ordering "1 H1B for delivery please".
It involves applying at the beginning of April, being entered into a lottery, and you find out if you "won" (and your application is looked at) around the end of March. IIRC it is ~30% that your application is even looked at.
At this point, you're out legal and processing fees (at least a couple thousand), and likely more if USCIS wants more evidence that the position qualifies, or that the individual being sponsored is eligible. As a side note, this is often why job descriptions have degree requirements and such, even if they will hire people without a degree. If a similar job at the same company doesn't "need" a degree, it will be much more difficult to get a work status for, even if the requirement bar is actually quite high.
After this, assuming you actually get your status, you don't "get" it until the beginning of October.
It's now cost your employer 6 months of lead time, a legal process, thousands of dollars, and uncertainty throughout to know if they even _could_ hire someone.
It is not _easy_ to get an H1B.
If you have 2 equally qualified people, who will make the same amount of money (which is what market rates are, see my initial suggestion above), then any reasonable employer is going to go with the candidate that they can hire the next week, rather than going through the H1B process.
Except in industries that have high turnover, like technology and fashion. There, H1Bs are abused by companies who don’t want to compete for talent at market rates and instead can lock in foreign workers. It makes more sense to hire the foreign worker specifically because they can prevent them from leaving. Illegal threats and intimidation of H1B workers are more common than you think.
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I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status.
If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
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Stop tying the H1B visa to an employer, and the entire basis of fraud that you have outlined disappears.
The reason it's a disingenuous argument is that the H-1B is not technically transferred: The new employer is actually filing a new H-1B petition, which, yes, is not subject to the lottery. And the employee can start working while the petition is pending.
But here's the thing: Even though the new petition is very likely to approved, it's not automatically approved and there's no guarantee that it will be. Particularly if the new job doesn't use the skills that make the employee special.
It also adds uncertainty to the job hunting process. And, if the current employer finds out that they're looking, they could be fired... which technically makes the ex-employee immediately eligible for deportation... which means there's no counter-offers.
You have good intentions towards the kids, but some communist intentions towards business owners. Let them decide how to spend their money. It's their money.
Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?
That and US doesn’t need to pay a dime for them developing their skills while getting to skim the cream of the crop.
We had a revolution and a civil war and unrest to fix our own failures. They can work to improve their own self determination. Look, Panama 25 years ago was a basket case. But now they are one of the better economies of the southern cone.
Tell me more of this “our own”. 25% of the current US population is either 1st or 2nd gen immigrants arrived after immigration reform of 1965. They include the innovators, laborers, entrepreneurs, researchers that pay a lot for your “our own”. Can’t eat the cake and have it too.
That's not entirely true everywhere though. For example, I was born in the US, as were my parents and grandparents. My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy, and if I can gather the proper documentation, I'm eligible for Italian citizenship. If I ever get this done, then yes, I could indeed go back to my great-grandparents' country and do what you suggest is silly. I believe quite a few other countries also have policies like this.
It actually kind of seems like we can do this. We do that by increasing the visa requirements, as this new directive is doing so.
It's infinitely better than importing huge numbers of uneducated fundamentalists whose culture is incompatible with the western values and includes throwing gays off of roofs.
It's better to have a few shining examples of truly great countries in the world, rather than mediocre mush everywhere. So citizens of other countries can point to such countries and tell their politicians and their friends - see, we can do better, much better.
Yes, immigrants built America. But so did enslaved people. So did natives. So did rebellious colonists of the British empire. Most of those people did not consider themselves immigrants - and nor do their descendants.
Many immigrants have contributed amazing things to our nation, and they still do. But immigrants as a group are not a monolith. Many of the "highly skilled workers" that come over on H1Bs, are frankly - not highly skilled workers. Many are semi-skilled workers who are preferred over qualified Americans because they work for low wages and nearly never quit when abused.
Americans have a right to say that we don't want our immigration system used as a tool to devalue working conditions - something which affects all of us. If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants. But it's absurd to say to reduce this to "immigrants = good = America". Not when we know the current system is abusive to both immigrants, and to the Americans who are part of the toxic workplaces that the H1B visa-mill paradigm has created.
Not many people are capable of traveling from distance places away, learning a new language, and then starting from scratch, with no family or friends. I'd give them a bit of credit, especially since their contributions are still being uncovered after being purposely devalued.
To your point, there are of course other hard working demographics in the US, but limiting the number of H1Bs that can come over is slamming the door on people who rightly deserve to be in the US.
My actual point though was that building this country is not, in itself, an exclusive or special claim. We have to look at the facts on the ground as they are today.
The US has a great relationship with immigrants, they make up 15% of our population. But even Alan Greenspan said that one of the purposes of H1B visas is to depress wages, and he actually proposed opening up more H1Bs because he said depressing wages on high skill workers was the easiest way to fix income inequality. That sounds crazy to me, because it's obviously not engineers who are the root of income inequality at all. But we can't deny that effects like that are real, and can be really harmful - especially to early career workers who are also facing crazy high housing costs (increasing the price of housing, is unsurprisingly another "benefit" that Greenspan likes about H1Bs).
Agreed!
> If we can solve this problem first, then we can talk about allowing in more immigrants.
This is really just not a hard problem at all to solve from a policy perspective. Political will has been a big problem; both parties have campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, but nothing has materialized. Corporations with political influence love the status quo as it allows them to import workers for similar or lower wages who can't quit or do anything that would risk them losing their job without being sent home.
The right solution would be, to require high wages for H1B visas - if you're hiring a developer, the minimum wage for the H1B worker should be (eg.) 1.5x average developer wage in that area/state. This would solve companies firing local workers and replacing then with H1B workers, and still solve the problem of a company 'really needing' that one worker.