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.
"""
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.
As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.