https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2020-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
It isn't bias, just look at the H1B distribution, it heavily biased to the CS/IT space. Like for every possible biologist you are imagining, there probably 100 IT/CS guys coming in. I'd love to have the biologists and chemists come in, but the big IT consultancies are massively abusing the system, and that needs to get fixed first.
Look at the top company sponsors, not STEM fields like biology, chemistry, and physics. It is entirely software.
It looks like this is a response based on demand. Why in the world would you want more biologists when there isn't market demand for them?
This is mostly wishful romanticization of particular "underdog" areas of studies. Makes no sense to me. Even more preposterous is the parent's profound claim:
> I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field
I don't understand why we are talking about bias? It's not like the market goes "Gee ... we are a software company, but only if we would abandon our biases and hire an archeologist from Columbia and sponsor an H1b visa for them. Not sure what would do with them, but we must hire them though. Hey Rob! You got any ideas man?"
Alternatively, large computer science companies may have just greased enough pockets to create regulatory capture of the process, creating the inequality in a non market driven way.
Then how did we end up with things like nuclear fusion startups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding? Market forces do a superb job of driving scientific innovation. We live in the most scientifically innovative period of our history.
I find that what people who say this sort of thing actually mean is “the things I perceive to be valuable are insufficiently resourced (according to me)”, rather than “things that are valuable fail to find resourcing”.
By millions upon millions of dollars and man hours spent by governments and universities doing basic research. Markets are very poor at laying the groundwork required for scientific breakthrough, but quite good at leveraging that space to their own advantage, once it exists. This is, in fact, why the US government used to spend so much on basic research, so that its Capitalist economy could advance innovation more quickly.
> We live in the most scientifically innovative period of our history.
You’d have to state your measure for this. Scientific breakthroughs are not advancing at anywhere near the speed of the early 20th century. This may be because we’ve picked off a lot of the easy targets in the fundamental aspects that describe our reality, but would be contrary to this sentiment regardless.
The fact that private capital can even find its way to funding ideas that have not and may never be proven to work completely disproves your point. Long term, high risk business propositions don’t seem unable to find investors. There is no tragedy of the commons here. If the market values something, there’ll be somebody willing to produce it. The only real room for disagreement is when the market doesn’t value something as much as you think it should.
> You’d have to state your measure for this. Scientific breakthroughs are not advancing at anywhere near the speed of the early 20th century
There’s more to science than quantum mechanics and a good approximation of gravity. It’s generally seen as rather obvious that our rate of innovation is increasing exponentially. I’m typing this comment on a pocket sized computer that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world was on the day I was born.
https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/1.19431!/menu/main/t...
COVID-19 has been an excellent demonstrator of this: at a time when it's become clear that epidemiologists and virologists don't actually seem to know much about viruses, and know even less about stopping them, we have widespread riots and protests against 'systemic racism' that can't be found in any data sources. All this badness is coming from universities which look bloated, over-funded and nowhere near scrutinised enough.
Then finally you look at the tech sector, you look at commercial organisations at the cutting edge. The sad reality is they don't use much university output. They don't. Look at CS, most of the breakthrough papers are coming from corporate labs. The last 10 years saw multiple new programming languages take off and gain critical mass, none of them bear any resemblance to Haskell or other research languages popular in academia. A lot of the improvement in tech, whether it's electric cars, self driving cars etc, it's been coming from corporate labs.
THe bias I speak of is in regard to the attitude towards H1B. I have my own different bias, for in my field most people are in favor of it.
"I can't afford or don't want to pay market rate salaries" isn't supposed to be a valid reason to grant an H1B visa.
The existing H1B system works pretty well for employers and employees. When I hear people describe H1B immigrants as somehow taken advantage of, their experience seems far different than mine (I have never seen people mistreated by the system).
The idea that this system makes it harder for native software engineers seems crazy to me. I know many software engineers and both the great ones and the terrible ones have no problem finding work.
No, programmers are underpaid, deliberately. We just had a story all about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689582
It has been suggested by Eric Weinstein that the H1B visa was deliberately designed to cap wages of PhDs... this is a side-effect.
Restricting the supply of software engineers to the US will help software engineers at the expense of everyone else.
Yes, it is unfortunate for students looking to move to the US that the path through the standard academic route is no longer easily viable but that does not mean important research does not get done. There are also plenty of other countries that are in fact seeking such talent that might actually look like better options for the now disenfranchised (for lack of a better word) foreign students.
I sincerely believe exactly the opposite. The best and brightest in the USA avoid research academia because the quality of life is terrible and the pay is below average. Like, "all my students make more in their first year than I make with a PhD and 20 years of successful research" is a common lament among CS profs everywhere outside of the top tier of R1.
Meanwhile, the "graduate school as a ticket into the country" incentive structure creates a lot of pathological behavior among the foot soldiers of academia.
The academic system in the US is incredibly sick. The best and brightest students are certainly not lining up to squander their youth being treated like slaves when they can make top dollar in another field.
But you have to also remember that the current group of academics came out of PhD programs in the 1970s. That was a time of expansion in academia. These folks are just about to retire. On the other side of this, I think the universities walk a fine line with respect to graduate student admissions between foreigners and US citizens.
The fact that we bring in foreign graduate students from foreign undergraduate programs either means that our current system is not producing applicants of sufficient caliber who then apply or it is not economically viable. In that sense there is evidence that graduate student research stipends are depressed. Is this due to foreign competition?
There is some anecdotal evidence to this in that the majority of CS undergrads get a job ratherhe than pursue a PhD etc... b/c of the salary differences. Foreigners have to get a masters at a minimum to achieve better odds in the H1B lottery. And after they graduate from a US masters program, they can work at a US company for a couple years anyway.
Even killing the H1B program entirely wouldn't directly effect the ability of universities to recruit research/teaching assistants.
Consider if any US trucking line could hire literally anyone in the world. Wages would be below subsistence level. Which, well, lots of the Research Assistants working as Software Engineers for National Science Foundation portfolio companies are barely making enough to support themselves.
(Note: this doesn't mean the schools aren't fulfilling their educational missions, it just means that revenue is both necessary in itself and as such a core metric that is pursued.)
As an example, America would never have been first on the moon if it were not for a certain German engineer Wernher von Braun.
> The international collaborations that it thrives on are largely formed via exchange of students.
1) Students are on F visas, so they are unaffected by H1B changes.
2) There is no magical reason that students educated in another country in this day and age have a markedly different tradition of thinking about fundamental science. The internet has largely erased the differences in access to the latest research in top institutions around the world so the only thing that remains needed for high quality research is a pool of bright people. Perhaps there are some educational tradition differences between Europe and the US but US postdocs are largely educated in the US itself so those differences aren't really affecting current US research anyway.
3) Given the current labor and supply demand in academia, this pool of bright people can be satisfied by either US researchers or foreign researchers, and since there is ample choice between the two, the research of great import still gets done by just as many smart people as before, so once again, I fail to see the "problem" for great research being done.
If your goal is sufficiency, then the local population will suffice. If your goal is to capture as much of the truly top talent, you have to cast the net wider.
> Quality is distributed somewhat evenly.
Starting from that assumption (which I can agree with), here is a simplified (perhaps numerically inaccurate) argument. Assuming the top talent constitutes 1000 best researchers who have just graduated from their PhDs, and all relatively equally qualified, 500 US, 500 foreign.
There are 400 postdoc appointments. Currently if 200 postdocs are US and 200 postdocs are foreign and these H1B rules then inevitably disallow the next generation to have 200 foreign postdocs we still have 200 US postdoc candidates who are just as good and are still top talent.
Would this not still retain equal quality?
It's not a "problem" if you hear this and think, "Yeah, it should be hard for them".
Ultimately, people explicitly disagree with your initial position and framing.
If not, that is a rather disingenuous reading of what I wrote. No one is saying it "should" be hard for foreign students to get a job in academia, my point was academia has ample domestic labour, so even if H1B salaries are raised, the research attempted is unaffected.
Wanting more researchers is well and good, there just aren't enough jobs and funding for them in the current STEM academic market (which is completely separate from any H1B related issue), hence the rather large number of people who move to industry.
Academia is a great example of how opening up a domestic job market to The Entire World suppresses wages and drives competition for relatively modest paying jobs through the roof.
If every job market in the US worked like the Academic job market, the country would be hell on earth.
I think this subtle misdirection is how the lie gets slipped in. It's not that there is a shortage for talent. It's that there is a shortage for talent available at the price point that corporations want. Does that mean we should create an indentured servitude system to make that available?
The whole idea of artificially creating an immigration system expressly for those willing to get exploited is pretty distasteful to me and harkens back to a bunch of other distasteful ways this country used to procure its cheap labor. The bandaid has to be pulled off at some point. People will get hurt in the process. But if this isn't rectified now, even more suffering will occur in the future.
I don't care. It's not the US's job to educate the world. Until someone helps me get into university again I don't give a rat's ass about foreign students coming in. Those students are typically in the higher earning income brackets for their countries.
Why should a university give a "rat's ass" about you when a foreign student will pay more?
The issue probably was your parents made enough to not qualify for extra financial aid.
That sucks, and I empathize. I'm living it trying to get finaid for my kids private school.
But, let's not blame immigrants for a broken system. If anything they aren't to blame because they didn't vote for it.
Two instances stand out to me: Someone 1/64th or less Native American getting scholarships for that, and a girl who just by accident ran into (literally) the rowing coach and was offered a scholarship on the spot.
These economies are efficient in the sense that much of their population lives in poverty, the likes of which is almost entirely absent from the US. We basically won’t let anyone starve if they don’t refuse help, and we subsidize even the most stupid and violent members of our population out of compassion (and sometimes for votes). Personally, I would not welcome depressing US wages to a global mean while political apparatchiks and the idle class pocket the difference. I don’t think you really want that either.
Foolish logic for a country to operate under, and why should any citizens support that kind of policy? Lose either way.
This is the equivalent of a ponzi scheme if you think about it - unsustainable.
US is a country, not a company - citizens are non-voluntary members - some of them have ancestors that served and died to make it what it is. US did not magically become an epicenter of innovation where Google could be created, it took the whole history of the country to get to this point.
If "more efficient economies" were about to take over, people would stay home. folks continue to come to the US because it is still best here.
some of the "more efficient economies" come from are growing by widescale industrial espionage, made easier by lax controls on intellectual property. People still come here.
Other emerging economies have almost intractable demographic issues that only so much hope can address.
The US would be well served to not blindly repeat the mistakes of other countries for the sake of short term economic gain.
Secondly the fact is most of the developed countries run on successful immigration policies. Countries like Japan which did not encourage immigration until recently had a stagnating economy for a very long time. Only recently they are loosening up immigration to help boost the economy. In fact the reason USA is a great place to come and work for many SKILLED immigrants is that immigrants has contributed greatly in the last three decades and helpers US companies to dominate in the global competition and increase their profit to stellar levels. Look at any of the global hi tech companies from IBM to Microsoft and you will see immigrants holding not only back office roles but also holding all kinds of positions from middle managers to being CEOs. Do you think these companies could have been so successful without the contribution of the immigrant communities? These companies success are America’s recent success and let us not deny this fact or take steps that will kill this glorious fountain of prosperity and innovation.
I think easy case to make IBM is dying on the back of becoming an outsourcing company. IBM, once a feared titan of global tech, is basically a joke, it's leading tech is a recent acquisition (RHEL).
America in the 100 year view - what was the society that led to the founding of HP, IBM, microsoft, google, apple? that's the secret sauce we need to cultivate, and of course immigrants are part of it, but the current culture around H1B is another story.
reading between the lines, i see the pride in your response of the new CEOs of some of these tech behemoths -
as an engineer who is bad at politics - i know this to be true - getting to the top of a big mature organization is nothing like starting one, totally different skillset.
not to say these folks aren't extremely smart cookies, but it's a different ballgame being played.
Nazi germany was literally taking over, and people were not staying home! Its an extreme example, but the argument is a non-sequitor.
Like my family left Russia (not for US) bevause they wanted less crime, better healthcare, and they lost a lot if financiall opportunity in the process.
"lax controls on intellectual property" - Our IP laws mean I buy a phone and have no right to know what software its running, what it's doing while i am asleep, if it has security flaws, etc.
Also copyright lasts how many decades after author's death?
How many patents were given for 'slide to unlock' and 'shopping cart'?
If i lived in a developing country, i would absolutely want my government to have super lax IP laws, first so that we can catch up, and then so that a more sane set of laws can evolve.
Foreign workers are partially compensated for low pay with a potential visa to stay, while this extra motivation is not there for Americans.
Having a native pipeline of education to knowledge work is important for long term competitiveness and is hard rebuild. If the US falls upon even harder times the foreign pipeline will dry up.
The H-1B visa program currently requires to have a "bachelor's degree" or equivalent. When you open the door to any "bachelor's degree or equivalent" from anywhere in the world, results are pretty random. You can get a freaking genius, or a person that cannot implement fizzbuzz, and anything in between.
I think the solution is to give priority to the most skilled applicants in the pool, in this way, the cheaper talent will be left behind and wage depression becomes harder to achieve.