What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?

My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean.

I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.

Additionally, there should be a feedback loop when the economy slows. The Visa cap should be reduced, maintaining the yearly rate. Btw, I don’t envision this visa fee to be a few thousand dollars a year, but in the 10s to 100k per year. Right now, there are American engineers who aren’t being hired, while H1B are being forced back into the office.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Is there more?

You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector.

https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf

It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.

Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.

Everyone agrees that they face systemic issues. People don't agree on what those systemic issues are.

As an example, the California math curriculum is being organized around more extreme versions of the idea of keeping grades together, even though some have not learned previous material. They point to the fact that blacks wind up staying in class to higher grade levels.

Troglodytes like myself point out that if someone is missing key concepts in math, it is absolutely essential that this not be glossed over. You have to go back and fix the foundation before trying to go on. Systemically not even trying to do this allows only the pretense of an education. People like me then point to poor test scores and adult outcomes as evidence that pretending people failed to learn doesn't work. We need to have more rigorous standards, offer more support, and be willing to go more slowly at first until people "get" concepts.

When you look at states by black/white disparities in the prison population, progressive states dominate the bad end of the spectrum, and conservative states dominate the better end. (No state is actually very good, but some are less bad than others.)

My opinion is this. Conservative states do a lot that's obviously bad. What progressive states do is not as obviously bad, but generates worse results. Rigid ideological lectures around equity don't change that. Most people think that we live in a more progressive and tolerant society than we did under Reagan. But black/white wealth disparities have been increasing, not decreasing. Not because of old problems like redlining. Which was banned in 1968. But because CURRENT policies passed since 1980 are bad.

So what would I change? First I would end the drug war. It was always a race war. Second, I would bring back school bussing. Data showed that it really worked.

You don't think that the South's centuries of chattel slavery, and then a century of formal apartheid, and now a kind of less formal apartheid doesn't have a lot more to do with why black Americans face barriers to entry to good professions?

No, it's the immigrants' fault...

There’s plenty of reasons why black American’s fail to succeed, but in IT, the availability of cheap H1B is absolutely a factor. I worked in a Fortune 500 company who hired a ton of engineers from historically black colleges and universities. Probably 30 engineers in our group of around 200. After 4 years many weren’t working out and were let go. Of the 30, I believe just 4 remain. Since then, the company has hired almost exclusively H1B for those positions. Was there a competitive problem with those newly minted engineers, yes. But, they were effectively replaced by H1Bs.

This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

You could go the Canadian route--i.e. grant permanent residence to high-skilled immigrants (which lets them become citizens and fully integrate), and not treat immigrants languish on temporary visas, which IMO is belies viewing immigrants (i.e. new permanent residents) with disgust, hatred, callousness, and contempt.

Also, Canada rapidly (like within 1 year) transitions temporary work visa holders into permanent residents, instead of letting them languish as visa holders without basic rights for decades like the US.

Imposing a higher tax based on national origin or immigration status is quintessentially discrimination.

The trade off being that generally Canada pays half as much and most tech high skilled jobs are going to be in metro areas that Canada has few of. Top that with a worse housing crises than what we see in the US.

I also think your argument would be more constructive without some of the strong language you use. For myself it takes away from a constructive conversation and reads poorly.

The higher salaries in the US probably has to do with the concentration of highly-successful tech companies in the US. Not just FAANG et al, but the many small high-revenue-generating companies in the US. There probably isn't as much of concentration of high-revenue successful tech companies in Canada. The lower salaries in Canada probably has more to do with that, than with Canada being more welcoming towards high-skilled immigrants.

I used strong language in my comment earlier, since I've lived in the past for over a decade without basic rights in the US, and since moved to Canada. So this is real and personal to me. Whenever I talked about not having rights in the US on HN, people on HN responded with intense hatred saying things that effectively amounted to "get the fuck out of this country you brown piece of shit", "we hate you", "you deserve to have no rights", "you have no right to expect to have any rights" etc (no, they didn't use those exact words--I am paraphrasing their sentiment--but they expressed an equivalent level of hatred using politer words). You can dig through my comment history to find those comments. To me, it was oddly reminiscent of the hatred white Americans must have shown black people during the Jim Crow era, or Germans towards Jews after the Nuremberg laws had been passed. I just didn't expect so much extreme loathing and hatred toward immigrants to be so incredibly prevalent on HN.

Certainly, I won’t even begin to speculate why salaries are different and I am sure there are more high paying jobs there now but last time I had the chance to look they were always drastically lower for the same company that had locations in both Canada and the US. And often times the cost of living were higher in Canada when accounting for housing.

I am sorry you had the experience you did and I make no argument about your experience. I think it’s hard to push for change in immigration law when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US.

> when there is no shortage of skilled immigrants coming into the US

Where did you get this idea from? Ask anybody hiring managers in tech (who are willing to pay well), and they’ll say there’s nothing but a shortage. And I’m sure there’s multiple other fields besides tech with a serious shortage.

Employers requested 758,944 visas for skilled workers (H1B), and the U.S. government due to congressional limits, can only issue 85,000 and will have to reject 673,994 applications.

Source: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Not sure you understand what I mean or we might be conflating ideas here. Probably best to back away since I know it’s a powerful topic for you but at least let me explain this part.

Your general thesis has been that immigrants are treated as unequals without rights by the US government. I am not arguing if that is true or not. I am simply stating that those processes are hard to change when there is no shortage of people wanting to come to America. There is not a supply shortage of people wanting to come, so there is no incentive to make the process easier/better. Adding proof with your statement that we annually reject more applications than accept.

Yea, you're not wrong about that.

Just because there is demand, doesn't mean it's morally right to treat people badly, and to restrict their rights and freedoms.

Canada is an excellent counter-example to this.

Canada gives most people moving to Canada their full rights and freedom, unlike the US. From a purely moral point of view, that's highly commendable.

There is huge demand (and millions of people willing) to move to wealthy countries the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait UAE, Qatar, etc. That demand and desire exists mostly due to higher salaries there.

There's no reason the US should treat immigrants worse than Qatar or Saudi Arabia (I would say the conditions of the H-2 work visa and especially the undocumented are probably worse than in some countries in the middle east), but the US (or at least Republicans[1] in the US) chooses to do so out of general disdain and hatred towards the concept of granting permanent residence, and integrating new people.

[1] I'm clarifying with Republicans here, since many blue (Democratic) states have indicated they'd like the welcome immigrants, Democratic politicians have introduced legislation that is immigrant-friendly; and all of these efforts have only been opposed to and blocked by Republicans.

I don't understand why so many people take any criticism of the USA as a personal insult.

In many regards USA is a great country, in some/many regards it is not. Constructive criticism like from the parent comment would only make it even better.

It's not like the parent just criticized for the sake of criticizing. He also gave a proposal to improve the whole system. You can agree or disagree, maybe provide a better proposal, but this dismissal brings nothing to the discussion.

I didn't take it as an insult. I truly want other people to not want to come here. The downward pressure on IT salaries is impacting all other sectors of the economy and denying people here access to the economic ladder.

Canada wants to keep their wages low, that's why their immigration is so wide open. If it wasn't mostly Arctic tundra, they would be inundated with immigrants by now.

I'm just going to quote dang to you here:

Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here!

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> This amounts to imposing a higher tax--which is discriminatory, and treats immigrants with less respect and less human dignity.

Not all discrimination is wrong. For example, the American immigration service currently discriminates against people by criminality, among many other factors. The purpose of the U.S. government is to serve and protect the American people. If that means discriminating against migrants, that is, literally, their entire raison d'etre.

Do you think Canada doesn't "serve and protect the [Canadian] people"? Do you think Canada rolls out the red carpet to people with criminal backgrounds?

Canada just chooses to welcome skilled immigrants, whereas the US has an immigration prohibition. See: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-n...

Canada also has a ranking system that picks the best immigrants with the highest scores (unlike the lotteries the US relies on).

But charging immigrants a higher tax rate is discrimination, 100%. Your comment is baseless, and entirely invalid.

You continue to argue discrimination is wrong. I explained that it's not wrong, prima facie. There are good reasons to discriminate. I don't think the Canadian government is serving and protecting Canadians. The Canadian government welcomed a million new migrants last year, into a country suffering one of the worst housing crises in the West. It's clear that not all Canadian immigrants are skilled, with reports that 95% of food bank service is to migrants (https://tnc.news/2023/08/08/food-bank-reports-95-of-users-no...).

I agree with a points based system, but there are clearly many structural issues to the Canadian system.

95% of food bank users are immigrants… but what % of immigrants are food bank users?

Your link also says 65% of food bank users are students.

Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.

> A total of 95% of those relying on Feed Scarborough were not born in the country, while 72% had only been in Canada a year or less.

I wonder how they collected these statistics. Do food banks seriously hand out forms asking people to fill out (a) their country of birth, (b) how long they'd lived in Canada?

Conservatives and right-wing media in general have shown a proclivity towards making up false statistics and false numbers, if it advances some conservative cause. For example, fake scientific papers denying climate change, or fabricated (un)scientific papers saying that the COVID vaccine is somehow dangerous. I would not trust data someone puts forward blindly.

I agree with the sibling comment that:

> Anecdotally, I’m an immigrant in Canada, and every other immigrant I’ve ever met is comfortably in the top half of society income-wise, with the majority in the top 10%.

This is true in my case as well.

I would argue that "For the year 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and saw a net increase of the number of non-permanent residents estimated at 607,782."

Combined with "About 286,000 new homes are currently built each year, according to 2021 data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. But the country's housing supply is not keeping up with population growth."

Is absolutely not serving the Canadian people when their home prices are completely unaffordable to a growing number of their population. It also suppresses wages for their own skilled citizens.

I do think importing skilled immigrants is a good long term strategy for their country, but they should tone it down a notch until housing prices are better.

The housing shortage is an issue caused by restrictions on building housing. This is supply side problem.

There is restrictive zoning laws, inordinate red tape, extremely high development charges (taxes), super long delays, NIMBYism in general, that all contribute to the Canadian housing shortage crisis.

Immigration is demand side thing. The solution to the housing crisis is to not to try to mess with demand, but to increase supply.

Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

> suppresses wages

This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.

"The solution to the housing crisis is to not to try to mess with demand, but to increase supply."

Why? Why should we only worry about supply, especially when that's a much, much harder issue to tackle?

I live in a rural part of the US. There are no real zoning laws to speak of, red tape, high taxes, delays, NIMBYism, etc. None. Zero. Yet our house prices have also surged. My parents were able to afford 60 acres on a construction worker's (single) salary back in the 80s. My wife and I both have degrees and we could afford 15 acres with a much worse house, and that was 10 years ago. My wife's brother just bought a house for more than we spent.

It's in town, which is undesirable around here, on a regular in-town sized plot. The house is half of our home's size and needs a lot of work. Yet it's 25% more than what we paid with a much higher interest rate.

You people in cities always think it's all that red tape you have, but the problem is a lot simpler. There are more people than ever and housing supply hasn't kept up with demand. That is something the Canadian and US governments could fix going forward incredibly easily, without somehow finding 4x the home builders we currently have.

> Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

Ad hominem. I'm sure racists bring it up, just as it seems everyone else is afraid to bring it up for seeming like they're racists.

> This statement is wrong, yet abusively often repeated. North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom.

That's an incredibly silly argument, and I don't know where to start. Again you're ignoring basic supply and demand. If immigrants didn't suppress wages, companies wouldn't bother hiring them. If they need 10 coders in a department and can't get enough, they'd have to raise their starting wage to entice more potential workers. If they can get 6 and fill the rest with immigrants they don't need to do that.

That's so basic I felt silly typing it on here.

> Yet our house prices have also surged.

Are you aware that housing prices surged during and immediately after COVID, i.e. circa 2020-2022, a time period which had the lower immigration numbers in recent history.

Lowest immigration in recent decades, yet the massive housing prices?

Yet you blame immigrants? Why do you hate immigrants so much?

> an incredibly silly argument ... felt silly

So you respond with the word "silly" repeatedly. Tells me all about your character.

> ignoring basic supply and demand

This is wrong. It's called the zero-sum fallacy. This doesn't apply to labor, at least not in the same way as to material goods. I'm not going to explain it further to you, but my example "North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom." demonstrates this.

> raise their starting wage

And you think highly-skilled workers would magically appear out of thin air, as soon as this is done? http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html

> suppress wages

Your tone of language belies an incredible level of hatred, resentment, and rabid xenophobia towards immigrants.

> I live in a rural part of the US.

Why does it entirely* not surprise me that a rabid immigrant hater is from a part of the rural US (likely a Trump-supporting region), and which likely has seen few immigrants (versus liberal states/regions)? Rural areas with few immigrants that are responsible for much of the hatred towards immigrants at the national level.

The wickedness of restricting the free movement of people is that people like you want to use the violence of the state to exclude people peacefully moving. It's a morally evil thing to do. It makes you morally monstrous (not that you'd ever care of regret repent of it, I'm sure).

Personally, I really shouldn't engage with absolute evil moral monster like yourself, it's not great for my mental health. It makes HN a toxic, and suffocating place. Thank you (/s) for making HN far less welcoming, with your xenophobia.

I've generally avoided engaging in any immigration-related thread on HN for a few years now to the vitriolic level hatred of immigrants that many people here hold. This post has sort of been an object lesson in that -- most of the responses to my comments have been of a xenophobic nature. So I probably should go back to ignoring immigration-related thread on HN.

> Whenever I look at the Reddit history of a person attacking immigration by bringing up housing, I almost invariably see comments full of racism, xenophobia, a hatred of non-European-origin people/cultures, etc.

I think it is unfair to make these kind of statements. You are essentially telling the parent poster that they are racist. Perhaps your experiences have created your own kind of biases and hatred.

I agree that often times people do use secondary arguments to guise what they really mean but I think the way through that is to either refute their arguments, not to suggest they are racist.

The problem with the Canadian way is that we allow family reunification. As a Canadian taxpayer I don't want to pay for the economic emigrants parents and grandparents social security and health care.

For the refugees, I have no problem with family reunification because if the situation is bad enough to qualify for our humanitarian refugee program, chances are that it's also bad enough for the rest of that migrant family.

Canada only allows 28,500 parents and grandparents[1] as permanent residents per year (and that limit was 20,000 until recently). That's just 6% of the total immigration target.

There is a temporary visa for parents and grandparents, but there is no access healthcare with it, which is serious matter[2][3][4]. For example:

> She says he needs a different type of care and has even offered to pay out of pocket, but she can’t get him into a long-term care home without an OHIP number.

Did you bother to google Canada's family immigration laws?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/citizenship-immigrati...

[3] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/kingston-ont-woman-fighting-for-pa...

[4] https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/no-ohip-no-health-ca...

I read a few pages on canada.ca and you are right they don't become citizens they obtain a "super visa" and are forced to buy a medical insurance from a Canadian provider.¹ I have no more opposition to the reunification program !

1) https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

It's pretty sad that you rejoice in other people being treated badly (or unfairly).

With a 200k CAD income, I'm likely[1] a top 10% earner. Most immigrants to Canada likely earn more than the average Canadian, since the Canadian immigration system heavy selects for high-skilled individuals with. So, considering skilled immigrants' tax contributions are likely quite a bit higher, don't immigrants' parents deserve to have full access to free healthcare?

[1] The statistics top out at 100k: https://www.statista.com/statistics/464262/percentage-distri...

Maybe not evidence exactly, but the stereotype of the barista with a fancy degree and lots of loans comes to mind.

> Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer.

The flaw in that kind of logic is:

1: Many people who enter college can't graduate, for many different reasons.

2: Many people who graduate are incapable of working in the field they studied for, again for many different reasons.

In my experience, I went to an expensive school that had a high dropout rate. A lot of the dropouts were people who either had poor study habits, or simply weren't able to understand the material. Unfortunately, everyone who took out loans and then dropped out still had to pay back the loans.

That's why all the smart people became home contractors and started their own business.

Well, that was some of the best advice I heard in high school. I went to a religious "prep" school, and one of the best teachers I had pointed out that fact to us.

He basically said that, if you're planning on working in a field that does not need a college degree, it's not "worth it" to go to college. In 4 years, you'll be making more money then someone graduating, and have no debt, and have savings.

It was "sacreligous" on his part because the school had a 99% college acceptance rate; but years later I bumped into an alumn from my class who went the contractor / no college route, and was doing well and very happy.

Edit:

> That's why all the smart people became home contractors

That's not a job for everyone, which is why college is also needed. I'd really hate being a home contractor, for many, many reasons. College was the right path for me, but I'm under no illusion that it's the right path for everyone.

IMO there are many Americans who would work in IT/Tech if you paid them to do it, but the risk calculation doesn't currently make sense. If you're an adult making $25-35/hour in your current job, just meeting rent/utilities/obligations, it's hard to accept going back to school for several years to complete a Bachelor's degree, with zero guarantee of employment, but a definite guarantee of debt on the order of ~60K (taking a cheaper option). This is also true for those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole, whose parents are not going to pay for them to go to school. We've seen the result of making student loans widely available, there are many under-employed Americans in debt.

Numerically I agree with you, the debt load is worth the risk, if you're specifically going for software/IT, but the risk is not zero.

I don't know how many typical hourly workers are going to be able to be reasonably trained for it, but there are some. The vast demand for it and tech workers should pull them in. But it doesn't, cost is one reason, but a bigger reason is it's hard or they think they can't do it or are actively dis-interested.

One way to see this is that a million people every year who are already in college choose not to study cs or it type things. They could do it as part of regular college but they don't. Then they get out and can't get a job.

The debt load is worth the risk for someone who's wanted to be an engineer all their life and has seen signs in their schooling they are likely to be good at it. I think the debt load is very questionable, for someone who is at the margin between being an engineer and not being an engineer, has no indicators they would be good at it. Plenty of engineers (especially outside big cities) end up peaking at $80k/year which isn't worth taking a huge amount of debt for especially if their alternative is earning $60k/year already.

Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.