Interesting. I think this gets at guywithhat’s sibling comment:

> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.

If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.

It would definitely be higher.

Lower supply tends to drive the price up.

I saw this in my specialized science field too, in California a couple of decades ago. Real wages for that work have dropped 5 fold at least, partly due to automation, but I saw labs that were 100% immigrants, many H1Bs. Not complaining, just observing. were H1Bs necessary though? No. Many US born in that field found themselves jobless upon graduation. It was all about cheap labor

yup, anecdotally the majority of postdocs these days are internationals who are willing to work 60+ hour weeks on $50k a year, for the infinitesimal chance to land a R1 tenure-track faculty position. americans have no interest in getting a phd and then subjecting themselves to this kind of indentured servitude.

Whoa whoa whoa, that's (1) not correct[1], but (2) shameless goalpost motion in any case.

The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.

[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.

> An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.

The assumption that companies won't offshore is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Companies already do a lot of offshoring - you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?

On top of this, these are workers who would have otherwise paid tax in the US!

It feels as if you're insinuating that we shouldn't be taking measures to prevent offshoring and there's nothing to do but allow our labor markets to be subverted.

>you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?

This was true before and after today.

Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.

I'd argue that it doesn't happen more because it's (relatively) easy to bring labor onshore.

But yes, if that path doesn't exist, I don't think that global companies are going to start hiring American, they're going to continue hiring globally but take the path of least resistance towards bringing this talent onboard.

Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?

It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.

The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.

I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?

"Computer science ranked seventh amongst undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment at 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-ma...

Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.

I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

Well, historically a significant portion of the graduating cohort in top CS programs in the US has been overseas students.

This reflects that there are just less openings overall. In a shrinking job market layoffs have already disproportionately gone to H1B holders; future layoffs, if this policy is implemented, will further erode H1B numbers, but it won’t magic up more domestic engineering job openings.

You know what would provide job growth in high tech? Economic growth and expanding prosperity in the economy overall.

you'd really need to look at the median pay for specifically companies that hire a lot of H1b SWEs. I'd suspect that would be higher.

You also get the baumol effect increasing wages even for unrelated sectors (sounds helpful at first).

The flipside is that every american industry becomes less competitive globally without the H1b guys.

Yeah, right India has 10-100 times more H1B level talent that they send to US.

And it is the 10 times more competitive economy compared to non H1B importing nations.

Maybe? But what about training and talent pool? Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea. Imagine you’re a startup and you have hiring difficulties because all the good ones are over at Oracle or Microsoft (doubting the existence of FAANG).

Maybe, maybe not. Too many factors to consider, and it’s extremely hard to get a definitive answer.

We can arrest all of them and send them back like in hyundai !

If they don’t have valid visas for the kind of work they were doing, like was the case for Hyundai, then the indeed were breaking the law

>> Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea... Why should we do imaginary stats with narrated conditions? America striven on startups well before H1B became expanded so much it's barely doesn't include janitor positions... with smaller H1B pool, startups may need pay more. But also more compensation and demand in IT in US would make more people go to IT - smth-smth middle class, not poor class. BTW, what's the stats on how many doctors and lawyers come to US on H1B?

Median salary for a software engineer according to BLS is over that - around $133k.

The problem you will have selling this to this crowd is we have been in the meetings. We know that 'we're going to use a consulting team on this' means lower wages. We know that 'we going to outsource this' to a company full of H1Bs is being done... to lower costs.

Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.

If h1bs are statistically a lot more centered in higher income urban areas, while overall populations of a given profession are more evenly distributed across the country...

Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.

I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics

Underpaid or overpaid doesn't really matter.

Sure it's sound to argue that wages would be higher with more constraint supply.

BUT: The network effect of all SWE talent from across the globe moving to the US is also huge.

Probably, you'd have a smaller overall tax base without H1B. Make no mistake most countries would like to keep their H1B expats :)

If you really wanted to grow US supply of engineers, you'd have to start by fixing the education system, making it cheaper, and then wait 5 years.

> An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

Base salary, not total comp, the first year

K, but if these are experts that literally do not exist in the US, why are the salaries not higher than median? It wasn't meant to fill junior level positions.

This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.