ex H1B here. Yes Trump is right.(though I do not like him personally, he is right in this matter) Most of the corporate America is exploiting H1B workers. I have worked in one of those firms and I have friends in many other firms. These are not Indian body shops, these are American companies. Everyone's topic of discussion when we hangout is how our H1B visas were being exploited and there is nothing we could do about it. We were bound to the employer with no hopes of promotion and the long wait for GreenCard (10 years). H1B has become a system to pay lower wages than a skilled visa. How can it be a skilled visa, if the visas are allocated based on lottery ?
So we decided to do something about our situation. We started foraying into the immigration systems of other countries and we decided to use the express entry system of Canada. So we all applied for it ourselves, got evaluated for our skills & degrees and now I am happily typing this as a permanent resident from Canada.
Of all of the political candidates, only Trump and Sanders spoke out against H1-B visa abuse used to depress wages. (Former) Presidential Candidate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida wanted to triple the number of H1-B visas to 250,000 from 85,000 and accepted $2 million donation from Disney.
Disney of Florida had recently replaced 250 US IT workers with foreigners on H1-B. Trump especially spoke out against this move. Clinton was silent.
Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks. Wall Street banks like Goldman hire lots of high tech computer programmers and it is in their interest to depress wages as well as those firms in Silicon Valley. Trump was right that Clinton was bought off (she could have donated the $675,000 for charity as President Obama did with his Nobel Peace Prize Award money).
Incidentally, HP head and Republican Meg Whitman came out against Trump and she mentioned other reasons, but her true motivation is that HP would have to start paying market wages for all of its high tech workers if Trump won.
> Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks
Okay, I get it, Clinton bad etc. But Trump has appointed tons of people from Goldman to his administration[1] and filed an executive order against financial industry regulations[2] - you know the regulations put in place after the last Wall Street crash, to prevent a similar crash?
Can we stop pretending that Trump isn't bought off by Goldman now?
Not a Trump fan at all here, but technically I think it's more the other way around. Trump is buying up Goldman, rather than they buying him. I have yet to see a clear line of influence from Goldman to Trump personally. It seems more like he's hiring old buddies for potential future favors from them. Reverse lobbying! You heard it here first!
Corruption is by association, not direction. So Trump's involvement with Goldman at all is indication of a quid-pro-quo that stinks of corruption.
Trump may be right about H1Bs, but he's knee deep in corruptive patterns. The details will come out when those "old buddies" start doing their "former" businesses huge favors.
How is giving Goldman people government positions buying them if not by giving them the power to set rules as they like? It's not like they are in it for the cushy gov't benefits.
I am saying the causality here is backwards (I think). It is not the case that Goldman did something for Trump so now he has to make these appointments. It is that he is giving them these appointments so they return the favor in the future. I think he is doing this for future business needs after he is done being president, but I am sure it could be any number of other reasons.
These corporations are huge, with many many employees (over 30 thousand just at Goldman Sachs).
Just because you used to work for Goldman in the past, does not mean you are a current and future supporter of Goldman.
Nor does it mean that you are a bad person.
Trump is hiring people that know how these companies work from the inside-out. Which is the exact type of person you need to be able to deal with these companies head-on.
Tom Wheeler had been a telecom CEO and lobbyist prior to running the FCC. He turned out OK, solidly reining in the industry he had worked for. He knew what to watch out for, and didn't need to rely on lobbyists to explain things to him.
So it works. Integrity and patriotism matter of course. Diversifying investments prior to taking office would help reduce temptation.
There is a big difference between selling out Americans to be replaced by foreigners whether H1-B as in Disney, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street or illegal immigrants replacing working class American jobs and depressing working class jobs and what Trump is doing now with Wall Street.
If Trump were truly bought off by Goldman, he certainly would not be behind legislation that fixes the broken H1-B Visa system. Goldman, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and other firms will have to start paying market wages instead of depressed wages because of the H1-B Visa reform.
It's possible that he's trying to stick it to Silicon Valley as payback.
Technology salaries are probably a drop in the bucket cost-wise compared to the profits that will be made from deregulation of the industry. So while Goldman might have to pay a few million more in salaries, it's offset by the billions more in profits that they will rake in (over the short-term, until they destroy the economy again, that is).
Tech companies aren't going to see a similar measure to increase their profits to offset the labor costs increases.
The SV elites were very much against him because he wanted to protect US STEM worker by fixing the broken H1-B program that stopped SV firms from hiring H1-B for depressed wages.
The "depressing wages" point is dumb. These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors. And HP can still hire them, do you want them to just open up more space in Bangalore, or would you rather those wages go to US based locations?
And it's not a zero sum game. One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company. Other H1B hires enabled a contracting firm I worked for to get a large contract that kept 7 other people employed.
Did you read the article? Many tech jobs can't be done effectively in India or overseas with low quality labor for any number of reasons. The 250 American workers for Disney had their jobs replaced in the US, not by overseas workers.
> "These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors"
Well, let them work for Samsung instead of Apple then.
> "One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company."
The point of the H1-B visa is precisely for those cases where there are no Americans that can do the job, so your hire follows the law. But then if it such a hard to find job, then the scarcity implies the person should get a higher salary, especially if he/she created "20 high paid jobs for our company."
> One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company.
That type of thing was the original intention, and I think most people would be okay with that.
But a gigantic majority of H1Bs are not used to fill positions that require unique skills. If 99.9% of H1Bs are abusing the system to avoid paying market wages then the system is broken and it needs to be fixed.
and someone like this smart person in your example would now be highly unlikely to get an h1b visa with the current lottery system.
once you introduce a lottery, it's no longer about hard to find skills, it's about how can you churn out most applications to win most visas.
i'll be looking for the elimination of the lottery system in any proposed fixes.
He was a japanese physicist, lost his job when Supercollider project canceled. Instead of going back to Japan, I was able to hire him as lead graphics engineer on a Macintosh imaging product, he was super creative in developing unique graphics effects and his product became our biggest and most profitable. The company grew to 140 employees, his team was 20, but it's reasonable to think about a quarter of the workforce was tied to it given it was about a quarter of our revenues.
So how much were you paying him? (Last week?) there was an article about someone trying to double the H1B minimum wage to $140k; surely if this physicist is as important as you say he is, you were compensating him around that figure, no?
As someone who is solidly for this move, it is a bit silly to point out Clinton accepting money from Goldman for 3 talks when Trump literally puts wall street and others in his cabinet.
> Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks.
So what? That is what people with her credentials are worth on the speaking circuit. God forbid someone get paid what they are worth, what do you think this is, a meritocracy?
> she could have donated the $675,000 for charity as President Obama did with his Nobel Peace Prize Award money
The Clinton's donated over $15MM to charity over the course of 2008-2015 and paid over 40% of their income as taxes. I'm pretty sure they've done more to help people than you (the average you, for all I know you're Bill Gates) or I ever will.
>> Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks.
> So what? That is what people with her credentials are worth on the speaking circuit. God forbid someone get paid what they are worth, what do you think this is, a meritocracy?
$675,000 for 3 talks to Goldman leaves many with the implication that Clinton was "bought" by Goldman, whether true or not (and how to prove that?). It gave both Sanders (who asked that Clinton dispose the contents of the 3 talks which she never did but which Wikileaks eventually did do) and Trump significant ammunition against Clinton in the campaign.
If you are running for President, esp as a Democrat, it is unwise to accept money like that from Goldman or Wall Street. She could have said when she accepted each payment from Goldman that she was donating that money to charity so as not to leave people, potential voters, with the impression that she was "bought." Perceptions matter and as someone who came from a family that ran multiple times for President (3 times prior to this election) she should have known better.
Clinton proposed automatically giving H1Bs a green card, which would have removed them from indentured servitude. Your narrative ignores the actual policy.
> Clinton proposed automatically giving H1Bs a green card,
When? Her proposal, as reported in the media was, "'staple' green cards on STEM grads' diplomas". Was there other proposal she made specifically addressing H-1Bs?
> Her proposal, as reported in the media was, "'staple' green cards on STEM grads' diplomas".
Well, that's a terrible idea if she said that. She apparently wanted to depress STEM wages in the US and put Americans STEM workers, who worked very hard for their degrees and skill out of work. The green card, H1-B should only be given for STEM jobs for which there is no American.
So Clinton wanted to depress STEM wages and take STEM jobs away from Americans and Trump wanted STEM workers to be treated fairly.
It does the exact opposite by making employers pay at least as much for an H1B as for an equivalent local worker. You're suggesting that they not even be allowed into the country, which would incentivize American companies to set up their campuses in other countries that take a more liberal view to immigration.
That is amazing! However I would like to point out, H1B is not only for Silicon Valley. There are many automotive companies which require foreign talent in specialized fields. Very smart people with multi-disciplinary knowledge are nowhere to be found in auto sector.
Signal Processing and vibrations and programming and control systems understanding etc. is required to deal with things like active noise control which is now a need in auto sector.
The Canadian Automotive R&D is not as good as in US.
Also, there's no way we can work remotely.
So our fates are still determined by 'lottery based skilled visa' allotments.
I believe the proposed solution to the H1B issue was to simply increase the minimum wage for H1B's to $140k. If a company is bringing over top-talent that is irreplaceable; surely that salary is justified. Otherwise, they probably don't need you as bad as they say they do.
How would that solve the symptoms? And why is that the cause? I think the actual issue is that there aren't enough top-talent individuals in the country already; meaning the real cause is actually our broken education system.
Opening the flood gates might solve the issues of select individuals and some companies, but it doesn't solve wage depression.
Most people in the industry believe that the best way to increase your income is to change jobs. How often would you change jobs if failing to secure a position resulted in your near-immediate ejection from the country? Probably not often, and that's the situation that many H1B workers are in.
The general belief is that H1B workers are underpaid because they have less flexibility in the labor market. While they can move jobs, it's somewhat tedious and requires both companies to work together to make the transition. It's not impossible, but it's certainly not easy.
If there were less friction involved with moving jobs, people on H1B could shop around for a better positions without worrying about their residency should things go wrong.
140k might sound great in silicon valley.
its enormous amount of money for a place like detroit.
i am sure they will pay some of the people that sort of money to keep them here. but think about all others who will go back to their own countries and create new startups that will compete with the US industry.[1]
Yeah this fixation on Silicon Valley is dumb. The worst affected will really be other industries. Small wonder that Lofgren who is a Bay-Area Representative is the one sponsoring the auction system. Many Si valley jobs for which H1Bs are hired are generalist in nature. And it is for generic programmer jobs that you have potential for wage abuse. But outside Si valley, for much lesser wages, companies rely on highly specialized skills. So specialized that often these are jobs-for-life without much transferability. Think about skills in microbiology, materials science, etc. relevant to specific products in specific companies like P&G, Dow, etc. These employers and employees will be majorly shafted if legislation is made with just Silicon Valley in mind.
The whole notion of pay big $$s if the specialized skills are worth so much is wrong because these companies have smaller budgets for personnel than plant.
The fixation on Silicon Valley isn't dumb when wages were deliberately suppressed by Google, Apple, Adobe and others. The big tech companies really do want to keep salaries low and H1Bs can help them with that, along with paying for the really smart people that they can bring in too.
Except that Google, Facebook, Cisco would gladly sponsor you for green card - if they're gaming the system they would surely try to string you along until you've used up your H1B renewal before doing that?
At one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies? Google at least has a policy that promotions & annual raises normalize to level-defined salary bands, i.e. if you have a higher salary coming in relative to your coworkers of equal skill, you will get smaller raises until your salaries equalize.
The point is that Google purposefully tried to keep the wages low. If not for FB, they would have never changed the practice. I have zero trust in Google for doing the right thing regarding salaries.
You don't have to trust in Google, only in self-interest. The reason FB broke the cartel is because they felt they could pick up some talented people by paying more. The reason Google normalizes salaries is because it negatively affects morale (and hence productivity & retention) when you have people paid dramatically different amounts for equal work. The reason big tech companies sponsor green cards is so they don't have to use up their H1B quota on you, and can instead get new H1Bs. They may not be doing it for your benefit, but that doesn't mean that you don't benefit from it.
Yes, everyone wants to keep their costs low. Especially software companies because most of their expenditure is on personnel. However, in meat-space companies like pharma, chemicals, etc. plant, hard goods, etc. cost more than personnel. A senior-level manager often cannot pay $30k extra just to match Si valley salaries in an auction because they don't have so much room on personnel.
These norms are not set by individuals, but by a system of financial analysts, shareholders (think large pension funds, etc.), etc.
"vast majority" still excludes tens of thousands of people. These are real people with real families and real jobs in real companies, not just some statistical data points.
So a fix for 90% of the problem is out because it's bad for a small percentage? Everything is a trade-off, a solutions for the vast majority of cases outweighs the inconvenience on a small minority
I am not assuming that you are in Detroit. I used to work remotely for an Automotive company in Detroit for their telematics unit. Some colleagues I know commute from Windsor.
Lottery based skilled visa means that there's many more skilled people on the other side, and less spots for them. Unless you have a way of quantifying extremely small differences in skill (and keeping the process balanced), I don't see how you feel a lottery is unfair.
Not entirely true. Companies like Infosys, cognizant, Accenture spams the visa applications with huge amounts, causing the H1B visas go into lottery process (if applications exceed the 85k visa availability). And for this spamming they deserve to be blamed.
These companies alone file more than 100k LCAs each year.
LCA is the first step before applying for H1B.
This is a major issue for students who pursue Masters in US Universities, gain very special skills and have to leave US because they couldnt get the lottery.
There's a difference between skilled people and talented people with specialized skills.
edit: one can write good programs, other can invent frameworks
The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily.
As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies. There are specific "one room consultancy" companies setup in the US to hire these MS graduates in OPT, fake their resumes, run their fake payrolls and push them to an employer.
"The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily."
I don't mind a bit of cynicism but this is absurd. Why the hell is "study" in scare quotes? It's a pretty standard thing for fresh graduates to better their chances for employment by getting higher degrees.
"As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills."
Maybe you should keep your speculations to things you do know.
I think you're being making the classic mistake of using your narrow experience range into making far larger proclamations based on speculations and innuendo. As an employer in silicon valley myself, I would definitely look upon a resume from a person with a Master's degree from US more closely than someone coming off of the infosys/wipro train. That is not to say that there's a clear yes or no either way but having an MS from a US university is at least one positive signal among other signals I'd look for in a resumé.
How about IITians from India, getting high quality education for free using Indian tax payers money and moving to US.
Someone coming off the free education that the Indian government provided using Indian tax payers money should keep quiet and should be ashamed of himself to be called a silicon valley employer.
you are partially right about the 'gamed' system and contractors gaming the process.
However,'the MS hires do not posses any special skills. Most of them fake their experiences to get into the companies.' this is not entirely true.
Anything else than pure salary can be gamed. We are for better or worse a capitalist society so lets use the one currency we have to determine who is most needed instead of making up new currencies.
This. We can happily allow millions of illegal immigrants in to work as seasonal farm labor, or import unskilled refugees from war-torn, ideologically questionable areas, that become a drain on social services, but we throw up barriers for well-educated people who will immediately start contributing, if we'd let them. It's nuts.
Hear, hear! I am firmly in the camp of the people who are really ticked off about illegal immigration, but in addition to stopping that, I've always thought that we should be increasing _legal_ immigration as much as possible.
I'm so sick of people copping out and trying to have it both ways. Bring in the immigrants who want to work, especially if they have skills. Filter out the gangbangers and the terrorists as much as possible. Win-win. Today we have the worst of both worlds.
Well, the car companies and other companies need to open up offices where tech workers want to live as some firms have already done. Sorry, but a lot of tech people don't necessarily want to live in Detroit or parts of Michigan. They do want to live in SF, Boston, NYC, DC.
> "We were bound to the employer with no hopes of promotion and the long wait for GreenCard (10 years)."
I don't doubt that many immigrants harbor this impression, but it is wrong. A H1B visa holder can switch companies at any time, by having that company apply to have the visa transferred to them. 99.9% of the time, this doesn't impact your GreenCard wait at all, because your Priority Date can also be transferred to your new Green Card application. I have a friend who has been on a H1B for 8 years, is currently at his 4th job, negotiated a 30% pay bump every time he switched, and still has the same Green-Card priority date that he had from his first application.
The fact that so many H1B workers harbor this misconception, and are afraid to switch jobs, is what gives employers the confidence to abuse their employees. If enough H1B workers start quitting on bad bosses, we'll see some pretty rapid change.
Eh, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I say this as someone who actually went through the process.
Sure you can switch employers while on an H1B. I did. But that's an extra moving part added to the process. It's extra effort added to both sides, employer and employee. They need to really want to hire you to go through all that. If it's a tiny startup, the amount of work might just be too much (and you wouldn't want to work for a tiny startup anyway, as an H1B worker).
Also, if you somehow lose your job as an H1B holder, you only have a limited time interval to get a new job. There's a lot of pressure to just accept any job that comes along, regardless of all other considerations.
Also, typecasting is very real. The whole H1B / greencard process really, really puts the pressure on you to stay in the same job description for a long time. It's not set in stone, and there are exceptions, but as a rule you're basically forced into a straightjacket.
Basically, if you're caught in this process, there's the freedom & opportunity Big Carrot dangling ahead at the end of many years of wait. Meanwhile, your hands are tied and your actions are to a large extent dictated by a faceless, remote bureaucracy that has the full power to decide your fate. It's extremely frustrating.
I'm so pleased to hear this. Please, fellow American citizen hopefuls and potential American citizens tired of Trump, come on over to Vancouver or Toronto, we desperately need you to raise the decade old stagnation of tech worker's salaries.
All is not well. You are going to have to deal with a significant salary cut around 40~50% not factoring in exchange rates. You also have to deal with small supply, high rent and cost of living. Prepare to commute for hours packed into the Skytrain like sardines in a can and bus. that is provided you don't get "renovicted" where landlord kicks you out to accommodate their relatives. You also have to deal with the isolation, cliquey and outwardly friendly but internally unfriendly and flaky citizens and sleepy eyed nature of No Fun City. You also have to deal with the fact that this is essentially a socialist country with socialist values which means lot of your taxes are going to people who have nothing to do with you or care for.
But hey, our ruling party thinks that's a small price to pay for Living In the Best Place on Earth™
Unless you make an obscene income (a few 100k) or lower your taxes by holding a mortgage, you'll be paying more taxes (which includes Medicaid, Social Security, etc.) in California than in Ontario or BC.
Very hard. You need a US work permit to work in the Valley. Most early stage companies are not gonna have a Canadian subsidiary.
I do run a consulting company that consults to US companies. That is possible. But at that point, if you consult with startups, you won't be getting options.
Did you do the immigration paperwork before looking for a job in Canada? What I'd like to know is if its better to have this paperwork sorted out before applying for jobs in Canada.
But pretty logical, no? You don't want someone to migrate to your country in his late 50's / early 60's, contribute to your economy for a few token years and then piggyback on your medical welfare system for rest of 15-20 years. Whats the incentive for local citizens to welcome immigrants in that case? (And no, I don't want to consider rare examples of superstars in their 60's. I am just talking about average Joe's).
Some studies (search Google) have shown the average age of an entrepreneur is around 40. And I'd like to see the backlash the US would get from the world if they implemented many of these criteria.
It makes some sense as a way to weight for "promise". Many of the other factors (level of education, language ability, work experience) are measuring things that an older candidate will be more likely to have already, but which a younger candidate may be more easily able to acquire after immigrating.
green cards are equally distributed to all countries. 7%?
hence the amount of time you will wait is dependent on where you are from. for india/china, i believe its close to 8-9 years.
but if you come from a country where no one applies for green card, chances are this process will be done in 6 months.
So you're talking about a sponsored greencard by your company? This is weird as this wasn't mentioned to me. There is a fixed step-by-step process to have a greencard and you have to go through all of them.
No lawyers needed. Its a simple online system. If you have the skills and you can prove it( IELTS,work experience,your degrees), the system awards you the points. No employers needed, no lawyers needed, you are totally in control of your visa. This is the beauty of this system. There is no place for bad apples like the H1B in this skills based system. You cannot fake it.
For anyone considering this who has an American criminal record, even a misdemeanor (!), understand that it is extraordinarily easy to become permanently barred from Canada if you don't perform the immigration steps correctly. There is an official bribe of up to $1,000 that must be paid before you can even be considered, and unless you are exactly truthful to a fault the Canadians can find cause to permanently and irrevocably bar entry. They have access to American criminal databases and you will be checked, and turned back, at the border for even a day trip. (This bugs me by itself. I didn't harm your sovereign state.)
I know of one person who will never in her life see Canada because she got the paperwork about a twenty-year-old misdemeanor wrong, even after the $1,000 appeal to the Minister. Definitely get a lawyer. The fetish for American criminality is one thing about Canadian immigration that I would hope to see reformed. Canada is very welcoming unless you've had a taste of American justice, then they make you work very hard to enter. Caring about criminal records is common, of course; having direct access to neighboring criminal records is not, among most world countries.
Given that a number of American states are law-and-order criminal record factories, and given that a criminal record is not necessarily indicative of someone's life (if it were, I'd be selling heroin instead of debugging right now), it seems time for Canadians to revisit this policy. I'm guessing there was a flood of cons to Canada at some point that made them skittish and enshrine a bunch of hoops in legislation. With a lot of Americans now looking for possibilities such as these in the current environment, there is a huge reform opportunity here to make Canada even more welcoming.
> I'm guessing there was a flood of cons to Canada at some point that made them skittish and enshrine a bunch of hoops in legislation.
Not really; it's more of an outcome of political balance. Our conservatives have historically been ornery about immigration, but our progressives made it a focus of their policy. (This is very untrue now, few outright oppose immigration, but historically shaped the dialogue). To accommodate the disagreement we somehow came to a skills-oriented system with a high-threshold for ability and other qualities.
We have/had our own problem with authoritarians, and it's shaped our policies in some particularly Canadian ways.
Far from "emasculating" it like the article suggests, the "bucketing" system in Lofgren's bill is designed to put upward pressure on all wages, including those of American citizens. The way that it works is that positions paying in the top 2/3 of the average wage for their geographical area will get priority over those that pay only the average wage, regardless of how much they pay their H1Bs. (And within the bucket, they get priority based on how much more than the prevailing wage they pay the H1B worker.) This prevents companies from bidding up the price of their H1B workers only, and forces them to raise wages for all of their American citizens as well in order to take advantage of the market-based allocation of H1Bs.
I'm a big fan of her bill for the above (market-based) approach and other reasons:
- F-1 student visa becomes dual-intent. This is huge! Essentially an employer could now sponsor permanent residency directly out of a PhD program (or even college assuming sufficient work experience for employment-based immigration). No need to first get a H-1B.
- It appears that switching employers while on the H-1B becomes easier (the new employer must only submit the Labor Condition Application). This will provide mobility to H-1B workers and therefore not suppress wages.
- 20% of H-1B visas are set aside for startups and small businesses, and to prevent these from becoming subsidiaries of outsourcing firms the H-1B holder may not be working at a 3rd party worksite for more than 30 days.
- H-1B dependent companies (8 H-1Bs if < 26 employees, 11 H-1Bs if 26-50, 15% of workforce if 50+) either must prove that no US citizen is being displaced, or they must pay at least the dependent company exemption minimum salary of $130,000.
Note: I'm a former Math & Comp Sci (double major) international student (F-1 visa) from a top tier school, then H-1B, permanent resident, and this week (!) will become a citizen.
Also of note, the H.R.392 - Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017 [1] aims to fix the green card backlogs by removing the per-country quotas.
H-1B and J-1 consulting and labor firms are far more nefarious than people probably think.
Most of my personal experience is with J-1 pimps. These "firms" import seasonal labor and directly collect wages from the hiring company. The catch is as old as markets, as they usually debit housing, food, and fees that are grossly outside of true cost, but allow for just enough origin country adjusted income to still make sense for students to keep signing on. I have dealt with these firms from Eastern Europe and South America, with both operating on the razors edge of indentured servitude.
These exact same practices dominate the H-1B program.
The most effective change to any of these programs, outside of just volume, would be the direct to employee payment requirement or minimum percentage. That change would force the either higher salaries in order to maintain the labor firms margins, or the labor firms would have to eat the cost to keep the prices down. Enforcement would have to be extreme. As the nature of the relationship between the firm and the visa holder is already indebted, and there would be lots of opportunity for harassment and coercion of the visa holder to fork over more of their paycheck.
Addition:
Another solution may be a visa marketplace that the government would run, to connect employers and visa seekers directly and eliminate the middle man.
How about simply allowing H-1Bs to change jobs if they get an offer from another company, and giving them a sufficient window to find something new if they leave their current company? The no-recourse indentured servitude relationship that makes people dependent on a company for their residency takes away all the employee's negotiating power. If we could change this, I expect that wages would begin to even out.
They can. It's just painful and depending on the competency of both companies legal counsel, it can take months. We've had employees accept offers with a start date, only the visa transfers weren't finished yet so they started MONTHS after the expected start date.
It probably needs to be made easier then, so the H1B can switch jobs as easily as a native worker.
I have not had to deal with US immigration, but my impression is the H1B process is between the employer and the government. It would probably help to make that between the employee and the government, to give the employee more control.
I used to work at a company that had a lot of H-1Bs and treated them terribly. Whenever someone was trying to transfer of get a green card there was some involvement with their current employer, and I always used to wonder "What incentive to they have to do this quickly and correctly?"
The J-1 program is readily abused. I've known young people abroad just graduated with finance or accounting degree are brought in under the J-1 program, under the guise of "business training" for 3 months. They end up doing retail work in bakery or manual work in the kitchen for minimum wage. They have to pay for their own cost for flight, food, and room.
In the early 2000s my dad left his cushy job as an electrical engineer at a nuclear power plant in eastern europe to come to the US with an H1B to fix AC systems for a company owned by an eastern european that only hired immigrants.
They would count the price of plane ticket, technical training classes, english classes, etc to a "debt" that you had to pay off. You would get paid a salary, but depending on how much money you made the company each month, this debt would either go up or down, and the company claimed you wouldn't be able to leave the company until you paid off this debt (eventually my dad figure out that this was not true or at least not legal, but this policy still goes on as we speak).
You can imagine most people who worked there struggled for years to pay off said debt.
Ok what's the suprise here? If you give companies a chance to get cheaper "mostly the same" labor without a downside, or maybe with the upside they can't leave, they're going to take it. That's why I do believe globalization and the availability of huge amounts of cheap unregulated labor does hurt American jobs and industry. Its not xenophobia, its just common sense. I think if you look past any ideas of racism, xenophobia, etc, you'll see that in plain economic terms, Trump is right -- but it applies to every industry, not just SV. Imagine how if this is applicable to something requiring the skills of software development, how much more so it would be true of some low-skill job.
It's not obvious at all. Shipping lower skilled jobs to other countries mean higher margins for US companies. Which is good in itself for the US economy. Buying manufacturing from other countries means it's easier to sell stuff to them as well, which is also good to US economy. The fact is that the US has a very good overall economy, so maybe one has to look at the issue of redistribution of wealth for instance.
Economy-wise, the problem is a lot more complex than what you make it appear. You can't just say: economically speaking it makes sense to close the borders...
I think you're missing two key points here - 1) what are corporations doing with their increased profits as a result of tactics like abuse of the H1B system?, and 2) what portion of H1B salaries ends up back in the US economy vs. abroad?
The net effect for the overall economy is only going to be better under the current H1B system if companies reinvest their profits into productive uses, which they haven't been [1]. And if H1B workers spend their earnings in the US instead of sending that money back home. I don't have solid data on this last point, but having worked with many H1Bs over the years I can at least anecdotally confirm it.
You can also look at our trade deficit with India as another data point here [2]. We are not, in fact, selling more stuff into India than they sell us. There's a pretty strong argument to be made that the current system is more harmful than helpful to the economy as a whole.
It's not about selling stuff to India, its about selling stuff to the world and Indian developers help us do that.
And it's not H1B abuse it's what it's intended for. Since we slammed the door on immigration 50 years ago, this program was created to release a tiny amount of the massive pressure of super smart people world wide who want to come to the US and help make it better.
It's funny that engineers don't get the massive benefits of free trade that built this country, and the huge risks (Smoot Hawley) of trade barriers to our economy.
Every dollar we send to India has to be spent in the US to be worth anything. They can save it, store it, send it to other countries, but it's nothing but imaginary paper if no one ever buys something from the US or reinvests it here.
And if you are tired of foreigners buying our T-Bills instead of our goods/services, then stop running such massive budget deficits and fix the corporate income tax system that is taxing reinvested capital so highly that US firms are forced to park their foreign profits overseas to avoid losing nearly half of them to federal and state taxes. It's like a farmer eating their seed corn.
I'm sorry, but I'm somewhat confused by your comment. Are you for or against the current H1B system? I'm not sure what economic outcome you're saying is its natural result.
To your point on corporate taxes, please see [1] and [2]. The effective tax rate on US corporations is on par with that for corporations in other large Western countries. I'm all for reforming the corporate tax code, but talking about it as though the effective rates are sky-high is not really going to get us very far.
Even after then restoring manufacturing may be non-trivial. I have been thinking that currently NAND fabs would be good, not to restore jobs but to restore the balance of trade. It is probably not a simple matter though.
It's a matter of amounts, not of yes/no. Of course they pay rent and buy food, but in what comparative amounts? If you send half of your money outside the country, where very little of it makes its way back to supporting the US economy, that's worse than if your salary was given to someone who was going to use it all inside the US. If you disagree with that, please provide some numbers for us to use as examples.
Also, please point me to these Americans who save their money. The average domestic savings rate is 5.7% and almost all of that is money stored in US bank accounts and stocks, which in turn is used to help the US economy.
> Shipping lower skilled jobs to other countries mean higher margins for US companies. Which is good in itself for the US economy.
US companies and the collection of US voters are different. Their interests do not always coincide.
One might say that higher margins are "good for the US economy", but that doesn't mean they're good for every person participating in the US economy -- which is what the US voter cares more about.
It's important to recognize that US Companies, to a great degree, are owned by shareholders. It is the shareholders who receive the profit.
The fact that Walmart sells goods manufactured overseas, giving it higher margins, has allowed various members of the Walton family to become billionaires. But someone working as a Walmart greeter probably sees very little benefit.
And, of course, the now unemployed US manufacturing workers/voters do benefit a little from Walmart's lower prices as customers. But, it's reasonable to question whether such workers are better off unemployed, even if they are able to buy cheap products from Walmart.
The shareholders are us, our 401ks, our pensions, etc. Overall, higher margins are good for us.
Walmart should not sell higher cost products just to have them made in this country. The ability to specialize is why free trade makes both parties wealthier, if we can't make bicycles as well as the chinese, then let them make the bikes and we'll sell them smartphones and apps.
If you were a lawyer making $300 an hour and could type 200 WPM, would you hire a secretary for $30/hour who could only type 100 WPM to type your filings for you? Of course you would because that means you can bill more $300 hours. Thats the specialization of free trade.
> The shareholders are us, our 401ks, our pensions, etc. Overall, higher margins are good for us.
The people working shit jobs at Walmart don't have 401ks or pensions. Or maybe they did, back when there were some good manufacturing jobs that produced goods locally, instead of being outsourced to the other side of the world.
Specialization only works on seller's market, i.e. when there's more demand than capacity. If there's more capacity than demand, it makes sense to try and capture bigger share of the market while being less efficient at delivery.
I think the basic idea is that the economy has operated on credit since the 1970s, with both a budget and a trade deficit. The idea is that debt increases over time, and obviously they want to get as much as possible of the extra debt. That is why higher profit margins are good for the US economy.
Conservatives usually use the phrase "at best, the impact is nil"
Liberals usually use the phrase "at worst, the impact is nil"
Because the study shows there is negligible impact. Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor.
If you believe in the mainstream economic theory, more jobs are produced for the ones that are "taken."
You might ask where are those jobs, and then people will say they are in new fields and require training etc.
The debate goes on: why aren't tech jobs in short supply? A: They are. Q: I don't see that, where? A: there isn't one "tech", there are many different fields and they are in short supply in the important ones etc.
It is not as straightforward as you make it out to be.
> Because the study shows there is negligible impact. Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor.
See the sweatshops, guess they are just "another spender":
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103798/Revealed-Ins...
Your point was that the impact of using non-American labor was essentially nil in every study ever done. My point was that replacing a $25 / hr union factory worker who has healthcare and PTO, with a $2/hr factory worker in a "suicide sweatshop" is not nil. You said that in general, the replacement workers are just economic spenders too, and I provided a counter example (don't seem like these Chinese workers are likely to buy $800 iphones anytime soon).
Okay, I now see what you are saying. So let's take apart those two points.
You might be asking how could replacing a $25 worker with a $2 worker -- foreign, domestic, etc doesn't matter -- have no economic impact on jobs and wages?
So one might argue the following: The company paying the $25 to the first worker, now has $23 in profit/savings. What happens to that money?
They might reinvest it, they might pay it out as dividends, or they might use it for an acquisition, or they might reduce the cost of the good sold (passing it to the consumer). And so on.
Whatever they choose to do will end up creating more jobs and boosting wages in something else.
Now, you might say -- and I won't disagree -- that if they pay them out as dividends then the kinds of jobs they will produce is ship building for yachts, and massages for rich people and perhaps you don't agree with that kind of redistribution.
That may be, but purely from an economic perspective the net impact of jobs and wages has not been significant.
"from an economic perspective the net impact of jobs and wages has not been significant."
I suppose you mean "from a global financial economic perspective". And you are right, of course: income equals expenditure.
From a economic local perspective, you have now a worker that before won 25$ and now doesn't. He is pissed off, and it's going to vote somebody that looks angry too.
You have 23$ in profit that will go (with a short stop in Ireland first) to buy an empty condo-mine in London or will be invested in places with 2$ waves in order to repeat the operation.
But, yes, the USA commercial deficit is totally the fault of the Chinese.
Most of that money is likely to be re-invested or spent in the United States.
You make a whole host of claims in your 4th sentence about the London condo mines etc. which I don't understand.
Just to be clear: the price of commodities don't get magically untaxed by Ireland. The transfer pricing only applies in cases where the value-add is not objective such as IP.
If the $23 were re-invested it would increase jobs and increase wages too.
If Walmart replaces it's american made bikes with chinese bikes, and saves every family in america that shops there $10 on their bike purchases, that savings gets spent elsewhere in america.
The dollars that go to china get either spent or reinvested here. And Chinese purchases of iPhones has exploded over the last few years.
> That's why I do believe globalization and the availability of huge amounts of cheap unregulated labor does hurt American jobs and industry. Its not xenophobia, its just common sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by unregulated labor, but the bigger problem in this specific case is not the foreign worker, but the fact that they don't have freedom of movement once hired. If they could transfer job easily, companies would have to pay closer to market salaries.
Was referring more to general case, like using less regulated labor abroad (China, Mexico). It has an impact because workers in the US or other first world countries are essentially in an unfair competition those workers can't demand benefits or higher salaries, and the US workers can't "skirt the law" to take lower wages or benefits (for example you can't pay a factory worker $2 / hr in the US). Put it another way, the law essentially says "If you use workers here, your minimum cost is $X. You have unlimited freedom to use workers elsewhere though, and you don't have to follow these rules in that case."
Globalization has made the US massively wealthy since the American Revolution. We rely on the ability to sell our goods and services across the world, cut off the world and we get poorer. Look up Smoot Hawley.
These engineers will be working for our foreign competitors if Trump has his way, how is it good for our economy if more apps are sold by foreign firms, that Samsung sells more phones, etc, etc?
In reality, it's made more than just the 1% wealthier, but the balance is that it's made a whole lot more people poorer. I don't have references, but I remember reading them at some point, in terms of numbers there have been more losers than winners when you look at inflation adjusted wages.
My point here is that its not surprising that a company takes a better cheaper option that can't just leave, and often costs less and has fewer regulations. That means that its worse for the average American worker, because they either have to lower standards and wages to compete, or just lose the potential job.
My experience has been that my H1-B coworkers don't get paid as well as US counterparts sand that there is significant friction for them to change companies or even get a big promotion if they are in process of applying for green card. Rather than adding more rules to an already difficult process though I think the best solution would be to allow people with H1-B to easily change jobs after some period of time at the original sponsoring company (e.g. 6-12 months). That way it would be harder to pay below market rates and would be much more dynamic than having the government trying to estimate what the prevailing wage should be.
I get really frustrated though with most articles on the H1-B visas which either seem to be bashing immigrants or imply that somehow more government regulation will help the situation. In my experience growing up in the US we are incredibly lucky to have such talented people coming here to work and they have contributed incredibly to the tech companies in the US which are really one of the few bright spots in the US economy. Some of the smartest and hardest working colleagues I have grew up in other countries and we are lucky that they have come here to build the US economy.
> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false
There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.
> most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) [...] sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.
Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?
> the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry [...] Almost all the H-1Bs are young
Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.
And this is just from the first page. I feel like the author is just throwing every possible argument against the H1B, instead of making one good coherent point. =/
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.
Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs.
> Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?
I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer.
> Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.
If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students.
You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.
>The average hourly wage for college-educated workers in computer and math occupations rose 5.3 percent over 11 years, from $37.27 in 2000 to $39.24 in 2011 (in 2012 dollars), which translates to an average wage increase of less than half a percent per year. If a labor shortage existed in these occupations, one would expect wages to rise sharply as employers try to lure scarce workers to their firms.
If your study is claiming that software engineer compensation rose no more rapidly than the population at as a whole (they also saw a 5% increase), then something is deeply wrong with your study.
Note that "Computer and math occupations" is a broad catch-all term which includes all sorts of professions, such as:
Computer User Support Specialist: Provide technical assistance to computer users. Answer questions or resolve computer problems for clients in person, or via telephone or electronically. May provide assistance concerning the use of computer hardware and software, including printing, installation, word processing, electronic mail, and operating systems. Excludes "Network and Computer Systems Administrators" (15-1142).
If your contention that it rose is based on your experience in SV or NY or similar, then you're probably not getting a complete picture of the state of the industry.
Do you have an actual tech sector where you're at though. I also live in a flyover state and the average salary for a software engineer is $91,894, and that's well below the national average.
For S&G, I looked up salaries for software engineers in some random cities in the middle of nowhere and I have yet to find a place with an average salary close to that. Edmond, OK: 73,005; Eden Prairie, MN: 77,325 (23% below the national average); and the worst so far: Tuscaloosa, AL: $62,020.
Perhaps a few companies can get away paying so little, but it's hard to say that's the norm when they are so far below average, even for towns in the middle of nowhere.
Don't get me wrong, the cost of living is much lower than SV, but there are several major industries here that pay 2-3x that rate for less skilled work. Even many service-type jobs pay better. A buddy of mine that dropped out of college was making more money than I did right out of school managing McDonald's.
I personally left software engineering (regretfully, I love it, and still do what personal projects I can) to do a government job that is at least somewhat technical that constituted a massive raise over my old salary - and as I worked there for a few years and was a high performer, I did get several big raises before leaving.
The WWII-era holdover of making American employers be responsible for their employee healthcare is definitely something that should be gradually reformed out of existence. It used to be an incentive, not a necessity.
It's entirely possible (I am not claiming either way) that both are true: that the H1B system has benefited employers by allowing lower wages and technology growth has increased by access to a broader talent pool than was available in the US alone.
There are very few clean economic metrics - in this case you can't directly measure the effect because you don't have data from an equivalent system without the effect of H1b wages in it. So in the end, as with most economic arguments, it is more art than science.
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.
It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.
I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers.
This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest.
It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.
> implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest.
Your basic calculation is still right although I'd add more numbers to the opposite site. "Potential graduates" with or without CS can potentially enter to any software sector, or even hardware. Though this is just a small factor.
This is a good point. Lots of these 'calculations' neglect bootcamp or self-taught programmers, electrical/computer engineers who end up in software, and a lot of other grey-area work like embedded systems programming. The calculations are sloppy enough that I ignore them, but I'm not sure what the total weight of the errors ends up being.
I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains.
My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming.
There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details.
(I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees.
It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS, Engineering, and IS, at a time when the national level was lower.
I'm not sure if we're on the same page, but my contention is that western governments are encouraging kids to pursue STEM, knowing that there's already an oversupply of workers due to visas issued to emerging economies, and that the issue is compounding year on year.
Wow. That's a decently narrow standard, and I had no idea it was so high.
I object to some specifics - IS without programming education is quite different from CS/programming - but it's still a potent statistic. More narrowly, my (cynical) take is that CS degrees are decidedly unequal. Having seen multiple companies say they only bother with top-seven job fairs, and some genuinely talented friends struggle to land interviews with third-string universities on their resumes, I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side.
I completely agree with your conclusion, since it holds regardless of whether I'm right about segmentation within CS degrees: a lot of people are being unhelpfully pushed into "employable" STEM degrees by people who want to look science-friendly, and they're going to be left holding the (unemployment) bag when that doesn't work out.
Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.
There is a big difference between foreign workers who are great and add value, and foreign workers who are brought over, are subsequently exploited, and who are also used to depress the income of the local workforce. Seen it happen.
Then there are the "Indian Mafias" in places like Microsoft, where over 50% of an organization is Indian because they got into a cultural hiring spiral. And the products from those groups are generally pretty awful, because everyone seems to want to be a manager or see how high the next re-org will take them, and not do good designs or write good code.
H1Bs shouldn't be used for job shops, and they shouldn't be used to bring in cheap labor, but that's largely what they're used for now.
A lot of really good Indian engineers are going to get hurt, and that will suck.
>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.
Mainly because we have over 7 million people unemployed. The controversy is why are we bringing in so many foreign workers when we have so many people out of work here?
The argument basically comes down to what would we need to do to get some of these unemployed people here trained to be able to take some of these jobs? and if so, what's that cost compared to these H1-B's were bringing in? Also, at the end of the day, how motivated are those unemployed people to go through the rigorous training in order to be able to take these jobs? If you've spent 20 years putting hubcaps on cars in a factory, are you going to want to take six months to learn basic .Net or Javascript?
I don't have any of the answers, these are just some of the rumblings I've heard from executives I know at various large corporations.
Realistically, most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice. They are unwilling to do many jobs they perceive as being "below their station" and they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are.
We need to import a better working class to pay for our leisure class since pushing our leisure class into work is considered socially unacceptable.
Here's a great first person account of this: http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemploy... "There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor...I would be too humiliated...a neighbor or friend [might]...see me working the cash register or pumping gas. "
Again a few examples that are often used to justify calling 7 million people lazy.
If the visas are being used for for cash register and pumping gas jobs (how many states pump gas for you?) then this might make some sense but these are just isolated events and fit a narrative convenient to corporations to justify many practices that are mainly beneficial to the corporation.
Realistically, the only thing in support of a ridiculous statement like "most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice" is that one article, where a person, for multiple reasons not explicitly stated in the article might not want to take a certain demanding manual labor job.
I would suggest coming up with better arguments for the debunked supply side economics you're trying to push.
The last major study I saw on this showed that a large proportion of IT and STEM graduates had to move into unrelated industries due to an inability to find employment.
This meme that there are hordes of people who would choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work is disgusting.
Where are you getting 60%? Are you adding up the two years?
And I presume you're in the US, but from an external observer's perspective, 'poverty' in the US is extreme and is almost incomprehensible to people the rest of the Western world. These are not people "choosing" to not work, they're the most decrepit, uncared-for group in the developed world.
And I presume you're in the US, but from an external observer's perspective, 'poverty' in the US is extreme and is almost incomprehensible...
I spend about half my time in the US, half in India. So as a semi-external observer, all I can do is laugh at you. Most middle class people would love to live as well as the American poor do. Actually so would many Europeans - Bulgarian GDP/capita is about 1/2 of what the average poor American consumes.
No matter how much you might scoff and sputter, most poor American adults chose not look for work even once in the past year. That's just the basic fact of the matter.
In 2014, 6.9 percent of workers aged
18 to 64 were in poverty. The poverty
rate for those who worked full time,
year round was 3.0 percent, while the
poverty rate for those working less
than full time, year round was 15.9
percent. None of these rates were
statistically different from the 2013
poverty rates (Table 3).
Among those who did not work at
least 1 week in 2014, the poverty rate
and the number in poverty were 33.7
percent and 16.4 million in 2014, not
statistically different from the 2013
estimates (Table 3). Those who did
not work in 2014 represented 24.7
percent of all people aged 18 to 64,
compared with 61.7 percent of people
aged 18 to 64 in poverty.
I can't see what you mean in the Table. I can only see 30% of people who had no work experience in the year in question. I presume that you aren't adding up both years. And I presume that you also noticed that ~15% have a disability.
Yeah I'm sure middle class people in India would love to live "as well" as the American poor do. I was talking about the firmly developed world. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU and they still have access to free and competent healthcare. Compare that the US where the poor people considered by that table sometimes die because of bad teeth and no immediate access to care.
Oh yeah I see now, thanks. I was misinterpreting the first column.
Obviously it's impossible to glean motivations from a table, but it's telling to me that among the general population the majority of workers work full time, whereas among the poor it's the opposite, with most working part time for the entire year.
These people would probably be called the 'working poor' in my country; they're trying to work, but unfavourable economic and employment conditions make it difficult to maintain stable/consistent/quality employment. But in comparison to other developed countries, the proportion of workers (in that table) for a poor demographic is relatively high. Which would also signal to me that not only is the demographic not choosing NOT to work, but that they're choosing to work in higher numbers than in other countries despite their poverty (or maybe because of it).
I still maintain that people don't choose not to work en-masse for extended periods, evidenced by the fact that the US has had full employment for many periods.
Surely most aren't. I know in my graduating class in the late 2000s, maybe only 10% had any experience upon graduating. My point here is that the H1B policy has put these grads into an impossible situation, whereby they're competing against people from emerging economies who do have the skills for these entry level jobs, where 10 years ago grads would be hired and get up to speed on the job.
So there isn't an undersupply of willing workers, there's an unwillingness for companies to accept that entry level workers aren't commodities that you buy, ready-packaged to go.
There is no other industry in the world where lobbyists can say "grads don't have the proprietary skills that we need, so give us more visas to issue to Indians!" and keep a straight face. Training is a normal part of every industry.
>they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are.
How exactly would an unemployed person move? security deposit/down payment, moving costs, etc all cost real money, and without an income, I'm not sure how you would expect someone to move across the country.
Humans are on average risk averse - and certainly no one would advise someone to move out to california on their credit card, in hopes of immediately finding a well paying job.
Its not like someone who has been unemployed for two years is so attractive that theyd be getting offers with relocation included thrown at them.
How exactly would an unemployed person move? security deposit/down payment, moving costs, etc all cost real money, and without an income, I'm not sure how you would expect someone to move across the country.
Strangely, illegal Mexicans seem to have solved this problem. In fact, they solved it so well that we plan to build a wall to keep them out.
This is why I say we need to import a better working class. Our own leisure class seems completely incapable of doing anything!
Have you ever met an illegal immigrant? been to their home? asked them about their experience coming to the US?
Its interesting to see you assume so much about illegal immigrants, when you clearly dont have even a foundational understanding of their lives here or in mexico.
Do you have a substantive argument, or merely the vague supposition that somewhere out there there must be some personal anecdote that invalidates what I said?
Could you clarify what "assume so much" refers to? I'm pretty sure that the only assumption I made is that most illegal immigrants are not non-workers collecting benefits.
The "Shortage of Engineers" myth that just won't die. If you're going to claim there's a shortage of a good, you need to mention the price you're willing to pay. I want a new BMW for $10K, but can't find one. Therefore there's a shortage of BMWs.
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years.
These two statements are not linked. One can agree that without foreign talent, SV would not have grown to what it is. On the flip side, this doesn't mean their is a shortage of talent.
Simply that their is a shortage of talent that is willing to sell that talent for lower wages and less perks. I can't see how raising the minimum salary will hurt.
If you are correct, and the value of this talent is amazing enough, even $130,000 is a paltry sum considering what they should be capable of doing. If raising the minimum salary on all of H1-B visas to $130,000 is too much, one could easily make the assertion that the talent is simply not there.
In the end, if there is a talent shortage, salaries should be rising, and they aren't.
> Younger people are more willing to move to another country.
> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years
I don't think you can prove this point, because you're arguing a counterfactual without proving the base claim that foreign talent was in fact necessary or that similar development wouldn't have otherwise happened.
You're also confusing what is meant be a labour shortage, which isn't about the absolute number of qualified candidates per se, but the number available at a given price. That is to say that there may be a sufficient pool of workers, but they demand a higher wage than firms would like to pay. As a result firms choose H-1Bs to suppress wages.
> Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?
We don't necessarily. As with many aspects of economic policy, it's a bit of a balancing act. You need enough immigration to satisfy demand for talent, but not so much that your drive down wages, and diminish taxable income while also upsetting constituents. You also don't want visa policies that encourage skilled workers to come, stay long enough to learn how to copy American businesses, and leave (sort of IP/business process remittance).
Generally I'm pro skilled immigration but H-1B as implemented is too easy to use for wage suppression vis-a-vis contracting through outsourcing consultancies like TCS or Infosys.
The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field.
I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply.
The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor.
Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose
Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field.
Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies.
tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who applies to 1 place and gets accepted. Look, 90% of applications have been rejected!
Total BS. I have seen this first hand both as a hiring manager and as an applicant. I have been rejected from jobs based on totally insane interview questions that have nothing to do with the job. In one case I interviewed at 2 competitors. One gave me nothing but trick whiteboard questions, the other emphasized my experience and gave me a real world interview. I was rejected by the whiteboard company and hired by the competitor. My first day on the job I sat down and commited code that ended up in production the very next day and did that for many years afterwords.
I have also hired people that had to pass insane interviews due to the company culture and watched them fail at being a developer. I know many good devs that cannot pass these interviews that would run circles around these super whiteboard problem solvers.
There's a lot wrong with that article, you're right. Another way the article is BS is that Joel assumes that it is only possible to get good candidates by being the employee's first employer, since "they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy." It's impossible! Here's a pro-tip for all you hopeless employers trying to hire these inscrutable "top engineers", who are unfairly entrenched in their existing jobs. Ready to be blown away? Write it down, who knows when this post will go away!
Offer them a stimulating job, and pay them lots of money, more stimulating than their current employer, and more money than their current employer.
There you go, glad I could help.
If there is this "floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online" as Joel puts it, then I'll offer that the software job market is also flooded with a floating population of "dog jobs" that are uninteresting, low pay, crappy company/work conditions, etc. that never get filled without paid recruiters spamming thousands of people daily. When you search job boards, nearly 100% of the jobs are such. When you get another LinkedIn message, it's more than likely a dog job. Don't get me wrong, I like hearing from recruiters, and I appreciate the opportunity of getting a heads up about the kinds of jobs that are out there, but the pickins of GOOD JOBS, jobs that I would leave my employer for, are pretty slim.
Improve job quality and you'll improve your candidate pool. Pay bananas, get monkeys.
Right now I would love to be working on amazing challenging stuff for these companies. Instead I have to decide if i want to go gungho studying my ass off for whiteboard interviews...and if I am insanely lucky I will get offered a salary already in line with my current one at a company that doesn't have billions in the bank...like all these SV companies that are so convinced there is some shortage.
You bring up another reason why 90% of applications might be rejected: false negatives.
Consider a hiring filter which rejects 90% of good applicants and 99% of bad applicants. In such a world, consider a population of 10 good applicants. These 10 applicants will go on 100 interviews, be rejected on 90 of them and each will find a job. So in this world where every applicant finds a job, you still get 9/10 applications being rejected.
This seems to agree with your (anecdotal, and likely biased [1]) experience.
[1] "I got rejected after an interview, therefore hiring is broken" is a perennial topic on HN.
I've come to accept that I'm no good at whiteboard interviews. The only way I can get hired nowadays is either via a personal referral and/or an employer so desperate (or serious enough about hiring someone in a reasonable time-frame) that they short-circuit their interview process and skip the whole whiteboard hazing process.
For my current job, I had a total of 2 phone conversations (first with a recruiter, second with the hiring manager) over the course of a week when they all of a sudden dropped an offer on me. I was a bit surprised by it -- "What? An offer already? Uh, I was expecting some sort of interview first?"
I actually nearly walked away at that point, but was... talked into accepting after a little back-and-forth on the salary.
But anyway, I just ignore cold-call/emails from recruiters anymore, because I know it will just end in wasted time (like getting rejected after 4 rounds of hazing and a weekend-stealing homework project) and stress/frustration I don't need. Most companies are obviously being overwhelmed with large numbers of high quality applicants for every open position ;)
I'd love to have an interview where I got to show off what I know with some whiteboard problems. Every interview I've ever had usually goes like "So tell us about the kind of projects you've done in school or on your own." I don't have any huge personal projects, just a million little ones and for the most part, my school projects have been very uninteresting and not 100% towards the interests I have. I end up sounding pretty dull and lazy. If I was given some whiteboard problems, I would at least be able to show off what I know rather than just talking about it. In interviews, I'm always afraid of sounding like I'm bullshitting something when I'm not an expert in something but know enough to carry a conversation about the subject. The job I got hired for, the skills they were looking for were things I've done as a hobby in my spare time. I was surprised they offered me the job since I figured there had to be a bunch of masters grads out there much more qualified than me. Now I sit here and feel like I'm maybe a bit too underqualified for the job. It's going to take a bit of time just getting up to the knowledge level that I think they were expecting me to have. If I had some whiteboard-style questions during the interview, maybe I would have gotten weeded out. Maybe they really are looking for someone of my experience. I'm really not 100% sure but I'm not about to tip my hand and be branded as a bullshitter. I really do like the job and the projects they already have me working on are way cooler than I'd ever imagine. But I wish I was a bit more prepared for the level of knowledge required before coming in here.
I think this is probably close to being the case. The Google interview is an "any given Sunday" thing, with a huge amount of luck involved as to choice of interviewer and interview questions. I suspect that a person who got an offer, if forced to re-interview, would fail 9/10 times.
Seems like it's because the industry has accepted that there's a fixed number of good applicants, and so employers are engaged in a zero-sum game to dig them out, overlooking the notion that average programmers can become better with guidance.
This seems to agree with your (anecdotal, and likely biased [1]) experience.
Spolsky's observations are no less anecdotal and no more data-driven than the previous poster's experiences.
This is exactly what happens. The hiring bar is so arbitrarily high that companies can say there's a shortage when they reject 5-10 good applicants for every position.
In a true labor shortage this would be completely unsustainable. Trying to justify rejecting 90% of your good applicants to avoid "false negatives" and extending that logic to say that there's a shortage... Obviously retarded if you think about it.
Does that include the accounting for recruiter salaries, the time taken away from employees to conduct interviews, etc.? You'd think that CA being an at-will state would encourage more performance-related terminations. Fail early, fail fast- with your talent pool.
Indeed, thanks to Spolsky & co getting a scripting job entails a three ring circus of burdens and hazing to get an offer. They are looking for any excuse to not hire you rather than trying to fill a position.
Joel Spolsky makes important points in the article. Disregarding them because you don't like the web site that they're posted on is fallacious reasoning.
Inc is a publication targeted towards business owners. Nothing about the site is meant to be neutral. It's like learning about Democrats from a Republican website.
I wouldn't disregard it so quickly if the source was more neutral.
And that's how echo chambers of thought develop. Only listen to the sources of information that you wish to and disregard others without evaluating what they are providing.
Sorry, but Spolsky is normally extremely insightful and if you read the article, he makes many excellent points that are worth considering no matter which angle you're approaching the problem from.
You aren't asking Inc for a recommendation, if you did their bias would be an issue. Thinking clearly means focusing on facts of the argument, not Joel's job or the site's business.
If there's not a shortage of skilled engineers, then why is Google paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? While it's true that the industry has a bit of myopia and tends to focus on a specific subset of engineers as "skilled," there is absolutely a huge shortage of them and massive competition to hire them.
Google is one of the few companies hiring H1B's for their true purpose. If you look at where most of these visas are going it's clear that a large majority are low quality jobs.
It's a disservice to the brilliant visa holders I know as well as US citizens. it's extremely hard for them to get a job at a good company because so many of the visas are getting soaked up by those abusing the system.
If there was a huge engineer shortage you would see companies step in to provide developer training problems. This is clearly not happening.
I'm not saying the H1B system isn't abused. It absolutely is, and should be reformed.
What I'm disputing is this notion that there's no shortage of qualified developers. There absolutely is—that's why you see substantial salary growth for senior engineers.
What exactly do you think bootcamps are? They're outsourced developer training programs whose entire business model depends on the high tech salaries.
Tech companies also reject applicants because they are "software engineers wannabe" that are just a bunch of phonies coveting the high salaries.
Tying up visas effects only to wage diminution is just a big mistake. But I can't wait to witness the effect of being a lot more selective on visas. We'll see!
Visas are currently the "easy way out" to get decent developers for cheap. The problem, that's not what they were designed for. Their purpose is to find specialized skills that cannot be sourced otherwise.
The most immediate effects of fixing the visa system will be employers suddenly offering "on the job training" to fill these lowly skilled jobs. It's hard to see this as anything but a net positive for US workers
Sorry to say this but you've probably got pretty strong selection bias.
At least from my experience (I used to be a consultant) consulting jobs mostly attract people that can't get a job elsewhere. They generally include low pay, long hours, and a lot of client interaction.
It's no surprise to me that the nation's biggest software consultancies are largely considered the worst places to work as a software developer.
H1B's know to apply at these jobs because they have a much better chance of getting them. They have a better chance of getting them because these same companies are generally the ones abusing the system to hire software developers below market rates.
Tech companies have a strict interview process because a mediocre engineer is actively harmful.
At most companies, the hiring manager and interviewers, who are predominantly other engineers, get to decide whether or not to hire a candidate. There simply isn't a mechanism for upper management to manipulate the process in the way you suggest.
Every time the topic comes up, I wonder how many of the HN'ers who are cross at H-1B workers because they are depressing wages are intellectually consistent (and honest) enough to accept that this position is part and parcel of the same system of nationalist thought that leads to a wall to Mexico and steeply increased tariffs on chinese import; of "America First"?
If you find yourself reconciling the idea of protecting against wage competition from H-1Bs, but are in favour of continued undocumented immigration from Mexico (or at least opposed to taking any substantial measures against it), in favour of NAFTA remaining in place and in favour of continued trade with China under current conditions, I'd be very interested in understanding how you model that?
(There is also a critique around the specific rules of H-1B being unfair to the worker, mostly around restrictions on changing employers. I agree with most of that and don't think it inherently incompatible with other views on immigration and trade, pro or con.)
The way I saw it, the "build a wall" campaign was more about mobilizing the frustration many felt about cultural changes and (perceived) social costs of illegal immigration and less about "they're taking our jobs" (though I'm not saying that argument was never made).
I think it was about people becoming upset at seeing their communities change for the worse, seeing signs and publications coming up in spanish, seeing mexican names in headlines about high-profile crime, seeing mexicans use EBT (welfare) cards at the grocery, hearing anecdotal stories about traffic incidents where "a mexican hit me and had no insurance..", and seeing mexican gangs come to their town.
I think a lot of those voters felt unheard and tired of the politically correct excuses used to defend them. And when someone finally stood up and said "I'm going to fight this [ one precursor that enabled these changes] ", they were immediately sold.
(I'm not going to put an "I'm not a racist" disclaimer here, you all should be mature enough to interpret whether or not I actually endorse those stances or whether I am explaining the motivations of others who do)
And I would add that people saying they are racist live in nice neighborhoods somewhere in SV with smart people and say but look at these engineer friend of mine who is so smart, intelligent and cultural.
Zuck building walls and buying islands to live alone and peace, without having slightest idea what is it to live in average neighborhoods who get to taste the immigrations bad (and good!) sides, while preaching no walls, no borders, mass immigration is good.
I think you're spot on, but I do have to question how much of this is empirical and how much of it is misdirected blame at the loss of social status these people's families have suffered.
In other words, would we see the same political fervor from these people if they had a median income of ~150k/yr?
Protecting against wage competition for H-1Bs: More money for me (U.S. citizen / permanent resident tech worker).
In favor of free trade: Cheaper goods for me.
It all boils down to "which collection of policies help me maximize my stuff?" Most people seem to take a more pragmatic approach, valuing tangible things over intellectual consistency.
The wall equivalence makes sense to me, but you're stretching the analogy to include tariffs on foreign made goods.
With illegal immigration (wall) and H1B, you're describing the creation of a second class of workers within a country that depress wages within that country by having a separate, unequal workforce.
With foreign made goods you're describing a situation where workers from different countries have different protections, but those protections are consistent within the country.
So that's a consideration, but it's more complicated than that. The H1-B system damages the ability of these workers to negotiate salary and move freely. It's not like H1-B visas represent opening up the labor market - they create disadvantaged labor that can't operate freely in the labor market.
I'm all for actually open borders. Depress wages by allowing brown people access to the job market, fine. Depress wages by exploiting brown people and not giving them access to the same wages as their western counter parts, eh. It's intellectually consistent to be opposed to that.
I do believe H1-Bs were used to pay lower wages (more so because of being tied to the employer for long periods of time in the Green Card Process).
However, in my observations and experiences, the last few years (i.e. the years when H1-Bs were allocated by lottery), due to the scarcity of H1-B visas, employers started paying a premium for employees who already had an H1-B visa and the skills necessary, because they could switch jobs immediately (as opposed to having wait 1+ year to hire someone from abroad and wait/hope for them to get through the lottery).
What made it even better was that thanks to legislation by the Obama administration, your spot in the Green Card line was now portable, i.e. even if you switch employers, as long as the new employer files a green card application, you still retained your position in the line.
As you can see, the theme has been giving more leverage to H1-B employees as opposed to the employers - and that is what the American immigration system desperately needs. In the end it's only going to protect American workers.
Could H-1B be more effective? Yes. It could definitely be more fair to the visa holder and do a better job of attracting and retaining the most skilled workers.
But I also think it's totally wrong to say we don't have a technology labor shortage. The best evidence of this are the salary numbers for people with math and science degrees. It's not because physics and math suddenly got more valuable. It's because tech is so starved for labor it's hiring people from different disciplines to do the job and it's actually brought the average salaries in line with CS and engineering graduates.
Also, even if we had an adequate national labor supply, the job opportunities are not distributed proportional to population density. The density of technology jobs is highly concentrated in a few parts of the country, but we are producing qualified engineers everywhere. And not everyone is willing or able to move.
There is a luxury yacht shortage. I say this because I want to run a luxury yacht business and I'm unable to buy a luxury yacht for the $10 that I have in my pocket.
There is a Ferrari shortage because I want to start a "Uber With Ferraris" business, and I'm unable to buy a Ferrari with the $10 that I have in my pocket.
There is a developer shortage because I want to start a software business and I am unable to buy a developer with the $10 that I have in my pocket.
There are no shortages. There is capitalism and the market. If salaries rise so that My Brilliant Idea Co is unable to hire a software developer, that just means that My Brilliant Idea Co isn't valued by VCs or Angels such that they can afford to hire the necessary people.
My company was unable to hire people. When it increased offers by 40%, suddenly it could hire people.
Thank you. The supply of employees is only constrained by employers' willingness to pay. At the current prevailing wages, supply is not meeting demand. This does not necessarily mean there is a shortage.
I know tons of people my age who wanted to go into computer science. They failed out, lacked the dedication it took to make up for missing skills, etc.
The wages are making people try, but the field is difficult.
Increased wages could also pull people back into software engineering who are skilled but left for more lucrative fields (or careers with better upward paths).
There can be shortages and you could also be able to hire people by pricing competitively.
If there are 100 open positions and 80 available software engineers, if 1 of those positions is able to pay twice as much as the next highest, they will get that software engineer - it doesn't change the fact that there are 80 engineers to go around, and no matter how high they offer in pay 20 positions will go unfulfilled.
No. That just means that there are unviable businesses when software engineers are priced correctly.
If there are 10 businesses that each need to hire 10 engineers, but there are only 80 engineers, then the price of the engineers will be determined by which 8 businesses have a business model that can afford those 80 engineers. The other two businesses don't have a viable business model. They can't sell enough X to account for the cost of the engineers.
Likewise, if you have a business that depends on building an electric car, and you can't afford to buy lithium at market price and still make the car cheap enough, then that isn't because there is a shortage of lithium. Its because you don't have a viable business model based on the price of lithium.
In my example above, there is no shortage of Ferraris. There is only a shortage of people willing to sell their Ferrari at $10.
Or stock. There are 100 open positions for AAPL at $129, but only 80 offers at that price. Thats not a shortage of AAPL stock. That just means there's only 80 people willing to sell at that price. However, if you offer $160 for AAPL, suddenly you'll find a lot of sellers.
Only 80 engineers looking for work? Find someone that looks good on LinkedIn and offer them double their salary. Suddenly more than 80 engineers available.
> Find someone that looks good on LinkedIn and offer them double their salary.
You make the assumption that individual employees are economically rational individuals. That is, they will optimize their lives to maximize income without regard to other factors.
It also asserts that employers clearly advertise pay for a position, which we know is not usually the case. It's not like you can peruse job boards and know exactly what every company will pay you. Sure, sometimes they have (very side) salary bands, but the vast majority of tech workers don't know what their offer will be until it is made.
>But I also think it's totally wrong to say we don't have a technology labor shortage. The best evidence of this are the salary numbers for people with math and science degrees. It's not because physics and math suddenly got more valuable. It's because tech is so starved for labor it's hiring people from different disciplines to do the job and it's actually brought the average salaries in line with CS and engineering graduates.
This series of claims is so different from the reality that myself and many others have observed that I don't even know where to begin. Physics graduates are literally jumping off of buildings because of how poor their employment prospects are. Can you provide any sources for the statements you just made?
Also, I work with and have interviewed many people with physics and math degrees. Granted, there's some sampling bias going on there. But the ones I know didn't really have prospects actually using their degrees in their respective fields unless they got a phd and went into academia. So they all went into tech one way or another.
The title is a bit overly-polarizing; Prof. Matloff has been an outspoken critic of H-1Bs for quite some time, and only mentions the president once in the article. The actual EO isn't even out yet.
I agree, this issue has been around for quite some time, but is just a matter of adjusting the application of a policy that has been abused.
This issue has nothing to do with joblessness in the Midwest (and is certainly not of the same scale), that is mostly due to the departure of big manufacturing companies to foreign countries. This is what Trump was talking about: blaming immigrants and corporations for the loss of low-skilled jobs. No one in America cares that overpaid software developers loose their jobs to H1B workers...
Trump may be "right" about this topic but he's massively wrongheaded about the solution. Making America the place the worlds best and brightest used to want to go is not going to solve this problem - regulation to protect visa workers is. I have a number of friends I went to school with now working on H1B Visas who want to make a life here and worked very hard to get here and I hate to see them indentured to their sponsors. I don't know anyone I went to school with that was even remotely competent that couldn't get a job even in my home state, let alone nationwide (and this isn't even from a big or well known program).
Maybe the demand for H1B visas would go down if the playing field was leveled but who knows? This doesn't validate his actual ideas whatsoever, many people see this issue as a problem but I would like to see some actual reform instead of just pouring gasoline on the problem and lighting a match.
Whoever argues that H1Bs are paid handsomely, have a look at this data disclosure for 2016 H1B wages (137 MB) from DOL. You can find all the details of companies that exploits the workers with some MS Excel wizardry.
The companies exploit a loop hole called "Pay Ranges" if you see the excel columns - WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM & WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_TO, rather than a single absolute WAGE, the companies can legally pay any salary in that range.
That's where Mr Trump needs to "patch" the system, raise the minimum WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM.
I'll just suggest that it's probably a great time for tech companies to open a Bangalore or Gurgaon office. Bangalore in particular is a good choice - the people are smart, the infrastructure is good, and it's a very pleasant place to visit. Perfect weather all year and the best breakfast in India. Also a very strong tech culture; second in the world to SF, in my view, and without many of the social pathologies [1] that seem to be threatening SF.
Rather than fighting with the legal system to replace one or two of your overpaid employees, you can replace entire divisions. It's certainly an investment of effort but it's well worth it.
Plus if you need foreign talent, as long as you pay $25k/year the visa is more or less guaranteed.
If the US wants to be uncompetitive, leave the US.
[1] Meritocracy is still considered a core value and a great thing. There's a lot less xenophobia - while many in US tech harbor negative feelings about immigrants "who took our jorbs", I've literally never seen the same negativity in the Indian tech scene.
We outsourced most jobs to Bangalore and productivity dropped to around about 10% while costs increased. We have experienced death by committee and hierarchy in all of our outsourced projects so far and are now starting to solve this by in-housing everything again.
Our biggest problem wasn't the outsourcing, it was the number of candidates who had false references and qualifications from diploma mills. And the was just the start of the problems. People also seemed unable to work without installing a hierarchical leadership structure and cascading very specific instructions down that structure which were then misunderstood due to Chinese whispers. Every person I speak to, who works at a company who has tried to open up a development shop in India, seems to have war stories about this.
That's completely contrary to my experience. I've managed at least 3 Indian teams, worked with several more, and never had these issues. I admit, I might have a problem with people who had fake degrees. I never bothered to check degrees, why do I care if they can pass the code interview? (The same one I give to US devs.) My teams are generally pretty flat, more or less the same as any team I've worked on in the US.
I have heard of people having your experiences though; every single one was some clueless firangi who stayed at a fancy 5 star hotel for 2 weeks before jetting off, visited the Taj Mahal and was too scared to eat pani puri.
Opening an office in any country is an investment. You need to integrate the teams, you can't just drop by, rent an office and hope your local handlers run things perfectly. When my company opened our Pune office (a 2 hour flight from the mothership in Delhi) we shipped a relatively large leadership team down. When we hired new people they were joining an existing company, they weren't just left to fend for themselves. That would be a disaster even if it was just a NY company opening a PA office.
I respectfully disagree about Bangalore / Gurgaon office. The time difference between west coast and Bangalore is 13.5hrs now (or 12.5hrs for ~8 months). That makes it very hard to have even meetings, let alone meaningful collaboration. Even 7am in SF means its 8:30pm in Bangalore (or 7:30am in Bangalore means its 6pm in SF). With east coast, time difference is still 9.5hrs vs 10.5 hrs - only slightly better.
Source: first hand experience working with Indian colleagues while in SF; working with US colleagues while in India; observing hundreds of colleagues over the years, vast majority of whom arrive at work ~8:30-9:30 and leave ~5:30-6:30; frustrations of those having to attend late night / early morning meetings and how that affects personal lives.
As a remote worker based in Thailand had worked with guys in CA (14 hrs difference) for almost 2 years. It is true that life style and physical body got seriously affected.
My regular meeting time is 1-2am, paring with designers at 5-6am sometimes. Always not sure when to sleep during daylight, eating time messed up. Biological cells never get used to it. Anyway, I love my team.
| Meritocracy is still considered a core value and a great thing.
No it isn't. There is something called "Reservation" which is affirmative action designed to lift up exploited lower castes. It was also setup to reduce the domination of upper castes in white collar (and other) professions.
The results are far from ideal, though things get better each passing day in the younger generations. Upper castes believe merit based college and thus jobs have been stolen from them. All castes are able to circumvent merit with bribes & money.
| There's a lot less xenophobia
Yea, no ..Apart from the religion & caste issues, native Bangaloreans & Kannada are well known for despising & discriminating against "outsiders" from other parts of India for "ruining their city". If it were that legions of Chinese/Koreans/Arabs/Europeans etc were arriving in Bangalore for tech jobs, like they do in SF, there would be riots. Every major Indian city has seen some form of violence, protests against folks from other parts of India.
Bunch of my friends suffer from a chronic cough and throat irritation from being exposed to traffic everyday. Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.
There is no way to escape constant air and sound pollution.
>>Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.
I doubt this is because of pollution, noise or dust. Most people are stressed for the same reasons why any millennial traveling between Mountain View and SF is stressed- Rents, High home prices, Home expenses etc etc.
I was mainly referring to the internet. Io've never commuted in Bangalore, and most of my friends live/work in Indira Nagar or Koramangala. so I've got no real firsthand or even secondhand knowledge of traffic.
Having worked in a ton of different large corporations that have large H1-B employee populations, I can say this is completely true from my experience.
In the last three places (including my current employer) there were huge swaths of H1-B's from India. After some long lunches and happy hours, I found out that a) they're being paid significantly less than I was and b) two of the three companies wouldn't sponsor them to stay at the company and come on as an FTE.
This meant several trips and back and forth between the states and Bangalore to get a new visa, then turn around and try and find a new gig somewhere. For the developers who were single it wasn't a problem. Those workers with families, it was quite stressful to have their families moving back and forth on a regular basis and not having the stability of knowing they had a gig lined up or not.
Toss in the fact getting these visa's are incredibly competitive and I can only imagine the stress involved.
Just as a counter-point (not saying your experience is incorrect at all), I've worked in the US on an H1B and was compensated very well, as were my co-workers. The system allows abuse, but doesn't guarantee it.
I do wonder if the employees you mention know that an H1B is transferrable between employers. It's a time consuming process, but I'd love to see more people take advantage of those who abuse the visa by getting one, then immediately transferring it to an honest company that pays a fair salary.
Its not easy as it sounds. Being a single that time, I have transferred my H1B myself and it was a nightmare. I had sleepless nights and uncertainty. My GreenCard process was reset. Any H1Bs who knows about the system really well will not risk transferring because of the risks to their green card process.
There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs. If you see the data from here:
I have a huge circle of friends in many companies. We discuss our salaries and issues openly. Not one of them says that they are paid equal to their American colleagues. Moroever the promotions and salary raises goes to American colleagues, while the H1Bs bears it all to support the family with the income where his/her spouse is not allowed to work (H4 visa)
> There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs.
..
> I have a huge circle of friends in many companies. We discuss our salaries and issues openly. Not one of them says that they are paid equal to their American colleagues.
I am not your friend, just a random person on internet. But I am on H-1B, and if this offers any solace, I know that I am paid par with my American colleagues. My boss is on H-1B; both he and I have American and H-1B employees reporting to us.
The rules have been changed, if youre not aware.
Lot of my friends have moved between jobs on H1B.
There's no uncertainty there. Moving after approved i140 prevents the greencard process from resetting.
I work in autosector and my salary is definitely equal or higher than my coworkers.
I have a general understanding of all the nook & corners of the I-140 portability rules. Its very precarious & employees with a family and kids in school will not dare to do this. Its a high risk maneuver.
Suppose an employee did take the risks, think about when he will be getting a greencard for EB2 or EB3 from India/China, 10 years ? If the queue readjusts, 15 years ? What if the portability provisions are taken out by a new government ? Whats the point ? Why should an employee's future be dictated by a broken immigration system ? I believe in fail-fast, so that's why I took the Express Entry path of Canada and I didn't fail.
I have done the transfer. It is not difficult if you find a company willing to pay for lawyers to handle it for you. But yes, if you are only in the first phase of your green card application you will be set back.
And I promise you, there are companies that pay a fair amount to H1B workers. I have worked for four of them myself. I don't know what kind of companies you work for or where in the country you are, but they exist.
Where I've worked we paid H1B similarly. Remember, that the visa process isn't free, it's an additional cost to the company so paying a little less isn't unreasonable.
> The industry lobbyists’ ace-in-the-hole argument is that if they can’t hire more H-1Bs, they’ll ship the work overseas. But for projects on which H-1Bs are hired in the U.S., face-to-face interaction (between themselves and their American coworkers) is crucial. That is why employers bring H-1Bs to the U.S. in the first place rather than sending the work abroad, where the wages are even cheaper.
Considering the growth of tools that facilitate working remotely, and the flexibile schedule pursued by many software engineers, the willingness to ship jobs overseas is hard to merely cast aside.
Visa workers should absolutely be paid a fair wage, and it seems a realistic side-effect that there may be a shift in the type of roles offered to visa employees vs. overseas when the cost of in-house now represents a premium on the foreign employee.
Keep in mind, though, that a lot of H1Bs are being used as replacements for a typical IT department, not as the type of staff you could easily offshore, even with remote working technology. For example, at a Fortune 100 company I did quite a bit of consulting for, fully 60% of their IT staff was Infosys and Congnizant H1Bs. You could make the argument that some portion of those positions could be offshored, but realistically no large company would do that - they want people on-site too much. I don't think the rise of tools is really changing this mentality fast enough to make remote/offshore work a real possibility here in the near term.
I suspect that instead of shipping work overseas, you'd simply see a relaxation of attitudes on remote work. The US already has a large base of engineering talent that is willing to work for less but either won't or can't relocate to a tech hub. (Often because if they relocate to you they're going to want more money because of cost of living differences.)
There is a significant advantage in doing the work here, but they'll still do some work overseas. And they'll start their own companies overseas and compete with us.
Trump asks the right questions: the danger of globalism, incredibly high global debt, the danger of radical islam, the overestimation of Russia's danger on the US and EU, the questionable usefulness of NATO, the economic manipulation by China, he just has the wrong answers.
In general, I agree with your point. However, I don't think we would be having this intense national debate over these important issues if not for Trumps answers. Like it or not, we're finally bringing these issues to the fore front.
Trump forgot that the USSR once had a massive superiority in military forces in the European theatre (over 2-1 vs. NATO). The breakup of the USSR made Europe tremendously safer. Now Trump is going to let Putin recapture the Ukraine and restore much of his missing military edge, while undercutting NATO.
It's like he's inviting Putin to just invade Poland. How is that going to end?
This is like saying the breakup of the USA will make the rest of Americas safer. Maybe but military strength does not directly translate to 'threat' without intent. Some states by their geography, history and technology are naturally more 'powerful'. Does that automatically translate into a threat or the idea that they should be broken up. Who gets to decide this?
This is like positioning Russia creating a SATO with South American States to defend against 'US aggresiveness' and trying to actively break up the US as a 'defensive action'.
Yet this is the kind of foreign policy routinely adopted by the US and 'the west' and yet it's others that are 'aggressive'.
and yet forgets the 1$ trillion student debt? and how costly a university education is in the US, plus doesn't get irony either, he himself is a third generation immigrant. A billionaires who is "anti establishment" who surrounds himself with even more $$ billionaires.
The danger of radical Islam?? That one's in the mix just for an extra dose of racist nationalism. They'll stop fighting us once we stop occupying their countries.
Radical islam is the real danger on the west, I come from a middle eastern country and as an ex-muslim I know very well the danger of the islamization that has been going on in western Europe throughout the past 3 decades.
The flu kills more people every week than "radical Islam" has killed in the last decade; but yes, keep telling us how much of an existential threat to Western civilization it is. Us "enlightened individuals" are lecturing you because you are terrible at evaluating risk and are afraid of your own shadow.
My point isn't about radical Islam (no quotes needed, it does exist), but rather about privileged Western know-it-alls who feel the need to lecture about things with which they have no experience. Especially to people who have experienced these things firsthand.
Radical Islam is but one example. American Communists lecturing Eastern Europeans is another.
The flu also killed more people than the Jews killed by Hitler during that time. High blood pressure killed more than the two combined. Nice logic you've got here.
The hubris and self-righteousness of SV billionaire bully-boys has reached the point where I'll favor practically anything that takes them down a peg. I'd love to see the Republican controlled federal government treat them the way the Democrats have treated, for example, the gun and coal industries.
If a gun manufacturer should be held liable for the results of people misusing a gun, then why shouldn't Airbnb be held liable for harm people may suffer as a result of renting or leasing through Airbnb?
But many say they should be. Simply because they want to drive the gun industry out of existence and outlaw private ownership of guns in the U.S.
And FTR, I normally would not favor regulating Airbnb out of existence. But I've had such a bellyful of Airbnb CEO Brian Chevsky's self-rightousness, that I would love to see him and his investors take a multi-billion dollar haircut.
The Democrats weaponized the federal government against their political enemies. I'd love to see them, and their supporters, get a taste of their own medicine.
So you want to enact sweeping legislation that covers an entire industry because you feel that the CEO of a single company has a poor attitude and you want to spite him?
I'm at a loss for how naive and petty that viewpoint is, and how drastic the unintended consequences could be. But hey, you stuck it to the man, good job!
>So you want to enact sweeping legislation that covers an entire industry because you feel that the CEO of a single company has a poor attitude and you want to spite him?
Yep.
>I'm at a loss for how naive and petty that viewpoint is, and how drastic the unintended consequences could be. But hey, you stuck it to the man, good job!
So by that you mean, propose changes but then never have any of them implemented in any way and be blocked entirely by an obstructionist opposition party? I'm not sure thats what you really want.
I'm just confused as to what you actually want to see happen to the SV bully-boys. The democrats (as far as I can tell) have had little to no actual effect on coal or guns but your comment makes it sound like they've been able to rein them in or bust them up or something.
I was kind of making a joke because to me the democrats have been largely ineffective against coal and guns. Thats not necessarily their fault, to me they have generally proposed pretty measured policies (even if some peoples rhetoric is bombastic) that end up being totally rejected by the republicans and my guess is that is NOT what you want to see happen with SV.
>I'm just confused as to what you actually want to see happen to the SV bully-boys.
I'd love to see the value of their businesses destroyed through zealous over-regulation. I'd love to see the IRS target them for audits the way Obama's IRS targeted conservative groups. I'd love for them to be criminally prosecuted, and -- dare I dream? -- jailed for any violations of the tax code that might be uncovered. That would wipe the smug off their faces.
The political left in America no longer employs persuasion as their primary means of gaining and maintaining political power. Instead, they attempt to inflict social or financial punishment on their political enemies to shut them up. Recall the reaction when Peter Thiel had the audacity to support a presidential candidate they opposed. Google [memories pizza] for another example.
So if that is how the game is played these days, then I want the right to use the same tactics against the left, and inflict massive pain on them until they offer a truce.
I'm basically an Adam Smith free-market libertarian. I think the country, as a whole, would be better off if the cap on H1Bs was lifted entirely. Productive, tax-paying, wealth-creating people would flood into this country and enrich it.
But politics is war these days. And Airbnb is more than just an enterprise, it's a wing of the Democratic party. So I think the Republicans should, to paraphrase Obama, "punish [their] enemies and reward [their] friends."
The problem is, the GOP's rhetoric is free markets, but their reality is crony capitalism. If they were serious about illegal immigration, they would go after the American employers and corporations that exploit illegal labor, first.
You are right that politics is a war and ideologies are shouted but policies belie them to be empty promises. It is ironic that a libertarian is cheering on a protectionist administration to attack economically libertarian/neoliberal corporations (in the SV mold - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) who are aligned with a center-left liberal/socially liberal party.
>The problem is, the GOP's rhetoric is free markets, but their reality is crony capitalism.
I agree with every part of that statement except "the problem is."
>It is ironic that a libertarian is cheering on a protectionist administration to attack economically libertarian/neoliberal corporations (in the SV mold - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) who are aligned with a center-left liberal/socially liberal party.
These people are only libertarian when it benefits them personally. And now, because of that, so am I.
Massively increase their market size and profits? It's hard to argue that Obama was the best thing to happen to the gun industry in decades. Fire arm production in the US had DOUBLED since Obama took office.
Stock for Ruger has gone up 4-fold since Obama took office. SWHC was up 50% over its pre-Obama peak, but it dropped after Trump won the election.
> and coal industries
Competition killed the coal industry, so if you want to point a finger, you can blame the oil & natural gas companies that developed and utilized fracking techniques along with the solar and wind-turbine industries that have developed products that can produce electricity much cheaper than coal ever could.
Obama was just trying to get a few good blows in before The Market lands the TKO. He gets to take credit for defeating the coal industry, which looks good on his environmental record. But the writing was already on the wall for the industry.
In 2008, candidate Obama remarked, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them. … Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Four major coal companies have filed for bankruptcy in just the past 15 months.
Do you have a link that isn't extremely partisan political commentary?
The reality is even without Obama's CPP coal is dying world wide, between china pouring billions into clean energy and the natural gas boom in the states coal can't compete.
>Do you have a link that isn't extremely partisan political commentary?
It was the first result in a google search for [obama coal fired power plant]. I was just looking for that quote, and I found it. If you think additional context will refute my point, feel free to provide it.
Anecdotally, as a former H1-B worker, I would not say I was underpaid or the employer ever exploited the fact that I was on H1-B. From my standpoint it has always been a fair deal.
Okay, the gist of the article is that H1-B should require higher salaries (in the 75th percentile). This would have the effect of cutting off younger and less experienced workers. The problem here is that more experienced and older people are less likely to want to move. In other words, this would mean that the US tech would lose out on the potential talent. Again anecdotally my current tech org is 60-80% foreign born. It is also one of the most selective places around. Would it be like it is without H1-B program? I doubt it.
So perhaps the system needs tweaking, specifically in the area of making the system work faster and being less arcane. I highly doubt this is what's going to happen. Ten years from now we'll be having the same conversation, as we were ten years ago (I have been watching this since '99).
The thing that kills me about this whole debate is the flyover states are full of smart hard working people who had the misfortune of ... I shouldn't have to explain this.
These people could be trained too. Every enterprise client I've had for the past 5 years has H1B's doing minimal coding tasks on enterprise COTS software like PEGA or Informatica. Those skills don't take 4 years to train people for and they pay a liveable wage.
H1-Bs are not unfair to Americans, even when abused. All this talk about protectionism and fairness is really bizarre to me.
Thought experiment: Imagine if Canada found a cure for cancer but chose to sell it to Canadians only. Would that be fair? Would it be fair to Americans that can't get access to it?
Job protectionism makes some people entitled to jobs based on random circumstances at birth. How can rational people think that _this_ is fair?
Silicon valley companies rarely bring in H-1Bs as a cheap replacement, the consultancies like Accenture, Tata, Disney, IBM, etc. do, but hey f*ck it, blame silicon valley....
I think an issue lost in the discussion is that citizens are losing jobs because of this. I'm all for the plight of the immigrant, but as an American, my concern is first and foremost with my fellow countrymen.
Why would Americans lose jobs over this? I can understand the "immigrant tech workers are the reason we don't have higher salaries" argument, but not why somebody would actually lose their job over this (since salaries have to be the same, and if you accept that salary you would cost less to the company since you don't require paperwork, lawyers, relocation)
Hiring H1B visa holders creates jobs in america. The product created by the one I hired employed 20 people in high paying jobs. There are multiple billion dollar companies in SV employing thousands of americans founded by H1B holders. Do we want those companies to have been built in India?
If you are a decent software developer there is a guaranteed job for you, unless you code in COBOL or FORTRAN. Heck, people are jumping ships and we hire people from English or Humanities background who go and do 6 months intensive coding boot camps. Wake up and go find opportunities for yourself. Jobs don't come to you. Get yourself out there and be known. Put your hobby projects on Github. Attend Meetups and network with people. People hire a lot at tech meetups.
I thought that COBOL devs have guaranteed jobs, given the startlingly number of legacy systems out there that urgently need people to maintain them and prevent our nation's aged banking databases from collapsing.
> EB sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.
Increasing H-1B pay would be a step in the right direction but I think the green card policy is the biggest thing that needs to be fixed. H-1B workers should be fast tracked for green cards instead of having road blocks put in front of them. By definition they are skilled workers that the US doesn't have enough of so why would we ever want them to leave?
idk, if you have an underclass thats forced to work for you for substandard wages due to externalities, that seems worth hanging on to.
i think the most dangerous ideas distorting the software market is the fiction that every team is the best that was ever fielded, and that development takes such unique skills. you're hiring a web dev - stop turning people down because they aren't Guy Steele.
The discussion about H1Bs is getting dominated by SV. The brunt of the changes are gonna affect other industries, for example, someone i know is currently doing a masters in biotech at a really good research university, and she is really scared about the 130k lower limit for H1B applicants. According to her, even postdocs in her field don't make that much! If the new H1B system passes as is, then its gonna cause a massive brain-drain in most fields that are not SV tech related.
Ever tried hunting for a job in academia? There are hundreds of super-qualified U.S. candidates for every opening. If your friend's so amazing she beats all of them, 130k is a steal.
You do realize that the average salary of a tenured professor in the US is around $100k right? It goes up to $200k for some private universities but I would say 100-150k is what most top public universities pay. So 130k is a shitton of money in academia.
Ignoring all of that, average salary of a senior biomedial engineer is 90k. The rest of the USA doesn't live in the 100k++ bubble that is SV.
If you are a H-1B dependent employer ( 8 H-1B workers if the company is < 26 total employees, 13 if 26-50, and 15% of workforce if 50+) then:
You can either (1) prove that no US citizen is being displaced and no suitable US citizen could be recruited, or (2) pay the dependent employer exempt minimum wage of $130k.
In the case of (1), or if you are not considered H-1B dependent, you still need to pay the prevailing wage for the job (which as you mentioned is likely low for postdocs).
I'm following your use of SV as a pejorative for the tech industry. The tech industry accounts for most H1Bs.
> Why does everyone else have to suffer because of them?
Perhaps there are alternate solutions than a price floor on foreign labor; Japan has a points-based system where you must meet extensive criteria to be considered a highly-skilled professional worthy of importing. I would agree that "must be paid $140k+" seems like a crude version of a vetting process.
I think big companies do abuse the system, but I manage a small company and in 30+ years we've used H-1B's 3 times. Each time it was to get someone that we could not find in the US. Yes, we are a small company (~30 people) and in a niche market, but each time, the person we found was 10x better than the nearest candidate. And each time we paid the person as well as we paid US employees.
1) H1Bs depressing the prevailing wage (true if you believe in classical supply and demand)
2) overall economic utility; aka the economy does better/worse because of more H1Bs (I don't really care, but I guess someone might)
One thing which gets left out: H1Bs are more compliant employees, because their employers have them over a legal barrel. They have a much harder time leaving their employer than a citizen does, and they're a lot less likely to complain if they're abused. Turnover is hugely expensive to a software company; between that and the "costs" of having an employee with civil rights; well, not all employers are bad actors, but the temptation has to be there. I've certainly seen this at work in various places. It's pretty rotten. I mean, obviously many consider it a good trade, but it isn't exactly humane. Social costs like this are often left out of economic considerations. Who cares if your GDP goes up if we end up living in a dystopia as a result?
"..the company can’t prevent the departure of Americans.." this is part of the problem. I have seen people (especially young ones) jumping ships in less than six months from startup to startup in SV because of the competitive market salary. Even though larger companies can take this hit but for a startup of <10 employees this can prove to be very detrimental. I agree that Indian consultancies have been abusing the H1B program for a while now, and even though American companies pay them same or actually more (consultant hourly rates are always on the higher end), these consultancies keep the lion share to themselves and pay minimum to the consultant. The problem is not just with immigrants (both educated from US colleges and brought in by the Indian consultancies) but also nomadic nature of young American tech labor. Should there be some sort of collateral such as one year contract? Probably not a welcoming idea in a free market of USA.
The solution is not making it harder for US citizens to move around(which is basically impossible anyway), it's making it much easier for H-1B workers to move around so everyone is on the same playing field.
The ability to move quickly from company to company is not a bad thing. I don't believe it causes startups to fail, it just accelerates the process for ones that already weren't going to make it. Few people want to jump ship if they believe their startup is going to be successful. If after six months though they feel that it's not going to make it there is no reason to wait to go down with the ship.
My point is that we got where we are today when employers started violating their end of the contract and employees slowly got wiser of the shift. To unsettle the status quo, the employers have to do some disproportionate show of good faith and win the trust of the employees.
former H1B & like any red blooded liberal, a Trump critic. However, on this particular matter I agree with the man. H1B is basically indentured servitude for employer. Its not just that you get paid less salary & bonuses it also reduces the bargaining ability when looking for potential opportunities as there is a lengthy transfer process that requires new employer to spend money.
Another practice that I have seen happen lately is (atleast common in employers like amazon etc) is that the younglings that get hired on H1B get a fairly low level position like engineer-I. they are then told that they are ineligible for green card processing until they get to next level. so in effect they are either working 60+ hours a week eyeing for that promotion or just burning their early years out of scarce 6 years limit. Honestly I dont know how is this legal. then there is matter of green card processing and prio date regression which is a whole another can of worms. IMHO at the salaries most young indians are coming to valley and given the rise of startup ecosystem in india, its almost not worth it especially if you look at cost of living here.
One more thing, often immigrant managers who themselves have hone through the process or are aware of intricacies are the worst exploiters as they know when employees are most vulnerable. Lastly, Dont even get me started on the 'consulting' micro body shops that do shit thats clearly illegal & would land the employee is fair bit of trouble if detected.
I definitely have to applaud trump for doing something about this even if under the guise of xenofobia. that said 130k limit will definitely have effect on the small body shops that are exploitative as hell.
there is one positive thing that happened in last few years which should be preserved, its the ability for dependent spouse (H4) visa to find employment. the wifes that come over here are fairly well educated & have carriers of there own. they often fall into isolation and get depressed due to lack of social circle & opportunities. I wish that still remains viable.
Another category of immigrants who'd benefit from such a situation is the "grad student visa" students.
The US academic system (in STEM) has for too long relied on "free labor" of hard working, poorly treated grad students from countries like India, China, and Iran (paid minimum wage, often not adjusted for high living costs of cities like LA or Seattle). US students often don't go to grad school because as engineers they'd earn a lot of money and are less susceptible to being poorly treated by their boss. The visa is technically non-immigrant, but students often then get H1B jobs (yay for more abuse).
The whole thing is a travesty. This is pretty much exploiting other countries for natural resources, except instead of resources we exploit them for talent.
Speaking as someone who has hired H1-B's in the past, there really do seem to be two tiers. There's the companies/organizations that are truly abusing the system and then there are the traditional tech companies who are happy to hire anyone qualified, no matter where they are from, and pay and promote them the same as other employees. They also sponsor green cards. Competition between these employers has gotten to the point where they mostly all do the sponsorship immediately, too, reducing the time the person is "stuck" in the job to around a year (not great, but not horrible -- most people are "stuck" in their job that long so that they will at least vest some of their stock-based compensation).
One example: I hired an engineer who I'm going to anonymously name Bob. Bob was at Yahoo and on an H1-B. Yahoo was his first employer in SV, he had gone to CMU. He interviewed reasonably well, not amazingly, but had experience and interest in a specialty that many people aren't interested in. At the time we were trying to take a team of these people from 2 or 3 engineers to 20, so we were pretty excited. Bob also got an offer from Netflix. Netflix, if you don't know, gives offers that are basically "all-in" -- you can take the entire offer as cash, or you can parse it out and use some of it for health care, stock, etc -- your choice. The end result is that matching Netflix offers is very expensive. We mostly matched the Netflix offer (we felt our stock was going to have more upside -- which ended up being very true). I had to do extra work for this person to get them hired above and beyond what I'd have to do for an American. Then I had to do even more work to get the employer part of the green card process started. I had to help them navigate getting required documentation from Yahoo. Bob got promoted on a similar schedule to other people and as far as I know is still happily employed, now with a green card application that will transfer with them to any other employer they move to.
I would have _happily_ hired locally, and in fact most of the people I hired for that team were US citizens, Bob was one of 3 H1-Bs. He was from India, another was from Singapore, and the third was from France. They were all very talented engineers and any company would hire them in their specialty in a heartbeat.
I find it hard to say the workers in either of the two camps are particularly exploited (at least once they're in the country -- I've read ugly things about how they go into debt to be able to get these positions in the first placed). They are being paid fair market value for the work they are doing. The money they're making is far in excess of what they earn elsewhere -- that's why they go through the lengths they go through to get these jobs in the first place. If they have the ability to get hired at a more traditional tech company, that company will take over sponsorship of their H1-B with very little complication -- demand is effectively infinite for good engineers who are happy to work.
They are only being paid fair market value because the H-1Bs are suppressing the fair market value. Without the H-1Bs you would have had to pay more, and that "more" would have been the fair market value.
You say "matching Netflix offers is very expensive": again, no, matching Netflix offers is the fair market rate, and without H-1Bs, the rate would be higher. Indeed, unless you are a well known company, you should expect to have to pay more than Netflix, since Netflix's offer also prices in the stability and prestige of working at Netflix.
Which is to say, the "expensive" Netflix wage is actually less than fair market value.
Arguing with strangers on the Internet is not something I enjoy, so I'll just point out some details of this that I either didn't cover or that were apparently overlooked.
1) We actually did match Netflix's offer in total comp, by offering Bob a mix of base salary and stock that exceeded the total value of their Netflix offer significantly. The difference is that Netflix's offer was all cash. It is very hard to compare a Netflix offer to a pre-IPO Twitter offer except in hindsight. Bob, a market participant, ended up picking the better offer.
2) I truly question whether H1-B's are lowering the fair market value at the tech companies I've worked at, have had offers from, or have had to counter offers from. Via these three means I've gotten a good handle on what people pay at the top tech companies in SV, and as far as I have been able to determine the supply of H1-Bs who can get through an interview process is so greatly outstripped by the demand for such engineers, there is effectively no impact to salaries. H1-Bs are a very small proportion of SV hiring, and are probably even smaller outside SV, _except_ for the companies that I called out in my initial post on this thread who I agree are abusing the system. Engineers working at those firms aren't showing up in my recruiting pipeline, much less getting offers, so they have zero impact on the market for top engineering talent.
If you're trying to say that the addition of even a single qualified candidate into the hiring pool lowers what we pay a developer, you don't understand how engineering hiring works at tech companies.
I applaud you for paying H1B the same as your other employees. I was an H1B myself in SV. My experience, and those of my peers, differs greatly from your experience.
To answer some of your points here:
> It is very hard to compare a Netflix offer to a pre-IPO Twitter offer except in hindsight.
No, its not hard. There's overwhelming evidence that the expected future value of a pre-IPO start-up is zero. Its a lottery. Might as well contract "we'll buy you a lottery ticket every week you are an employee".
>If you're trying to say that the addition of even a single qualified candidate
Is that what I said tho? What about 80,000 candidates? What about 30,000 candidates that are hired by contracting organizations with the express purpose of moving US jobs offshore? Isn't that the antithesis of H1B visas? Isn't that perjury?
Your last example is an instance of the other class of employer I mentioned. They are clearly abusing the system. I would love for the H1-B to be fixed so that they aren't able to take advantage, although I think the law of unintended consequences may well kick in. The proximate thing that would do for the H1-Bs I've known is make it so that they aren't sweating bullets to see if they got lucky in the lottery.
Re: future value being zero, um, no. You can argue that the expected value is low, but it's certainly not zero. I personally am financially independent because of Twitter's IPO, and I've been through another IPO since which has made me money. People at Google did well in their IPO, Facebook people also did well. Some IPOs people didn't do so well (Box is the most well-known recent example, but there are many where people ended up with 10's or maybe 100's of thousands of dollars when they were hoping for millions -- still not zero tho).
And speaking of lotteries -- lottery tickets generally have lower expected value, but even in this example there are exceptions.
Then there are the startups where you don't go public, but get acquired by a public company. Those often net the staff something meaningful tied to hitting a post-acquisition milestone. They may not be directly tied to stock (common shareholders get wiped out), but it is correlated. So even in some significant percentage of the failure cases you aren't wasting time negotiating for more stock.
At any rate, if you truly believe stock is worth nothing and should be completely discounted, fine. You're not Bob. Bob believed differently, behaved according to his belief, and most importantly Bob did better financially because of his decision -- and in a relatively short time frame.
And here's Lloyd [0]. Lloyd won $5m. Does Lloyd's experience inform us about buying lottery tickets any more or less than Bob's? Is Bob representative?
Hey, look, if you can get a full salary, benefits and stock, then you're not losing anything. But anyone who sacrifices salary in the expectation that the stock options are going to be bigger is just playing the lottery.
My point is simply calculating expected value. If you can't actually do that calculation, there are a lot of activities you should stay away from. The lottery, poker, and startups all immediately come to mind. You may also want to reconsider getting in a car or crossing the street. Low probability of an event multiplied by a large outcome is not zero. It may be low (I do get in cars and cross the street) but people do regularly win the lottery, make money from stock, hit a straight on the river, and get hit by cars.
The market rate is a mix of factors. Including the cost of shipping the work overseas. Would you rather have the same engineer work in Bangalore or California?
I'm an engineer and don't think my wages should be artificially increased by keeping smart immigrants that would benefit this country out.
Its not that your wages are artificially increased, its that an H1B worker's wages are artificially decreased because they are trapped in the job and are unable to negotiate at market rate. They can't leave their job, so they can't negotiate a fair salary. The green-card costs the company $5k, but gives them a worker who can't leave for years.
Wage theft in the form of capping competition is the big issue.
Assume the rate of salary change dS(t)/dt is propotional-to/a-function-of (average_labor_demand - average_labor_supply)
Now, if you keep topping up supply from overseas, salary never increases as much as it might, as such it is limited - as such, salary rate increase is also capped; and it's not employees can have any relief from a lack of demand, other than maybe fewer visas, but I doubt there would be many lobbyists for that... complaints about unemployment or lack of jobs falls on deaf ears - ears stuffed full of money by happy employers...
Just to play devils advocate, wouldn't it eventually even out then because high demand and lower wages here would mean that other countries with a tech sector would have high wages and would then be more appealing, which would encourage H1B visa seekers to consider going elsewhere or would even lure more talent from the US overseas.
Granted, like many market-based arguments I make a lot of assumptions about how easily people can move around. Immigrating is hard and once you've immigrated successfully you may not be willing to take the risk of ending up back in the repressive regime you came from (hence, a lot of the issues we have right now) and people in the US may not be nearly as willing to leave the US and go elsewhere. But theoretically (if not in reality) more mobility and access to labor is a good thing.
This would work if all countries were equally desirable, and capable of supporting the same economy. Maybe the US is competing with Europe? But at the moment US salaries are considerably higher.
By way of an unrealistic formalisation there you actually assumed that salaries are determined exclusively by labour supply and far more predictably and linearly than possible. The complexity of the economy, greatly confounds simplistic formulas.
So you're complaining because my post above isn't a more comprehensive analysis? I was responding to one specific point, not implying that the above formula is a complete model of the economy.
Excuse me it was not a complaint it was a criticism breifly and carefuly explained to be constructive. I was pointing out that if you had wrote: "Assume salaries are determined exclusively, predictably and linearly by labour supply..." the position for your observations would be clearly flawed, so you would have to examine them more and find a better footing for them (which there may well be - i havent wondered).
But you did write precisely that case in symbolic form - the technical value of formulas is that they are precise and we write them to be precise, so look at what you assumed there!
You are suggesting that a symbolic form implies "precision", further implying "exclusive determination"?
I disagree, in this case I used a symbolic form to prevent ambiguity, that is all. The relationship outlined is done so in a precise manner, but it is not comprehensive.
also, you'll note I described the relationship as "is-a-function-of", which provides sufficient cover in any case.
yes, to allude to a relationship to rate, hence reducing one form of ambiguity, (but not all possible ambiguities!).
non-clarity, and purposeful ambiguity is different. Also, be specific on one aspect (in this the on the point I was trying to make) and general else where (any other unrelated economic stuff) is not uncommon or inconsistent.
Ok if youre going stick with this its fine - its clear, that you use mathematical expressions to allude to things, not to define them. And that you find it not uncommon or inconsistent to base observations on clearly insufficient mathematical expressions, appealing to ambiguity in your math to carry such technique.
I don't think that's the case. I think you're inventing a problem.
> appealing to ambiguity in your math to carry such technique.
"carry", "appeal"? Again, the aim is not to provide a full economic model. If some parts are general (not merely ambiguous) and other parts specific, it is not because I am missing specificity in the general parts, but because those parts are not my focus.
If you are going to throw around "insufficient" you'll have to define: insufficient for what?
"Now, if you keep topping up supply from overseas, salary never increases as much as it might, as such it is limited - as such, salary rate increase is also capped; and it's not employees ... "
It was just used as a gesture regardless of its actual mathematical meaning. "Assume" could honestly have been replaced with: "Resolve a general sense of this iffy expression which supports the following claims:"
Math is not meant to be treated as an ambiguous medium, it is intended to explicate analogies and to manipulate them accurately. I understand you feel that is unreasonable, but it is what math is developed in order to be capable of and what it is used properly for.
No it isn't, it demonstrates that exact relationship.
> I understand you feel that is unreasonable
You misunderstand, I don't agree with you; I'm not commenting on "the proper use of math" because I disagree with some of your base accusations. I believe you are just passive-aggressively badgering me over nothing.
It doesnt "demonstrate" ANY exact relationship, because you put an anonymous function in it! All it really demonstrated is you were considering salary as preposterously simple function of labour supply with no other parameters.
You basically just wont be told that your math was very blatantly bad, resorting to accustations of unreasonable complaint and now passive aggressive badgering.
How many careful replies have i composed to try and gently explain to you that you should check your use of math? If you dont wish to feel "badgered" just get it and/or quit replying.
> considering salary as preposterously simple function of labor supply with no other parameters.
Or it's not a complete model of the many possible parameters relevant in the economy. "preposterously simple" needs qualification on why it is ""preposterous" given IT IS NOT A COMPLETE ECONOMIC MODEL.
> It doesn't "demonstrate" ANY exact relationship
It demonstrates the rate of salary proportional to some function of the difference in supply and demand. If there are multiple factors involved in determining a value, I can still represent the nature of the relationship a single factor has with that value. It's "that-exact relationship", not "that exact-relationship".
I won't be told, because you're wrong. I don't "feel" badgered, I am badgered.
I can't count how many colleagues I've talked to that are in a stuck-employer situation. Some are happy, but some are miserable. I'm also aware that some of the people with H1-B's are family members that actually don't know anything about technology and don't belong in any job anywhere in technology.
I'm also aware (being 53) that my livelihood is directly tied to the number and type of H1-B visas in the U.S. I can't stand Trump, but on this issue he has a valid beef.
It's all a cluster-F and the system should be changed to treat foreign workers well and to make sure U.S. workers have opportunities.
We can discuss the economics of the H-1B visa program at such a time as we have a president who's capable of discussing the economics of the H1B visa program.
Right now, however, we have an administration that's intent on ratcheting up ethnic tensions, and there's 100% probability that they will use the H1B debate as a pretext for casting aspersions at the entire Indian nation, including Indian-descended natural born Americans.
I'd rather keep on earning my H1-B depressed wage rate for my job than risk yet another hit against my country's credibility thanks to president banana's divide and rule strategy.
It's not only SV, it is also the firms that supply telecom engineers under contract to the big mobile operators and related, such as Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile/ATT/Verizon/Sprint etc.
Indian companies start subsidiaries in US so that they can send invitation to workers in India so they get H-1b visa. The companies requesting H-1b visas have to be American, Indian companies or companies working for contract to US companies should not be allowed to request H1-b visas. THe US IT workers also have to change; they have to accept some work will be outsourced and their job is now more like participating and controlling outsourcing for their employer.
These are witch hunting cases. Why didn't government took action against these companies who are buying services from companies like TCS, HCL? Why demonizing younger and talented foreigners and enforcing hypothesis based on these 5% wrong cases?
Where is your study when these people get selected in touch interviews at places like FB, Google, Linkedin?
Branding H1B people as "Cheap Labor" is an old fashion and the saga continues at alarming rate.
I actually saw this with a few of my colleagues that worked at Amazon. There was one superb engineering — one of the best Android developers I've ever worked with. Our project ended and, I had the freedom to leave Amazon and jump to another company (which I did), but he was stuck. He ended up having to move his family from SF to Seattle just to keep his job all in hopes that he didn't screw up his H-1B visa process.
Part of the compensation is the possibility of permanent residency in the US. This is quite valuable. The employer does not actually pay for that benefit.
When the SuperCollider project shut down I was fortunate enough to be able to use H1B hire a japanese physicist who worked on it. Cost $20K IIRC. One of best hires I ever made, his work ended up creating about 20 high paid permanent jobs in our company.
I would have happily given him citizenship, was just glad he didn't end up working for our over-seas competitors.
The article mentions reseting the green card clock as a way to render workers de facto indentured servants, but unfortunately that's not the only way. One immigration lawyer explained this all to me as "cost effective employee retention". Fixing salaries is good, but I wonder about fixing immobility as well.
So logically I can agree with this however in practice at my startups this is just not true. Maybe it is because we never got that big before I went to do the next startup. I left at around 500 people in the last big one that IPO'd. (They are now over 3K - I was in the 1st 30). At my current startup we are ~50.
In both startups finding qualified engineers was the issue always. We did not care if where they came from, just that they could pass the interview process. We would interview 250 and maybe find one person. The goal was top 1%. I once asked the VP of Software if we could make it the top 5% and he said "can you tell me how to tell the difference between the top 1% the top 5% vs the rest? 1% is simple, anything below that you make mistakes."
For the 1st ~250ish people the difference between top 1% and the rest was huge and those top people made a world of difference to the success of the company.
I guess if you are a company with 1000s then the H1-B money game makes more sense. For a small startup, it is the talent that counts, not where they are from.
but it can also be fixed by removing the artificial wait for some nationalities. doesn't he want to repel tons lof laws. here's an opportunity to solve both at the same time.
creating yet more legislation and rules will make the problem worse.
It's not all of tech companies. Even if you bump up the minimum without proof to $130,000, the biggest tech companies are already paying over that to H1-B's.
H1B employees being exploited works in Murica's favor. It means American companies are more competitive at the expense of some Rajesh from Chennai. This is something Trump should love.
Even if American companies are paying lower wages I don't see the problem. It helps American companies make more profit and lower prices for American consumers. Something that we all must cheer.
Some people argue that it lowers the wages of neo-native people. It is good too. We all would love a cheaper electrician, cheaper plumber, cheaper burger flipper, cheaper doctor what is so wrong with cheaper coder ? It benefits the entire society.
If Rajesh from Chennai is sending all his money back to Chennai, Americans won't have the funds to benefit from the lower prices. You can see a just released Hollywood movie in the theatre for $3 in Indonesia, that doesn't mean it's better to live there.
> If Rajesh from Chennai is sending all his money back to Chennai, Americans won't have the funds to benefit from the lower prices.
LOL! That is mistaking money for value. If Rajesh sends the money back to Chennai it will very likely increase the value of money for Americans which affects the poorest of poor in a very good way.
I would however worry more about Rajesh maxing out his credit cards and then catching flight to India. :P
foreign service markets become more attractive, americans again lose jobs to outsourcing, will be interesting to see how this plays out. I certainly think in the short term it will be better for the American worker (in terms of employment, mobility, higher wages), but long term?
You do realize that half of the reason this post is noteworthy is because it's so out of the ordinary that The Huffington Post agrees with Trump right?
wanna know why tech companies are anti-Trump and against his immigration ban? Because they actually care about immigrants and human rights or because it will affect their bottom line. Hint, follow the money.....
The real news here is that HuffPo agrees with Trump. I thought their editorial policy was to interpret everything Trump says in the most low-IQ and paranoid way possible. Someone needs to call them and ask if everything is OK.
> overestimation of Russia's danger on the US and EU
Depends what you mean by “EU”. Western Europe? Sure, Russia maybe isn't a big deal for them. But the Baltic states, which are EU and NATO member states, understandably consider their next-door neighbour a huge threat.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581128 and marked it off-topic. I realize that other comment planted the seed of offtopicness but this is where it sprouted.
> Depends what you mean by “EU”. Western Europe? Sure
It also depends on what you mean by danger. Are Western European EU countries in jeopardy of being invaded by Russia? Probably not. But considering Russia's position as supplier of most of Europe's natural gas and a big chunk of its oil, danger can have many meanings.
The most plausible explanation I've heard for the situation in Syria involves a proposed pipeline from Qatar that would challenge Russia's position as primary natural gas supplier to Europe. Russia has been propping up Assad, since he's against the pipeline. Western countries, including the US, have wanted him gone so that a more pipeline-friendly regime can be put in place. There's a cold war being fought between Europe/US and Russia in Syria, and ISIS stepping into that power vacuum has been the result. And while that's not an existential danger to Europe, just ask the French how safe they feel. And the refugee crisis hasn't exactly been pleasant for Western Europe either.
Meanwhile, Russia also wants to tap oil reserves in their arctic areas but wants help from Exxon to do it. That requires the US dropping its sanctions. Hence Russia's involvement in getting Putin-friendly Trump elected and Exxon exec Tillerson as Secretary of State.
The reality is that Russia is a petrostate ruled by oligarchs who are intent on exploiting those resources to their fullest. Russia will do everything in its power to thwart transitions to alternative fuels. And it is more than willing to use its military to promote its interests in third-world countries. This isn't unlike what the US does, but to anyone who cares about the environment, it should be a very scary thought, since the Russian agenda means increasing our effect on climate change. Equating Russian danger to military aggression against the West is probably overly simplistic and ignores the primary dangers of Russia. The true dangers are likely more subtle forms of advocating their interests.
What would a big country benefit from invading its weak neighbor in the 21st century? Putin isn't an angle but he is surely not Europe's or US' enemy like the liberal media is trying hard to push that narrative. Many of the Baltic states are inexplicably pushing the west towards a pointless conflict with Russia. It's just like Georgia in 2008 or maybe even like Poland with Nazi Germany in late 1930s.
Isn't it true that Ukraine has never been an independent state except since the fall of the USSR? In its history? Except for 2 weeks after WWII? It has always been a fertile land, agrarian, impossible to defend due to no natural boundaries, its people of fiercely independent mind, yet, having been rolled over by Poles, Russians, Vikings, Norsman repeatedly and periodically throughout history? That would be the context. I would even go as far as saying that Donbass and Crimea are not to be counted as Ukraine, historically?
Most of your claims are false.
And for argument sake if they were true, let's face it: Ukraine not only was independent since 1991, but it's territory integrity was guaranteed by Russia and USA.
I would only request that it should be viewed in context of its history. Especially if we might decide to enshrine the world in more war over it. It is in its current state a construct, without a foundation. To reach peace, a compromise must be reached.
'I would only request that it should be viewed in context of its history.'
THE context of its history is that Ukraine was independent longer than the USA exists. And even despite that fact, the post-soviet era requires borders to be intact in order to reach peace. If we'll let this go, that would mean that it is 'ok' to invade countries and we would fall down back into world wars times.
*And by invading countries, I mean grabbing someone's else land and declaring it your own.
The U.S. had to emancipate from a perceived oppressor by forging alliances, engage in deception, and by defeating the enemy. In the end, that's what it all boils down to. Raising the specter of a giant guilt-trip wasn't gonna work for U.S.
the world is based on aggression, unfortunately. To just pretend this is not so only makes things worse. A prognosis must include a proper diagnosis. Currently all that's being done by either side is using it as a ping-pong ball, that's how it has been for recent history (1.5 millenia?). Declaring Ukraine a state seems not much more than a paper-tiger. Nothing of what I said or say is meant to justify aggression or bloodshed.
Russia has pretty much always desired to control the Baltic states for the same reason: having them as proxy states create important buffer zones to a country that has otherwise weak borders protecting it's population centers. Historically most of Russia's geopolitical actions can be explained by Russian border protectionism. If Russia didn't have the Caucuses mountains to rely on I'd be willing to bet you'd see them laying pressure in that border region to capture them too.
Inexplicably? Let's take a quick look at some history.
Russia has attacked & occupied the baltics multiple times. Imperial Russia occupied Estonia during 18th - 20th century, and Soviet Russia once again occupied for half of the 20th century. During this time they sent the natives to Siberia, while importing Russians here and imposing other forms of russification [1] to obliterate our culture. It's more than just about land, it's about the survival of our culture which has been under systematic attack by Russia for the overwhelming majority of the last 300 years. The current Russian regime isn't much different and holds a strongly anti-Estonian view, so of course self-preservation is the #1 political issue for us.
Russia still celebrates everything Soviet as the biggest heroes that have ever lived, and have an amazing number of Stalin statues/paintings everywhere. Then they fund & organize attacks on Georgia [2], and annex Crimea [3]. Then, as recently as 2014, the FSB came into Estonia and abducted one of our intelligence agents. [4] This agent was denied contact with anyone, and was given premission to only use a Russian appointed lawyer. In a charade of a trial he was quickly sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was later exchanged for a FSB agent who was sitting in our prison. [5]
Then there's the fact that Russia keeps flying their military planes into baltic airspace on a regular basis. [6] They have been doing this ever since the collapse of USSR and they keep doing this even today when we have NATO fighters patrolling the skies. It might be easy to say "liberal media is pushing propaganda" if you live far from the Russian border, but we are actually living here with regular Russian war plane visits and seeing events like Crimea where they go even further.
So you see, it's not only about precedence, but it's also about the continuation of the theme and actual real events that keep happening.
You're really putting words in their mouth, they never called him evil, not by a long shot. They were just pointing out that this is only one potentially positive facet of a whole series of deeply questionable policies on trade and immigration.
Not a hugely productive comment, but not worthy of the scorn you gave it.
I don't find his efforts to secure the country's borders questionable in the least, as a matter of fact I find it refreshing that a political leader follows through on his campaign promises.
Honestly he is not evil but he is unstable and childish. We should not normalize anything he says. It is dangerous to allow hime to be normalized.
He is not normal and a POTUS that spends time on his old reality TV show, lying about illegal voting, etc. is not acceptable.
So we decided to do something about our situation. We started foraying into the immigration systems of other countries and we decided to use the express entry system of Canada. So we all applied for it ourselves, got evaluated for our skills & degrees and now I am happily typing this as a permanent resident from Canada.
Express Entry System -
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/express-entry/grid-crs.asp