H1B doesn't suppress wages. There is no evidence of that. In fact, the global brain drain to the US has given us a clear competitive advantage and allowed us to create new industries and massive companies. Immigration is a good thing economically and technologically. Refugees will contribute to the long term growth of the economy by being consumers and producers over their life and allow for economic growth. Look at countries that don't allow immigration, and have shrinking populations, how are their economies doing.
You bring in workers who are paid less than the average and can't shop their services around. Free immigration can bring growth as those people can act in the market. H1bs are effectively indentured servitude, which are better for the company, probably better for the person taking the H1b over staying in their home country, but certainly will put a downward force on wages
Where is your evidence that H1B candidates are paid less? That is false based on my experience hiring. Further, H1B sponsorship costs money and commitment to the applicant and government, so hiring an H1B is actually more expensive than domestic candidates. Not only that, but in the H1B process you have to show that there isn’t an equivalent domestic candidate and you, as a company, made an effort to find such a candidate.
You are also ignoring the contributions such immigrants make to the broader economy by inventing, building, and hell, just using their salaries to buy things. We are stronger when we take the labor of or competition and put it to efficient use.
If you’re really concerned about wage increases for employees you need to focus on the imbalance of power we have as employers. I make hiring decisions every month, and I can tell you, as much as this is the best job market in a generation, and employees have the best bargaining position they’ve had in a long time, our company has way more power than any one employee.
>Not only that, but in the H1B process you have to show that there isn’t an equivalent domestic candidate and you, as a company, made an effort to find such a candidate.
And that is trivially easy to game atm as the government isn't enforcing it. We've all seen the job postings where companies are asking for X number of years of experience in a technology that has only existed for X-n years, or a combination of skills that would command high salary but they are only offering market rate or below.
>Further, H1B sponsorship costs money and commitment to the applicant and government, so hiring an H1B is actually more expensive than domestic candidates.
More expensive to the employer != increased wages. Why didn't the company just add that cost to the salary instead and hire locally? Because having captive workers is worth something to them.
The problem with H1bs isn't that they are immigrants, the problem is that they are not free to easily move around employers due to the terms of the visa, and the path to the green card that would give them freedom is also constrained. Personally I think that if a company has successfully argued that the American population can't supply someone to do the job and we need to import someone. That immigrant should be free to work at any company in the US since apparently the whole country could use them, and adding people to the country affects us all. Tieing them to one company is just indentured servitude with extra steps and let's a single company capture the value while putting a ton of the costs on to the nation
Anyway my main point was that you can be talking in a thread about supply and demand and say that increasing supply doesn't put a downward pressure on price, in this case salary. It may not be enough to move the needle if there's enough unmet demand and a price ceiling for whatever reason, but it is a downward pressure
If you want the government to enforce the law fine; but that’s a different argument. If I assume that is true, should we see evidence of reduced wages for the positions that H1B candidates are hired for? Happy to change my mind in the face of such evidence but everything I have seen indicates that wages of skilled employees is increasing.
Companies don’t push the cost of H1B processing to other candidates because those candidates aren’t suitable for the job. My point is that it’s hard to argue that employers are hiring H1B immigrants to depress wages when they cost more than the equivalent domestic employee would; assuming there were such a candidate.
Your argument that more people coming to an area puts downward pressure on wages isn’t consistent with domestic migration. Americans move internally all the time. If you look at the fastest growing cities or states, their wages aren’t dropping as more people move in. In fact the increasing population drives inflation as more people bid for housing and food etc, and that inflation flows through to wages as employees demand higher salaries to cover the cost of living.
I don’t see anyone arguing that people from Ohio or Alabama shouldn’t be allowed to move to NYC because they will lower wages for New Yorkers.
We live in an economy that is based on growth; a growing population (even if through immigration) can in fact drive economic growth.
To be clear I am not saying immigration always promotes growth or is always good. There are challenges. But I thing the gut reaction that it costs locals jobs and lowers wages is nonsense when you look at the evidence, and accurately model the economy.
Increased supply puts a downward pressure on price. That is basic economics. If demand is still growing price can go up, just not as fast as it would have without the increased supply.
No one is arguing that people from Ohio or Alabama shouldn't be allowed to move to NYC because those people are still allowed to move around. The H1b visa ties workers to companies and gets rid of the free part of the free market. I don't care that immigrants come in and work if we don't have the people to do the job here. I care that companies are lying about how hard they looked or the wage they pay, and then getting indentured servants.
The companies are extracting value from society without giving back.
Increased supply reduces prices doesn't it? If I notice BurgerKing and McDonald's are about the same price, I don't conclude that BurgerKing's prices have no impact on McDonald's.
You’re assuming demand is tied to supply. That’s a logical error. If demand is increasing faster than supply there is still scarcity and prices will increase. Is the ratio of supply and demand and the change over time that determines price. Further there is a lot of evidence that wages are unique and resist going down and are slow to rise (because employers are aware of the stickiness of wage levels)
In the case of H1B, we are talking about Highly Skilled individuals that are scarce by global standards. Basically the supply of highly skilled employees is less than the demand, even with current levels of immigration.
A similar thought experiment: if you build more apartments in NYC, the price won’t necessarily go down because the demand is massive and increasing; it would take a lot of apartments to lower prices in NYC.
