There's no changes that affect the real bottleneck: the annual quota on green cards and the per-country limits of 7% or children aging out. Those all require Congressional action and that's just not going to happen in the current political environment [1].
Here's my take: you get a work visa for 3-5 years that's tied to your employer and allows you to freely leave and re-enter the US. Believe it or not, we still have visa holders that can't leave the US without having to re-apply for their visa.
On renewal that becomes a 3-5 year visa that isn't tied to your employer. You can freely change jobs.
At the end of that period, it just becomes a green card as long as you satisfy presence tests. Naturalization has continuous and physical presence tests. Just use those. Failing that it is simply renewed for another 3-5 years.
If you satisfy the extraordinary category or get a NIW you simply skip the first step of having an employer-tied visa.
This would free up USCIS to deal with actual visa fraud rather than all the pointless hoops they currently (are forced to) enforce.
The only problem with it is that the problems it solves are problems for people who don’t have a say in the matter. While the drawbacks it implies affects people who have a say in the matter. (Either through voting or lobbying)
The fact that the current system imposes a form of long identured servitude on imigrants is not a bug but a feature. This benefits the employers in very direct ways.
The fact that the current system processes applications from select regions of the world much faster than other regions of the world is not a bug but a feature. It is a system which maintains plausible deniability while in effect racially selective. This is a sad and quite odious, but it appears to be consistent with the preferences of many voters.
All in all: a good plan with some fatal flaws. And I am very sad to say that.
> The fact that the current system imposes a form of long identured servitude on imigrants is not a bug but a feature
I was on the hill when the initial congressional negotiations over immigration began in the mid-2010s.
The stumbling block has always been illegal immigration. [0]
The Dems congressional leadership at the time decided that no reform on legal immigration would happen without illegal immigration reform (eg. DREAM act)
The GOP congressional leadership at the time decided that no reform on illegal immigration would happen without legal immigration.
Neither side budged, and neither side really cared because immigrants (legal or illegal) can't vote.
> neither side really cared because immigrants (legal or illegal) can't vote.
This really is the alpha and omega of migration policies all around the world: the people affected don't have a say, and the people not affected use the issues to play hateful games.
I don’t think that’s fair. If I could cross a border to earn $5M a year, I wouldn’t call the locals hateful for coming up with ways to protect their own livelihoods, and I wouldn’t feel entitled to a say.
Having done some student lobbying on H1B visas a few years back, I can tell you the fatal flaw in that plan is that it does nothing to secure the southern border. The same thing is true about sending military aid to Ukraine now — how does that stop people from crossing our border?
In the twisty little minds of Congressmen, we can’t do anything good and obvious unless we solve their tangentially related problem first. All of that stuff you said about the system sounds like it matters but honestly those concerns never even appear in their minds.
This is similar to how it works in the Netherlands. First 5 years as "knowlage immigrant" your visa depends on your work. Not tied to an employer per se but working in certain sectors (IT, SW dev, HW dev etc) and earning minimum a certain amount per year. As long as you satisfy the conditions you are free to change jobs. If you lose employment, you have 3 months search period with extension possibility. After legally living in NL you have the option to either get a permanent residence permit or becime a citizen.
Won't this just dramatically shrink the number of initial work visas given out? Because you'll have to assume each one is now just a green card with extra steps.
If the qualifications are for a field that has 95 workers for every 100 jobs, come on in. If it’s for a field that already has 105 workers for every 100 jobs, I can see a lot of reasons ($$$) why current residents would want to see their potential competitors stifled or limited in number.
Because we don’t want an unlimited number of foreigners moving into the country? Like it or not that’s the reason Congress won’t touch the issue, right?
This "unlimited number" argument is a common dog whistle. If the Dept of Labor is certifying each one of the qualified immigrants and vetting the credentials, how is this unlimited?
You should not take every immigrant. Take immigrants who bring their skills and productivity to you. Don't make their lives difficult with unnecessary hoops to jump through. Skilled immigration is not asylum or illegal immigration.
Well they are taking 100s of thousands immigrants as they see reasonable. What is problem with following established rules and timelines? Immigrants would surely be aware of those before even thinking of immigration.
Besides if Europe / Australia / Canada have much simpler immigration why would any skilled/productive prospective immigrant would even think of US.
1. The problem with established rules and timelines is they are have been outdated for decades and do not reflect the reality we live in. If the same logic was applied to federal minimum wage, it would never be raised because the number has been well established at an arbitrary time in the past. That is surely not the case and hence timely revisions are necessary.
2. Immigrants are absolutely aware of this. That is reason why overall skilled immigration has not grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years like it did decades ago. US is no longer the top destination of choice for international students in STEM fields. It is only a matter of time that you'd see the effects on overall productivity. The Social Security Administration is already hinting towards this future. The funds are supposed to run out by 2041 (reference https://www.ssa.gov/newsletter/Statement%20Insert%2025+.pdf ) . Quoting from the document ".. the birth rate is low, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is falling.." . The US simply doesn't have enough productive people to fund benefits for the population for the coming decades.
Can you please stop posting like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38776618 to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We've had to ask you this a couple times already.
> Work visas and education visas are two different things that should be treated separately
It makes zero sense to educate kids and then force them to grow those fruits abroad. If we’re going to teach them, it makes sense to give them a chance to work here applying their new skills. This is such low-hanging win-win fruit.
Thinking about unintended consequences is good, but you're assuming more intentionality to existing laws than is actually there. It's convoluted more for political reasons than for pragmatic ones.
>“You don’t have any accomplishments,” the lawyer told him. “You don’t have a patent, or even a product.” That scolding spurred Sanjay to make a list of what he needed to do to achieve his goal of staying permanently. He improved the technology his AI-based firm was developing, expanded its customer base, and filed for a U.S. patent, which was awarded earlier this year. In May those efforts paid off, allowing him to move from an O-1A to a EB-1 visa, which grants him permanent residency.
Question from non-USA-an here. I wonder if this will lead people to spam the patent office with low quality inventions hoping something will stick and help them secure a EB-1 visa.
As a US citizen interested in improving the visa process who regularly interfaces with policymakers, propose an objective rubric that is better and I will get it in front of policymakers. Can't guarantee an outcome, will guarantee the effort. Patent quota is bullshit, but also "I know talent when I see it" (even though I do and how I hire) isn't going to fly. Sorting hats are hard, Goodhart's Law, etc. High level, you are attempting to build a system to encourage the best and brightest to come work (and hopefully make it home) in the US while defending against those who will attempt to find system weakness to exploit.
EDIT: I won't pollute the thread with thank yous for replies, but they are appreciated.
You don't have to look far, Canada has already implemented a point based system for granting permanent residence to skilled workers. It assigns scores to applicants based on education, skills, employment offer, language speaking ability, etc. I believe it can be a good starting point for a more objective selection criteria than the current system which is more based on luck.
Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?
Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).
Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.
"Canadian work experience" is a generic reason often given to people who the company doesn't want to hire. It has happened to people I know. There can be many reasons:
- Racial bias
- Sexual bias
- Age bias
- Candidate's English / French ability.
- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.
- Candidate's personality.
- Candidate's appearance.
- Candidate's communication skills.
Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?
Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.
I was going to say something similar. I don't believe in points any more. It just reproduces the class prejudices of overeducated people. The US has an abundance of "highly skilled" FAANG workers. It has a shortage of construction workers, plumbers, and electricians. The one "high skill" (really high class) industry where I'd make an exception is medicine, because there are shortages there.
But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.
And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.
One can just adjust the points towards what you need, like Australia does. Me and then-wife applied about 15 years ago - she studied at the American school in Milan, graduated in the UK, and got a master and PhD in computational chemistry. I'd been living in the UK for a decade, working in IT. They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.
>They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.
Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.
Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.
The layoffs were for wage suppression, if anything, they need more H1B to continue that wage suppression. I work in BigTech, we had layoffs and are also hiring like mad.
> Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?
Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.
In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?
Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.
Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.
> Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).
I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.
Same for the UK, the tier-1 visa, which is how I got my first independent visa there. Unfortunately it also gives high points for income, which biases for privileged peoples and origin countries. But if you can get to the UK on a work permit with a high salary for a couple years, then you can apply it as points when you eventually apply.
The utility of a point system is that it makes the criteria legible—the problem wasn't the fact that it was a points system, the problem was in the details of the system.
The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.
(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)
This is a strange comment to read since, as far as I recall, the only details that were ever really shared before the overall plan was killed due to its political backlash are that it would be merits-based considering age, ability to speak English, job offers, and educational background and that it would shift the number of green cards away from being primarily awarded based on family ties to this new merit system. Democrats rejected even discussing the proposal out of hand. Some quotes from https://apple.news/ABYsQ0lE-RFWj_S5pwuFq5w :
On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.
…
Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.
“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”
The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.
I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.
I would love to see a revamp of visa system that when someone is sponsored by companies they are required to do a 1:1 match for scholarships on the salary of someone who they are sponsoring. Alternatively make the minimum $100k or max $250k.
As someone who had someone come over on a O-1 visa, I 100% would have been willing to pay double for that person specifically.
It also removes the common issue of people who are hiring people below market rate or are trying to push salaries down for certain industries. It makes companies really make sure they actually need that technical expert from overseas.
Then open it up to everyone else if there are quotas.
Rather than doubling the cost a company has to pay for a foreign employee, which inevitably pushes down wages for high-end talent, why not just rank applicants based on how much they’re actually paid?
If an employee is recruited at $250k, they clearly have skills the market values.
If you mean the existing H-1B lottery, see sibling comment linking the Forbes article which says "However, attorneys say attempting to reorder the H-1B lottery from highest to lowest salary by regulation, as the administration has discussed, would be unlikely to survive a legal challenge."
There’s nothing in the constitution preventing legislators from altering H-1B regulations that I know of. What kind of legal challenge are you referring to, exactly?
I don't think it would push down wages for high end talent if you keep the requirements they pay prevailing wages. If anything, it would increase the wages for people.
The point would be that we fill and address the talent problem longer term. AKA if you need to hire foreign workers, you have to invest in developing new talent.
I would say that total comp should be taken into account, but we should take a more strategic approach to addressing workforce gaps rather than just relying on importing talent.
I guess the rubric depends on whether policymakers view the employment based green card system as zero-sum or non-zero-sum.
My proposal for green cards:
zero-sum - points based system based on your current salary, taxes paid and the occupation shortage list OR straight up auction
non-zero-sum - let people apply for a green card as long as they've stayed in the country for X years without any criminal infractions, have earned above N*min-wage for all those years.
If you're asking about work visas, probably just ranking by location-adjusted-salary and handing them out should do the job.
Who creates the occupation shortage list and how is it protected from companies who want their jobs included on it to drive down wages and suppress workers' rights?
My very high level wish is that immigration basically gave a free pass to anyone earning more than mean salary, since that by definition makes the nation wealthier.
I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.)
Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them.
Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.
I’m an American (born here), but I’ve felt our skilled immigration policies are wrong-headed for a while, especially after dealing with them as a hiring manager. Broadly speaking, I feel we need a better focus on a) getting people who have the skills that our businesses need and b) naturalizing those people as US citizens who are willing to commit their whole careers to our country. The H1-B system seems to be the worst of both worlds…gamified so that bad actors get many of the hires and gamified on the employee side so you get people, say, sacrificing salary for a better green card process.
If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.
This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.
The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.
Degree from a recognized school. Verified work history in the field.
Those wouldn't be perfect metrics, and they might be easy to fudge. So it then becomes a question of if disqualification of the capable is worse than qualification of the incapable.
I personally prefer to let more people in than less. It's not like it's smooth sailing in the US if you can't do skilled work.
Degree and work history are already a significant part of evaluation on L1/L2 and H1B visas.
IIRC 3 years of work experience are considered equivalent to 1 year of college education, which allows those who didn't get a degree but have extensive experience to also have an avenue for obtaining a Visa.
It’s a ridiculous system to value 12 years of experience in the movie industry as on par with a film degree. The software industry makes it even more absurd since historically the very top talent has often skipped college and become world class in their early 20s.
Reply from non-USA who has worked in USA. Many companies already spam the patent office with low-quality/non-existent inventions. One put a quota on us for number of submissions, so that led to at least 200 a year from one firm knowing full well the vast majority would go nowhere. Another would file at least one with every product and delay the evaluation as long as possible to game the system so they could write "patent pending" and attach the veneer of innovation on the marketing material
> so they could write "patent pending" and attach the veneer of innovation on the marketing material
There's another reason too:
Having a large number of patents for a given subject matter makes it a veritable arsenal for use against other companies, either offensively or defensively (since a common defense to a lawsuit of patent infringement is a countersuit with your own parent infringement lawsuit).
Gotta feed the dancing gorilla
>Currently all the layers in patent application process is incentivized to ignore quality.
Not just "incentivized to ignore quality", they aren't duty-bound to consider quality at all. The PTO evaluates applications for novelty, not quality.
The three main relevant parts of the US Code are:
35 USC Sec. 101: is it patentable? (i.e., it must be a process, machine, process, or manufactured good. It can't be something like an idea or song)
35 USC Sec. 102: is it novel? (i.e., no one single prior existing item teaches all the limitations of the patent claims)
35 USC Sec. 103: is it non-obvious? (i.e., you can't combine a couple of different patents to arrive at your patent)
There's a few other important sections (like 112 that ensures you're giving enough detail), but none of them look at "quality". In other words, you can patent a worthless invention as long as it passes those wickets.
Edit: Somewhat surprisingly to some, they don't necessarily evaluate infringement either. So you could, in theory, have a novel patent that you can't use to make something because it infringes on an existing patent.
They're barely qualified to address novelty and get it wrong often, so I can't even imagine the types of things that would have been denied had they tried to evaluate the quality as well.
>>The PTO evaluates applications for novelty, not quality.
As it should be.
The USPTO is in no place to evaluate a patent's quality, unless youre a USPTO clerk whos first name starts with Albert and your last name ends in -Stein.
---
But in seriousness, novelty is the important factor in a patent, not quality. As utility patents/improvement patents are a thing.
Patent examiners are rated on office ACTIONS. Grants and denies both count as actions, although denials often take more effort (and complaints from the potential patentee).
I mean they're not rated on ACTIONS. They're rated on their PRODUCTION UNITS; of which an ALLOWANCE yields twice as many PRODUCTION UNITS than a REJECTION yields.
So; clerk are incentivized to grant a patent as it takes less effort and yields more production units. If a patent is of poor quality and later is invalidated in a lawsuit; the clerk will not lose production units. Therefore; the clerk is incentivized to grant patents as they count as more production units and not penalized for granting a patent they shouldn't've.
This is a misunderstanding of the slideshow. As can be seen on slide 10, productivity is "Number of office actions / period of time" and slide 12 shows the breakdown of how production units are calculated from office actions. A final disposition (allowance, appeal, or abandonment) is worth twice as much as a final rejection; however, that does not mean an examiner is incentivized to allow patents. Rather, they are incentivized to get to the end of the process by either allowing the patent, having the patentee appeal the examiner's final rejection, or by the patentee abandoning their application. Which of these three occurs is irrelevant to the examiner, although as I said before: an allowance take the least amount of effort.
In fact, the most production units that can be obtained by a patent examiner for any particular patent is to issue a final rejection, get the patentee to ask for re-examination, reject again, and then have the patentee abandon the patent.
0. Large companies much prefer to settle patent disputes with "Okay, you might have a case for patents A, B, C. We have a case for you infringing on our patents D and E. We like your patents F and G. What do you like from our portfolio? Okay, and we'll throw in these 300 random patents to show we're willing to reduce our ability to drown your lawyers in paperwork. How about you throw in 200 random patents to bring down the size of your paperwork arsenal? Do we have a deal?"
Edit: so at some point in the patent portfolio cross-licensing negotiation, there's a pure numbers game, so for large corporations there is some value in patents nobody is ever going to implement.
At least that's my recollection from 15 years ago about why Google paid me as sole inventor of a patent. (I was working on indexing, and thought "Oh no, if someone does X, then indexing becomes incredibly harder, basically DRM for the web. Webspam could hide more easily. Oh, but if we patent X, that might make my life easier in the future." The patent lawyer zeroed in too much on my mention of CAPTCHA as a possible use case, so I'm not sure if Google could really use my patent to prevent its use as DRM/Webspam hiding. At some point, I decided pushing back against the lawyer to make the patent more broadly applicable might not be good for society. I didn't feel strongly enough to turn down my patent bonus, just strongly enough to stop pushing edits back to the lawyer.)
I know this is a little controversial, but I wish our software development culture would discourage patents as taboo, something to not be proud of. Software patents are a truly terrible arms race, and they essentially aren't protecting anyone except the big boys.
"Having N patents" should be something that gets frowned on, not something you highlight on your resume. When asked about this myself (during interviews or whatever), I proudly boast that I have zero patents to my name and that I actively avoid being part of the problem by participating. I see it as an opportunity to 1. help steer our culture in whatever tiny way I can and 2. get up on a little soap box about the problem.
In the past, I've been asked to help out with patent applications for these so-called "inventions" that I developed, and I always tell my manager "If you want to patent this, I can't stop you, but do not put my name on it or associate it with me in any way."
> "… do not put my name on it or associate it with me in any way."
If you invented it, then they have to put your name on the application as the inventor. There’s also a declaration that the inventor is supposed to sign as part of the application. If the inventor is dead or otherwise unavailable (e.g., refuses to sign), there’s an alternative form that can be filed.
I'd be willing to bet lots of companies play fast and loose with the "inventor" names on patents anyway. I've looked up software patents issued to companies I've worked for, and sometimes the "inventors" listed were just eng managers and likely had nothing to do with the actual grunt work of writing the code.
"the actual grunt work of writing the code" isn't actually patentable in my experience, from Europe (inc. UK).
The inventive step is the actual decision of 'we will do this thing in this way', or rather determining the 'method'. In fact, the guidelines we follow are that someone implementing the design based on some instructions, i.e, just working on a ticket, is explicitly not to be included as an inventor - unless they actually decided that's how it should be done.
Of course, it's nice to work in a place whereby you get to design and implement the system and become an inventor. In my opinion and experience at least. But I can see some organisations whereby developers are popping off tickets in sprints and implementing them - but that is by definition not an inventive step.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. The lawyer's job is not to judge the quality of a patent -- in the same way a defense lawyer is not there to judge the innocence of their client.
The patent lawyer is just there to file the patent and help their client get past the approval process.
It is the PATENT OFFICE who's job it is to judge quality.
>1. Large companies pay a bonus for every patent applied and bigger one for approval.
When at lockheed we had what I referred to as the "Croatian Coalition" a bunch of Croatian engineers that were all over all the patents we were filing (RFID for weapons) -- they were all so proud of all their patents (as they should be) - but they were really aggressive on filing for not just the satisfaction (getting a patent must be a great feeling, I am not yet personally on any even though I have influenced several)
But they like the bonuses and internal recognition that came with them.
Also, spamming the patent office would be hard unless you have deep pockets/are a patent attorney or have Big Corp funding your efforts (and rewarding them)
I am sure there are cheap ways to file, but for the average person, not so much.
Someone mentioned Lockheed, at GE they had a program that was pushed really hard on software engineers/EE's etc. with a carrot of a bonus for patents accepted and approved.
They just created a giant loophole that will be easy to game. Patents are easy to get and someone will come up with a startup mill that will be nothing but a visa factory.
That seems like an odd retort to me. Like I have zero because I find the whole idea ethically dubious. When I was at IBM, they had occasional patent brainstorming meetings. I remember saying to one of the more senior engineers that everything I worked on was straightforward/obvious, and he told me I'd be surprised, which didn't do much to sway my thoughts on the ethics there.
Everyone who had been there for a few years had a couple patents. I don't remember any of them now, which I guess is sort of the point: it was all basic stuff that would be very difficult to honestly characterize as an "invention".
How is it an odd retort? If you haven't obtained a patent then the likelihood that you've actually gone through the patent procurement process with the USPTO is extremely low on this website. It's hackernews, not patentexaminernews or patentagentnews after all.
It would be like me saying "designing your own operating system is easy" and having someone respond "how many OSes have you designed?"
And by the way, your own story bears out the same: despite working for IBM (a company where attorneys familiar with the patent process are no doubt legion), participating or being aware of these patent brainstorm sessions, and stating that everyone had one after a couple years, you have zero. So what would you know about the patent prosecution process? Certainly not enough to say that it's easy.
Perhaps it comes down to an interpretation about what's "easy".
Evidently, based on patents being issued, it is easy to get a patent in the sense that you don't need a novel or nontrivial invention to do so. You don't need to go through the process to observe the results.
Perhaps there is a lot of paperwork, and in that sense it's not "easy". Or perhaps it is not "easy" to convince the patent office to accept trivial patents or patents on nonpatentable subject matter like math, but the volume of these things suggests that it can't be that hard.
If you knew millions of high school students write an OS as a project each year, you could safely conclude it's not that hard, even if you haven't done it.
Not only is this unnecessarily hostile, but also easily refuted. Here's the process for software patents, which by the way some countries do not grant because it's such bullshit. Software "ideas" get written up and then transformed by a lawyer into incomprehensible legalese. Often to the point the "inventor" cannot understand them anymore. Sometimes, managers get added as "inventors". Then, the patent is submitted and iterated on until it gets accepted.
So the hard part is having enough money to pay a lawyer. And being morally opposed to patents, especially software patents, is a valid position.
Step 1 - Come up with a software idea and give it to a lawyer (let's not even get into how hard this step might be)
Step 2 - ???
Step 3 - Patent
There was nothing hostile in my reply. I just laid out the exact facts that GP put in their post in order to support the opposite conclusion that GP was pushing.
Eh, they aren't that difficult to get, especially if you have an attorney to help with the legalese. To your point, if you have a couple grand and an even mediocre idea, you can patent it. Technically, you can do it yourself but I suspect navigating the patent minefield is what makes it seem hard, not necessarily having a great new product.
Source: I've done it just to see what the system is like.
Yeah, some larger organization have a good admin and legal support structure around it, so it feels frictionless to the applicant. But it is a total slog, and can take years to materialize.
The patent office is always spammed with low quality “inventions”. The US patent system is in pretty desperate need of reform. The conversation with a few extra crappy patents is basically zero.
I would be surprised if it didn't, as other parts of the immigration system also warp post graduate education. EB-2 provides a much easier immigration route than EB-3, and EB-1 is easier still: Arguably the only road you can call easy if you come from countries that hit the per-country cap. The most reliable way to EB-2 is post graduate education. For EB-1, as listed here, will be patents and publications after a Ph.D.
So now you go look at your typical STEM department at a good US university. As you go into masters and Phds, the percentage of foreign students goes up. This isn't because most international students love academia: It's because the immigration system, as described earlier, just makes the piece of paper they hand you so much more valuable that it'd be for someone that is already a US citizen. And since it's especially valuable for students from visa-capped countries, guess what? Students from those countries are disproportionally going through that route.
If we cut the visa limits, and said that a STEM degree and some STEM employment after was a guarantee for a green card in 2 years, I'd expect the number of international students that pick that route to plummet. The disparity between the demand for green cards and the visa limit is so wide, every year the incentive to study longer just increases.
If none of those numbers change, I'd expect that the patent route will just be pushed further. So just like the visa caps are a subsidy for post graduate degrees, this rule clarification will be an implicit subsidy for patent attorneys. Then we'll have yet another set of people with a lot to lose if we raise the visa limits, or stop the per-country quotas.
> This isn't because most international students love academia: It's because the immigration system, as described earlier, just makes the piece of paper they hand you so much more valuable that it'd be for someone that is already a US citizen.
Nonsense. I've been at a typical STEM department at a top us institution for a decade and interacted with thousands of students. I can count the number of students who were in it for a visa. You don't do a 5-6 year PhD simply for a green card. There are easier ways.
They're acquired either by huge companies for a defensive portfolio or by retired old men who get scammed by bottom feeding lawyers willing to file anything for their fee.
My employer cannot hire H1Bs. They are prohibited by law. All employees must be US citizens.
They pay extremely competitive rates. They are the reason for and a source of complaints regarding gentrification in my area.
edit: as an example the starting rate for high school work-study and college interns is the hourly equivalent of $78k/yr plus the same benefits as full-time employees from the second they show up.
The work environment is spectacular. There is no work from home because that is a practical impossibility so the work-life balance is carefully considered and benefits are outstanding. There are no after-hours tasks (there can't be, really).
You show up, work 9-5 in a relaxed environment, go home, cash your fat check, and enjoy travel and hobbies.
From IPC soldering-certified technicians to senior RF scientists and everything in between we cannot find enough workers for the amount of work we have.
For sexy startups trying to use sexy AI to steal user data in order to serve them sexy ads yes, maybe the market is saturated.
For hard-STEM fields my experience has been that there are too few people who take their linear algebra classes seriously.
I worked for a sexy startup (non AI and didn't steal user data, but did have ads) that got bought by one of these big hard-STEM companies. The scientists there who had 15 YOE and a PhD made less than programmers on our side with no college degree and 2-3 years of experience programming.
Hard-STEM seems to have lots of jobs where you can grind your ass off for the better part of a decade or two and hope to make $100-120k/yr by then if you're lucky. At least on the coding side you'll get to that level within a handful of years if you're willing to job switch often and optimize for that salary. Glad to hear there's at least one hard-STEM place where the grind isn't as bad.
The "hard-stem" places rely on a bit of gaslighting and the "holier than thou" self-image of the "hard-stem" people to pay them less and to overwork them
As much as the IT world has issues, it is night and day compared to the hard-stem world where a lot of times they won't even look at you if you don't have a MSc or PhD. Learn on the job, what is that?
I'm a U.S. citizen who does 1 hour of linear algebra first thing in the morning, when I'm not getting crushed by PhD-related deadlines. Currently working through Lang's _Linear Algebra_ for a new take on the material.
(side note: for the first 5 months of 2023 I did 1.5 hours a day of real analysis. I'll probably get back to doing that after getting through most of Lang.)
Can you give me a hint of the types of employers I should be looking for who would value this? How should I go about finding them?
I interned at a company that can hire H1Bs. They do so often. My manager and several coworkers were not US citizens. I received the hourly equivalent of more than $78k/yr, with a great working environment. I'm not sure what your comment proves?
There are several companies in my area that can only hire US Citizens, and they all pay lower than the company I interned at.
This kind of issue cannot be analyzed anecdotally.
> My employer cannot hire H1Bs. They are prohibited by law. All employees must be US citizens.
If this is a contractor that requires security clearances, that’s a significant barrier to recruiting even US citizens. Most of your best applicants will be snapped up by someone else prior to completing the months long clearance process (which requires telling their current employer they’re looking to move elsewhere at the start).
If it's just export controlled stuff(radar, dual use stuff), technically you can hire non US citizens, and IIRC it's actually discrimination if you only hire US citizens. But you need to get export licenses, which they might not grant based on the country of citizenship, and they require permanent residence.
But let's be honest, it's pretty standard practice to require US citizenship.
As someone not far removed from university, you will have a very hard time finding US citizens who take linear algebra seriously and also have a willingness to work for the Mil Industrial Complex (which this sounds like)
Only half, roughly, of our revenue comes from the Department of Defense.
If you have:
* Received an alert on your phone saying that it's going to rain in your local area in the next 10 minutes,
* Been alarmed by a paper containing synthetic aperture radar data showing high-resolution plots of coastal erosion and sea level rise, or
* Used a map or route planning application that has satellite imagery textured onto high-resolution terrain and 3d models of buildings and landmarks,
You've PROBABLY used our products.
The military just the sugar daddy who pays for the other stuff.
I mean, I don't do any of that stuff.
I just stare at error-ridden digikey product listings all day, argue with PMs about the reality of their schedules, and sit through endless design reviews. But somehow, someone somewhere in the company does that stuff.
You could do that with rapid valuation increases in tech shares over the last 10 years inflating your RSU award, and even then you're talking < 1% of engineers at that comp level. And that path is very likely closed now at FAANG (poor staff SWE will have to suffer with $400K TC). TCs in the millions will be reserved for high ranks at large companies, a few lucky early engineers at billion dollar startups, and phds in AI or whatever the new hotness is at the time.
I still see L7 and L8 offers like this handed out.
You act like 99% of people can work profitably in hard science. What parent poster said is also available sub 1% of talent.
That’s true. L6 offers are 700k to 900k plus whatever stock appreciation and refreshers. L7+ has nominal value of 1M+.
My point is for the past several years staff has been clearing 1M W2 or more per year and the nominal offers are high 6 figures. L7 and L8 offers are nominally 1M.
If I could make that money working on cool science and aerospace I would. When I graduated, Boeing, Lockheed etc wouldn’t give me the time of day but adtech welcomed me and paid me more in 1 year than Boeing would have in 10.
L6 being 700k+ is a top tier offer even from a big company. That’s an exceptional offer for staff. I know several people in staff roles and they were not offered that comp upfront. They get to that through appreciation.
The US created literally all relevant consumer technology in the last 30 or so years and demand for tech talent has exploded ever since.
Having a competitve sector/ economy which regularly pushes the edge of innovation and hence expands demand (both on sell and supply side) is actually what keeps salaries up.
This logic is as deeply flawed as often as it comes up.
Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it. Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.)
It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
Exactly! The companies often prefer the people on H1B visas because the workers have to be much more subservient or risk being deported and they have leverage to pay them at the lower end of the salary range for the position/level.
Interestingly, the meat ag and farming employs (no pun intended) similar tactics with undocumented people working in near-or-de facto slavery conditions that are very dangerous. The major meat processing plants in the US advertise salaries in Mexican and Central American newspapers to encourage migration. And, the US immigration system is a Kafkaesque, Byzantine, understaffed nightmare purposefully to keep official immigration meeting socio-political objectives of appearing selective. In truth, it facilitates megacorps importing large numbers of foreign knowledge workers through official channels while criminalizing and marginalizing undocumented people to be under the thumbs of other megacorps monetizing unpleasant work society inconveniently needs to function.
I think it is more about leaving their comfort zones. One might have to move out of their towns / states to access resources that the US has to offer. Dozens of US states offers so much support to their students studying STEM. You can defer education loan payments. There is so much federal aid. There are dirt cheap colleges if you want to get vocational education and start working quickly. But all of these are not available in one city. They are spread across the nation.
Globalization is a two way street. If you want the best of what the world has to offer, the best of what the world has to offer will arrive at your doorstep. That includes human resources.
So basically you only have open engineering positions in the same few markets that every other tech company does and then you complain when you can't find enough engineers. Engineering talent doesn't only exist on the coasts, despite startup tech culture pretending it does.
We listed all these jobs remotely. There just aren't that many engineers who know OS Internals, eBPF, or XDP in Indiana compared to Tel Aviv or Bangalore.
We didn't have the time to risk on hiring a dud in an industry as competitive as Cybersecurity.
When competing with Israeli and Indian companies who are able to tap the Israeli, Eastern European, and Indian talent scene where such skills are much more common, we don't have the time to risk timelines falling behind.
> 200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage
That was what we were offering, but we were also demanding on quality and skill required.
We ended up getting some top performers in Israel and India for a fraction, despite being ready to pay the above.
I don’t believe you couldn’t find anyone for 750k. At least throw out a believable number. Also you know very well that the majority of H1b is for generic web dev jobs and not OS internals or whatever you were hiring for.
They probably made ridiculous requirements on the listing to show they posted the job and could not find people that met the description so they could hire an H1B
That is a policy problem. Opening up more immigration makes that problem worse, not better. It should be a question that everyone asks: why do US Universities not create an adequate supply of workers to meet the demand of the market? No one seems to care and the solution is always “just do more immigration”. Makes no sense.
So what? Again, this is a pipeline problem, that can be influenced and addressed via policy. I'm not trying to "command economy" anything. It's a problem that companies, and increasingly universities, don't think that it's a huge issue there not being enough home-grown citizens to fill these roles (a claim I find to be dubious at best). That is definitely something that policy can be used to fix.
>Immigration is the only reason America hasn't stumbled like Europe, Japan, or Korea demographically.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. You want some demographic growth target to be hit? Europe has many countries in it, but mentioning Japan and Korea implies you have noticed the birth rates there. Well, I think the wrong question is being asked in that situation as well. If people aren't having babies, why? What changed? What policy options are there to fix that problem?
Thinking that "just import a new workforce" fixes that is extremely weird to me, especially when they are coming from places that are not exactly culturally proximate to the places they are going, to say the least.
Do companies have a moral obligation to distribute jobs geographically?
Assuming that the issue is that these positions weren't remote then if they decided that they're better served by workers that live locally then they're either right and you're asking them to harm their own interests for yours or they're wrong and they're just leaving money on the table for a competitor. If they aren't harmed for giving up a competitive edge then that monopoly power to just ignore the market is the actual problem.
Either way, work visas isn't even close to the most salient problem. Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes to avoid hiring who we want them to hire. Let's just cut out all the messiness and cut them checks directly. Call it reparations for the coasts ignoring the good honest midwest American talent all these years.
> Restrict them and who's to say how startups will find loopholes
We'll just open offices in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India instead and pay 70% of a US salary. It already started happening in 2019, and avalanched during the pandemic.
When the US banned Israeli companies from selling military IP to China, they began selling to India.
Drone tech saw a similar impact, hence why Chinese and Turkish Drone companies are outcompeting American ones in both commercial and defense applications.
One observation I've made throughout the years of reviewing tech resumes - if I get a resume from a U.S. citizen, I (and anybody else) immediately know the difference between MIT/Stanford vs. "The University of Wisconsin" without even researching it. OTOH, I have no idea what the difference between the University of Hyderabad vs. the University of New Delhi, and there's not really a good way for me to tell. Foreign applicants actually have an _advantage_ over U.S. citizens in that the person reviewing their resume will almost certainly bin all of the resumes into the same "ok, has a degree" vs. a potentially unconscious "ah, ok, couldn't get into an ivy league".
No wonder they can't find workers, if from a nation of 334 million, all but ~16k/year [1] are considered substandard because they couldn't get into an Ivy.
Edit: More relevant is comparing Ivy undergrads (64.5k) to all US undergrads (20.3 million) [2], meaning only the top 0.3% make the cut.
We didn't discriminate based on educational program.
But we didn't have the time to train someone in eBPF or OS Internals from scratch over months when there are competitors in Israel or India able to release the same thing in the same time period with a fraction of the cost.
For certain specialities of tech, there simply isn't the skill set anymore in the US. OS Internals and Computer Networking is a great example of that.
$200-300k base with 15% annual bonus and equity ($300k-750k when I was working at public companies. I can't speak to my portfolio company's equity practices) is not a shit wage.
We needed people who understood stuff like XDP and worked on it for years.
The talent pool for low level development, OS Dev, cybersecurity, networking, and some parts of ML is sparse in the US compared to Israel, Eastern Europe, China, and India.
The problem is that instead of building a domestic talent pipeline for high demand skills we take the easy route and grab immigrants for it. So the talent pipeline never gets built, and then we continue to be dependent on immigration. This is obviously not your company's fault because they are not policy makers, but if companies like yours were told "too bad, hire and train locally" you would get it done. e.g. I am a software engineer that currently has a TC of around $200K, and none of the skills you need, but I could easily be trained and learn any of that for a 300-750K TC at the end.
I am unpersuaded as I have never heard of a company that collapsed and was replaced by foreign competition because they couldn't get enough H1Bs. But even if this is correct, the best that should get you is N visas for the next 2 years and then no more because you will have built the local talent pipeline you need by then.
It is so obviously not zero sum. From Google to Yahoo to eBay to Palantir. None of those hundreds of thousands of jobs would exist without immigrants. Or they would be overseas.
I'm sorry for your friends who cannot get tech jobs. It's time to level up their skills. No competent developer can't find a job in this economy.
Stop blaming immigrants for your own shortcomings.
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries.
The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital.
BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.
america hegemony exists since the germans rocket scientists immigrated to work at nasa. the tech sector is the same story.google pretty much created the web revolution and it was a russian immigrant leading it creating millions of jobs. the next big moment was musk, an immigrant with tesla.
> Yes it is. Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
That's simply not true. The alternative is often just not having this job at all. A tech startup without employees can just fail, without creating any jobs.
And the guy from the Midwest will be worse off in the end.
if US citizen with all best resources in the world for entire lifetime, is losing opportunity to some 3rd nation, maybe he/she/they is not competitive enough?
I think your reply is the perfect example of the malaise of the general public discourse on most topics these days which seems to be far less informed by scientifically established laws and principles rather than by personal anecdotes.
Let me preface my writing by saying that I am neither a US citizen nor a tech worker currently employed or aiming for employment with a US based firm.
I am a first generation immigrant in a continental European country who faced no barriers in charting my career in tech. I deeply believe in and have experienced meritocracy.
So let's go at it one by one.
> Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.
That is simply not true as the distribution for demand and supply of tech talent within an economy is hardly ever matching perfectly temporally. Either there is more demand than supply or more supply than demand. Also upskilling everyone in the Midwest does not work just that quickly.
That is how the world works.
Your argument is not rooted at all in basic macroeconomics, rather, it seems to me, in wishful thinking.
No country other than the USA is better at playing that macroeconomics game through talent oriented immigration laws.
Has been for the past 200 years, will be for the next 200 years.
I'd bet on that.
> Fuck this dishonest talking point, I know people coding since high school working at Toyota plants while people from overseas with entry level skill sets have employers move them to the west coast and land jobs (for whatever reason.)
Said people you know must either not have the chops you claim they have, not know their market value or not have the required mobility for the purpose of securing said jobs (i.e. moving out of the Midwest to the economic hotspots of the US).
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that indeed subservient immigration is an economic niche of it's own, there is no chance that practice alone saturates the demand for tech talent.
How many SWE positions in every other HN thread alone require citizenship, timezone presence or offer no assistance with immigration?
> It’s favoritism, it’s cronyism, it’s a nation putting its own struggling people last and it most certainly is zero sum.
While a populist, assertive statement, I think it is lack of widespread education & upskilling initiatives (which literally everyone else outside of the tech sector has incentives for: what would Toyota, Walmart, literally everyone else stand to gain from more educated citizens leaving the Midwest for higher paying jobs?), greed and fiscal pressure (I've promised my VCs 200% growth YoY, so I need SWEs stat from literally anywhere NOW, can't wait for these folks from the Midwest to upskill within 2 years) and generational change (those HS friends chopping away at Toyota might not have applied in their early years when remote work was as prevalent as it is today. It will be a totally different game for a Midwest child growing up in a tech inspired household today).
Lack in speed of upskilling/ education, fiscal economic pressure and glacial pace of generational change is literally what every other nation is facing.
Time is always the scarcest and most critical factor.
And that's why it's not zero sum.
In the long run, no economy is bound to employ more people in tech both domestic and foreign than the USA and that is a massive, massive achievement - and based in simple macroeconomic rules, not some emotional anecdotes.
> ... when there are plenty of US citizens in STEM who are underemployed.
Where, exactly?
Unemployment rate among STEM graduates is half of that of the general population [0]. Salaries are also substantially higher [1], and keep getting higher [2].
I'm not seeing it either. The only engineers I met who are 'under employed' either left the field intentionally, decided to go backpack Europe for 3 years after they graduated (some fields it definitely seems like if your not in the field for awhile the value of your degree vanishes), or they graduated and moved to a place where I live with a ChemE degree looking for ChemE jobs when we have maybe 2 companies in town that hire a small number of ChemEs. It is a highly desired location, so why pay an inexperience ungrad when you can score a ChemE moving into the area with a decades experience at a good price.
Another good one. We hired a person with a MechE degree with experience working at JPL into our customer support because they are so in love with the area because of easy access to winter activities (snow shoing, skiing, etc).
So the unemployment rate in your first article is not relevant, missing labor participation rates etc.
The second article is about median wages of people who are already in jobs categorized as stem. Same with the third, which is also only about the derivative.
> Where, exactly?
The most prominent segment can be found by dropping the engineering and tech. Biology, math, physics, chemistry, etc. However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
I would appreciate it if you were to provide some hard numbers to back your conjecture that immigration is the reason for these cases of "underemployment", like you call it.
> However even in engineering we find that the top grads move into software or finance.
Software engineering is notorious for being one of the markets with the most H-1B visa holders, yet you are saying that most "top grads" move into it for better wages?
The gross number is only 1/3 of stem degree lead to stem jobs. But that includes quite a bit of soft degree's, still in the ballpark of half of all graduates not working in their field.
> software jobs
Yes there is higher demand for software which is met with higher wages and drawing underemployed people with other degrees as well as immigration. The immigration restriction argument is that increasing that part of the equation will lower wages and increase corporate control of their workforce.
So an alternative way to meet that demand is to hire us citizens who have those qualifications or a related degree that could be trained.
I don’t know man. I passed 2 FAANG interviews last year and then failed to team match because they froze hiring. I have the skills but no room for me, there are already 10s to hundreds of thousands of foreign workers thank you very much. Seems pretty zero sum to me.
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.[1]
> American tech workers are getting pushed out, and they aren’t coming back
If the downward pressure on salary in American software jobs is so extreme that salaries frequently go all the way to zero, while there is a countervailing upward pressure on salary among Indian no-job-yets, why do we say it's "categorically false" that there is a downward pressure on American software salaries?
[1] Note that this is what you expect from a pricing shift, not an increase in the value created by the work. The quantity of software labor purchased has gone up and sellers are being forced out. If the driver of increased quantity-of-jobs were increased value created, you would see sellers entering the market, not leaving.
Both you and the blog are conflating leaving the Bay Area with losing your job.
Yeah. A lot of people are leaving because of the housing insanity. That doesn't mean they're leaving teach and losing their jobs. There is zero evidence for that.
This isn't evidence for any impact on jobs. It's evidence for the mismanagement of the Bay Area and California as a whole.
The reality of Canadian tech salaries would disagree with you.
Our immigration system targets skilled workers from abroad, and brings in a lot of them. It's a far more "rational" and less confusing system than the US, but also explicitly geared around bringing in skilled workers as permanent residents and it brings in a lot of them.
The downward pressure on compensation rates is real. Apart from exceptions in FAANG type companies, salaries here are often 1/2 of the rates of US employers, and it isn't because we're a lower quality product.
As a result a large % of us just move south to the US on a TN visa, or take remote jobs from US employers. Because the disparity in compensation is very high. And it's in large part because the market here is flooded with talent from abroad.
People who gain citizenship are no longer in a precarious visa situation nor tied to their current employer. Moving people off visas and into PR/citizenship would seem to me to remove downward pressure on salaries.
Heck, workers with PR/citizenship are probably more likely to unionize for higher wages because they feel safer.
This affects very few immigrants of extraordinary ability. Such people are likely to be job creators with the companies and products they build. I agree that if we were to lift the cap on H-1b visas it could easily destroy tech salaries. Thankfully that’s not under consideration.
If you open the door wide enough, salaries will drop. It’s an economic reality. It may be a very good thing for the wider economy and stock market though. Right now critical roles that enable high productivity work are behind a tall wall of a multi-100k salary. It’s possible that we are letting a small number of engineers get early retirements in exchange for a drag on the whole economy.
People in tech have blinders are. We're already in tech, so we don't see the repercussions. Entry level jobs are almost non-existent, they're all going overseas and to indentured servants.
This is just a repeat of what started in the 90s (probably earlier). It's really a scheme for companies to get access to more talent to drive wages down.
It does when those people who leave have a chip on their shoulder due to bad experiences with the US.
For example, the founder of Zoho (Sridhar Vembu - I actually lived in the same apartment complex in the Bay Area that he started Zoho at) has become a NatSec cabinet advisor to Narendra Modi's administration, and has a chip on his shoulder about his experience dealing with US immigration. It was a big reason he returned to India.
Wang Huning, the Chairman of the Chinese Politburo and Xi Jinping's right hand man - soured on the US after his experience dealing with the US as a student.
A good friend of mine from college in the ML space who's parents are pretty high up in the ruling party of a major SEA state has been constantly complaining to me and them about how they lost 2 chances at the F1 to H1B conversion, and every single time became more and more ambivalent about the US. They can end up returning to SEA and make a large company, but they will also have a chip on their shoulder about the US.
Another good friend of mine was an Indian national who specialized in EE and Condensed Matter Physics (semiconductors type work) - even did grad school in it at a Stanford type program. He left the US to work for a major Chinese company in SEA because immigration in the US was horrid.
Plenty of Israelis feel the same way now about the US due to similar experiences.
The US Immigration system exudes a sense of American exceptionalism because voters say "Love it or leave it". But the people who leave end up becoming successful, but still angry at how much effort and stress was expended for naught.
China is now a near peer in 2023. There's no reason to fuel anti-Americanism in India, SEA, LatAm, etc and push them to the other side.
China and India combined take in less than a tenth of the immigrants the US takes in yearly. There's really no reason anyone should take their opinions on immigration seriously.
He didn't miss the point. You're missing the point that if these people soured the US because it was hard to immigrate, they are being very hypocritical. It's hard to immigrate anywhere ("crap treatment"), including the countries they came from.
It's somewhat difficult to immigrate to most places, but usually the difficulties can be resolved in weeks or months. The US level of difficulty is an exception, not the norm.
Or more accurately, the processes are obfuscated and full of inexplicable delays. Why would someone even consider hiring a lawyer for something as simple and common as employment-based immigration? And how can the green card process take longer than a few months?
If it were that bad people would've stopped migrating to US long long back. In this case people are speaking with their feet (including those who chose to go back)
Well, the elite in formerly pro-American countries like Thailand, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil start turning to competitors like China or Russia, or deciding to go it on their own.
Countries like India or Vietnam only began starting to warm to the US because of the diaspora. If the diaspora gets treated like shit, anti-Americanism begins to breed.
Pakistan leaned pro-China since the 1960s after Ayub Khan normalized relations with China over Aksai Chin and Pakistan helped negotiate the Sino-US Pact, but fully pivoted after Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto became PM, as he had a good working relationship with Mao [4]
The Pakistani nuclear program was jumpstarted by PLA technology transfers in the 1970s [0][5], Pakistani Tank Technology like Al-Khalid are results of PLA tech transfers in the early 1990s [1], Pakistan began adopting Chinese fighter jet IP in the early 1990s [2], and the entire indigenous missles program in Pakistan began thanks to Chinese IP transfers in the 80s [3]
The US-Pakistan relationship was always transactional and surface level. Chinese SOEs would at least invest in Military affiliated companies like Heavy Industries Taxila, Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, Khan Research Laboratories, Global Industrial Defence Solutions, and National Defence Complex
The countries in the list abovr had a relationship with the US that was similar to that between China-Pakistan, but began pivoting away from the US in the 2010s.
> The US Immigration system exudes a sense of American exceptionalism because voters say "Love it or leave it". But the people who leave end up becoming successful, but still angry at how much effort and stress was expended for naught.
That's funny. I guess every visa holder is some little genius doing particle physics work
You're going out of your way to give very specific anecdotes here, the average level of talent I've met on a visa is something very easily matched domestically. It's pretty hilarious actually, some of them can't actually program and have an SWE job title
Great point. If out of many million immigrants few brilliant ones went back due to bad experience and achieved great success back home, I'd say it is excellent system already for US in terms of overall people chose to stay and people went back to great success.
The article says that most of these approvals are going to tech entrepreneurs / startup founders. The effect of this seems to be to create new companies that otherwise wouldn't have existed, spurring demand for tech workers. The net effect of this is upwards pressure on wages if anything.
More generally, if another country became the global nexus for top tech talent, capital would eventually follow there, and the long term effect on US tech salaries would be negative.
Ah yes, the last 30 odd years of increasing immigration has exerted tremendous downward pressure on US tech salaries.
And countries in Europe that have not seen as much Tech immigration have seen huge boosts in Tech salaries. Comparable Europeans earn almost 1/3 - 1/2 what their American counterparts do today!
But really, it’s much easier to enter the EU. You have dozens of countries with their own rules so there are many more options. Plus immigration rules tend to be much easier than the US with its famously strict legal immigration with low caps.
Indeed, this balance between supply and demand is exactly what keeps US tech salaries high. Our dynamic economy creates a lot of tech roles while our restrictive immigration limits high skill immigrants from filling those roles, raising salaries.
Tech companies have been lobbying unsuccessfully for years to raise or eliminate the h-1b cap, which would absolutely cut salaries. That’s why they are lobbying for it, to reduce their labor costs.
Personally I think this is all going to be moot anyway. With software development becoming a mostly remote role after the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot less barrier over the past few years to hiring offshore teams. My own small division of 100 people has offshore teams in 3 countries.
You can earn European level tech salaries in Bangalore and Beijing now. There isn't as much demand to move there and uproot your family just for $30-50k a year.
Having worked in the EU and the US, here are some differences that I think are relevant for global employers:
- The hiring pool is much smaller than in the US, one reason is probably demographics and lack of skilled immigration. This makes it less attractive to hire/grow there.
- Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.
- Taxes are much higher than in the US, so even if employers spend a lot of money on payroll, much less of it will end up in employees checking accounts.
- Demand is much lower. Tech industry in Europe is definitely there, but not booming to the same degree as in the US.
>Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.
Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the
layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.
There's much more to this than you cite. There's Betriebsrat and Sozialplan etc. I'm not at all saying any of this is bad, but it does play an important role when companies make decisions about where to put their engineering centers.
Watching friends work through the decades long journey of citizenship, going to prestigious undergrad institutions, getting PhDs, publishing in journals, teaching part-time while working full time in industry, all just to get the right to stay in the country they’ve lived since they were 18 is fucking depressing.
I doubt I’d qualify for EB-1 [1]. I’d have qualified for EB-2 at 28 when I attained five years of work experience [2][3]. If I didn’t have a BS I’d need ten years experience. If I had spent the usual five years flailing about in a PhD instead of dropping out early, I’d have delayed “work experience” another three years.
Now this hypothetical version of myself waits as short as two years (China-born) and as long as eleven years (India-born) to get an application considered. Meanwhile, they’re trying to maintain work authorization, either via the time-limited OPT or hopefully winning an H1-B which has its own highly competitive lottery. And when they finally get PR/citizenship, their (now quite old) parents have no hope of receiving PR/citizenship so they’ll probably be flying across oceans to care for them as they age.
All of this for the mistake of being born in the wrong part of the word.
Meanwhile, I’m some fuckup who happened to be born in the US who has never known struggle. It just all seems cosmically unfair.
> At 33 years old I’m still two years shy of the 10 year minimum for EB-2 [2]
not sure what your link has to do with age requirement that you mention. eb2 has no age minimum.
You also wrote bunch of other falsehoods like visa renewals requiring lottery, renewals don't count against yearly visa quota.
Most of the stuff in your comment is not correct.
I’d be delighted to be proven wrong but the ten year minimum experience comes from the second reference:
> Letters from current or former employers documenting at least 10 years of full-time experience in your occupation
EDIT: I see where you misunderstood. I emphasized the age to show how long someone would be waiting for a non-precarious situation. I’ll edit above.
Apologies if I’m unclear, I mean getting the H1-B in the first place requires a lottery. People who graduate with US undergrad degrees can start on OPT or the like but must transition to something else when that’s exhausted. One friend just went through exactly this where she exhausted her OPT, lost work authorization, but missed three attempts at H1-B.
> Letters from current or former employers documenting at least 10 years of full-time experience in your occupation
Thats if you are in the second row in the table above. i.e "Exceptional Ability".
You don't need it if you have masters or bachelors + 5.
> Meanwhile, they’re trying to maintain work authorization
There is no 'meanwhile' , they are not in eb green card queues without going though the h1 lottery first. In no case are you going though h1b lottery and in green card queue concurrently.
Fair on the first point, I’ll adjust the text to clarify the need for a BS.
On the second point, first claim, you can be in an EB-1 queue without an H1-B (e.g. OPT or TN [1]). On the second claim, I admit to not knowing someone who is in the queue and in the lottery but they’re on TN, preparing materials for an EB-1 and applying for an H1-B. My understanding was that they’d apply for both concurrently (due to the EB queue period), but I have no references to back me up.
[1] If you were born in China and then immigrated to Canada, you’re still in the China queue for EB.
Yes correct, Greencard is not tied to maintaining current employment or having a visa, its a separate process. I know ppl who came to USA for the first time on a greencard. I was addressing the word "meanwhile" in your comment, i guess it technically possible that someone gets their greencard applied while they are on OPT/vistor visa/some other visa ect and then go through the h1b lottery.
just saw this.
> What else is wrong?
> And when they finally get PR/citizenship, their (now quite old) parents have no hope of receiving PR/citizenship
Family based greencards have current wait time of ~11months start to finish.
Thanks for all your comments thus far! I have an axe to grind with the US immigration system but it’s best to grind it on a stone of facts.
Yeah, I was a bit loose with the parents situation. I made a general comment based on a specific circumstances. That’s my bad.
To petition for parents you need to be a full citizen not simply a green card holder. That adds five years. For India-born folks, this practically puts their parents date over a decade away. Meanwhile those parents become elderly and live thousands of miles from their grand children. So, for a lot of folks who spent years pursuing PhDs and have Indian passports their parents might immigrate at ~seventy while they’re in their fifties. I dunno man, that’s fairly old. Their parents might not make it.
I can’t edit the original post anymore, so your comment will have to serve as the correction.
I went through the EB-1 process and finally got my GC. I applied in my 6th year of working in industry.
The work done towards your PhD counts as work experience, if I remember correctly. A couple of people I know applied in their second year in the industry.
> Now this hypothetical version of myself waits as short as two years (China-born) and as long as eleven years (India-born)
China and India are the outliers. For most people, pre-pandemic (and post financial meltdown), the wait was under 2 years - almost everyone I know got it in under 2 years (EB-2, MS or higher degree).
If you weren't born in China/India, and had an "advanced degree" in a STEM field (i.e. MS or higher), the green card process was/is fairly smooth. The real bottleneck is the H1-B visa quota/lottery.
They're not outliers in the sense that a significant percent of the world's population come from those two countries, so disadvantaging them disadvantages a significant fraction of the world's population.
As long there are countries boundaries there will be disadvantage. I don't think we are implementing that total amount of earth's resources be divided equally among total number of earth's inhabitants.
How many of those 3B would qualify for an H-1B absent any caps? How many more STEM professionals could the US absorb at something close to current salaries?
For India alone, Wikipedia says ~8% or ~100 million have a BS. I was more focused on PR/citizenship in my post. I do not know what qualifies you for an H1-B.
In the second point, I only have an imprecise opinion which is that I’d rather suffer some loss of quality of life personally if the median human experience is raised.
Would you support kicking out someone who doesn’t qualify for an EB or H1-B (in practice, you’re kicking out non degree holders) for a foreign born person who does qualify? If not, it seems to me we are embracing a lottery of birth place. To be clear, I’d like to see substantially more freedom of movement even if it means reducing my quality of life.
Huh, it is unfair in the same sense that football, basketball or movie stars are living in mega mansions or penthouses and flying in private jets while millions in US struggle for basic needs in US.
Most H1B coming from India are among top 1-2% of India's vast population and thats pretty fucking huge luck. Going through normal wait of immigration process, which no one forced them to undertake btw, is a kind of elitist thinking where any delay in fulfilling upper class want is an untold atrocity inflicted upon them.
If you want to complain about pro athletes making too much compare to STEM, consider that the average aspiring pro ends up making less than minimum wage over the duration of their career.
Only a tiny handful of about 250k high school football-playing seniors are able to find any at all job in their sport (if they even make it to college). Meanwhile, the roughly 100k yearly US CS grads have an unemployment rate of maybe 10%.
This is a good start, but without solving the elephant in the room (illegal immigration), there will never be the political capital to really make these programs efficient and effective.
I'm an Australian citizen who has lived in the US for over 20 years, gotten degrees from Yale and Berkeley. I've worked as a software engineer for over 10 years and am currently a cofounder.
I'm so put off by the immigration process in the US that I have decided to leave the US permanently. Don't worry - i still work for the same US based company remotely from a more cost effective nation. I just don't pay your taxes anymore.
For those confused: Unfortunately, the US focuses on your origin (where you were born) rather than your nationality. alisahik is an Australian citizen, but was not born there. My guess is he was born in India, which has an absurdly long queue in the US immigration process.
Only a feature if you believe in the per country limit. The alternative is to just score everyone based on point based system and admit the highest scorers regardless of national origin.
Today if you're an illegal migrant and claim asylum, you get +inf points.
If you're born in certain countries with long wait time, you get -inf points.
Clearly the system today is working within your definition.
> If you're born in certain countries with long wait time, you get -inf points.
Re-read the parent comment again. They say "point-based system [...] regardless of national origin", which implies that the origin country wouldn't have any effect aka point-value (neither negative nor positive) attached to it.
> if you're an illegal migrant and claim asylum, you get +inf points
Bringing up the asylum visa category makes zero sense, because it was obvious from the context (both the parent comment and the entire thread) that the conversation was about a point system in the context of employment-based visas. Having a point-based system go cross-category or even used at all in most categories doesn't make sense.
So no, the system you described isn't working with their definition at all.
Ok, so you want to make a system that does not include some otherwise very popular criteria to the citizens of the host nation? Because... it benefits you?
I don’t want to make any kind of a system, in fact, I am not even sure if I am behind that point-based proposal.
All I was trying to say that the point of the comment i was replying to was making a faulty statement “well, the way you explain it is already how it works under conditions XYZ” with a “those XYZ conditions you mention directly contradict the premise you are addressing.”
On the US side, we're still enforcing EO 10043 [0] which prevents Chinese nationals who studied at any Chinese university part of the Chinese Civil-Military Fusion strategy from getting F- and J- visas, and requires enhanced background checks on other visa categories.
Turns out, just about every Chinese STEM program will get a military grant, the same way just about every American STEM program will get a DoD grant.
On the Chinese side, they put a cap of $50,000 on money or assets you can bring outside of China each year [1]. Tuition is included in that cap. That means most American universities are out of reach for Chinese students, and immigrating from China to the US with your entire family is a pain (you need some money to land on your feet).
Also, during 2019-2022 there was this small policy called Zero COVID that severely restricted ingress and egress.
Also, US Consulates and Embassies paused visa processing for almost 2 years during the pandemic.
What an idiotic system! Any sane policy would just put a max number of annual visas or total active visa holders and choose the best value applicants based on a scoring system, but no we can't have nice things.
Australians, Chileans and Singaporeans are eligible for a class of work visa that basically has no cap (or cap has never been reached). They don't have the complete with the unwashed masses who have to deal with H1B.
I have no idea what these have to do with the matter being discussed here. We're talking about legal immigration and cap applied to visa/green card.
What is "virtually uncapped"? Do you have a source explaining how Australia, Singapore, Canada and Chile are treated differently? And as an FYI, I see no problem with Canada having a special regime.
Thanks for the link. After reading a bit about H1B1 it looks like
1. It is included in the H1B cap, ergo it is de facto capped
2. It is actually capped as a portion of the available H1B.
"Of the 65,000 visas allocated to the capped H-1B visa program, the amount of 6,800 are reserved for use for the H-1B1: 1,400 for Chile and 5,400 for Singapore."
Counted separately but included in the overall cap.
Another interesting difference is that H1B1 seems to not be dual intent, contrary to H1B. Definitely not the panacea that was hinted at in this thread.
I hire a ton of engineers in LATAM who have no interest in migrating to US. They get paid well in USD, they live in kings and queens in their respective low cost countries. In fact, looking at their live inspired me to make the decision to leave.
It's a great deal for them. It's not the best deal for us, though, since they're not part of our tax base, nor are they growing families and social networks here for us to benefit from. It's a great outcome morally (Latam, African, and Asian countries deserve greater participation in global industries), but the one thing it doesn't do is optimize for the interests of America.
I think the long term interests of ordinary Americans are better served by having a stable population and culture without significant immigration. I have a theory that America is so relatively libertarian and ungovernable because of the immigration of all these rootless people who are willing to leave everything behind for economic reasons, who feel relatively weaker affinity to other Americans. I think we’re seeing this play out in real time with Latinos shifting right just because of a little inflation.
If that means our tech and financial sectors look more like Europe, that would probably be a good thing too. The tax base thing is a trap. Having seen the influx of tech workers and rich immigrants move into Virginia, I don’t think it was a win for the median person who was already there.
1. America was built on people willing to leave everything behind for all sorts of reasons. America is great because of it.
2. American immigrants feel a very high amount of affinity with the US and the opportunities afford to them by the country, regardless of how much affinity they feel towards their neighbours. I think the main problem is that native born Americans feel a fairly low amount affinity towards each other - and that has little to do with immigration.
3. I think having a low immigration, stagnant tech and finance sectors is probably beneficial to the median person who is already in the US and doesn't really wanna work that hard and compete with immigrants. I agree with you there. If you go to Australia the ones who are getting the highest grades, becoming doctors and lawyers, buying expensive properties are all immigrants (usually East Asian / South Asian). If you want to relax and just enjoy life without working hard Europe is absolutely ideal for you.
> 1. America was built on people willing to leave everything behind for all sorts of reasons. America is great because of it.
America is great because it was founded by rule following British people with a long tradition of self governance. What’s come after that is debatable. It’s certainly made America rich, I’ll give you that.
> 2. American immigrants feel a very high amount of affinity with the US and the opportunities afford to them by the country, regardless of how much affinity they feel towards their neighbours.
Yes, but what is the “US” they feel affinity for? I think the “US” they have affinity for us a very shallow concept. It’s not like say the French or Chinese that have a thousand years of shared history they identify with. My whole family is immigrants. My parents just got back from visiting family in Canada and Australia and were complaining about how much better America is. But what is America to them? They don’t care about Appalachians, or the constitution, etc. They like that you can make a lot of money and live in much bigger houses than in Australia or Canada.
> I think the main problem is that native born Americans feel a fairly low amount affinity towards each other - and that has little to do with immigration.
I think the two things are directly correlated. The vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries. That means the ones that immigrate tend to be the ones that have weaker social ties. And I strongly suspect that persists for at least a couple of generations within family cultures—if only because it takes longer than that to really develop deep and broad family networks in the country. But most Americans are just a couple of generations away from those initial immigrants. (None of Donald Trump’s grandparents were born in America.)
> 3. I think having a low immigration, stagnant tech and finance sectors is probably beneficial to the median person who is already in the US and doesn't really wanna work that hard and compete with immigrants. I agree with you there. If you go to Australia the ones who are getting the highest grades, becoming doctors and lawyers, buying expensive properties are all immigrants (usually East Asian / South Asian).
I agree. So I think where we differ is on whether that’s a good thing or not. A bunch of my family is exactly that kind of immigrant to Australia. They’re doing well individually. But does that make the country better for the median Australian that’s already there?
by rule following British people with a long tradition of self governance.
Their love of rules and self-governance was so great they had to leave their rule-following, self-government-enjoyer country where they called them 'non-conformists'. This doesn't really add up.
>It's not the best deal for us, though, since they're not part of our tax base, nor are they growing families and social networks here for us to benefit from.
It's a fantastic deal for us because they're not immigrating here and therefore driving prices of housing, social services, etc. to the unsustainable levels we're seeing now. Outsourcing over the past decades has been a huge boon for the US. They're generating value for US companies and we're able to take advantage of that. The US needs to grow its own families and social networks organically. Every country should.
>but the one thing it doesn't do is optimize for the interests of America.
Generating wealth for US companies and providing stability to their home countries is a win/win. This is optimal for US interests.
Housing prices aren't unsustainable in the US; they are in a tiny subset of hotspots that elite buyers want to move into. The people we're talking about importing are the least fixated on buying in those particular markets.
Housing prices are a big problem, but the fix isn't depopulation; it's fixing zoning and building rules.
How is it a win for the United States if American companies are employing less people in the country, and instead are paying remote workers who pay taxes elsewhere?
So it is either that US company got better work done at cheaper price. Means win for US as it got a tiny bit competitive. That'd be pro-market argument.
Or another way that if US company has decided to not employ US born local at least those got employed overseas will not compete for housing, schools and other services for which they easily out compete locals if they are employed in US. Means another win. That would be pro-nativist argument. I know they are not much loved here but that's that.
Another thing could be that you come collecting US degrees is a WIN for US. Maybe degrees in Australia or your birth country weren't good enough for you (or you weren't good enough for them). Either way that US was able to have you for education and jobs for many years after that is win in my book.
Imagine the US parents paying $$ to get their kids into an elite kindergarten in the hopes of some day sending their kid to an Ivy League.... Only to have their spot taken by some shmuck from Australia who has never previously set foot in the US get a free ride for a $200k education.... you're going to convince them that its a WIN for America!
By all means they should change but I hope not to the interest of very vocal tech minority, who are already elite in their own counties, and to the detriment of other deserving groups.
The US doesn’t understand the social burden of integrating an immigrant, and the resulting social conflict. Meanwhile, the prospective immigrant gets to stay in their homeland (most don’t really want to leave, money aside).
If tax dollars are the issue, just tax the company.
There is no meaningful social conflict arising from importation of skilled labor. Gainfully employed immigrants building families in the US are an asset, not a burden.
I think the immigrant with three kids from Venezuela is probably easier to integrate in a way than a skilled immigrant who was typically an elite back home. I think the latter folks are more likely to bring their culture with them and try to change America.
Software engineers are notoriously apolitical, even if that has been changing gradually. Plenty of technical "elites" remain separate, aloof from social life. Are foreign born doctors trying to "change America?"
You're right actually. Have you seen how many Australian coffee shops there are in New York? Crikey! Changing America one cup of flat white at a time. Tough work.
> paying $>50k / year in income taxes to state and federal government?
Because anyone else employed for that role/ income would've not paid income tax or any other tax at all. Its to immigrants credit that they pay taxes when they could simply chose not to.
I think it's more nuanced than this. The left believes in immigration based on the amount of hardship / suffering endured by the immigrant. The more the suffering, the more deserving they are of being let in.
The right believes in either no immigration or immigration based on an impossibly high bar with caps preventing immigration from undesirable origins.
My view is that in the long run immigration policy simply does not matter because we will have figured out how to educate, recruit, train, and exploit the high quality remote labor from any country. The most talented folks around the world will find a way to reap the rewards of the American economy either by residing within the US or doing it from afar. The after tax wage spread is margin that can be exploited.
Oh the US has been amazing to me! I love the US! It gave me degrees (funded by American donors), it gave me work experience, it provided me with capital markets to raise $$ and build companies. I love it all.
However, since the US doesn't really want me to be physically IN the US, I will simply continue loving the US from afar. I will maintain equity in US companies, I will take US capital and I will sell to US customers, and continue making US great! I just will do it without paying US taxes because I'm not located in the US. I love Australia too but that's for my health and retirement plan.
I'm no different from the many dozens of contractors we already pay who are located in other countries. The IRS does not require tax contributions from company or the contractor if the contractor's domicile is outside the US and does not meet the substantial presence test.
Don't worry I've done my research and consulted tax lawyers. It's all very much legal.
Scroll over to the title "You live and perform all the work in your country"
| Form W-8BEN is used for foreign individuals that perform work outside the US. In this case, your income isn’t taxable in the US, and you’re responsible for paying your own taxes in your country.
I'm a little surprised to see a number of anti-immigraiton comments on this thread, some of which you could describe as reactionary.
The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way?
Let's dispense of the common issues:
1. Tech layoffs. This is unrelated to immigration. This is de facto employer colusion to suppress wages. Notice how all the tech companies started doing layoffs at about the same time? The counterargument is "economic conditions". You may have a point with VC funding drying up due to rising interest rates but many of the biggest companies are massively profitable. Profits tend to fall so they want to suppress costs to maintain profits. That's it.
I will say that layoffs should basically prohibit you from applying for more work visas for a period. For example: if you've laid off anyone in the last year, sorry you can't sponsor a work visa. You can escape this by, say, paying severance of at least a year's total compensation. The point is to remove the economic incentive of suppressing wages from the layoff-then-rehire cycle.
2. Lowering wages. Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less. Poultry farms are an excellent example of this. They pay undocuemnted workers less. If they ever start making noise about wages or conditions, you clear them out by calling in an ICE raid, pay a nominal fine, rinse and repeat.
How do we know this? Because when states actually go after employers rather than the workers, it's an economic disaster [1].
Also, we used to have a temporary worker program for seasonal and agricultural workers called the Bracero program. This filled an economic need. Eliminating it created more undocumented residents because crossing the border became too difficult and expensive.
3. A rising tide lifts all boats. There's mountains of evidence for this (eg [1]). Unions increase non-union wages. If we didn't have wage suppression by forced undocumented workers it would raise wages for everyone.
Immigrants aren't "stealing your jobs" or "lowering your wages". There's a long history of trying to blame immigrants instead of (correctly) blaming the concerted effort by capital owners to lower your wages.
> 2. Lowering wages. Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less. Poultry farms are an excellent example of this. They pay undocuemnted workers less. If they ever start making noise about wages or conditions, you clear them out by calling in an ICE raid, pay a nominal fine, rinse and repeat.
This only happens because there is no policing of companies exploiting undocumented workers. I've seen wages lowered time and time again in various industries due to the exploitation of undocumented workers. I've seen it in the restaurant industry, construction, trades, cleaning services, etc.
I wish I could find the articles that came out about this at the time- but the bakery was reported by employees, mainly black employees that were losing their jobs to the illegals and experiencing pay cuts. The company complains about losing 21 million- bc they had to start paying fair wages to get actual citizens to work. I understand your sentiment- that if there is no pay gap between undocumented workers and citizens- then the wages should go up- but in reality- you just doubled the labor pool, so wages will not go up. I also agree- we should be blaming the capital owners for this- but my opinion is that capital owners write the laws and that's why enforcement on undocumented labor is non-existent.
> The US is and always has been a country of immigrants.
This is a platitude not an argument about whether hiring tech workers from foreign countries is good for them or for US citizens.
I also don't think the value you're expressing is historically supported.
> Profits tend to fall so they want to suppress costs to maintain profits. That's it.
We have internal emails from major tech companies showing that the CEOs are conscious about how these decisions affect the labor pool and their control of it (as well as competitors). So we already know there is a plurality of motivations going on in backroom discussions.
Why the lack of curiosity?
> Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less
You just said it lowers illegal immigrants pay, not the citizens. Also this example is from the bottom of the labor market, not Electrical Engineers.
> This filled an economic need.
Yes, farm businesses would prefer to pay cheaper people without rights or benefits. That's the need it's filling.
> Unions increase non-union wages.
Being pro-union seems incompatible with the rest of your post. you think unionized companies would be with hiring some illegal immigrants on the side who aren't protected by the union?
> The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way?
Just because we needed and encouraged immigration 200 years ago doesn't mean we have a duty to never adjust policies based on current needs and realities. What was necessary in 1900 may not be desirable anymore. Surprisingly that's a fact that people usually have no problem applying to the 2nd ammendment, but is a big no no when it comes to immigration.
Edit to quote the specific part of the message I am reacting to.
Most towns in this country outside of coastal cities that do have significant immigration are hollowed out. Look at St. Louis or countless other cities satellite imagery, and tell me its somehow prudent to have every other parcel abandoned and razed as if it were bombed during a war for lack of any population growth for a half century.
Pretty much every advanced economy is seeing stagnant population growth. Integrating immigrants is one of our most important skills and we need to keep practicing it.
The government has much more control over immigration policy than individuals’ lifestyle and financial choices. Also it seems to be a pretty widespread problem, so I’m not sure which country we should steal ideas from.
Look how integration of migrants looks like in western Europe. Worshipers of economic growth don't see all the social issues mass scale immigration brings.
FWIW I'm a foreign-born US citizen and I agree with them. I think immigration is important for highly in-demand fields that can't be fulfilled by US citizens or existing permanent residents within the next 5 years. Nurses and doctors for example. Tech is not one of those fields, so I would 100% support anti-immigration policies (including outsourcing restrictions) in that sector until there is a true need for it.
This is simply untrue. The US graduates far more stem majors than they have ever done. Many fail to fine gainful employment because employers would rather cry about a phony shortage so they can hire cheap labor.
There are also a bunch of recent immigrants on threads like these who have the 'close the door after me' mindset. They also support hard restrictions on immigration, as soon as they get the green card or citizenship.
I'm a little surprised to see a number of anti-immigraiton comments on this thread, some of which you could describe as reactionary.
Threads change pretty fast and prefixing your comment with that kind of goady meta makes it strictly worse and less effective at advancing your arguments.
>> The US is and always has been a country of immigrants
The US has had periods where immigration was relatively unrestricted, and periods where it was heavily restricted.
>> Restricted immigration actually lowers wages
The US passed laws restricting immigration after World War I (Immigration Act of 1917, Immigration Act of 1924). These were in effect until 1965.
Wage growth was slower to non-existent after restrictions on immigration were removed compared to the period when they were in effect. The evidence from US history does not support your assertion. You can deny the law of supply and demand, but you can not repeal it.
> The US is and always has been a country of immigrants
Settlers founding new places are different from immigrants. The US was created by British settlers. Its language, laws, political system, and to a great extent its culture are British. If you look at various statistics, the Anglo countries share strong commonalities, even though people of British descent are now a distinct minority in the US (while being a majority in Britain, Canada, and Australia).
Over time, other people moved in. Those were immigrants. But for a long time it wasn’t immigration as we know it today. Many of them created greenfield communities, settling large swaths of the Midwest, etc. Those communities were pockets of Germans, etc., in a country that was still distinctly British.
“Immigration” since the 20th century looks quite different again. Immigrants aren’t founding new greenfield communities, they are moving into (and changing) existing ones. The place where I grew up is culturally unrecognizable now thanks to immigration (both of foreigners and of people from other parts of the country).
Its language, laws, political system, and to a great extent its culture are British.
This is ahistorical enough to have been inaccurate at the end of the 18th century when Canada and the US were barely in their larval stages. The perceived cultural and systemic distinctions were already invoked for propaganda purposes even then, curiously mirroring US/Canada tropes to this day:
By delivering abundant food with a paternalistic flair, the British sought to strengthen loyalty in Canada. Lord Grenville assured Dorchester that the aid would impress “the minds of His Majesty’s Subjects under your Lordship’s Government with a just sense of His Majesty’s paternal regard for the welfare of all his People.” In 1791 the Crown canceled that debt with a flourish meant to contrast British benevolence with the crass commercialism of the republic. Upon arriving in Canada, the king’s son, Prince Edward, announced: “My father is not a merchant to deal in bread and ask payment for food granted for the relief of his loyal subjects.” By contrast, in the republic, the bread merchants ruled and imprinted their names on their towns. In the Mohawk Valley, the people renamed one town as Paris, not after the French metropolis, but to honor Isaac Paris, a merchant and miller who had loaned them food in 1789. The British promoted a Canadian identity framed in contrast with the republic, understood as an amoral land of greedy competition where demagogues flattered the common folk but exploited the poor among them.
From: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, Alan Taylor
> If you look at various statistics, the Anglo countries share strong commonalities, even though people of British descent are now a distinct minority in the US (while being a majority in Britain, Canada, and Australia).
The preferred term for Australia's historical ethnic majority is "Anglo-Celtic" not "British"; calling it "British" can be seen as ignoring Irish-Australians.
One big difference between the Australia and the US - there was a significant minority of Irish Catholics in Australia from the very beginnings of British settlement. Although they did experience some discrimination, it was a lot less than in the US, so they integrated more quickly and easily into the establishment. People thought it was a big deal when a Catholic of Irish descent was elected US President in 1961; Australia had its first Catholic and first Irish-descended Prime Minister over 30 years earlier, and it was an event which attracted far less notice.
> Over time, other people moved in. Those were immigrants. But for a long time it wasn’t immigration as we know it today. Many of them created greenfield communities, settling large swaths of the Midwest, etc. Those communities were pockets of Germans, etc., in a country that was still distinctly British.
You seem to be drawing a "settler"-vs-"immigrant" distinction based on majority-vs-minority ethnicity. From my perspective, that's a rather idiosyncratic usage. To me, an immigrant is an immigrant, regardless of their ethnic background. A "settler" is either an old-fashioned synonym for "immigrant", or else a term for those immigrants who "created greenfield communities".
> Settlers founding new places are different from immigrants. The US was created by British settlers. ... Immigrants aren’t founding new greenfield communities, they are moving into (and changing) existing ones.
Various Native American tribes — estimated population in 1492: 60 million [0] — would like a word.
>I suppose the counterargument is that the US educational system is generally so poor that it's not generating enough people with the necessary technical capabilities to meet employer demand...
It's not the quality of the education system, it's the motivation of the students. In the mid-2000s, it was very fashionable to believe that all programming jobs should be offshored to India. People imagined that the startups of the future would have executives living in California and programmers living in India. Some VC firms would even pressure their startups to structure themselves in this way.
Now imagine it's 2006, you're 18, you're American but you're hearing that the future of programming is going to be in India. Are you going to major in Computer Science? Probably not.
Fast forward to 2012. The problems of offshoring to India are much more apparent, plus some of the most successful startups of the mid-2000s (e.g. Facebook) did not rely on offshored talent. So now people want to hire in the US. But now there's a shortage of new CS grads.
But of course, companies/executives/VCs blamed the laziness of American students and the alleged poor quality of the American education system, rather than the messages they themselves had been sending out for the previous 10 years.
>It's also rather noticeable that the VC tech investor sector wants more cheap obedient labor, and doesn't want this point raised.
I've never been able to wrap my head around VCs, executives, and others in the US who have a obvious preference for foreign-born talent, but still complain about the lack of US-born workers.
I think you're exaggerating the idea of offshoring. The reality is that tech is not a sexy sector at all and that's what pushes Americans away from it more than anything.
The people who work in tech are usually people who were never going to fit into mainstream roles anyway. If you went into tech, you weren't ever going to be in sales or marketing. Same for those who went into the arts, they didn't see offshoring of tech jobs and went, "Yeah, I should really pursue the arts."
Most of the decisions people make in the US around careers has more to do with image than it does with financial sense.
> Most of the decisions people make in the US around careers has more to do with image than it does with financial sense.
I've thought the same thing about this, it's kind of depressing. It's like science and tech are both stigmatized. These are fields that have to compensate well, because if they didn't, very few people would take interest in them
And I don't think the problem is under-funding of stem, it's more cultural
I shouldn't be complaining from a money standpoint, but from a national standpoint it's probably bad for places like the DoD which hire mostly domestic citizens
> the US educational system is generally so poor that it's not generating enough people with the necessary technical capabilities to meet employer demand
The US educational system might be generating enough people with those skills, but a very large proportion of them are foreigners who would need visas to work (40-50% of STEM postgrads: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347)
People on here don't seem to realize what an amazing asset it is that the US has a large pool of talented people that want to move there. I am from Europe and HN folks really like to look down on the European tech sector, but I would argue that the most important reason the US has a much stronger tech sector is because of the talent pool from around the world. Moving to Europe is a lot less interesting for people from around the world because of the language barrier. Honestly, for the EU it would be a gift from heaven if the US closed it's border to this talent pool and left it up for grabs.
I can see how it is an asset to businessowners. I cannot see how it is an asset to, say, qualified engineers who consequently cannot find a job in their field.
What an amazing asset, to not even have a country, just an economic zone where you get to compete with talent from all over the world. To slowly become a despised minority in what used to be your country, but the economy does so well!
I am also from Europe, and I pray the US doesn't give us this "amazing asset".
Immigration will be politically encouraged either way for demographic reasons alone. Pensioners are the strongest voting block in most of Europe and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Someone needs to be productive for the pension system to keep on working.
As a European myself, I'd much rather have the comparably educated, motivated and talented immigration Switzerland and the USA get versus what the rest of the EU is currently getting.
wake up we have the lower income of mass immigration coming to western europe just like the US but unlike USA we dont have highly educated immigrants coming to europe
> What an amazing asset, to not even have a country, just an economic zone where you get to compete with talent from all over the world.
Is this what europeans think the US is like? No country, just an economic zone? Mind if I ask how "just an economic zone" manages to produce cultural exports that most of the world has been predominantly consuming for decades? Is it the same "economic zone" that has some of the strongest national identities out there in the modern age? (not that it is an absolute positive or anything, but it would just be weird to claim that an "economic zone" has some national identity)
And competing with talent from all over the world, really? If you frame it that way, sure. I personally see it as getting to collaborate and work together with some of the best talent from all over the world, to accomplish things that often wouldn't be possible otherwise. This is the kind of a thing that makes the US a powerhouse, and not just from the economical perspective.
> To slowly become a despised minority in what used to be your country.
Ah, the european attitude towards immigration has finally shown its face. I can assure you that no american doing anything worthy with their life thinks so. Please tell me who that "despised minority" you are referring to is, and who "my" country used to belong to? Who specifically makes someone feel like a "despised minority" and how? Are you talking about Indian and Chinese software engineers immigrating to Bay Area, who then make rural american midwest farmers feel like a "despised minority"? I am legit confused how any of that tracks, so I assume you are talking about something else, so I am curious to hear you elaborate on that.
Note: I wasn't even born american (but I am white, in case you were trying to pull that "of course you disagree, because you are the minority being referenced" card), and I can assure you that I feel like less of a "despised minority" here than I do in my country of birth (where I grew up and had spent half of my life). And my country of birth was much much more homogenous in every single way compared to most large european countries, let alone the US.
> I am also from Europe, and I pray the US doesn't give us this "amazing asset".
If I were you, I wouldn't worry. Doesn't seem like Europe is going to manage to get there anytime soon, not even if they actually tried. Which they haven't yet, but judging by how well they manage to resolve any significant matters like that in Europe in general, I wouldn't place much hope on it going anywhere.
> Is this what europeans think the US is like? No country, just an economic zone?
Just enforcing your southern border is controversial and critically underfunded. I would say that is a minimum requirement to be considered a country.
> Hint: I wasn't even born american (but I am white, in case you were trying to pull that "of course you don't think so, because you are the minority being referenced" card), and I can assure you that I feel like less of a "despised minority" here than I do in my country of birth
To guarantee that minority status receives appropriate weight, the manual also suggests “placing contributions to diversity high on the list” or even making that “a criterion candidates must pass to make it to the second round”—for example, by “contributing to diversity” or “serving as a role model for URM students.” Since white candidates cannot “contribute to diversity” or “serve as role models” for students of different races, this guarantees that representatives of the correct races will get hired.
If, somehow, a committee still managed to hire white people or the wrong minorities, the manual suggests developing an audit process to identify criteria where “white candidates, male candidates . . . receive higher scores,” so that those criteria can be removed. Particularly, rigorous scientific practices like “publicly posting data, hypotheses and materials to guard against accusations of selectively reporting results or falsifying data” tends to “produce biased results”—namely, the hiring of white men. This was easily solved by “subsequently dropp[ing]” scientific rigor from “evaluation criterion” of candidate searches.
> I suppose the counterargument is that the US educational system is generally so poor that it's not generating enough people with the necessary technical capabilities
But what if it's not a policy/ed system issue but a culture/society/values choice? As a teen today, why go to college when I can try my hand at drop-shipping/digital marketing/content creation/ChatGPT startup/whatever guru du jour's shilling today
This isn't bad timing really, we just had a year of layoffs and have a federal election just around the corner. The people who are interested should read up on Trump's previous immigration policy, which looks to be considerably more favorable to domestic citizens
Historic means the year must be notable for something. Otherwise, it is just being used as embellishment here. I doubt 2023 layoffs will actually make it into the history books.
To enter a country as a non-citizen is a privilege, that a country has the right to deny for any reason or none. Just as you can deny others entry into your own home or private property, without needing to give any justification. If the border agents are not applying their own stated rules consistently or transparently then that is wrong, but you are not entitled to anything just because you put in "time and effort".
In the U.S. being a CBP is not well regarded and is generally a stepping stone for other federal law enforcement agencies due to the pension system. The guys checking passports are treated like children, I’m sure misuses of privilege can be escalated to a supervisor or complaints can be filed with the OIG or HSI even.
It’s pretty simple - software engineering compensation can be 2x-4x or more in the US compared to other western democracies. Money circumvents a lot of the problems you describe.
Here's my take: you get a work visa for 3-5 years that's tied to your employer and allows you to freely leave and re-enter the US. Believe it or not, we still have visa holders that can't leave the US without having to re-apply for their visa.
On renewal that becomes a 3-5 year visa that isn't tied to your employer. You can freely change jobs.
At the end of that period, it just becomes a green card as long as you satisfy presence tests. Naturalization has continuous and physical presence tests. Just use those. Failing that it is simply renewed for another 3-5 years.
If you satisfy the extraordinary category or get a NIW you simply skip the first step of having an employer-tied visa.
This would free up USCIS to deal with actual visa fraud rather than all the pointless hoops they currently (are forced to) enforce.
[1]: https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/columbus/news/2023/12/21/congre...