And also, there's a proposal to _finally_ require that H1-B's are paid no less than median pay for the jobs, when visa issuance is resumed. Companies are fighting it tooth and nail, obviously, but I think they'll lose this time.
A lot of people are under the assumption that H1-B workers are all about saving on salary costs when this is actually not the full picture and actually leads to misguided arguments in the media and discussions that I have observed. As someone who has worked with many many H1-B workers in the past decade, I can tell you that H1-B workers are hired not because they are "low cost" but because they are willing to put in long hours and are very agreeable to tough working conditions. They are generally agreeable to managers and will not typically complain about or call out ethical/legal concerns when they arise. On top of all of this, companies understand that they can mistreat H1-B workers as much as they want because most of them cannot switch jobs for years due to their visa situation. Simply put, H1-B workers are highly sought after because they have little effective working rights compared to American workers. And after decades of H1-B reliance, companies have been able to transform the American working culture by making this the norm. Even American workers must now adhere to these types of working conditions as in many top companies, H1-B workers make up the majority of the workers.
> As someone who has worked with many many H1-B workers in the past decade, I can tell you that H1-B workers are hired not because they are "low cost" but because they are willing to put in long hours and are very agreeable to tough working conditions.
Pointing out the obvious here: Long hours = low cost
Yes and no. You get to hire PhDs and senior developers into entry level positions, with entry level pay, and then keep them there until they get a green card and show you the middle finger. Glorified indentured servitude. And I say this as a former H1-B myself (sponsored by Microsoft). Once I got a green card (which, BTW, took 7 years), my career took off like a rocket. Elsewhere.
They pay similar _at the levels where they are hired_. That's what the letter of law requires. They just hire them at lower levels to pay less. And where they _really_ want to save costs, they hire the typical Indian sweatshops which are full of H1Bs who are overworked and paid peanuts. That's why the overall number of people working at e.g. Microsoft or Google can be nearly double their FTE count.
Sorry, that's just not correct. Microsoft or Google does not intentionally try to hire people at lower levels based on their immigration status. They do outsource some IT work to companies like Infosys or TCS which are Indian sweatshops but not their FTEs.
Many grads graduate from top tier universities and get the same level as their American counterparts. Please have some respect for the law abiding students, who pay full tuition and taxes only to get shit on on this forum and by the President and his phonies.
> Requiring equal wages is almost like banning it.
It's not designed to be "equal". It never was. It's (nominally) for importing highly skilled workforce, which, naturally, would be earning somewhere in the upper quantiles, their ESL English notwithstanding. Instead it's mostly used to depress entry level wages for recent grads as well as to reduce overall cost of labor by dramatically boosting supply.
> I want none of that.
Why? Seems like fresh grads could use help getting started, and so could the folks recently laid off due to COVID. And so, by the way, could US citizens from disadvantaged backgrounds, a lot of whom would be competing for entry level positions. What's so bad about increasing wages in the entry level segment, and increasing demand for native talent in that segment? Remember, some of the companies in question are inching towards multi-trillion dollar valuations.
> It's not designed to be "equal". It never was. It's (nominally) for importing highly skilled workforce, which, naturally, would be earning somewhere in the upper quantiles, their ESL English notwithstanding. Instead it's mostly used to depress entry level wages for recent grads as well as to reduce overall cost of labor by dramatically boosting supply.
I'll grant you that immigration depresses the wages of the field they get in to: but thats true of any importation. Immigration restrictions are like tariffs, just on people instead of goods. Importing iphones from china also depresses wages of those who would manufacture them in the US.
Its the wrong way to look at it, its really not economics. If an immigrant produces X and gets paid X - Y, the country gets richer, period. And if the X-Y is used within the united states it becomes a virtuous cycle: if instead the immigrant works from outside and exports into the us, americans lose on demand and the American governments gift taxes to other governments.
If there are good reasons for immigration, they are not going to be economic, and this is so widely accepted in economics that its truly absurd to argue otherwise.
> Why? Seems like fresh grads could use...
Whatever conceptualization you make about the economic effect of immigration will have to be backed by the limitations of imports which have the exact same effect. Unemployment is not caused by immigration at all, it's even the other way around: any immigrant spends in the US creating demand for other jobs.
