To just blithely dismiss the positives because of your own naked self-interest. ("suppress tech worker wages"). FYI US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation, and there is full tech worker employment, your claims have no basis I am afraid.
You are not even remotely addressing the concerns of the person you are replying to. Saying the program is a "path of entry for many immigrants" while true doesn't in any case obviate the fraud, in fact it's true even in cases of fraud, it's a tautology.
There are ENTIRE multi-billion dollar businesses that are entirely based on immigration fraud. This last fiscal year TCS alone made nearly $5B in profit on more than $25B in revenue, and their entire business model is based on immigration fraud. The entire WITCH segment (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) are structured to enable, support, and advance immigration fraud for profit.
> US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation
This does not obviate wage suppression, it's merely a testament to the real value of technology.
It's been litigated and proven beyond doubt that SV companies engaged in wage-fixing, including FAANGs like Apple and Google, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
This type of behavior was a concerted effort that is provable that was taken to suppress tech worker wages. Immigration fraud is also a pathway to do so.
H1B is quite problematic in its design for sure, a sensible approach would be to determine the need for a certain job group / skill set and give people relatively long residence permits (i.e. 5 years) to come and build a life with the option to naturalise at the end. A skilled worker won’t change professions usually as that is a huge undertaking.
Instead you have company controlled visa structures where market swings can result in quite a bit of losses.
Almost anything can be seen as wage suppression, however creating a healthy market for both parties is much more important than some people significantly earning more at the expense of unfulfilled need.
What's even worse about this is that there are many many highly skilled and qualifies foreign workers in the US on H1B that absolutely deserve to be here in the roles they are filling, and their presence is negatively impacted by the sheer quantity of fraud that surrounds the H1B program through things like what is shown in the video and the behavior of body shops.
But everything checks out to what I saw: throw every qualification or certification into the job ad, no one could seriously match it
"No, it is not possible for me to ethically hire you" is... quite a take.
1. The person who has to leave won't use any goods/services in America anymore, further decreasing demand on the economy at the worst time. H-1B's are generally well paid and can afford to spend money on goods/services when employed, which probably usually sums up to more than one job's worth of labor (and not just unskilled labor, things like legal counsel too). Especially if they have family. In particular, while they are still unemployed they cost 0 jobs but still consume, so kicking them out is a guaranteed net negative until they find the next job. Which they would be most likely to do when the upturn begins, at which point it wouldn't matter anymore.
2. They are laid off and didn't find a new job. So they _aren't_ consuming a job in the US that an American could have filled - instead, the job is gone. On the contrary - if they _had_ retained/found a job in the 60 day window, they would have been allowed to stay. And they might not have gotten a new job before the next economic upturn. So the expected cost of letting them stay is more than 0 jobs but also less than 1 job.
3. It might help improve the odds for current job seekers competing for a limited job pool, but as H-1B's are on average highly qualified (the H-1B category is for specialty occupations), the job that the H-1B might have held will still not be available to most Americans and companies will probably end up with worse qualified employees (otherwise they wouldn't have hired an H-1B in the first place). So companies will be worse off, which is probably also bad for Americans as a whole on average. And those Americans who are likely hit hardest by the downturn - lower skilled labor - don't benefit from it at all.
4. The reduced supply of highly qualified labor may contribute to delaying the next economic upturn. This can have very severe mid term consequences. We see this in other areas, for example the chip shortage is _still_ causing serious issues. And considering how slow the US immigration system moves, it unlikely a (skilled) labor shortage would be any easier to solve than a chip shortage.
5. Kicking H-1B's out also means they will take any property and savings with them, instead of keeping them in the US market. Tech worker investments can be significant.
6. It is possible that their departure may lead to a job moving overseas, which is strictly worse for Americans than the job being in America and just held by a non-American (taxes etc.). Both because of reduced high skilled labor supply in the US, and because if they were already attractive enough to be employed as an H-1B, imagine how attractive it would be to get the same employee overseas, at a lower price point, and maybe with a better chance of long term retention if the company works on a new H-1B with them. All the US labor market protection mechanisms (prevailing wage determination, labor market test, etc.) don't apply to non-US subsidiaries...
Also, not deported. Deportation is one option for what happens after breaking laws and being put in removal proceedings (another would be voluntary departure). All H-1B's that I know are acutely cognizant of immigration laws and would leave if they can't find a job rather than risk incurring a ban. Either in 60 days, or maybe longer after applying for a period of satisfactory departure. Of course this distinction is primarily important for that person; the outcome for those who stay may be the same but let's have empathy.
I've interacted with DHS (the department under which immigration is housed) and they are nothing but authoritarian jack-boots who systematically destroy your civil rights, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually ask them "may I pretty please papa" on a regular basis while you wait for the next arbitrary reason for denial.
If you came here legally there's millions of illegal immigrants laughing their ass off at all your effort. ~400k removals a year with ~11M undocumented/illegal immigrants; the chances of someone undocumented being removed without committing a crime is well below 5% a year (and probably well below that, since a pretty small minority get into crime and thus disproportionately expose themselves to the system).
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re: it is not easy to retain a good middle class lifestyle long term
Something like half of illegal immigrants don't have a high school education. Yet they earn roughly the same amount as US non-high-school graduates at roughly ~25k / yr. So portraying them as earning much less than Americans without high school education would be wrong. They are earning close to same as citizen without having to go through immigration process. The higher earning illegal immigrants may be using B2B payments (possibly to offshore company they setup) or someone else's document to satisfy I-9, if they aren't working off the books.
1. Mandatory I-9 verification means you will not be able to work at any large or non-shady company. No more highly paid tech jobs.
2. You can not re-enter and therefore you cannot leave, e.g. to see your parents in your home country, business trips or international vacations.
3. You cannot renew your drivers license past your visa expiration date. At best you can get a worse alternative (depends on state; AB60 in California) that lets you drive and not much more.
4. You would live in fear of ICE. After going through the legal immigration system, I cannot even imagine the stress of interacting with the illegal immigration system.
5. At that point your chance of naturalization is gone. Even everything else being equal, leaving and legally coming back on another H-1B would've been a _much_ more appealing option.
And I don't think any illegal immigrants would be laughing at the efforts of legal immigrants. I am shocked that you would write that. I am pretty sure nearly all illegal immigrants would love to follow a legal path if there was one that was achievable for them. After all, undocumented immigrants currently pay billions of dollars in state and federal taxes every year.
It’s not easy - and not an easy life compared to having a valid work visa
Ideally, we'd spend more on education/training and less on sourcing workers from other countries - but being nice to the workers already here and making it work for small companies seems a legit altruistic move (and good PR).
Really? Still going with this? Especially the S and M?
NB: this isn't an argument against immigration. We should welcome all. But we should also truly require reasonable prevailing wages, no matter what. Otherwise everyone loses.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03478-x
[1a] graduate students are often instructors of record on courses and conduct funded research. These are jobs.
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-...
So, instead, they hold foreigners hostage (in all but the most literal sense) with poor wages and the "promise" of citizenship eventually.
No one wins - except of course the megacorps.
