Why Silicon Valley Wouldn't Work Without Immigrants(nytimes.com) |
Why Silicon Valley Wouldn't Work Without Immigrants(nytimes.com) |
- The argument against H1B isn't an argument against immigration or immigrants, it is an argument against corporate welfare. This pretty much negates all of the points the author makes (We all agree immigrants provide diversity, some are net positives on the economy, sometimes talent doesn't exist in the US, etc)
- H1Bs aren't allowed to start companies, so this point is moot
- It isn't surprising that many companies are founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. The entire nation is made up of immigrants. The same point that could be made is that most rank and file worker drones are immigrants or children of immigrants.
- startups valued at more than 1 billion dollars? OK...
- "Uber, Tesla and Palantir, had created thousands of jobs and added billions of dollars to the American economy" and those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy on the backs of immigrants.
- I love Stripe, but I have a hard time believing he couldn't find "engineers and executives" already in the US to "create a novel machine-learning system to detect fraud; and it had to convince regulators and other businesses that it was safe and legal to process payments through Stripe"
Which argument against H1Bs are you referring to? Because Steve Bannon's, which may well be the most influential in government policy right now, was embedded against an argument that also specifically called out the overall proportion of immigrants in the US population as a problem. It is, quite directly, an anti-immigrant argument.
Explain. As I see it, none of these companies could hire enough in the US to exist here at all without H-1Bs. They would have to move operations somewhere else if they couldn't bring people here. I've never worked on a team at Google that was more than a third from the US.
Tech companies already have offices around the world since not everyone wants to or can move here. If there were fewer work visas, they would just hire less in the US and more abroad.
>H1Bs aren't allowed to start companies, so this point is moot
People who started the immigration process on H-1B do. They are one of the only ways to effectively come here. Getting a green card can take 8 years for someone from a large country.
Whatever the "arguments" may be for or against, the policies that fall out of those arguments have an impact on immigration and hiring practices.
-- So are you saying we should let H1bs start companies and not be reliant on the job?
-- "It isn't surprising that many companies are founded by immigrants or children of immigrants."
50% of the company is not immigrants. 50%! That number is mind blowing. That is much higher than the country as a whole.
-- "startups valued at more than 1 billion dollars? OK..."
?
-- "those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy"
You think immigration is to blame for income inequality?
-- " I have a hard time believing "
This is not an argument. You're just asserting that he is lying without any argument.
You're very obviously wrong. The employees of Tesla and its suppliers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value from the existence of Tesla. If Tesla survives for 20 years, that tally will be in the multiple hundreds of billions. Elon Musk will end up owning a single digit percentage of that value creation. The same is true about nearly all successful corporations. Of all the financial value created by Google over its existence, Larry & Sergey (and the early Google investors, most of whom liquidated not long after the IPO) will end up having owned a tiny sliver of it.
Uber's drivers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value created by Uber. Over a 20 year span, that number will dwarf what Kalanick and Uber's investors extract. Further, Uber riders will derive a similarly extreme financial value over what Kalanick does, through convenience / time saved etc.
Good luck naming a company that isn't true for.
(I think it is a weak point for me to make, but I'm pretty sure there won't be Uber drivers in 20 years, probably not in 10.)
I agree with the article that tech doesn't work like a factory, it's people are not necessarily fungible.
However, attracting the very best people is not how the H1B visa system is being (ab)used at the moment - for example the minimum wage was set back in 1989, and should be more like $130,000 in 2017, given inflation. So much as it pains me to agree on anything with Trump, I do accept the point that it needs a review. And if the terms were set fairly, there's no reason it couldn't be extended to allow many more people to participate.
Lots of people, some of them quite publicly—including Steve Bannon, Trump's Chief Strategist in that latter group—do. Some because they are competition for jobs, some because of general xenophobia, some for other reasons.
Bannon has specifically criticized legal immigration generally, and the "progressive plutocrats of Silicon Valley" and the H1B program and the preponderance of Asians (calling out both South and East) in tech specifically. If you think he's only interested in curbing "less skilled" immigration, you're mistaken.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-explained-his...
The travel ban was the first thing I've heard from him that was abhorrent and the near universal smack down it's received from every direction gives me hope that Trump will be kept in his place by our established checks and balances.
The bill just introduced to cut the number of green cards issued in half, eliminate the diversity lottery, and impose permanent cuts in the number of admitted refugees would be exhibit 1.
Respectfully: you have not been paying close attention.
Basically they're playing up one angle in the hopes it will cause sympathy in others who are not affected. Employers don't want to seem "exclusive" do they have to send out pro forma communications about their inclusiveness and vision of one world even when they are not affected or minimally affected by the bans.
They probably lose more money in the form of lost sales due to export restrictions to other places, but you don't see the dame dire warnings of a threat to viability.
Part of the reason is that it isn't a context free skill. The athlete analogy is effective here. You know that there are generally good athletes but you don't know which one will be LeBron. And general athletic ability doesn't translate to all sports (witness Jordan playing baseball or golf).
I wish there was a way to convince people who disagree but I really think they think this is just a cover for shipping in low paid workers.
I had started making plans to leave in late 2014. I convinced myself that if the administration does not do anything to fix green card backlogs by end of that calendar year, I should leave in 2015. Obama's State of the Union address gave new hopes, and I stayed back. The promises made then went through the red tape and USCIS finally published its ruling last November [1]. Unfortunately it did not contain any relief for skilled immigrants stuck in green card backlogs.
My current plan is to wait until end of this calendar year to see how things progress. My green card priority date is April 2012 and, as things stand now, I am still many years away from getting a green card. I will re-evaluate in December. If I don't see this administration making any concrete plans to fix things for the green card backlog, I will leave in 2018.
H.R.392: Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017 [2] gives me hope. It currently has 66 co-sponsors [3] and will hopefully pass.
H.R. 392, Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act replaces the current per-country caps
on immigration with a first-come first-served visa system without increasing the total number
of available visas. The current system of awarding no more than 7% of available employment-based
visas to one country is discriminatory. It ultimately imposes decades-long wait times for people
from some countries, creating a backlog of qualified workers. The bill makes no changes to the
current law limiting US employers to hire foreign workers except when there are no qualified,
willing, able, and available American citizens.
[2] http://chaffetz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentI...
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392/...
>They’re looking for the LeBrons and Bradys — the best people in the world
The LeBrons and Bradys of IT would not have any trouble obtaining a work permit or even citizenship from any country in the world -- but given the statistical rarity of superstars (by definition a superstar exists at the top of their profession, even one dominated by highly-skilled people), why would the US need to admit 85K (60K H1-B and 20K master's exempt) immigrants to find them?
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...
- Secondly, right now, it is the only pathway for legal immigration. If you don't qualify for the family-based or refugee route, employment-based immigration is the only viable pathway. The amount of hate I see piled on people trying to come here via the employment-based immigration is insane. The thing that infuriates me about the dialogue on H-1B visas is that they are effectively trying to ban skilled immigration, and exclude people like me from coming. I've written about my personal story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13530886
- Thirdly, the HN user ones_and_zeros is one of the most immigrant-hating users on HN, and is capable of spewing incredibly hateful vitriol against immigrants, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313462 To begin with, he believes in a bunch of lies (like the not being able to change jobs part). But even if he got his facts straight, his views are so extreme that only a total and complete ban of all immigrants might satisfy him. It's better not to engage with balls of hatred like the HN user ones_and_zeros. Talk to him enough, and you realize that he just hates every immigrant from the depths of his heart.
* H1B wage increase: I heard a rumor somewhere that they were thinking about raising the minimum wage for either H1B visas or NAFTA jobs to $130k. That shouldn't affect the Googles and Apples of the world at all; if anything, it benefits them because it frees the slots the cheap H1B outsourcing firms are taking up, or removes competition from low-paying startups.
* Increased enforcement against illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico. The "best of the best" that the article claims the tech industry wants should be able to get employees under NAFTA; I know people from Canada who do this already. So any policies targeted at illegal immigration shouldn't be relevant.
* Muslim ban: The green card/visa issues have other arguments against them. One could plausibly say that not honoring those legal documents makes hiring foreigners riskier. As for the actual people themselves though, 6 of those 7 countries we're currently at war with. Maybe not officially or directly, but we've been dropping bombs on those countries for years so they seem a special case. Is the article claiming that Google is expecting top-of-the-line MIT-quality software people from war-torn Syria? I know Israel has some pretty high-quality people; are there other places in the Middle-East(maybe Dubai)?
Is there any specific policy that people are worried will hurt hiring at tech companies, or is it just a general uneasiness about anti-immigration sentiment?
I'd love to see the H-1B visa cap expanded, I'd just like it to be done alongside a move to let workers actually enter the labor market like citizens. The current "must pay market rates" setup is a bizarre attempt to duplicate market results under a command system, and we see all of the mis-labelling and other abuses we'd expect with that approach.
I did see that as of 2017 there's a brief window to find a new visa'd job after leaving an H-1B position, which is a nice start. But I'd really rather see the thing reformed via something like "he's a skilled labor visa, go for it". Even if employers were still forced to apply for visa slots it'd be progress to say "here are people with visas, here are companies with slots, coordinate however you'd like".
The solution to H1B abuse is to abolish the visa category entirely.
The solution to "there is insufficient domestic supply of high-skill labor, and making more foreign workers available for domestic work of this kind would, with appropriate controls, produce a public benefit", if that is really the case, is to design a system with appropriate controls that does that, which probably won't look much like the H-1B program. It'll start with an analysis of the real nature and extent of the shortage, and the nature of the opportunity for public benefit.
Truth be told, I'm actually not that concerned. The pool of good programmers, even worldwide, is not that big, and as a decent programmer, I don't feel threatened by some companies going for the absolute cheapest people they can get. I figure they'll get what they pay for and things will work out in the end.
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
Now I realize that there are real specialties that you can't train someone for that easily, and if that's the case, then those people should be making a lot of money no matter where they are located.
Lower wage, and high wage workers are different and a VISA program designed for one isn't going to necessarily be fair to another.
Currently, employer influence of H1-Bs is high because they can essentially deport you when you get fired and you lose the life you built in the USA. That's not 'fair', but its at least mitigated if (a) you pay a very high wage and (b) the employees are in high demand globally so sending them out of the USA isn't really a downturn in their lives.
1998, under the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act[1]. $60,000 in 1998 would be about $89,000 today, after adjusting for inflation. Trump's initiative is around $40K above that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_and_W...
I have a hard time believing $89k is the equivalent of $60k in 1998. Gas was $1 a gallon, average rent in LA was $900, health insurance was $35 a month, DOW was at 9k.
The internet has an evil-genius ability to push all our buttons and drive us all crazy. There often isn't enough information to know for sure what anyone else means or intends, and imagination—drawn from our personal experience, i.e. data about us, not the other—fills in the gaps. This happens especially when strong feelings come up. At that point we start responding not to the real others, whom we have next to no data about, but to evil cartoon characters who vaguely resemble them. We end up feeling surrounded by our own demons.
The way out of this dynamic is for all of us to give one another the benefit of the doubt. It's a big risk, so we all need to be scrupulous about it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598500 and marked it off-topic.
I think you know all that isn't true and I think the readers can see through those accusations and it ultimately devalues your input to the discussion.
(For the record I want an automatic green card for skilled immigrants and a higher bar for what counts as a skilled immigrant. I want a massive expansion of refugee immigration into the US. I want automatic green cards for unskilled immigration where they have created roots in the US)
Honestly, there are no words more hateful than what you said, for an immigrant. I've been in the United States for 10 years now, since I was 17. It feels like home now, and my friends, my community, are all here now. To quote Justice Louis Brandeis, "[deportation] may result also in loss of both property and life; or of all that makes life worth living." You want to destroy my life.
If I'm mistaken about you, and if you truly want to have a constructive private conversation about this; add your email to your profile, and I'll contact you.
But in general it is the rise of anti-immigration sentiment, and the instability with respect to immigration.
There's the case of green cards for Indians and the Chinese. Under the current system, Indians and Chinese workers who start the process of getting a green card today must wait at least 13 years to get it. The prospect of working under a temporary visa for the best years of your life, always under the shadow of a change in administration or policy that uproots you and sends you back to your place of birth is likely to deter a lot of people, and might tempt them to move to Europe or Canada instead.
This is a lose-lose situation because these people don't get to work at the cutting edge of tech, and also the companies that desperately need bright minds lose out on them because they sensibly decided not to risk the US's broken immigration system.
This wasn't always the case, by the way. It's a pretty recent development over the last few years. Since green cards are allotted by place of birth and are a fixed number for every country, it is far easier for a person from Afghanistan to become a permanent resident than for an Indian.
I guess that makes sense. If you have a low opinion of Trump starting out, then hearing about his upcoming "immigration reform" is like the Pointy-Haired Boss telling you not to worry about that race condition in the billing server because he "fixed" it: It just makes you more worried.
> Under the current system, Indians and Chinese workers who start the process of getting a green card today must wait at least 13 years to get it.
That sounds terrible. Would plans to make the requirements more strict(such as requiring them to work a high-paying job, or sorting them by the salary of the sponsoring employer) help alleviate this, since the queue will be shorter?
> They’re looking for the LeBrons and Bradys — the best people in the world
"High-quality" means "would pass an interview at a top tech company that your typical US mediocre programmer or CS graduate would fail", or perhaps "could work as a senior executive at a top tech company". The article is presenting an argument that hiring at tech companies would be affected; humanitarian concerns are irrelevant to that argument.
FTA: On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.
The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”
“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly.
“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.
_____
edit:
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/2/14472404/ste...
A Vox piece provides a more detailed transcript of Bannon's views:
"BANNON: You saw these guest workers. You saw the CIS report yesterday. You saw that, what is it, 61 million? Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, is not illegal immigration? As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem, we’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country? When you look and there’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country, is immigrants — is that not a massive problem? You were with Jeff Sessions for many, many years. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?"
Beyond the obvious awfulness, the "progressive plutocrats" bit is impressively slimy. I guess he had to name their politics to differentiate them from Trump's record as a plutocrat employing immigrants at (illegally) low wages?
Only in that the political backlash was unexpected, forcing the Administration to backpedal.
So the problem is that two-fold: hard salary cutoffs translate poorly between locations, and $130k is enough to price out most parts of the country almost entirely.
Raising the salary cut-off to $130k would basically be urban protectionism: you could hire visa workers for well-paid but unexceptional tasks in NYC, SF, and Boston, but only for exceptional expertise everywhere else.
Yes, it has.
The market capitalization of listed US companies, according to the World Bank, was $25 trillion. [2]
Assuming average gains of 10% per year in the stock markets, which stockholders would be glad to receive, I think, employees receive 4x as much as stockholders of listed companies.
1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A033RC1A027NBEA
2: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?name_desc...
i'd say $60k 20 years ago is more like $120k today... and that's being generous.
The poster just happened to cherry pick things that have increased faster than inflation: refined petroleum, coastal city housing, and health care.
As an aside, people's perception of health care increases are driven by factors somewhat decoupled from a reasonable measurement of actual cost increases:
- employers have steadily shifted a larger fraction of healthcare premiums onto employees
- older people's healthcare is dramatically more expensive than young people's (actuarially). The fact that everyone alive has aged 20 years means your perception of cost is dominated by the age curve, not the steady-age cost
This is true, it's a major reason the public understanding of health care cost growth doesn't mirror health care spending growth. But it's also meaningful, because it defines consumer spending, and it's not usually accounted for.
Healthcare's piece of the CPI basket is ~5%, but for a lot of people the real share has grown rapidly and is ~20%. Which means that using a CPI calculation to scale income is a problem - one of the faster-than-inflation segments has rapidly taken over much of the basket.
If it does, the effects will only be seen in a couple of decades. A lot things can change by then. What would be better would a system where countries get green cards proportional to their population. It makes no sense for Fiji to be awarded the same number as India.
That makes sense, since it's reasonable to assume that high-quality employees are a percentage of the population.
Having a global fixed number of immigrants rather than a per-country pool would also work: If A has a population of 10, B has a population of 20(with similar quality percentage), and the pool is 6, then A gets 1/2 the amount admitted as B. If A's population rises to 20, then they'd get the same amount as B. So it would be proportional to population within the pool.
The only reason to prefer per-country fixed limits is if you wanted diversity. The meaning of "diversity" here is approximated by "variance of sampling immigrants' original home government from a uniform distribution over all governments".
There is already a separate 50k green cards set aside for "diversity lottery", so that concern should not affect the desire to remove per-country caps for skilled immigration green cards.
"Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we got to get sorted out here, is not illegal immigration, as horrific as that is and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem and we’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration..." -- Bannon
"... and how it’s overwhelmed the country? When you look and it’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country is immigrants. Is that not a massive problem?"
I don't know about those numbers, they seem to come from a right-wing think-tank called the Center for Immigration Studies [1], but wasn't Bannon claiming that there are too many immigrants? Which wouldn't be the same as wanting to stop all immigration.
1: http://cis.org/61-Million-Immigrants-and-Their-Young-Childre...
> While Bannon didn’t explicitly say anything against immigrants,
then adds the partisan spin:
> he seemed to hint ...
When asked about students staying back in the country after going to Ivy league schools the quote is
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Which implies that he would prefer fewer legal immigrants. The three-quarters figure is of course a gross exagerration.
link : https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-donald...
The part where he says, "a country is more than a economy, it's also a civic society" in the context that there are more south asian CEO's in silicon valley is terrifying.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...
I'd like to hear the quote in context and not speculate or repeat partisan spin based on one sentence he once said.
I think that's a fair characterization of his position. Fewer.
But I'm asking about a source for the claim "[Steve Bannon] wants to stop skilled immigrants from coming to America".