[tptacek]

First, do not accuse HN commenters of shilling for their own economic agenda. There are 18 zillion different forms of message board incivility, and accusations of bad faith commenting are one of the minuscule few than the site bans overtly.

Second, if you oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases supply, lowers prices, and thus reduces wages for tech workers, do you oppose everything else that does that? Should we educate fewer tech workers? Should we do fewer things to spot underutilized tech talent? Should we have fewer remote-friendly offices, so that we can constrict the market down to only those people who are willing to live in tech hubs? Where do you draw the line?

[moistgorilla]

>First, do not accuse HN commenters of shilling for their own economic agenda. There are 18 zillion different forms of message board incivility, and accusations of bad faith commenting are one of the minuscule few than the site bans overtly.

Did you read the parent comment? It generalized that every engineer that opposes immigration is doing it because they are selfish and are only interested in money.

Also you call it that I am claiming they are shilling when I was in reality pointing out that everyone has bias and you should understand your own before criticizing others.

>Second, if you oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases supply, lowers prices, and thus reduces wages for tech workers, do you oppose everything else that does that? Should we educate fewer tech workers? Should we do fewer things to spot underutilized tech talent? Should we have fewer remote-friendly offices, so that we can constrict the market down to only those people who are willing to live in tech hubs? Where do you draw the line?

The line will clearly be arbitrary. We as a country need to decide how much certain jobs are worth and design our immigration policy around it. Unchecked immigration of unskilled labor is killing the lower and middle class and driving wages into the ground. If Americans can't find jobs it's time to ease up on immigration. Likewise if companies like Disney are laying off entire divisions to hire cheaper foreign workers then maybe H-1B visas should be reduced.

I personally think the USG should always prioritize the welfare of Americans (including recent immigrants) over foreign workers.

[tptacek]

That's fair, but you can't respond to someone's offensive overgeneralization with a direct accusation that they are hypocritically talking their own book. Don't respond to bad comments with even more badness.

As for the rest of it:

The reality is that the market's pressure to increase supply in response to extreme demand will swamp any protectionist policies we come up with. There may be no job in the world more portable than software development. We can import labor to fill the gap and enjoy the tax revenue, or we can watch more and more of world's development work be performed overseas.

I don't love our immigration policy today (this is one of the very few places where I'm a libertarian; I think we should just auction visas off), but I don't think excluding immigrants is going to help us in the long term.

[ones_and_zeros]

That's a false dichotomy if I ever saw one, and I dislike using that phrase.

The other option is if there is in fact a skills shortage, we encourage our businesses to train people already in the country first. Our education system is excellent contrary to popular belief and we have plenty of unemployed and underemployed people that have demonstrated their ability to learn new skills so why not go to them first?

Instead the path right now is some very unknown foreign college -> non competitive masters program (USC, UTDallas, UFla are common) for an F1 visa -> employee hires on OPT for 3 years of "training" -> apply for H-1B for the ones that show any promise.

So we are optimizing a system that takes students from education systems that consistently rank at the bottom globally, put them in mediocre masters programs for 2 years, train them for 3 years and we finally have something usable? Please.

[moistgorilla]

So here is what I don't understand about the supply demand argument in the context of workers. When Disney hired their IT division it was clearly because their was a need and benefit from having them. If paying the wages of that division was prohibitively expensive wouldn't they have gone out of business before they had the opportunity to outsource? So clearly on that front I think we can assume that a company similar to disney would outsource simply for profit.

Now another argument in favor of immigration is that it brings down the costs of good for everybody. Chicken will be cheaper of course when you have people working for 5 dollars an hour to produce it. Well the reality is that only 5 to 6% of the cost of producing chicken comes from wages. I'm sure if we looked at the software industry we would have the same finding.

Now what is the cost of targeting a specific field for immigration? For native workers the loss in wages is half a trillion dollars. The immigrants create a 50 billion dollar surplus. Almost all of the increase in GDP from immigrants comes from their wages at 2,053.8 billion out of the 2,104.0 billion total increase in GDP from immigrants.

So American citizens see a 50 billion dollar net increase in GDP (that is relevant to them) from increased immigration. (page 9 in the link below)

So we are taking half a trillion dollars from targeted workers for a 50 billion dollar increase to the overall population.

The 50 billion dollar surplus seems like a lot thinking as a normal person but 50 billion is nothing when talking about GDP. So from what I see, the only purpose targeted immigration at a specific field serves is to divert money from workers to employers

In the same chart on page 9 it shows that the surplus is received by the native businesses that benefit from the cheaper workers.

also consider this, do we want to create an america where we have a clear divide between workers and owners because we constantly artificially inflate the supply of workers using immigration?

also I think it's a little hypocritical that we aren't bringing in other white collar workers, we should have A-1B for attorneys and B-1Bs for bankers, I'm sure people in other countries will clamor to learn american law and finance for a chance to come here

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...

[hkmurakami]

My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.

Having a bias is the same thing as having an opinion. We are each free to have our own opinions and preferences. Disagreeing is part of this, and even if we disagree about our own preferences, I hope that we can empathize with where the other party is coming from and what the basis of their opinion is. To have an opinion is not to be a hypocrite, to borrow your words.

What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development). There is a glaring lack of empathy for why someone could reasonably and justifiably hold an anti development position (anyone who opposes development is automatically a NIMBY, just as you pointed out that I have generalized all tech workers who oppose immigration to be doing so out of their personal self interest -- which is a gross simplification that I apologize for making). Similarly, when they demand empathy for their housing plight, they do not share the same empathy for their fellow engineers who similarly want to have access to greener pastures. But despite the lack of consistency, I can understand why they would take each of their positions.

[moistgorilla]

>My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.

My suggestion may go against your preference since it wont always help your engineer friends but I think dynamic targeted immigration at jobs that are suffering from worker shortage is the solution. What we have now is a disaster though, a long lasting law targeting fields that may not even need the increased supply in workers anymore.

I personally have nothing against immigrants, the people I have met are in general amazing. But I have my own interests to take care of before I can consider others.

Also H-1Bs target IT in general but is the sort of IT that disney laid off really facing a labor shortage?

>What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development).

I'm not from the bay area so I don't know the fine details of the housing market but are you talking about engineers supporting building more apartments? Also if they are acting in a hypocritical way you would be right to call them out on it.

[hkmurakami]

And I respect your well reasoned position, even if it does go against my own interests -- even after being called a hypocrite ;)