[falsedan]

The quota for E-3s is 10,000/year, it gets about 30% subscribed (with new applications, renewals aren't capped), and it's providing the free and open movement of labour that the AU-US FTA requires.

but also: white Australians don't trigger racist reactions & clamping down on all Australian E-3 immigrants would not be as effect of a dogwhistle.

[hiram112]

Is it really that Americans are just not racist against Australian workers , but are racist towards brown people on work visas?

Or could it be something else?

Maybe Americans don't tend to see their whole IT and Dev departments being filled with Australians, who are NOT willing to work in high COL areas on $60k year, share apartments and a car among 6 adults, and work 60 hours a week since the money they're saving won't buy them squat once home in Australia.

This is not true for Indians and others from low wage nations.

Most Americans aren't stupid. They know that businesses here use these visas to push down wages and working conditions. Considering this, I think Americans have been pretty damn friendly to most foreign workers for quite some time.

But eventually, even the most friendly of societies is going to say enough is enough.

[falsedan]

> Is it really that Americans are just not racist against Australian workers , but are racist towards brown people on work visas?

The dogwhistle is signaling to racists exactly this: that removing the ability for spouses on H4 visas to get EAD will reduce immigration from non-white countries. So's your comment.

[TheAdamAndChe]

The issue isn't that the immigrants are coming from a non-white country. The issue is that they are coming from a _poor_ country with poor labor laws, and that they're displacing American workers in the process. Australia and other countries have similar quality of life as the US, thus immigration doesn't deleverage American workers like it does with poor countries.

You injecting race into the conversation is racist itself, and does nothing to help advance the conversation.

[falsedan]

All I’m talking about is the dogwhistle, which your comment also has.

[TheAdamAndChe]

This is like saying that socialized healthcare is a dogwhistle for communism. It's a modified form of a slippery slope fallacy, suggesting that any movement in one direction will cause an extreme movement in that direction[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

[falsedan]

No it’s not. Calls for socialised healthcare are not a coded expression calling for the overthrowing of our capitalist overlord via violent revolution. I know it’s tricky because these look similar but please accept that this is a social problem, not a logic problem, and thus traditional engineering argument techniques are completely useless.

[TheCoelacanth]

> Maybe Americans don't tend to see their whole IT and Dev departments being filled with Australians, who are NOT willing to work in high COL areas on $60k year, share apartments and a car among 6 adults, and work 60 hours a week since the money they're saving won't buy them squat once home in Australia.

How does stopping their spouses from working prevent that? If anything, they would be the least affected by this change because anyone doing that is probably young and single.

[grad_ml]

I sense BS here. Come to SF, you'll see everyone sharing apartments. Having roommate is a personal choice, either you get in debt like typical american or live frugally. If someone doesn't have family in US and knows that he'll be kicked out because of his brown color, why would he spend money? Most americans are not stupid and americans have been pretty friendly to immigrants? Plain, simple lie. America has been always racist, look back how the orientals were treated in recent past. And, I/m talking about recent past.

[darkdreams]

Wow! You don't hold back on the stereotypes do you? Practically none of the people I know do this. Infact they tend to do better wage/house wise than the general population if you take a look at the data. By no restriction of spouses on E3, it allows a person to do any job including being a Walmart cashier, hairdresser anything like that - which generally tend to be lower paying jobs - even less than 60k. There are people on h4 ead making more than 120k+. So it's not even about low wages as well. If you take a look at all the decisions taken on immigration over the past year (Muslim country ban, GC lottery and chain migration policy potential changes, extensive rfe on applications)it looks like an attempt to make immigration from non-"Western" countries tougher - which is perfectly fine. It just shouldn't be packaged as something else.

[grad_ml]

Not but also, but only. Here is the thing, spouses of h1b can only work after getting I-140. For most of the indians, when they are legit, it will take 2-4 years after they start working on fresh h1b to get I-140. For non Indians, they will mostly have green card by then, so for them, all good. for 85,000 (h1b per year) 0.7(70% indians) 3 (years) * 0.5( 50% i-140 approval), families would would be forced to live on single income.