[sparkling]

> "Cities’ productivity would increase, as would the wages of native-born high-skilled Americans, if more H-1B workers and skilled permanent residents were allowed to come."

Please stop with this non-sense. You can be for or against the H-1B program, i don't care, but there is zero doubt that US citizens would be collecting way higher paychecks if the H-1B program did not exist. Thats simply supply and demand on the (tech-)labour market.

[marcell]

Disagree. There may be a short term bump, but long term it would be damaging. Tech workers are value creators. Having a hub of talent like SV increases value and salaries for everyone here because it attracts companies here, increasing demand along with supply. If there’s no talent in SV, there’s also no companies here. They’ll just move overseas to where the talent lives.

[garyfirestorm]

Again, I have mentioned this in different threads. H1B isn't just for SV. There's way more companies in US like automotive industry that needs multidisciplinary engineers (mechanical, controls, signal processing, programming, active system knowledge). It's just impossible to find people. My team has about 3 empty vacancies with job postings everywhere, we just can't find people with skills (I am on H1B, there aren't enough people in many fields) stop applying H1B = cheap tech jobs logic.

Also, the Masters degree I pursued (in mechanical engineering - Dynamics/Vibrations/Acoustics) had barely a couple of American kids vs ~8 foreign kids.

[nickserv]

Exactly. If you really care about being competitive, invest in education and social services. Then the locals can compete effectively for high value jobs.

[amf12]

Stop equating H1B with cheap labor. This is gross generalization. There certainly are some companies taking advantage of the program by paying H1B's less, but most of the people on H1B get paid the same as an American citizen would get paid. There is a mandatory step in an H1 application called Labor Condition Application [1] which needs to be approved by the US Government. This makes sure that the H1B applicant is being paid same or higher than the average wage for that occupation in the area.

People on H1B can't even change their location without filing another such application. So, no, H1B immigration does not lead to lower wages for citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application#At...

[Daishiman]

If the entire value a tech worker creates is properly captured by their salary, sure.

But if that were the case then no one would bother with spending the insane amounts of money it costs to get qualified foreign labor.

Talent is global and the difference a skilled individual adds to a company has a multiplicative effect.

[sparkling]

You seem to assume that foreign labour can only be used if imported to the US. That is not the case, consider remote talent.

[Daishiman]

Remote talent pours those same resources into another location to its benefit. Which is fine for the other countries; not so good for the US's position as a tech hotspot.