[SilverElfin]

> Dependence on H1B and other visa dependent workers leads to lower salaries

It does not generally. H1B employees are more expensive usually. In most companies - like any notable tech company - they are paid exactly the same due to fixed compensation plans, but cost more to the company once you include legal fees, processing fees, and especially the time delays and risks. It’s not even close in terms of a cost comparison. This isn’t a controversy among people who are actually involved in hiring and compensation - it’s well known. But this perception persists.

[fc417fc802]

They don't have to undercut their coworkers on an individual level. When a position that could otherwise reasonably be filled by an American is gated for any unnecessary reason, be it undesirable pay or excessively specific requirements or whatever else, that effectively removes that position from the domestic job market. When that is repeated many times the end result is the same number of domestic applicants competing for fewer positions. That results in downward pressure due to basic supply and demand.

That's fine if there's a genuine need for a specific sort of specialist and the US simply isn't producing enough of them. But when it's silly hyper specific requirements it becomes detrimental.

[bijowo1676]

tech salaries have only increased and never decreased. Not in 2000, not in 2008, not in 2020.

Your narrative runs against the facts on the ground.

Not only foreign workers were part of the reason US tech dominates the world, they also greatly contributed to every single major invention in tech, including the Attention paper which led to Transformer based LLMs.

All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives are exploiting either ignorance (foreigners undercut wages, while wages have tripled and more) or motte-and-bailey tactics (WITCH bad and H1B fraud bad, lets abolish all immigration)

[fc417fc802]

That's highly deceptive. To start with, salaries have to increase just to tread water given inflation. Beyond that, there's nothing wrong with a position that produces a large amount of value being compensated in accordance. If a particular sector does well we should expect salaries to rise relative to the economy as a whole.

The question is simply whether a policy would depress wages relative to not having that policy, and it's merely one of many factors that should be carefully considered when weighing the costs and benefits.

> All of these stupid anti-immigrant narratives

You reveal your own biases. Personally I'm originally from academia. I'm accustomed to a workplace where citizens are only barely a majority and of those many are naturalized immigrants. I have no qualms with importing labor that's significantly more skilled than the average american in cases where doing so benefits our society on the whole. Neither do I have qualms with filling jobs that are legitimately unwanted or that we truly don't have sufficient local talent to support. However I'll note that the last one there is exceedingly rare.

[bijowo1676]

you know what would depress wages even more?

not having H1B foreigners like Elon Musk or Satya Nadella create/grow companies that employed tens of thousands Americans and created trillions of value for investors.

Remember it was White American Steven Ballmer who almost ruined Microsoft (he took MSFT at $620 bln and left at $280 bln valuation), and it took a foreigner like Satya to bring it to $4 trillion.

not having foreigners who could discover Attention mechanism or Transformer based models that led to AI boom.

US would literally be indistiguishable from Europe's lackluster development and growth, would you want US look more like EU ?

All of the wignats who complain and bitch about immigration completely forget or take for granted all the tech progress made in the US by foreign workers, and all the non-tech jobs that get created thanks to tech work being done by foreigners.

Just visit any graduate program in the top tier US university lab, visit any leading scientific conference, or lookup nationalities of top cited research papers, and imagine USA without all those talented people with foreign sounding last names.

That will be proper comparison

[fc417fc802]

It appears you didn't bother to comprehend what I wrote before replying. I don't think this is the right venue for political grandstanding.

[bijowo1676]

quite the opposite, all of H1B opponents imagine current wealth and state of tech will preserve the moment immigration stops and their loud temper tantrums are satisfied.

that American capitalists are stupid enough to overpay underskilled Americans, the moment H1Bs are banned or limited, instead of opening satellite offices outside US

[watwut]

Elon Musk is causing way more harm then benefit to America itself and its economy. I dont think he is a good example of a positive effect of immigration.