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by pbiggar
4808 days ago
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Immigrant engineer here. Do immigrant engineers depress wages? Of course. Trivial supply and demand (and I'm surprised to see a supposed economics blog make unintuitive assertions without providing any evidence). You can already see wages rising rapidly as a result of the already low supply of engineers. Kids coming out of Stanford are getting 6-figure offers at Google. If there were less engineers, lots of companies wouldn't be able to hire at all, leading to no option but to increase their offers to attract talent. But the thing this article got wrong (which is the same mistake made by anti-H1B articles) is asking the wrong question (though it touched on it at the end). Is it better overall with immigrant engineers? Is the economy better? Are companies able to do better (therefore providing more taxes) as a result, or able to build better things (such as the google car or glasses)? Finally, I'll note that moving to the Bay Area does not necessarily result in 5x salary, but even when it does, it doesn't result in 5x standard of living. If I had stayed in Dublin, I'd be on a similar salary (maybe 20% lower), but I'd be earning over 3x the average salary and so be able to have a much higher relative standard of living. The downside of living in SF with a good salary is that everybody has a good salary. |
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n.b. While this is true about many people in our social circles, this is not broadly true of San Franciscans. About 15% or so of households are below the poverty line. Another 35% or so have household incomes which are meaningfully less than what AmaGooBookSoft pay for college interns.