Yes, it is. But that is a reaction to what trump did. Not a pre-trump order discussion of the pros-cons and abuses of the program.
Reads like crankery to me, just the same as all the MD professors with deep and important insights into global warming.
Hell, even if we were dealing with an economist, there’s a difference between one of their blogs and their peer reviewed work. And that’s before even asking whether this particular economist is one who actually knows things.
In every field, there are people who were last in their class and just barely snuck through by copying their friend’s work. Likewise, there’s the people who were geniuses that aced everything, all while knowing in their minds that the earth is flat and that the Buddha made everything, with earth a mere reflection.
You can have people outside of the field that are very reasonable and authoritative (but generally, most are cranks) and you can have cranks within the field.
The closest that you can ever come to finding some truth is by finding a body that has a reasonable and unbiased appointment/promotion/recruiting system, and then looking at what output they were all willing to sign off on as a group.
Everything outside of that, even when dealing with experts and their peer reviewed papers still needs to be viewed with a grain of salt.
A California professor’s opinions on subjects outside of his field, posted to his personal homepage that calls out H-1B workers as virtual slave labor, is just not worth paying any attention to past the post of any other SDMB poster.
If you want to cite his sources then, by all means, do so. He, himself, is not a source.
But they do exist. I don’t feel sad for multi m/b/trillion dollar corporations not saving money by hiring cheaper non-American labor over homegrown labor.
Looks like Krugman touches on it, but to be sure: In the academic/university/research sector, H-1B’s are not in any way about hiring cheap labor. It’s about being able to get the absolute best people you can for a given position. Sometimes those are US citizens. Sometimes they are not. Skills and experience in research are often very niche, and the talent pool for a given position can be quite thin. The very best person for a given spot is often way better suited than the rest of the short list.
If, in some counterfactual world, this $100k visa program was to be operated non-corruptly …
All it amounts to is a tariff on imported labor. We’ve been around and around about how tariffs on imported goods work. It’s perfectly clear that everyone in the USA loses from trumply tariffs.
This is just more of the same failed economic logic fantasy doctrine. With an extra dose of corruption potential and racist motivations.
Personal anecdote, so not up to a quality cite, but personal experience. My wife, with her STEM Phd, is a Senior Engineer at boutique microchip (ie they produce a few thousand or few tens of thousands to specific needs, rather than churn out tons of just one type of chip). Two thirds of her peers are here on such visas, most who have been working towards the slow path of citizenship (7+ years for several).
She’s the next most junior member of her team (there’s a brand new hire) and she’s paid more than that two thirds who have years of seniority.
BUT - even that might not be enough for a lot of American students. The costs to get to a PhD in the USA is staggering, even at a state school. We’ll be paying on her student loans for decades. Other nations are much more sane about the debt loaded onto their professionals (medical, lawyers, engineers). So there are multiple factors to how/why they can afford international workers much more cheaply.
I do think a lot of the appeal though (since we’re in IMHO) is the semi-literal indentured servant option, because they don’t want to train someone up to be head-hunted by a competitor.
And for the record, I’m seem to paint my wife’s employer in a bad light, but apparently they’re considered a very good employer by the standards of the industry. They’ve had hundreds of Intel workers apply for the position because the demands and controls are exponentially more relaxed than Intel, for both domestic and international workers.
One of the unintended consequences seems to be the benefit to Canada: Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee could help Canada recruit foreign workers, experts say - The Globe and Mail
While I feel comfortable in saying that Trump’s tariffs will be a loss, I’d point to things like this recent study showing that Pandemic-caused inflation is expected to stop impacting us in 2028:
Right now, the impact from Trump’s tariffs have been fairly slight and partially muted by the deflationary pressure of people holding off from making new purchases, due to fear induced by inflation predictions.
When you consider something like tariffs on Taiwanese bolts, those will go into equipment - we’ll imagine a tractor - that might be assembled across several locations, boated around on multi-month container ship journies, before being fully assembled and put in a warehouse in the US. At that point, most farmers still have perfectly good tractors. As time moves forward, those will slowly decay and break, and gradually more and more of them will be forced to upgrade to a new tractor. Now that they have a new tractor, they plants their seeds and wait 6 months until harvest. Finally, at this point, the cost of the increased screws hits the US consumer.
In general, tariff impacts act in waves that take years and decades to fully ripple through the economy. Given the delay in enactment, it’s likely that we won’t experience most of the tariffs for another year or two.
But, that’s just a belief. It’s a belief based in math and logic, but it hasn’t yet been entirely proven to be true. It’s most likely true. But we are still waiting for the numbers to change direction. So far, they’ve been fairly stable.
See, similarly, reports about Trump’s approval rating dropping due to bad economics. So far, his approval is holding fairly steady.
That’s not even close to true in the tech world, with the possible exception of the data science careers. I haven’t seen a strong correlation between genius level IQ and 10X Engineers. In the data science world, you are looking for brilliant people, but in reality the well-rounded brilliant people usually bring more value. While it’s finally starting to change, there was a long period where I would be unable to find a suitable candidate from India. It wasn’t because they weren’t smart, it was because they went through applied science courses with little to no arts. They seemed to go to school to get a job, not to learn. This had an impact on their natural curiosity, which is what I valued most in my candidates. Obviously there were exceptions and I hired several of them, but most of their non-engineering studies were self-taught.
TLDR: Not all super employees in the tech world are geniuses, and some of the geniuses make lousy employees.
Back to the OP. It’s a grift, pure and simple. Make the Pedo-Cheeto happy and you can get an exemption. Until you do something to make him unhappy again.
Again, I also posted a cite from the left leaning Economic Policy institute, which is trusted and respected.
Also Krugman had this to say-”There are many valid criticisms one could make about the details of the H-1B program, which could definitely be improved..”.
The H!B program needs to be fixed, not destroyed with a hammer.
Maybe not everyone. but yeah. See Economics on this level must be handled with care and precision. But trump solves every problem with a hammer.
Sure, there are issues with Americas trade imbalance, and the undeclared trade war China is waging on the USA. Other presidents have reacted with carefully chosen tariffs and other trade laws. And not all presidents- in fact few- are experts in economics. But they hire true experts, unlike trump, who has hired incompetent yes men, sycophants.
To be sure, I’m giving a framework for thinking about the problem, not a literal representation of how it works.
IQ is basically a measure of how good you’re likely to be at Sudoku. That’s not entirely unrelated to how good you’re likely to be in STEM, data science, comp-sci, etc. but it’s also not an actual measurement or we’d just skip past all the skill testing and personality testing questions, during hiring, and just give everyone a standardized IQ test.
IQ is, probably, about as a good a proxy as we can point to, though. It’s likely that the distribution of talent is pretty equal, even if not an exact overlap. So if we’re looking at what it means to recruit talent, it’s measuring a very similar problem.
Both are true, but while the Amazons of the world might factor in price, those of us who don’t have entire departments devoted to the H1B process, it’s way too much of a pain to do it for that reason.
When I built my first data science team, I went to the GaTech campus looking for soon to be PhD grads in physics, computer science, and the like. There were far more foreign born choices than citizens.
The candidates that I hired straight out of grad school asked for between 5K and 30K less than what I was paying for the role. I paid them what I had set forth as the salary, not what they asked for. So they weren’t hired to save money.
So while both can be true, the lack of people is far more problematic than the money savings.
I’m just not convinced that it’s a good proxy. My data scientists were certainly devastatingly brilliant people, but my programmers probably averaged around 110-120 IQ, including my stud devs. I’ll acknowledge that I don’t expect most 10X engineers to have an IQ of 75, but it’s not the 2% problem that you used in your example. I’m pretty sure that there are probably 75-100 million US citizens smart enough to be good programmers.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in what they say; they’re never satisfied.
Fair enough, I just wanted to make sure that we’re in agreement about what constitutes a real source and a fake one. I’m willing to engage with EPI (though trusted and respected is sort of out of the table when you’re specifically recruiting with a view towards a particular outcome).
All they address, in the linked article, is H1-B wages.
I’m not in HR and I don’t have much visibility into that question. All I can offer are some reasons, on the ground, to be a bit skeptical of the high-level view.
- Companies are often acting as guarantors and otherwise having to go out on a limb to satisfy the government to hire foreigners, and keep them up to date and legal from year-to-year. Baking that overhead and risk into the wage is reasonable. Most of these individuals will go back to their home country and open a school, doing pretty well, financially. A few will convert to citizens and (presumably) make citizen money.
- The wages for someone who is planning to return to India, the Philippines, Ukraine, etc. may still be wildly high relative yo what they’d be making back home. Their lifestyle, here, on a reduced way may still be well above what they had at home and what they’re planning to return to. Ultimately, it’s not clear that this is entirely unfair. It puts upward pressure on wages for those foreign locations and downward pressure on US wages, keeping the two countries closer to parity than they otherwise would. And it’s all something that the interested parties decided to, together, in full cognizance of the realities of the situation.
- Some bosses, probably mostly at smaller and poorly run locations, are evil jerks that are doing it with the view that they can treat these workers as slaves. I’d venture to guess that these bosses are also pretty horrible to their native-born workers.
More importantly, the $100k thing doesn’t help with any of that. Charging employers more money just feeds into point 1 there and makes there be even greater pressure to offer lower wages - if the company is expected to pay the fee.
You can pass a law that says that the workers need to get fair payment. That’s not what’s been done here.
2% just happens to be the magical (i.e. arbitrary) number for genius level.
Plausibly, you could get some useful engineering output out of 50% of the population, if you gave them sufficient training and organized your workload to require lots of rote tasks. (Likely, we don’t do that because it’s just not as efficient relative to having smaller teams of more talented workers.) But the distribution of aptitude would still follow a bell curve.
Whatever cutoff point you want to choose, you’re still just talking about the distribution of aptitude and, most likely, that will follow a similar distribution as the IQ does. Maybe the true one for data scientists is more flat with thicker tails, or thinner with narrow tails for software engineers, but it’s probably some bell-shaped curve.
5% of the USA is a lot smaller than 5% of India. How to win against an opponent is still largely just a matter of multiplying the average capability of your people by their total number. If you want to ship 50 projects, you probably need at least double the number as people as if you want to ship 25.
The company who can build, ship, monitor, and maneuver more projects is far more likely to win than the company who can only do less.
Again, this is a mental framework for every day folk to understand the problem, not a literal expression of the exact mechanics.
It’s obviously personal experience, but I don’t agree. I think there is a floor below which they would not be able to code proficiently. Of the remaining population, what differentiates a mediocre coder from a great one is almost always skills unrelated to IQ. Customer focused development (thus cutting back on rewrites, scope creep, etc.), experience, social skills, mentorship, problem solving skills (often overlaps with experience), discipline, and curiosity (one of the biggest contributors), don’t seem to follow any sort of IQ bell curve.
This is probably enough of a tanget, so back to the H1B again.
There absolutely is a problem where foreigners are being hired when there are plenty of citizens available and qualified. This is often in the more common computer science areas. Javascript (and the various frameworks) programmers can be found in any given Starbucks at any given time, for example. The exploiters will hire them from overseas to save money, but also for retention purposes. It’s possible, but pretty scary for a foreigner, to change employers while under H1B status.
I don’t think that conflicts with anything I’ve said, so I think you’ve failed to grasp my point.
If I said that I’d expect ant numbers to grow exponentially, in the same way as bunnies, that shouldn’t be read to say that I think ants and rabbits are effectively indistinguishable, nor that the rates of growth per unit of time are the same. We’re purely talking about exponential growth vs, say, linear growth or logarithmic.
If I see that bunnies take over the landscape, I’d do best to assume that ants will as well.
Do you have any evidence that that is a “me” problem? I’m not the one proposing that having more geniuses on staff than the other guy gives me a competitive advantage.
Well, yeah, because I just spent three posts where I explained how that’s not what I was saying and that you shouldn’t read it that way.