220 Comments

It's in the post, but needs to be louder: the alternative to importing more skilled labor is offshoring more skilled jobs.

Every time we open a tech role we are carefully weighing the pros of putting it in the US versus the cost advantages of putting it in India. This is happening at every major company I know. Without skilled immigration the balance will rapidly move offshore. That's what stopping visas will do.

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True.

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In the short term, yes, but in the long term, isn't the alternative growing more American STEM talent?

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No one has stopped white Americans from choosing STEM fields. There’s no quota reserved for Asians in STEM. Many white Americans simply refuse to get into it because of fear of competition, not because they’re not capable or don’t have the option.

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I wasn’t implying that there’s any kind of quota against natural born Americans in STEM. I meant more like, how do we *encourage* more Americans to go into STEM?

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Asians in STEM are also natural born Americans. That’s why I specifically referred to white Americans. Based on my experience, many of them are more attracted to more glamorous professions like finance or marketing or consulting. They don’t like pure desk jobs.

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I really appreciate Noah's perspective on this. I've worked in the tech industry for 35+ years and have previously harbored some bitterness regarding H1-B tech hiring, but I've worked with dozens upon dozens of Indian nationals over the years and feel like, if anything, many are exploited during their time in the US. You would not believe the housing situations a lot of H1-B holders have to go through to have the privilege to work in this country. I will observe that there are significant numbers of working people from the Dalits and untouchables classes in India who constantly have to contend with brutal discrimination in their jobs - the same kind of discrimination that they experience in their home country. Just anecdotally speaking, I've talked with a few about this over the years and I think the problem is real. But given my experience and track record, I don't think I've been affected except marginally, in a good way, by skilled people coming to the US in my career. What would be more destructive would be what Miles notes above - offshoring would almost certainly accelerate. I have other complaints about the technology working environment, but that's not germane here. I always feel calmer and more informed reading Noah's work. Keep it up!

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The part about Dalits and untouchables being discriminated against in the US is a completely made up story. I suspect that the part about housing is too.

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Also, someone needs to explain how the salaries of senior software engineers in major tech hubs have tripled or quadrupled in the last decade if shortage wasn’t an issue. These low IQ racists need to spend some time on levels.fyi.

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The concern is typically about H1b use by outsourcing companies, when they are used to replace existing IT workers.

An estimated 20-25% of H1b visas are used by these companies. Business IT salaries have not doubled or tripled, and H1b was not designed to replace existing US workers. When this happens, IMHO it is a misuse of the visas, and objections to this are affecting the perception of the entire visa class.

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I think that's a legitimate concern. Microsoft laid off its entire IT staff ~6 years ago and outsourced it to Tata Consultancy. I know this because I got roped into a subcontracting role at Tata's main office in Redmond when they were trying to get their entire operation up and running and were having a lot of trouble doing so. The building was packed with Indian workers, most or all of whom I suspect were there on short-term visas. (The break rooms were packed with ping pong tables, which was a bit more humane touch, I thought.) I got to see a few of the original Microsoft IT facilities in some of the buildings in Redmond and those server rooms were full of ghosts. I knew why those spaces were empty.

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People who are replaceable will be replaced one way or another. With most companies taking a cloud only or hybrid approach, the need for IT workers has reduced significantly in the last 15-20 years. You can’t have the high salaries in tech and job security at the same time. Even in Business IT the salaries are quite high compared to other professions.

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Literally anyone can be replaced.

That does not mean it is in the country’s best interest to replace US workers with lower paid H1b visa contractors from an outsourcing firm, and in fact doing so is explicitly against the stated purpose of the visa and is against the stated intent when the visa was created.

The need for IT workers has increased, not decreased, in the past 15-20 years. Yes, you can have both high salaries and job security, and we do in many fields. It is not persuasive to argue for using a visa specifically designed to offset worker shortages to replace current workers.

The argument you are making would be vehemently opposed by most voters.

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I am Indian, but I totally agree with what you are saying. Many Indians do.

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The choice is between bringing labor here vs offshoring those jobs. Protecting jobs for overpaid workers is not on the table.

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No, that is not at all the choice. The majority of jobs that can be outsourced have been outsourced. Regulations and convenience limit what jobs can and cannot go.

And no, these workers are not overpaid. The existence of cheaper workers in other countries does not mean that workers here are overpaid. Our goal should not be to immiserate the maximum number of our countrymen.

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That sounds like a very self-interested argument!

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This discourse highlights the anxiety felt by some Americans who I view as very “average” (think IQ around 100 or so) in a rapidly evolving meritocratic landscape.

The central question becomes how these “average” individuals can secure a meaningful future when economic success appears to hinge on specialized knowledge, creativity, and higher intelligence. If America’s prosperity relies on constant innovation and a high bar for ability, what does that mean for people who don’t meet that standard? This tension—between meritocratic ideals and the realities of the world it creates—is what the conversation is really about.

And remember, envy drives the world.

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True. I think those people would have been average in the America of the 1970s and will continue to be average now. And that's OK, because there's nothing wrong with being average. But I think many feel an anxiety about whether society will take care of average people. And the racists tell them that if the elite is a different race from them, the elite won't take care of them. That's wrong, but it's a seductive idea, and can make people afraid.

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Yes, I agree that a lot of average people feel that society won’t take care of them, that they’ll just be tossed aside. Immigrants are the wrong people to blame, though. I don’t see Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg stepping up to take care of the “average.” However, the “immigrants are to blame” idea is easier to sell than “there are many of your mom and apple pie fellow Americans who don’t give a stuff about people like you at all.”

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I think this is a great, very large, point. This is a question the politicians and policy wonks should be taking very very seriously. Would love to get a full post from Noah on his thoughts about this challenge.

Personally I support the "full steam ahead" meritocracy, with a stronger social safety net for the losers. But I recognize this policy has a big political problem when most people are "losers" by this definition, and that makes them feel bad.

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It kinda gets to his point about the team, a lot of Americans don't feel they are part of a team.

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If your perception of average people is that they are losers, by definition, you are not going to have policies that appeal to the majority.

You cannot have a stable society that only really works well for 2-5% of workers.

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That is indeed the political problem I mention. We see the top 20% earning about half of all household income, which is likely in line with the value they produce.

The median worker is not particularly valuable economically, but the median voter is quite valuable politically. A challenge.

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People’s innate value is not based on their economic contribution, and a full-fledged meritocracy is probably not best for most people. Which means that we need to seriously consider things other than maximizing the economy when making policy decisions.

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If more people are able to find their innate value outside their economic value, that might help defuse the situation. But as it stands, many people want to feel productive and financially valuable, yet they actually aren't.

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That is so inaccurate it concerns me. The ONLY reason the tech industry is able to exist is because of these workers. Unless you plan to generate your own power, grow your own food, pave your own roads, string your own power lines, build your own water plants, and all of the thousands of other essential roles that the tech industry is COMPLETELY dependent on, you need to face facts.

We are all part of a complex and interdependent society that is largely dependent on the labor of average people, and there is no tech industry without them.

Essential worker should be a clue. It is not a synonym for menial. It literally means essential.

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People remember the fifties and sixties, when it was easy for an ordinary guy to get a decent, well-paying job, that didn't require some special rare talent, buy a house and raise a family.

That doesn't seem possible any longer and a lot of folks wish there was a way to turn back the clock.

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These are old wives tales and are not true. US was a significantly poorer country in the 50s and 60s. The only difference is that there was no internet for all kinds of losers to gather around and complain about everything.

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But it didn't feel poor at the time! Every city was full of clean, safe, affordable neighborhoods, and almost everybody could afford healthcare for themselves and their families. It was also an essentially optimistic age, with technological and scientific progress advancing at an unheard-of rate, and nobody worrying much about pollution or climate change. Why, by 1980 all our electricity was going to be generated by nuclear plants and electricity would be too cheap to meter, and there would be thriving lunar colonies and manned missions to Mars!

That optimism gradually vanished in the Vietnam quagmiree and the stagflation of the seventies. It's one thing I really wish I could have lived through first-hand, now that everywhere you turn, you see nothing but doom and gloom, and everything from microplastics to AI to ultra-processed foods is going to kill us all.

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𝘜𝘚 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘰𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 50𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 60𝘴.

Not sure that's the relevant metric. Complaint is that the subsequent wealth creation should have been used differently for better result than the status quo.

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That is not an old wives tale, and was true. The average US worker, in the sixties, could buy a home, a car, raise a family, and have a secure life. I was growing up then. Good jobs were widely distributed and not concentrated in a few urban areas.

The average worker is not economically better off today.

GDP is not the right metric when you ignore opportunity and cost of living. Much less when you ignore what is and is not now feasible for most people.

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Try to Google first.

“Number of cars per household

In 1960, 22% of households had no cars, and 79% had fewer than two vehicles. By 2020, only 8.5% of households had no cars, and 59% had two or more cars. “

“Homeownership rate

In 1960, 65.2% of American households owned their home, and as of Q4 2022, 65.9% of American households owned their home”

“1960s: The median size of a single-family home in the 1960s was 1,200–1,500 square feet

Today: The median size of a single-family home in 2022 was 2,299 square feet”

This doesn’t go as far back as the 60s but no one was complaining about the economy throughout the 90s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

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I don’t need to Google it. I lived it, which is why I understand what you don’t.

Households had fewer cars because typically only the husband worked, milk and other perishables were delivered, and many people lived in circumstances that they did not need cars. The idea of a car for each family member is relatively new.

Homes were smaller, but people could buy them at a younger age, and could make the payments with only one spouse working.

The average worker had more job security, was able to afford necessities, and was in fact economically better off. They also expected their children to do better than they had, which is not true today.

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No need for economists anymore when the lived experience of low IQ people like you is enough to settle all economic arguments.

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Partly true, but the change in cost of housing and education is profound. My grandparents bought a 6,500 sq.ft. house in suburban Chicago around 1950 for less than $500K in today’s dollars and sent my dad to an elite private high school. It would take at least $1 million annual income to do that today. My grandfather was modestly successful middle management business person but nothing extraordinary about his career.

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Your grandfather was an elite in his time. The percentage of people sending their kids to private schools has remained steady at around 10-12%. It should have gone down if everything is harder to achieve for the current generation. Home ownership rates have remained roughly the same. All of these numbers should be worse if the standard of living has declined for most people. I stand by my original claim that the internet and social media has created a big mass of whiners and losers who don’t know how good their lives are.

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I mostly agree, but the middle/upper middle class is more challenging today, especially for people whose priorities are housing and education. If the goal/focus is consumption (and it is for most people,) average person today is way better off than 1950. And of course my grandfather was a white man.

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I think the difficulty arises from wanting housing and other regular stuff on top of a hyper consumerist lifestyle. Those who prioritize saving for housing do fine. My wife and I are able to afford an expensive home without stretching ourselves because we prioritized it over leading a lavish lifestyle like buying expensive cars or going to upscale restaurants every weekend. I still dress like a new college grad because I don’t care about what people think of me.

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Well that’s where AI can help, in studies looking at how it can improve job performance, it’s impact was best at improving the median worker’s performance, and not helping the highest performers as much. This may change as AI gets “smarter” but it will still be helpful to those with lower cognitive ability.

I have worked in the tech industry at two top companies for 35 years before retiring and even though projects succeeded based on how intelligent, creative and ambitious the main workforce was, many other people with more average abilities were needed to be successful (in software that is quality assurance, project management, administrative, documentation, compliance, etc) but the project architects and visionaries and company leaders need to be the best or the products won’t be good enough to keep the companies at the top.

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A good issue, but importing more of the highest skilled/educated people only drives down the marginal contribution and reduces the gap with "average" people.

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This is a BS explanation for plain racism. At any point, average Americans are going to be left behind by others, immigrants or not, in the knowledge based economy, just because they are average. Envy reserved only for non-white immigrants is based on racism.

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If we’re going to have average or below-average Americans (and we will, regardless of immigration) we’re going to need to have jobs that average people can do. This means tossing out the “must have college degree” requirement for clerical jobs and others that don’t really need it. I think the degree inflation came about because of the Great Recession of 2008 when employers could be choosy. It doesn’t have anything to do with immigration, though immigrants are scapegoated. In fact, a lot of immigrants LOST their footing on the ladder of upward mobility when the construction industry tanked.

Recently, Josh Shapiro and others have relaxed the degree requirement for state government jobs where it’s a frill and not a requirement (of course, doctors have to have an MD! Professional jobs still require degrees). I have heard these kinds of jobs referred to as the middle-skill jobs, and the “hollowing out of the middle” has been a theme since the recession.

We need to bring back these middle-skill jobs and not require college degrees to do what a high school graduate could in the 90’s. This has nothing to do with immigration - it has everything to do with “not everyone is going to be equally smart” and the average to below can’t just be left to beg or get Social Security (we’re going to have a crisis of not enough working age people to support the elderly as it is, yet another reason why we need to let in all those skilled immigrants who can and will contribute to the public purse).

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The "Evil Elon" idea is based on him wanting to do what is good for him personally even when it is at the expense of the US. High skilled immigration is both good for the US and in Elons best interest. The self interested choice for the owner of a big tech company is also the right choice for the US.

Even if it wasn't so clearly in his self interest, Elon being for tech immigration is a very small piece of evidence to make him "not evil". Mao was for the education of women. Stalin supported national literacy.

As for Indians in the US, Hindu nationalism is an ugly ideology that too often comes with. India is constitutionally and explicitly secular. It is majority Hindu by demographics but it is not a "Hindu state"' the way that Pakistan or Iran are Muslim states. The ruling BJP really wants to shift India into being an explicitly Hindu state and there is a popular undercurrent in Indian politics that "Hinduism is under attack!" Indian media has been very much Fox News-ified where they are selling fear about muslim immigrants to India and oppression of Hindus abroad.

This isn't disqualifying or grounds for blocking Indian immigration, but it is something that I wish more Americans were aware of. Like we know about the risks of jihadism, or the Christian theocracy types and those are on the radar. Most people in the US don't know about the history of the RSS and BJP or the rise of "cow protection". (Lynching people who are suspected of having beef or being too close to a cow) None of this has happened in the US, but there was a case in California where Cisco was sued because their high caste employees were systematically blocking qualified, but low caste, Indians from being hired. (In North India, a lot of last names are indicative of caste.)

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I'm aware. What does that have to do with Indian immigration? We should worry that too many liberally inclined Indians are leaving and that will strengthen the BJP?

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The reverse.

When the British had a ton of US service people in Britain during WW2, very early on they had to tell US MPs to stop trying to enforce the color barrier by barring black people from drinking in British pubs. The British had to explicitly tell the Americans that Jim Crow was not a thing on British soil.

Noah's post above is an explicit rejection of a bigotry and xenophobia in the US vis a vis high skilled immigration from India. I wanted to point out that India itself is going through its own particular xenophobic/bigoted moment.

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This is an excellent point - though the current mechanics are working more like Thomas L Hutchison said. Skilled Indians who want nothing to do with Hindu nationalism tend to make up a broad portion of those who are trying to immigrate

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It seems to me maybe only slightly biased in that direction? Plenty of Hindu nationalism going around Seattle.

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Yeah, perhaps. I may have been too broad in my characterization

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I'm also thinking of in recent years in Leicester (England) where there has been fighting between Hindus and Muslims.

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FYI the BJP/RSS has significant support in the tech ecosystem in the U.S. While I don't know if donations to the BJP/RSS can be tracked from the U.S. the sophistication of their IT cell in the Indian media and abroad is suggestive of widespread support. Just as there was widespread support for China's entry into the WTO and the subsequent negative fallout for American workers; blanket support for a policy that may come back to bite the U.S. is not very wise.

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It's a bit peripheral to your main point, but the whole Good Elon / Evil Elon thing is starting to annoy me a little, as it's a continuing strawman. I think if you want to discuss him more fairly you need to include the possibility of Dipshit Elon - the guy who always thinks he's doing good, has relatively narrow expertise in which he actually does do good, but who is horrifically immature; he seems to believe himself to be a genius in every field and lashes out like a toddler when he encounters any resistance. In fact, in all of that he's basically an average too-online American - but that means that Elon needs the same checks and limits as anyone else even as he is increasingly able to just act without them. He's not good, he's not evil; he's just a regular too-online dipshit with an unsettling amount of personal power.

So yeah, when he's talking about the things he knows well, he makes damn good points, and I'm glad he's making them. But don't take him sticking to his guns as a sign that he's "Good Elon" (or Evil; again, he's neither) because the big problem with Elon is that he sticks to his guns because he can't tell whether he's right or wrong. He's right here. He was wrong with the whole submarine cave fiasco. He doesn't seem to be able to reliably tell where his expertise ends and his bullshit begins. He's American as apple pie, but with hundreds of billions of dollars, his own social media company, conflicts of interest with America's main enemies, and influence over a demented President, being an ordinary stubborn dipshit makes him a unique danger.

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“Dipshit Overgrown Toddler Elon” is something I can get behind. I think you’ve hit on it. That’s why he gets along so well with Overgrown Toddler Trump.

I think Elon Musk has spent so much time with sycophants telling him he’s a genius in every field imaginable, another Charles Darwin or Benjamin Franklin, that he’s gotten higher than a kite off his own supply.

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To be fair, if I were in his shoes, I'd probably become a dipshit overgrown toddler too. But if anyone wants to give me huge amounts of money and increasingly unfettered power to test this hypothesis, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

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Yeah, it's clearly all too easy for spectacularly wealthy people to surround themselves with sycophants who will tell them every brain-dripping is a pearl of wisdom. It takes extraordinary discipline and strength to remain grounded in reality under those circumstances. It's funny that there's a chic for classical / stoic virtues, on the right, because the right-wing billionaire class doesn't actually seem to practice them at all, they're completely self-indulgent. (See: Elon spending all his time playing Diablo 4.)

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Too much time with sycophants? Have you read his bio? The man's entire life is people telling him constantly that he sucks and will fail!

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But he clearly isn’t a dipshit. I’ve never met him but from listening to him speak, he seems solidly above average. If i had to guess I’d say bright but unexceptional.

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"Smart" and "dipshit" aren't antonyms. I've met a LOT of very bright dipshits in my time. Listen to someone in their area(s) of expertise, and they're fine - even amazing - but they stray out of their expertise without losing a drop of confidence. I remember hearing Dan Carlin interview him once, talking about military history and I was amazed by the pure drivel coming out of his mouth. He had plainly read a lot, but had come to a ridiculous, sophomoric understanding that had more to do with playing Civ than actual military history. That's hardly a unique failing! it's just that when it occurs in someone with a lot of personal power it becomes a problem.

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Actually, a better word than “dipshit”would be “chuunibyou” but that’s not as well-known.

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Rather than a salary minimum, I’d love to just see the US government charge companies/individuals for H1B and alike visas, and get rid of the lotto entirely. $100k to the government, no country cap, work rights for dependent spouses, path to green card plus citizenship, and use the money for border security and/or free college for American high school students. Allocates visas most efficiently, provides a direct incentive to provide more, and changes the narrative a bit around immigration

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I would add a Social Security/Medicare surcharge (or even a bidding process) that was more like a green card system. Individuals could apply for the right to work (while working toward citizenship), and they and the sponsoring company would bid on how much extra they would pay in terms of extra SS/MC. The highest bidders would get the visa, which would only charge the extra amount until the individual gained citizenship.

Such visas could be stratified by skill sets if we needed extra workers, and we could even let projects bid (for instance, if TMC really thinks they need Taiwanese workers to build fabs in the US, they could bid into such a system). They could even include lower skilled professions.

This would be difficult for workers in some industries (mostly PMC types), but the reality is that most of those folks were fine with importing cheap labor to do their gardening, childcare, and adult care and only became concerned about this when the impact was going to be on them.

This system would provide them a lot more protection in terms of salary for the PMC (as the surcharge would reduce the difference in pay between the immigrants and resident workers). This is not really fair as very few people seemed to care about low skilled workers, but politically it would make the idea less impossible.

The bidding process could ensure that those who see the most benefit and/or the companies with the most need get the workers (as opposed to a random process), and the system would help fund our insolvent SS programs. Finally, the process of working toward citizenship would allow us to retain valuable workers, reduce the incentive for intellectual theft, reduce the number of individuals who take valuable skills home and end up competing with US companies, probably result in brain drain from some our rivals. Espionage would still be a problem but the benefits would outweigh the costs and the citizenship path would reduce the ability of foreign governments to influence the workers (as at least some of their family members would also end up immigrating).

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$100k per year or for 6 years? I’d say $50k to the government per year and a wage floor $50k higher than the going rate for an America.

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That makes it complicated, and requires calculating an average wage for an “American” for that particular job. Is that limited to Citizens or also include permanent residents? Is the job category defined by the government? Is it based on the work location?

Companies will game this also. At a company I worked at 30 years ago we had a British semiconductor researcher with a PhD who the company needed and he had an O1 special ability visa, but the company needed to show that the job he was doing was not able to be done by an American. They really needed what this guy who was an expert in a very specific area, so they put a classified ad for this job in a tiny rural newspaper and used that as proof when no one else applied. This probably wouldn’t work now, and they really did need someone with specific knowledge that they searched for and couldn’t find and this is what they did to make it work legally.

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I work in semiconductors and have thought about this a fair bit(including your idea of referencing pay to some spectrum of relevant workers) . I don’t think it’s workable. I think you just have to make the visa holders not beholden to the employer so that they can effectively change jobs and negotiate wages. In other words, let’s let the market do the work of finding the correct wage.

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That would be kind of hard to align to hiring practices. At least in my experience, companies don’t have a goal of hiring any H1B workers, but rather they have roles they’re trying to fill and go hunting for people who have the skills, and if they find a good enough H1B workers then they’ll (somewhat begrudgingly) do all the annoying paperwork that is necessary to hire the H1B person.

But sometimes people don’t work out, and you want to be able to let them go.

Right now this is basically fine, the *person* has the H1B already (not company), and the company does paperwork to transfer it if they hire. If they fire, the person still has the H1B and has some amount of time to find a new job before they lose it and have to go back. This is hard for the individual. But the company can basically treat them like any other employee, which is why it works.

Suffice it to say, I’d rather the system just had a minimum salary (say $100k or $150k?) and then no cap on the number of people who could be hired. That would be a lot simpler, and would avoid the two weak spots of H1B right now: that there aren’t enough of them, and that the lottery wastes some of the small supply by allocating to lower value jobs.

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Charge how much? Aiming at what number?

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I'd say charge $100k and unlimited, or set a number of visas, and auction them off

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I guess the real answer is aim for a considerably higher number than at present and work from there, maybe, probably increasing it further.

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Also isn’t the number of people who actually get an H1B visa each year tiny, like 85k? That’s a rounding error in the overall size of the U.S. labour force. If the U.S. has something like 5-5.5m tech workers, which seems a reasonable estimate, it’s also a tiny fraction of that particular sector’s labour pool.

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The number is per year so you have to multiply by 6 to get the total. It’s still small but some would argue that it matters on the margin. For example, the labor market looks very different if there are 5m jobs and 5m workers vs 5m jobs and 5.5m workers (this specific example is obviously falling to the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy but I think you can see the idea).

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It might at the margin, but the question is whether that annual rate of change is that significant compared to regular fluctuations in the number of available jobs or workers. Maybe in another industry with steadier growth/declines, I’d be a bit more convinced. But tech is quite susceptible to boom and bust cycles. Also not all accepted H1B applicants work in tech, and not all of those who do come from countries with massive wage differentials to the U.S. like India.

The lump of labour fallacy is I think another thing entirely, and a pretty big problem for the anti-immigration line of reasoning in tech specifically, even if it were at higher levels.

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But wait, jobs to workers is unemployment. And that’s controlled by the FED. So basically you’re saying that more foreign workers means we can have lower interest rates with low inflation. Count me in.

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I'll be glad for the Good Of The Country if we get closer to merit based immigration out of all this, but I'll be mad (again) that Democrats never make this THEIR issue.

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There are a few types of Capital. Physical,Financial and Human. Championed by the late great Gary Becker, human capital may be to most powerful. A country can’t have too many smart people. If one steps away from a moral or ethical analysis of immigration and just look at economic benefit, then the more skilled workers , scientists , doctors , researchers, the better.

Also ethnic food rocks

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It surprises me to learn that Becker, apparently, was a conservative. Also, I believe understanding the importance of human capital is probably why the US leapfrogged every other country over the past century. I'm actually surprised that Trump is turning out to be neoconservative and less of a white supermacist in his second term.

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He was from the. Chicago school of economics. No idea her personal politics. Met him once. Early days human capital not taken seriously. He ultimately got a Nobel Prize. Great guy and great economist

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40 years ago, there were a lot of brilliant conservative thinkers. There children all grew up to be liberals and now the intellectual conservative is an endangered species. \S (mostly)

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It just all feels like opportunistic behavior by Elon. He is pro deportations and limiting low skilled visas but simultaneously pro skilled visas expansion (?).

Full disclosure: I am in the ‘Evil Elon’ camp, I think he is using government policy for his own gain only. If he starts coming out more broadly about migration (physicians!) I’ll lean more into believing him.

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I dunno, isn't the Elon situation maybe as simple as "skilled immigrant supports skilled immigration"?

Shocking facts that will shock you?

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Why is it illogical to want skilled immigrants but not a flow of illegal border crossers who have a minimal impact to the success of the economy. I personally think we need more immigrants, especially to contribute to housing construction, but for the biggest impact to growth we need top performers. For his industries, he needs AI engineers and rocket scientists and the best people with the ability to do that are say 1 in a million, so if you restrict yourself to US citizens, that means you have a pool of 380 people. If you instead look at the global population, then now there are 8200 or 20 times more. And even if China and India restrict immigration they each have 3 times as many of these people as we do.

Elons rants about immigrant crime and them being the end of democracy are ridiculous and harmful and appear they are to get on the side of Trump and the other racist rightists, and you are right that it hurts his appeal for higher skilled immigration. But if Trump shuts Elon out, the other crazies will have his ear and shutdown all immigration and the future will be bleaker.

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"Today’s anti-immigrant freakout is the third since the founding."

Only third? You counted the anti-Irish freakout, and the one that was mainly about Italians, Poles, and other Catholic-heavy nationalities. But you've left out the anti-Asian wave (which resulted in an actual law, the Chinese Exclusion Act), and of course the repeated freakouts over Mexicans that started in the 20th Century. You can also find localized freakouts about Black immigrants, like hate against Somali or Nigerian communities in various cities, or the recent wave of hate against Haitians.

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This is a somewhat silly argument. Yes, the skilled immigration right now is good for the US. The same way exporting manufacturing to China was.

The computer science classes in the universities are oversubscribed, but there is low incentive to the country as a whole to increase production of software engineers, because we can always import more. Why would a company train young people and/or partner with universities to do so when there's a ready supply of top graduates of IIT?

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Maybe because the supply of these graduates isn't so ready? The annual cap for H1B visas is so low that it's easy to see them running out quickly in an average-to-good year for the industry. Plus it's a random selection process and is really oversubscribed every year, so if you extend a job offer to someone who needs sponsorship there is a strong chance it will have been for nothing and you will have to find another candidate.

The time you potentially waste waiting for Uncle Sam to come good is a strong incentive to hire someone native-born. Then there's the he fact that if you want someone to come on an H1B you have to plan for them starting at a specific time of the year with a long lag between when you make the offer and begin the paperwork process, and when the visa starts. This year, there was a gap of more than six months between the registration deadline and when the visa enters into force.

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Among top h1b sponsors are Cognizant, Accenture, Tata, and Infosys. They are well known to essentially swamp the lottery by filing a huge number of applications and not really caring which of their warm bodies get the visas

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So if you’re not one of these firms, there’s no real point in trying to hire someone on an H1B since your chances of “winning” the lottery go from “low” to “basically zero”.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of H1Bs because I think any non-immigrant visa that ties workers to one employer for their entire duration is a bad idea. I'm just not convinced there are enough H1Bs around for this to have the kind of effect some of their opponents seem to suggest.

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h1b transfers are a thing. And afaik they do not fall under any caps.

I know of several "body shops" whose whole business was getting people into US on an h1b and then letting them search for a real employer. For a price, of course. Those got closed by the rule enforcement, but the process still applies

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How does the country disincentivize production of software engineers? High school graduates decide on their majors based on expected job prospects and what they are good or interested in. Companies don’t usually tell universities what they want or train high school graduates in programming nor do they contract with IIT for H1B immigrant workers. There are 58,000 H1Bs a year, and last year 435,000 BS degrees in STEM fields were awarded in the US. Companies need all of them and more, the unemployment rate in technology is under 2.5%, which indicates just temporary mismatches, not a lack of availability opportunities.

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Not all (I would be surprised if much more than 50%) of stem graduates go into CS where most of h1bs seem to be. So the fraction of jobs taken is relatively high.

Also, as I said, CS majors are oversubscribed. Many colleges accept only a fixed number of students into CS. And speaking to people in tech (including ex googlers) it feels like unemployment is way higher than 2.5%

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I do think there is a legitimate cultural concern that people who come disproportionately from the top castes in a very historically caste-based society are not going to have the same moral flinch as cultural Westerners around things like censorship, religious liberty, equal human dignity of all citizens, etc.

I’m not so sure I want people who do not have Western moral and ethical sensibilities running our tech or medical industries without checks and balances that ensure they respect and do not change our culture in regard to our liberties.

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This concern is pretty inane in premise for a few reasons.

1) These people lack "the same moral flinch" - as people in the West who themselves can't grapple with censorship, religious liberty, or equal human dignity? How many centuries have people debated these subjects in the West and still can't agree on the direction we should be going? Meanwhile, numerous philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc) have emerged in Asia millennia ago which discuss the exact same issues, and in some ways more successfully offer solutions. Note the numerous Westerners who have come in droves to adopt yoga, meditation, etc. Those practices all originated in Asian traditions, and offer different lenses to approach these subjects. I encourage you to dive into any one of these practices and see how you emerge more enlightened about "Western concerns".

2) "Cultural Westerners" sounds like code speak for "people who look and sound like me", so let's just toss that point aside entirely as irrelevant to any discussion of morals.

3) The tech and medical industries are entirely morally bankrupt of any sense of checks, balances, or respect for civil liberties in the West, so this is just not as strong of a point as you think it is.

Culture is a fluid and dynamic thing. The culture of America and the West 100 years ago is almost entirely foreign to the culture of today. So claiming that some new, foreign culture is going to pollute the moral superiority of the West is at best a faulty premise, and at its worst, some light wrapper of Western racial supremacy.

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They are simply being racist, attempting to disguise their prejudice with sophisticated-sounding language.

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By the time we’re reach any group “running our tech or medical industries,” we’re talking about the children and grandchildren of immigrants, not the immigrants themselves. I don’t think any kid’s idea of their caste is strong enough to survive 12 years of public schooling in the US— it certainly never did in mine

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Well, the top two Indian tech CEOs (Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Satya Nadella of Microsoft) are both born in India, and are not Brahmin (or not fully, their actual caste backgrounds are disputed) and were educated and employed in the US from early ages. How their caste backgrounds or religious upbringing affect the management of their companies is not apparent, but I don’t see how they could possibly change the US culture, especially around liberties.

Other top American CEOs are Tim Cook (Apple), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Doug McMillon (Walmart) and Andrew Witty (United Healthcare) who are, respectively: gay, Jewish, born-again Christian, and a knighted citizen of the UK, and I don’t think those backgrounds effect our culture either.

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I've heard from Googlers that in the pichai era Indians have basically taken over Google and caste based or anti Indian discrimination is now rife. Some people have only Indians in their entire management chain. This era has also seen major declines in capability, though it's hard to know how much these two things are connected.

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Yes. Have you tried searching for old Usenet posts in Google Groups lately? Google bought DejaNews, kept the databases up for a few years, then absolutely gutted it. For no reason.

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I agree; I don’t think that ideas of caste can survive long in a society where the surrounding population is clueless at best. (All I know of “caste” I learned from reading novels with an Indian setting. Now think of how many people don’t read novels with a foreign setting at all…) You’d have to live in a really tight-knit enclave to keep that sort of thing going for decades - think the Amish.

Children of immigrants are going to go to American colleges where their classmates will give them blank looks when they bring up caste, and pretty soon, it will be forgotten. Add to that that children and grandchildren of immigrants tend to intermarry.

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