> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.

larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.

▲ mpyne 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.

The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.

Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.

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aleph_minus_one 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.

At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D

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nyolfen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why?

> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.

generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'. major employers routinely violate federal employment law in the pursuit of wage suppression; cursory googling will show you the biggest names you can think of losing lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars for their h1b pipelines, and yet they continually do this.

	▲	mpyne 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why? Not really, it's well explained by people realizing that wages are relatively high in tech relative to the labor required, which saw lots of college students pursuing computing degrees, the rise of coding bootcamps, and so on. The industry was growing, but so was the labor pool. You'd not expect wages to continue shooting up in that situation except for micro-segments where the demand for labor grew without labor supply going up (which is something you see in part of the AI field). > generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens' Of course not, but the point of having a country is to improve the general welfare of the citizens of that country, and immigration contributes to that. It is good for Americans collectively to have easier (i.e. cheaper) access to good software, even if it is worse for the very small subset of the American population that provides it to allow for there to be more software developers. We saw the field of medicine self-limit admission in that labor pool out of fear that wages would drop, and it has been disastrous for Americans' healthcare even long after the AMA removed the rules acting to limit new medical graduates. We should earn our wages based on the actual value we provide to our fellow Americans, rather than based on artificial rent-seeking behavior.

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SirChud 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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truffet 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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▲ 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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▲ bubblethink 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

larger pool + larger pie due to the growth of the economy. You are viewing it as a zero sum game. What's better ? Two jobs with a pool of 3 people, or 2 million jobs with a pool of 2.3 million ?

▲ dyauspitr 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The US needs immigrants. We need the best and the brightest. Those are the folks starting the new job creating companies. That’s what keeps us so innovative. The H1B is a good gauntlet through which we can get those immigrants. Ended it is shortsighted.

▲ DaSHacka 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The US needs immigrants.

At the expense of the citizenry?

▲ abenga 4 days ago | parent [-]

It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.

▲ AdrianB1 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is an exception used to justify the rule. There is a very small percentage that founded companies and the rest are impacting negatively the economy.

▲ throwaway2037 4 days ago | parent [-]

    > the rest are impacting negatively the economy

Can you expand this line of thinking? Is this also true for other OECD members that aggressively pursue immigration as an economic growth strategy?

▲ AdrianB1 4 days ago | parent [-]

If you import cheap labor, you hit your economy by lowering the wages in that sector. When you have immigration, there are a few very top talents and a lot of average people coming, the average ones are not a net benefit in most cases. In US migrants don't create huge problems of integration and culture clashes, in Western Europe there are problems with that so the overall impact is negative.

	▲	throwaway2037 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`> If you import cheap labor` How do you define "cheap labor"? What is your max annual income? What happens if you import middle class and above labour? In the USA, I assume this is about 75 USD per year salary.

▲ charcircuit 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.

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abenga 4 days ago | parent [-]

There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.

	▲	charcircuit 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Those are nonsense hypotheticals. In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical. I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?

▲ insane_dreamer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We have EB1, EB2, EB3 programs for the "best and the brightest". We don't need H1B for that.

▲ truffet 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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