Archives for 2024

The fight between Ketamine Boy and the MAGAts is definitely a time to root for injuries, but of course it’s being played as immigrant vs anti-immigrant, when really the H-1B program isn’t a good deal for immigrants or, really, for anyone but big corporations.

In my experience, the overhead associated with having H-1B visa holders is way too expensive for small companies to shoulder.  So, it’s a big tech company program, allowing them to have a set of lower-paid immigrant engineers.  Then, there’s the issue with the length of the H-1B, which is nominally 6 years, and while visa holders can apply for permanent residency, that’s by no means guaranteed.  Finally, the H-1B holder has to exit the US in 60 days or less if they’re laid off or fired.  Put all of these requirements together, and H-1B holders are essentially indentured to the corporation that hired them initially.

There’s also the question of whether H-1B keeps tech salaries down, and denies qualified US residents jobs,  because cheaper labor is available.  Noah Smith has a long post on this whole issue, and the consensus among economists is that it basically doesn’t, because when H1-B employment grows, so does tech employment as a whole, and when tech employment grows, salaries go up.  He also makes the point that companies will generally offshore instead of hiring more US residents if they can’t get all the H-1B employees they want.  I’m sure the research shows what Noah reported, but it’s far, far better for US tech firms to be able to hire visa holders and integrate them with their teams, than it is to offshore.  Most people who have experienced offshoring will tell you it’s a false economy when all of the hidden costs (communication, software quality) are factored in.  And, for the last year, we’ve been in a “soft” hiring period for skilled white-collar workers, so I’m doubtful that H-1B has no effect on salaries or job availability.

There was also a nasty back-and-forth between Elon/ stans and MAGAts on Twitter’s, where Elon et. al. argued that the reason that US residents aren’t hired is because they’re stupid (they used the r-word instead).

I’d put it a different way:  in times of peak employment, there are not enough US residents who have the aptitude and attitude (it’s both, not just one) to become software engineers.  There’s a lot of tedium in the job, and the reason that Indians completely dominate the numbers of H-1B visa holders is that there are a ton of them and therefore there are more with aptitude and attitude.  Plus, the ability to make, by Indian standards, a phenomenal living, tends to adjust one’s attitude towards tedium.  (And — this is critical — they have English skills that the Asian candidates generally lack.).  This, btw, is why the “job training” programs that try to re-skill coal miners and steel workers are almost always ineffective.  Even if they have the aptitude, they usually lack the attitude.  Democrats should no longer support these chimerical programs.

I’ve interviewed a lot of Indian students for internships, and some of them are indeed brilliant, and some of them aren’t.  From what I’ve seen, the non-brilliant ones get added to the group of H-1B holders hired in groups by large consulting firms, and basically the team adjusts for the less brilliant workers.  One of the non-brilliant ones that I mistakenly hired told me that they were basically forced to go to the US to get a job by their family, who had scraped together enough to get this person a paid-for college undergrad degree (of dubious quality) which was their entry to a US MS degree and US employment.  Like a lot of immigrant communities, the Indian students lived together and watched out for each other, and this person succeeded only with a lot of help from fellow country-men and women.

The H-1B program is what happens when rich interests (tech companies) use their massive political pull to get a visa program tailored to their needs.  The fact that no analogous visa program exists for unskilled workers (the H-2A and H-2B program — that Trump uses — are much shorter term) shows that the Elons of the world get the immigrants they want when they want them.  H-1B is probably in no real danger, but pointing out Elon’s hypocrisy is certainly worthwhile, and fun.

H-1BPost + Comments (346)