Personally, I don't think it matters much. So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. My only concerns with it are about their well-being and freedom under the current system.
I agree with you, actually. But we have to be honest about the intent of the H1B program if we want to fix it.
TBH I would support throwing away H1B entirely and creating a much more permissive midskill/lowskill immigration visa whose intent is more in-line with the actual use of the H1B. But if you try to get there by reforming H1B, it's never going to work well. So, if we keep H1B, we need to start using it as intended. And then fight for another visa class. I'm just fundamentally skeptical that the H1B will ever not be abusive until we align the original intent and practice of the policy.
So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries?
We do! The US takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, and they are welcome to become software engineers.
Now, if you ask "so what if we create a visa so that high tech employers can bestow, control, and revoke the US residency rights of people who work in a few narrow fields, including software engineering", I can take a crack at explaining how this can lead to harmful market distortions, to say nothing of labor and basic human rights abuses.
I mean, I don't really want a job in a country paying a fraction of what I make now? It's true though, there is not an existing reciprocal program afaik, but so what? We have things much better economically. And who knows, maybe we could arrange a labor trade deal of sorts with these countries.
By the logic presented earlier , it would only be fair if Americans could compete for jobs in foreign countries the same way their workers compete for jobs in ours .
Sure, I think that would be reasonable. I have two points though. Someone else doesn't have to do the right thing for us to do it. While it would be better if other countries reciprocated, it doesn't have to stop us from doing the right thing. Secondly, from a practical point of view the demand for people to emmigrate from the US and work in a country with lower wages is not nearly as high as the demand the other way.
With the high number of jobs being offshored and outsourced I would not be surprised if many Americans would gladly leave to increase their job prospects. It may be the case that people in the United States can no longer sustain a living here due to the high cost of living. Perhaps we will reach that point.
The United States had a very high employment rate leading up to the covid crisis. Lower than it had been during the 90s, but that was an anonymously propserous decade: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:.... It stood at roughly 62%.
According to the same website India's current employment rate is ~50% (part of this likely due to gender imbalances) and you can bet that wages are much lower. The relevant metric is purchasing power parity adjusted household median income. It's roughly 50 times higher in the United States than in say India (less so for China and Russia).
I don't understand how you can see countries like China or India as presenting more opportunity with local wages. There are of course cultural reasons to want to move there, but I don't think there's any reasonable case that there's more economic opportunity. Some things will be cheaper for sure (rent and labor, namely) but consumer goods, food, electricity, and the like, will not be commensurately cheaper wrt the drop in income.
Yes, but having a job and staying in the middle class in any country is much better than entering a lower class after your position has been either eliminated, outsourced, or off-shored and you cannot find another.
However, maybe there is an argument that the middle class in a different country is worse off in terms of purchasing power than the lower American class. I'm not sure if that is the case, but either way it would be better to be gainfully employed in an industry of a person's choosing than to be lower class in an industry a person does not want to work in.
The threat of this happening in America, as I perceive it anecdotally, is much more real than the statistics suggest. I could see a scenario where only the top 20% of skilled professionals in major industries survive in the United States, while the demand for the bottom 80% is met by outsourced or off-shored professionals.
> We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have.
By being born to an area you have done something special. You have received the special benefit of local education and infrastructure, you have familial and social connections to the people of that local area. You may even have a shared sense of local obligation to uplift the people you live near.
The problem with importing foreign labor isn't that they can't develop feelings of community or form social ties to an area. It's that someone local is harmed or excluded (after significant investment in them) while a foreign worker is underpaid and overworked in a job that exists because of the local's tax dollars.
We're allowing greed to create a permanent underclass of locals who can not climb the social hierarchy while also importing highly-educated quasi-slaves into the country. The whole thing reeks of economic opportunism and, to me, represents the very worst of capitalism.
Yes, I don't think the current implementation is great. Hence my last sentence. That said, it may be better for the people coming in than not having it at all. Although the net harm maybe be greater than without it or a similar program (corporations benefit, locals hurt some, immigrants benefit). It's not clear to me what the magnitude of the harm to locals is though.
