1: Every big tech interview I have been in the visa status is not even a question in the interview process. There is just a simple gate that “can you legally work in the US”? The hiring committee is not even thinking about visa (that’s a HR problem)
2: Are there confounders in that foreign workers are less likely to negotiate? Absolutely.
3: are there confounders in that people who come to US for study are likely already a self selected bunch who are striving to succeed? What are the typical grade distributions between foreign STEM students and US STEM students? Is grade a confounding variable? What happens if we control for GPA?
And finally does H1B abuse happen? Absolutely.
There is a lot of nuance that are not captured by surface level statistics. But nuance does not make outrage.
The American H1B system isn't about importing foreign workers that do a good job, it's about importing foreign workers that do a job no American could do. The system demands you look for some American do do the job first, and only if you fail to find one can you import one from overseas.
In that view, all the talk about GPA fall flat, because it doesn't matter if the foreign worker is better than an American worker, you are supposed to pick the American worker anyway.
The ‘mandatory interviews for Americans’ are just transparent scams.
I do not think anyone is making that point. Clearly a gated and scarce employee pool is always in the advantage of the employee.
You can agree or not, but the point is expanded availability of highly skilled labor from CS Graduates benefits the US companies hiring them, not just by removing some scarcity in the supply, but also having an expanded talent pool increases quality available.
From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry, or have them starting and staffing competition in their home countries? "Brain drain" fueled by unlimited reserve currency dollars is very real.
Lastly, those non-US graduates pay a very hefty sum for the 'privilege' of attending school in the US. Having worked with academics from around the globe, including US, I can state with some certainty the US degree courses are not qualitatively very different from what is available elsewhere at a fraction of the cost (US education costs are insane!). But they do carry the implicit promise of an easyer way to higher paying US jobs.
So all in all, everyone in the US benefits from the system, except the lower 66th percentile of native US CS graduates.
> From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry, or have them starting and staffing competition in their home countries?
This doesn't happen nearly as often as you probably think. Starting a company in many countries (including my birth country in Latin America) is very difficult. Not only there is no financing, but the justice system is also slow to resolve inevitable contract disputes. Additionally, government regulations crush advanced businesses to the point where it's really difficult for companies to compete internationally. The US remains one of the best places to start a tech company.
Given this, many smart people in my home country decide to work for the government in highly-paid paper-pushing roles, throwing away years of study and computer expertise.
There’s a third option besides unlimited H1Bs, etc and completely restricted market — which is preferencing US natives.
And this problem isn’t reserved to CS grads — but represents 2/3rds of prospective middle class US citizens experiencing a worse outcome. Which contrary to your glib dismissal, is politically unstable.
There are a whole lot of weasels who are adding a bunch of filler words and alternate phrasing to stuff that amounts to something akin to that point or some point built around that core.
>From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry,
If it tears the nation apart what does it matter?
>Lastly, those non-US graduates pay a very hefty sum for the 'privilege' of attending school in the US.
First off, most H1B workers do not have american degrees so this blanket assertion is laughable on its face.
Second, even when they do have US degrees enriches institutions and people that at best about half the country approves of and approximately nobody not getting paid by them approves of the economic model of.
>except the lower 66th percentile of native US CS graduates.
Now reconcile this with the prevailing HN wisdom that the american middle class ought to pay a lot of taxes to benefit the lower classes as is the case in europe.
What makes one ok but not the other? This nation is in the shit is is because of you and people like you who adopt or condone policy positions based on something other than principals.
At this point, software job opportunities are pretty low on the list of things tearing the nation apart.
If it does what now? Fearmongering that intentionally whips up nativist xenophobia might do that. I'm not seeing how work visas in themselves would do it.
> Second, even when they do have US degrees enriches institutions and people that at best about half the country approves of and approximately nobody not getting paid by them approves of the economic model of.
I honestly don't know which institutions and people you're talking about. I can think of several fundamentally different candidates.
> This nation is in the shit is is because of you and people like you who adopt or condone policy positions based on something other than principals.
You're being self-contradictory. Either you have principles to which you hold regardless of whether "this nation is in the shit", or your only "principle" is "do whatever works to keep you out of The Shit(TM)". Which isn't really a very inspiring principle. Anyway, as soon as you start doing things for instrumental reasons, you lose your deontologist card.
If your principle actually is "stay out of The Shit by any means necessary", then you have to prove that what you want to do actually works to keep you out of The Shit. Starting by defining what "The Shit" means to you. Maybe what works is building up industry.
What you've offered only works on exactly the same kind of "principles" as doing things "to build up US industry".
An actually principled approach to H1Bs might, for instance, be to convert them into permanent residencies or citizenships, because indentured servitude is ugly on principle. That'd also have the practical effect of making people less beholden to specific employers, thus reducing the negative effect on anybody they might be competing with, but that's not the principled part unless you can say what actual, specific principle it serves.
... and, by the way, for any actually reasonable definition, your nation (no longer mine) wasn't particularly "in the shit" until recently. Just normal fluctuations. It hasn't actually even really landed in "the shit" yet, although the people running Trump have succeeded in breaking its last hold on the the catwalk over the shit vat.
As opposed to what? All the other recent graduates with non-engineering degrees who are drowning in job offers? It's tough out here for everyone. This kind of hyperbole doesn't help.
"How the American engineering degree, sold as a solid ticket to the American dream"
It wasn't "sold" as though there were some cigarette smoking ad men behind it. People went after _software_ engineering degrees when they saw a bunch of 20 year olds in Mountain View with 6 figure incomes. The other branches of engineering have always been hit or miss.
And "American Dream" - really? Has anyone used that term unironically since The Great Gatsby came out?
There was a whole “Learn to Code” pitch from politicians saying that literally anyone could have a good job if only they learned to code.
You must be joking, although I can't interpret the second half of the sentence. University is absolutely sold as a product giving you a chance at employment in the US, even if the "education" is completely unrelated to the work.
As an aside, I think there's another equally important issue that should also be raised along with employment. A large number of our graduate+ degrees in STEM go to foreign nationals. The issue is not providing education to foreign nationals in and of itself, but that many of these degrees (public schools) are funded by tax payers, and we are depriving our country of an educated population while educating citizens in other countries who compete with our country globally. Private schools can and should do whatever is in their mission, but public schools should have some accountability to our citizens and tax payers. We all have a right to get value for the money that we put into things like our public university system, which is supposed to be training future leaders of our country.
Of course with that longwinded answer I have to say... Tech is like the weather, just wait for a minute its all going to change anyway, so don't stress all of this.
Foreign students are not stealing “slots” from Americans. If anything, their tuition dollars make more slots available.
The money might be going into nicer buildings or administrative costs, but it's also a white elephant once the foreign funding dries up as the domestic situation improves for many internationals. After which then these universities find themselves in major trouble.
It's probably true but not really meaningful in the broader context.
With the current easy money federally backed loans US university funding model the foreign students are just easy money on top of an already screaming money printer more than a noteworthy subsidy of their operations.
Guaranteed jobs? Sir, this is not France ;)
I won’t get into h1b which gets plenty of air time, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone wanting to eliminate OPT. This is beyond idiotic. Foreigners come and get educated in the US; if we didn’t have OPT they’d have to go back to their home country and contribute there. Instead with OPT we give them a chance to integrate into American companies, making the US more competitive as a whole. This is a massive strategic advantage. Places like MIT/CalTech/CMU are heavily made up of foreigners. We need the best and brightest minds from the world; only pulling from 350M vs 8B is a giant mistake.
If the US is a great place with more opportunity, then the pressure is to stay versus go back. When the US becomes anti-foreigner, then we all lose.
We didn't lie to comp sci grads, they have the skills to DO the job, but the interview is a whole other skill that they have to learn. There is a gauntlet to be run of goofy interview questions and qualifiers. I dont know any one in the last few years who hasn't gone back to leetcode and the like to brush up if they needed to look.
Then you get posts like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079183
https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-...
Staff doing nothing or not pulling their weight is far more common than people think. Managers are resistant to firing staff, not because of HR, or emotional reasons. Rather many of them don't want to deal with the judgement of their peers (why did you make the bad hire to start with), and the judgement of their team/group. Office politics at the director level and above in a large organization is BRUTAL.
Also H1B pays FICA taxes, that exemption is only for OPT. The OPT exemption can be easily removed.
Isn't computer programing all of computer science. This seems like a weird distinction to make?
The job market just seems to suck, if it didnt i dont think things like this would come up. I dont think immigration is the reason for the job market sucking. theres no jobs to apply to, theres no jobs to take from americans in the first place
If you've been in the business long enough, you've seen it happening. I've heard managers talking about how they're sick of citizen employees with their unreasonable demands about health care and vacation time, and how those hard-working foreigners don't annoy them with such nonsense. I've seen the gleam in owners' eyes when they talk about how they can hire ten nameless cogs through some company that will bring them in for the same price as one native, and as long as they're at least 11% as productive as a native worker on average, hey, profit. And that's not just in software; that's in everything from construction to food processing to service work.
Several years ago, a client asked if I wanted to join his startup that was going to sell foreign tech services to US companies. I would have been the "face" who sold our services to US executives and collected the money, and then passed the work on to $1/day workers he'd found somewhere. Were they well-trained? Who knows; he didn't care and I wasn't supposed to either. I passed, but that offer was a microcosm of what's been happening to the US software industry for the past few decades, and the US job market in general.
Are you sure about that?
Microsoft recently laid off 9,000 American workers while applying for 14,000 H1B visa workers [0]. They are transparently offshoring jobs from Americans to foreign workers.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/microsoft-applied-to...
But where are the job listings that h1b applicants are using. It seems like job availability is just down overall
In the same way accountancy is all of math.
Is this author suggesting that a CS degree is equivalent to programmer training?
I’m not saying it’s some written-out plan. But look at how left wing Indians and Indian politicians in the U.S. are compared to say German Americans. (Socialism was a founding principle of the modern Indian state.) People in the party are acting according to their incentives.
Moreover, foreign mindsets are durable over generations: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran... ("In The Culture Transplant, Garett Jones documents the cultural foundations of cross-country income differences, showing that immigrants import cultural attitudes from their homelands—toward saving, toward trust, and toward the role of government—that persist for decades, and likely for centuries, in their new national homes. Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth.").
Is there any proof for this statement? Republicans want cheap labor, they'll tell you that themselves, but I don't believe the Democrats would ever say that they believe in labor immigration to "get more voters".
That just sounds like a ludicrous conspiracy.
1) The biggest proof is under Biden's last term and at the end of Obama's last term, there were very large numbers of illegal border crossings. Especially under Biden where millions crossed. Let's conservatively say it was seven million people in four years. That doesn't happen by accident. Why do I say that? Under Trump's terms the border crossing numbers dramatically diminished. So it was just a question of enforcement which means the DHS, which happened to be run by the same guy Alejandro Mayorkas under both Biden and Obama, simply chose not to enforce the border and allow very large numbers of asylum claims (which I think are bogus and not our responsibility). That's a very nasty thing to do. Note that neither Biden nor Obama openly campaigned on letting millions of people in and it was a big concern of voters going into the 2024 elections.
2) Democrats have run on a racial platform and it has been very successful. See: https://keywiki.org/Race_Will_Win_the_Race. For example, California used to be a GOP state. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California. The demographics of California have changed dramatically in just a few decades as has the politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#202...
3) Democrats have refused to comply with ICE. ICE is responsible for deportations. They have created sanctuary cities, counties, and states. What reason is there for this besides not wanting illegals to be removed? "Human rights" is just a way of saying "endless litigation to prevent deportations".
4) The census was changed under Biden to include illegals in the population count. This is used to apportion representatives. So that would give more representation in the House to Democrats since illegals tend to live in urban areas which are all represented by Democrats.
5) Democrats have repeatedly made claims about how diversity is our strength. If diversity is to be valued, they must favor more immigration. Diversity here seems to be a euphemism. No one calls for diversity in China or Saudi Arabia for example. Why not? I think we know. So immigration and diversity are seemingly euphemisms for something else. https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-joe-...
6) The 1965 Immigration Act signed and sponsored under Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac.... It called for less homogeneity of immigrants. It has caused demographic change. If we look at how ethnic groups vote, demographic change has primarily benefited Democrats.
I think it's just obvious also. Lots of political things are put in terms of euphemisms that use watered down language. But it's quite hard not to notice ethnic conflict and balkanization beginning in the US and even across Europe.
This is such a weird phrasing. These people are not "guaranteed" jobs. They get a job and then apply for a visa which is granted because they have offer letters. In fact the whole article reads like American government is somehow giving these people jobs rather than allowing them to work on jobs they have already gotten.
The most uncharitable reading of this is usual racist dog whistle.
> This is just so completely outrageous.
> And Trump just approved another wave of Indians on H1B's for next year.
They would rather be poor and underdeveloped than have immigrants start more than half of billion dollar+ startups.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” ― Lyndon B. Johnson
Billion dollar raises, not billion dollar profitable business. What exactly are these startups doing besides mega grifting and creating more useless layers of tech?
The wage suppression is real.
Any student will look at the job prospects of their major before selecting it. We aren’t lying to them. I won’t feel bad for a student fresh out of college that “only” received a job offer for 95k, when that’s above the US median household income. I’m skeptical the lower job placement rate is due to H1B, and it might be more related to larger labor market trends.
Sound in identifying employment and wage challenges for new CS graduates.
Oversimplified in attributing these challenges mainly or solely to foreign workers.
Questionable in presenting policy recommendations as the only “truth-based” solution.
If you're looking for a deeper, balanced understanding, consider consulting:
National Science Board’s Science & Engineering Indicators
Brookings Institution or Cato Institute reports (for contrasting views)
NACE and NCES for graduate outcomes and education data
The key information is halfway down the page, in the figure that shows the number of new graduates and new temporary workers each year. The number of new temporary workers has been relatively stable, while the number of new graduates has been climbing steadily.
There was a shortage of software developers in the 2010s. The industry hired more people from abroad than there were graduates from CS programs. Still, CS graduates had better job prospects than their peers in other fields. The market responded to the shortage by increasing the supply of CS graduates, and that increase in domestic supply kept entry-level wages from rising faster than inflation.
The job market changed in the 2020s. A country with a more reactive immigration policy would have noticed the worsening job prospects of new graduates and routinely lowered the supply of new immigrant workers in that field. The US could not do that, as American legislators apparently don't believe in such central planning. The government can make employment-based immigration easier or harder overall, but it lacks convenient tools for targeted interventions in specific fields.
People who chose CS when the job market was hot are now graduating in record numbers. You could say in retrospect that the market overreacted and allocated too much resources to software. And it's quite likely that the market will now overreact in the other direction, as it did after the dot-com bust. Immigration policy can help smoothen these market overreactions, as you can get immigrant workers much faster than new graduates. But that requires dedicated effort from the government.
and that is their own "fault" for chasing money. The top graduates will still get good outcomes. It's the mediocre money chasers who would do poorly in a down market.
The exact same thing happened to the dotcom boom/bust. You'd think people would learn.
