Immigration reform in America

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/04/immigration-reform-0?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/forwardmarch

by tchalla • 13 years ago

30 58 13 years ago

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

Massive immigration will help make sure I get my social security...

klrr• 13 years ago

Well, they want to make it easier for companies to get good working power, not allow people come and "steal" your benefits.

dllthomas3• 13 years ago

I think you read me as saying the opposite of what I was saying. The biggest problem with entitlements in the current environment is that the younger/working population is shrinking relative to the older/retiring population. Opening the borders means more younger workers coming, and probably having more children, who'll be "paying for my social security."

Of course, the comment was jokingly flippant - it's not really a good reason to throw the borders open, though there are certainly more serious arguments on both sides of that debate.

jadoint• 13 years ago

I think he's alluding to the fact that the more people that come and work in the U.S., the more people there will be to fund his social security.

RegRegReg• 13 years ago

"...to get good working power..." You forgot "for much less money".

geebee• 13 years ago

Zuckerberg said: "We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants". The economist says "insane" would be a better term.

I actually agree that we should be more welcoming to highly skilled immigrants in general, but the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric is getting irritating.

The US currently takes 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. This will be true regardless of whether we award large numbers of work visas to the sort of people Zuckerberg would like to hire.

Our immigration system is more based on family reunification than the hiring priorities of the high tech industry. I would agree that there are better ways to decide who will get to come to the US.

But this isn't really about immigration per se, the specific legislation under consideration is about awarding visas or green cards directly to people with graduate STEM degrees. A good idea sure, but why does nobody at the economist point out that US takes huge numbers of immigrants every year and will continue to do so regardless of what happens with this legislation?

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Nobody is saying the US doesn't take in a large number of immigrants. The problem is that they make it incredibly difficult for people to get in and also difficult to stay. The "nation of immigrants" comments refer to the fact that the US got to where it is thanks in large part due to immigrants (e.g. by 1860 1/4 of the people living in New York had been born in Ireland and another 1/4 were from Germany).[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City#Early_history

potatolicious4• 13 years ago

Not to mention, as GP mentioned, the bulk of immigration in the US is family reunification. While other developed nations are using immigration policy as an economic driver, importing the best and brightest from elsewhere, the US's immigration policy does not support its own economic goals.

The argument being made by tech lobbyist groups, among other immigration reform groups, is that the US needs to start wielding its immigration policy as a strategic economic tool rather than the somewhat directionless policy which exists today where small allowances are made for the importation of talent but which does not appear to be part of any cohesive overarching policy.

WildUtah2• 13 years ago

Actually, the only immigration legislation that will be considered by the US Senate as currently constituted is omnibus ("comprehensive") immigration legislation. It will address several guest worker programs, amnesty for unauthorized migrants, border enforcement, personnel issues at CIS and Border Patrol, fees and budget authority, naturalization,and more.

The leadership of the senate chose that strategy in order to require tech company management and others to lobby in favor of a bill with both benefits for them -- like driving down tech wages -- and other changes that are unpopular with the public -- like amnesty. It's a gambit they use to get both sets of changes through instead of only the popular or best funded ones.

krschultz4• 13 years ago

Why is the 1.2 million number fixed in stone? I would be happy to have 10 million a year. 1.2 million is clearly below the market demand, and the market demand is what is driving the whole thing. It was really enlightening for me that illegal immigration dropped when the economy went down in the last few years. If we align immigration with the market everything would be better.

Obviously there is a number where our infrastructure would be completely swamped, but nothing grows the economy faster than a pile of immigrants. Especially when they are permanent immigrants. The current system encourages a lot people to come for a short period and then go home, which isn't really great for the country long term.

Kudzu_Bob9• 13 years ago

Why not a hundred million a year? You could get that many from Africa alone. Because nothing grows the economy faster than a pile of immigrants, except maybe an extinction-level mega-tsunami of immigrants racing toward the coastline at hypersonic speed.

Yep, that would really be great for the economy. Which is of course exactly the same thing as the country.

davidf184• 13 years ago

It is a means of lowering wage rates among engineers and software developers. Rich for Zuckerberg, with > $10 billion in wealth created by those engineers and software developers to want to lower their wages even further.

Of all the top large technical companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, Intel, Facebook, ...) only Google has a major presence in Manhattan (in Chelsea) for software developers and engineers (it owns the second largest office building in New York City). If Zuckerberg and friends would read a some of Richard Florida, he'd find that young people don't want to live in boring Silicon Valley (many take a long daily commute from SF) but rather in places like Manhattan. Disclosure: I live in Manhattan

Lowering the wage rate is not the best way to get technical talent. The best way to do as Google has done and go to where a lot of smart, enterprising people want to live.

objclxt2• 13 years ago

> It is a means of lowering wage rates among engineers and software developers

You might think Mark Zuckerberg is in this to bring in international developers and pay them peanuts, but the reality is that most people Google, Facebook, and the like are bringing in on H-1B visas are extremely well compensated, on a par with their US counterparts. Once you account for relocations packages and visa/legal fees (which alone can top $10k) it's often more expensive.

Yes, some companies take advantage of international workers. I don't dispute that. But many people who want to enter the US are losing out - they have great job offers, and end up being slaves to an arbitrary lottery with a fairly meaningless cap in the grand scale of total US immigration.

davidf184• 13 years ago

Econ 101: importing labor reduces "scarcity" driving down prices, regardless of paying going rate. It simply keeps rates from going up which would bring more Americans into the "silicon valley" tech labor pool.

See Tim Harford's "Undercover Economist" for TL;DR style of understanding economics: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007NIDW1Q/

If Zuckerberg's is trying to satisfy a labor shortage then he should go to where the labor wants to live, as Google has done which is to establish a major technical presence in Manhattan, where the kind of people he wishes to hire want to live.

general_failure2• 13 years ago

Most immigrants don't mind living in the valley. In face they would love to live in the valley.

Source : me who lives in the valley and practically all my friends.

ojbyrne2• 13 years ago

I've met plenty of young people who would prefer to live in boring Silicon Valley rather than places like Manhattan.

Irishsteve• 13 years ago

They all have big dev centers around the world. FB opened a big engineering office in the UK

nostromo• 13 years ago

I heard an interesting idea recently: auction off immigration slots. (Not all of them, just a large subset.)

Employers looking to hire talented individuals from abroad would most commonly foot the bill.

There are some cool things about this solution: it raises money for the US Government, it determines who will most likely be a high-value contributor to the economy, and it raises the cost of foreign workers (to balance the interest of American workers).

objclxt2• 13 years ago

It has been pointed out here before that this would significantly disadvantage both start-ups and small companies who may be working in extremely niche environments and require talent from abroad.

optiminimalist• 13 years ago

I absolutely agree. Companies like TCS, that get the highest number of H1B visas already, will easily be able to bid high enough at an "immigration auction". Nothing would change at the high end - only at the low end small companies would be crowded out.

Taking this further, the big corporations could potentially (and probably will) play strategically and outbid most start-ups.

WildUtah2• 13 years ago

That's not true at all.

Auctioning off worker visas would make it possible for startups to hire talented people and to being co-founders to work together in the USA for a cash price. Today, startups are almost completely prevented from using H1 and L1/2 visas because of the paperwork requirements and because CIS examiners choose to assign those visas only to established companies.

The established companies in question usually pay millions and millions to hire the first tech worker because they have to set up a legal department that can deal with the obsolete, contradictory, byzantine, and nonsensical requirements of the law and CIS bureaucracy. Then each tech worker after the first costs only the application fee and salary of the worker.

The high initial cost eliminates startups while the low marginal cost for additional workers means InfoSys and WiPro can fill the quota with low wage, low profit per seat CRUD developers. It's the worst of both worlds.

Startups could easily outbid the body shops for a single talented programmer or founder if each visa were up for bid. Also, the cost would be much, much lower than today's system where you need to hire lawyers to lie for you (yes, it is required to lie; the law as written contradicts basic economic facts).

It's time to put this foolishness to rest: putting tech worker visas up to bid would be good for tech workers, good for startups, good for R&D focused companies, and good for the government budget. It would not be good for cheap body shops that depend on low-wage no-rights workers.

general_failure2• 13 years ago

Why not base them off employee salary ? This will get in money in the form of taxes and make sure these companies pay big amounts to get skilled labor.

This also solves the whole TCS, infosys, services companies hoarding on h1b. They wouldn't be able to complete since it is not their business model.

krschultz4• 13 years ago

There is an NPR podcast on this idea (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/21/172501563/three-wa...), and it kind of skeeved me out. It just sounds like indentured servitude to me.

mbesto• 13 years ago

Alright, someone please explain to me how this can be fixed? For example, I'm American and my team is a Russian and a Belgian. I would love for all of us to pick up our bags and move to the US, but can't because of obvious immigration issues. So even if there was a system set up to support them immigrating to the US, how on earth am I supposed to prove that they would contributing members of society (aka pay high taxes and add jobs)?

volandovengo• 13 years ago

The challenge with the US is that all talk of immigration focusses on illegal immigrants, rather than highly skilled and educated immigrants.

It's unfortunate that the Obama administration won't separate these two kinds of immigrants since they fear in doing so, they won't be able to get comprehensive immigration reform passed.

Other countries recognize the value of highly educated immigrants who want to create companies. Canada, for example, just announced it's startup visa specifically targeting immigrants who want to move to the country to start a company.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/4170022/canada-startup-visa...

krschultz4• 13 years ago

Negotiating 101 is to always try and do the whole thing at once rather than piecemeal. If you do the parts that everyone agrees to, there's nothing in common to build around for the hard stuff later.

Also in general, just doing the popular stuff leads to big problems later (that's how we ended up with low taxes and high spending, nobody wants to do either of the hard parts of balancing a budget).

Kudzu_Bob9• 13 years ago

The whole point, of course, is to open the country to massive immigration under the guise of letting in a comparative handful of skilled immigrants. That way the Republican business interests get lower wages in their meat-packing plants and so on while the Democrats swell their ranks with impoverished voters. It's a win-win!

nahname• 13 years ago

Curious to hear others experiences. How many white, north american born people are on your current team? I'm the only one on my current team and have often been the minority in the groups I work with.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

What's stopping all these companies from growing the talent themselves? The rhetoric always makes it sound like the sky is falling and if they don't get their super smart foreign staff NOW, the business will crash. The problem is that this sort of story plays out year after year with one tech group or another having a "critical shortage." You'd think if this were an immediate problem then these companies that were unable to source and retain talent would have died off by now. Surprisingly they're still here.

And the types of talent that the likes of Google or Facebook would be interested in -- genuine genius and extra-ordinary ability-- already have visa programs: O-1 and EB-1. It's just that H-1B visas are relatively easier to get.

So what makes getting immigrants a better proposition than growing the talent yourself? Everyone wants the talent, but nobody wants to cultivate it.

krschultz4• 13 years ago

Forget that angle for a second.

When I sitting in my graduate engineer classes, 50%+ of the students were foreign. Most of them were working with professors on projects supported by the federal government via various grants programs (NIS, DOD, etc). Most of them wanted to stay in the US after graduation.

Few of them were allowed to.

Doesn't that seem like a massive waste of our educational system? Why are we spending so much time and energy educating people and then refusing to allow them to stay in the US?

Kudzu_Bob9• 13 years ago

No, what seems like a massive waste of our educational system is the notion that Federal tax dollars are going toward the higher education of non-citizens at the same time that millions of Americans either can't afford to go to school or are groaning under the weight of student debts. Odd that you should have missed that.

larrybolt2• 13 years ago

As a european developer and HN reader I've recently been wondering how feasible it is to move to the states after I finished university.

It seems the general trend would be something in the like of getting a visa, start looking for a job and be lucky your employer can get you a green card. After this 5 years of living in the states before you can become an American citizen.

Please do correct me if I'm wrong!

ropiku• 13 years ago

H-1B is an employer sponsored visa, valid only for working on a specific job (though it's possible to transfer to a different employer) so it's getting a job first then getting a visa. Then your employer can sponsor your green card application. Depending on the level you apply/qualify for you wait 1-6 years for a green card.

larrybolt2• 13 years ago

What exactly does that mean, the level you apply/qualify for? Does it depend on your education or merely on how much your employer put into it? Because 6 years waiting for a green card, after which another 5 years before you can apply for citizenship and keeping in mind the economy changes trough the years.

agilebyte• 13 years ago

Yup. An easier route would be to get hired in Europe working for a company that has a branch in US and then do a transfer.

Yet another alternative is to start your own company in US and invest about half a million $ (officially, unofficially have seen it done for 100k).

Yet another alternative would be to get a job in academia that has H1B uncapped.

yekko• 13 years ago

Abolish the indenture servitude H-1B program, have self applied green card program instead.

Immigration reform in America

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