Also H1B pays FICA taxes, that exemption is only for OPT. The OPT exemption can be easily removed.
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
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
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://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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The ‘mandatory interviews for Americans’ are just transparent scams.
Foreign students are not stealing “slots” from Americans. If anything, their tuition dollars make more slots available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guaranteed jobs? Sir, this is not France ;)
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.
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...
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.
The wage suppression is real.
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.
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.
It was supposed to be for hiring wernher von braun type world leading experts in their field.
It was never supposed to be for hiring a bunch of code plumbers, which is what 99.9% of this industry consists of.
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.
> 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
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.
In the same way accountancy is all of math.
Is this author suggesting that a CS degree is equivalent to programmer training?
> 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.
At this point, software job opportunities are pretty low on the list of things tearing the nation apart.
Billion dollar raises, not billion dollar profitable business. What exactly are these startups doing besides mega grifting and creating more useless layers of tech?
But where are the job listings that h1b applicants are using. It seems like job availability is just down overall
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.
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.
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.
"Demographics is destiny" seems to be a quote from a french philosopher from the 1800s, while "coalition of the ascendant" seems to be a description of the coalition Obama sought to build in his second term, an idea swiftly dismantled in 2016.
The articles I can find discussing these things don't contain any democrats scheming about using immigrants to overtake the republicans. The only people I find talking about how it will "estrange the republican party from these growing demographics" are republicans. I'm not going to claim that no democrat has ever considered that outcome, but I am going to propose that it seems more likely to me that if that were to happen it would be a result of politics they'd be in favor of anyway.
In general, it's pretty popular to help people. I don't think republicans would disagree that part of their coalition is built on higher income individuals, which they hope to grow by raising incomes. They're not doing that as a sort of underhanded tactic, they believe income is good. In the same way I think the Obama democrats do believe in helping immigrants, and obviously that makes them more popular amongst immigrants. That's not a scheme, that's just a policy.
I don't think this is nearly as clear cut as you believe it is.
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.").
But what was the nature of "the coalition Obama sought to build in his second term?" Normally, political coalitions are based on things like geography or economic classes. But Obama's coalition was based on ethnic groups. Specifically, it was based on winning supermajorities among demographic groups that were rapidly growing due to immigration. Indeed, the results of the 2016 election were portrayed in U.S. media as being the last gasp of the old America before it was washed away by demographic change.
Respectfully, maybe this would be clearer to you if you lived here, and spent the last 15 years reading countless headlines and articles about demographics, which were relatively rare before 2008. And those headlines and articles suddenly stopped last November, when Donald Trump won a narrow majority of naturalized citizens. None of that is a coincidence.
> The articles I can find discussing these things don't contain any democrats scheming about using immigrants to overtake the republicans... I don't think republicans would disagree that part of their coalition is built on higher income individuals, which they hope to grow by raising incomes.
That's a good comparison. But I think it's totally fair to say that Republicans have a policy of giving tax cuts to rich people because it inures to their political benefit. Republicans obviously never say that in those words, but Democrats certainly characterize Republicans that way. And I think it's a fair criticism.
I have heard commentators mention ideas along those lines (never the specific formulations you used as examples, but the general vibe) post 2016, and even a little before that. That is, to me, not the same as that being the policy. Post 2016 democrats needed a cope. They needed a hope to hold on to after they had lost, what to them seemed like a slam dunk. That's not a policy proposal, but rather a strategic observation. In general I think you're better served by listening to politicians when they are trying to build, than when they have failed in building.
I also think it's quite important to note that in that analysis, we presuppose that immigrants will like the democrats. That either requires that democrat policies are good for immigrants, and immigrants to recognize that, or a vast conspiracy to take America down. If demographic change would turn America into a third world country, as some commentators have argued, surely immigrants wouldn't be for that either.
> But I think it's totally fair to say that Republicans have a policy of giving tax cuts to rich people because it inures to their political benefit.
I surely don't hope it's that direct. I think it's fair to talk about the cause and effect, but it would be totally unfair to characterize it as naked corruption. I truly believe that the mainstream American republicans believe in tax cuts as a means to drive innovation. That they believe in slimming down the government from a place of ideology, and not simply a naked ploy to reduce the oversight of their sponsors' activities. That they believe their policies to increase the wealth of the regular American, which they then hope will make them vote Republican.
I worry that this is no longer true of the "far right"/"alt right"/"authoritarian right". That distinction, between doing something for a belief in a better world, and doing it purely for strategy to gain power, is where I place the line to "fascism". A definition I don't share with many scholars.
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.
Right, and most countries are very conservative compared to the US, in particular many of the countries that the average H1B holder is from. India, for example. That means Republican voters. The entire premise is flawed fearmongering.
I don’t have to fear monger. The cake is already baked. David Shor estimates that Trump tied or narrowly won foreign-born voters. Mass immigration didn’t kill the GOP, but it changed what kind of conservative party could assemble a winning coalition. And it looks like more like Trump (or Bolsonaro or Modi) and less like Mitt Romney or George H.W. Bush. Hope Obama was worth it!
You’re probably thinking of the O-1 Visa, though that was also created in the ‘90’s.
[https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...]
This country just cannot get over a black man being president.
The day he was elected the first time, the statement echoed in the small diner I was in a table over was "I can't believe he won, he's not one of us."
That's the day I realized how fucked this place is.