Comment by dsmark
Wage suppression
Wage suppression
If they bring in tons of new French language teachers and nurses, that suppresses the wages of people here. Those companies would have to raise wages to find workers, and if there aren't any workers, they'd have to raise wages to fight for what few workers there are, which might help some of our OWN UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE find LUCRATIVE WORK as they see they can become a nurse or language teacher and make a healthy living doing so.
The only people who need immigrants are greedy businesses. It makes life worse for literally everyone else in a nation.
> The more than 400,000 tech workers who have been laid off since 2022 are a clear reflection of wage suppression in the industry,
IMO, they are a clearer reflection of the fact that the industry has lots of jobs that are tied to remote future payoff and dependent on financing outside of operations, and that tighter money policies reduced the flow of investment into the broad industry (outside of the AI segment), cutting a lot of those jobs.
Again, you are focusing on tech workers. Not everyone on a H-1B visa is a tech worker.
There is a problem with tech and how oversubscribed the H-1B visa is because of tech contracting - especially with visa dependent employers. However, the suggestion to cancel the program would impact many other professions (that already suffer because of tech in the field) where the visa isn't used in the same way.
The problems that we are seeing is not one of the H-1B visa, but rather large amounts of money sloshing around in the tech industry trying to get things done first and consultancies trying to get a piece of the pie from people who have ideas but no idea of how to do do whatever the hyped thing is today.
Could you elaborate on how wages of native French speaking language teachers are being suppressed? Or that nurses in North Dakota are not getting jobs because the hospital is going through the process of hiring a qualified nurse under the H-1B program?
I'm not saying that the teachers or nurses are not underpaid - they should be paid more, but the ability for the organization to pay them more is often constrained by other factors (teacher salaries for public schools, medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals).
Saying "no, we shouldn't hire them" doesn't mean that a qualified American teacher will show up or new nurses will go to Fargo to get a job. Rather, foreign language programs in schools will be discontinued and hospitals in rural areas will close (being unable to meet the required nurse to patient ratios).
There are problems with the system. People on HN often forget that there are a lot of other professions outside of technology that make use of the H-1B when there is a genuine need.
Unfortunately technology - and especially technology consultancies - have flooded the application process for the H-1B visas to the point where H-1B has become synonymous with Indian programmer working at a WITCH company.
> Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions [edit: for H-1B dependent employers] and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.
This apparently has expired. The proclamation "Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers" is of dubious footing.
You know what would have been good with the budget bill (the previous Consolidated Appropriations Act was a budget bill signed by Obama)? Quadrupling the application fee for H-1B dependent employers and hiring auditors to make sure that the applicants are properly qualified, that there is a position open (not just a position on the bench at a consultancy) for the applicant to fill, that the position to be filled was attempted to be filled by a and that the employer is making full use of their existing employees (e.g. no one on the bench).
This is something that is (was) there and can be regulated and audited and catch the problematic employers - not French teachers and nurses.