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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
Thank god. The H1-B system is well-known to be an absolute cesspit of corruption and fraud. The original purpose was for US businesses to selectively fill positions that there was a shortage of US talent for, but it's been heavily gamed by Indian diploma mills. Even the idea of a "labor shortage" doesn't really make sense when since it's not like the market would have never cleared, it was more an issue of the right pay/benefits. Indians were much more willing to put up with crappy conditions and lower pay, which made the field worse for everyone, and that's before talking about the blatant nepotism they'd often engage in.
Here's hoping the rule will actually stick, but given Trump's previous track record, I'm kind of doubtful. There's a high chance the courts either shred this outright, or at least significantly water it down.
If people's true objection to H-1B workers is that they allow employers to get away with shitty employment practices and bad working conditions then the correct way to fix that is to lobby for the government to end at will employment and introduce unfair dismissal/working standards directive regulations etc. like we have here in Europe. That will go a much longer way and be more legally secure long term for ensuring better rights for American workers.
In reality the true reasons why people don't want H-1B are those that (still) can't be talked about in polite society and so we all get put through this charade instead.
The low pay and bad conditions is one part, but solving that with regulation has proven to be worse than the problem in Europe. When there is an easy solution in front of us in America: Ban fake resume H1Bs and let Iowa State and Florida Atlantic grads with B averages actually get STEM jobs, it is not a hard tradeoff.
To be honest, I wasn't aware that the problem that H1B visa holders generally are not good at the jobs they are typically allegedly overqualified for was not a topic that could be brought up in polite society. But maybe that is because I work in the legal field now and only interact with engineers as part of my job. Where I work, time falsification is a huge point of discussion, for example.
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I can talk about the true reasons in polite society: it undercuts wages and makes an underclass of workers who effectively cannot leave their jobs. It is an attack on the wages of a subset of professional workers.
The solution to that problem is to allow H-1B workers to shift employers after say 1-2 years which is how Canada and Australia do it with their permanent residence process, plus put a penalty on the employer if a worker they sponsor leaves a job with them to go elsewhere (like for example restricting them from sponsoring further workers in the short term) to ensure they provide good enough conditions that migrant workers don't want to leave them.
I'd go further and let them take any job at any employer. Assuming the new employer will sponsor them. I think tying people to their jobs is generally bad. And if the market determines such a person is suited for a different job title with more or different responsibilities then they should be allowed to do it. The fact that they have to ask bureaucrats for permission to professionally grow by accepting new job titles with more or different responsibilities is horrible.
For instance, supposedly decades ago Massachusetts' enforceable non-compete contracts slowed their tech industry growth and resulted in California overtaking them. Locking employees into their jobs is enforced stagnation and yet another scheme to push down wages. Such contracts were greatly restricted in scope in 2018 and completely banned last year. Good riddance.
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If an employer finds an underpriced asset who then leaves 2 years later they get punished? Kinda nonsensical implications even if employer working in good faith.
I'm a fan of three-strikes type rules. If one guy does it there are multiple possible explanations but if people keep leaving maybe something is going on.
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Nothing prevents the employer from offering higher pay to the worker to keep them there. People, especially migrants who are new to the country will place a premium on stability so unless they're being paid significantly under what they could get on the free market and the employer refuses to budge the large majority of them will choose to stay put.
Depends on the enterprise. Employees can easily graduate the pay scale of one organization especially in tech.
This is also a key problem with the industry that would be solved if the market was less confounded by things like H1B visas. Very few people have to leave the car dealership they work at to get paid fairly.
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Why would Trump’s constituents, and the wider voting public, want this when they can just opt for the simpler solution and turn off the tap?
Why would you prefer a total overhaul of American labor law and work culture instead of restricting a program that’s very unpopular with the American public?
I think increasingly, day by day, it’s becoming rather easy to state the preferences of the Trump base and the American voter more broadly in polite society, and it’s increasingly difficult for the people who oppose it who vocalize their opposition without revealing hidden preferences.
What is the executive even allowed to do here? Does the law let the president turn off the tap?
Congress is so passive that presidents end up enacting policy through rather strained interpretations of existing law. The law says they get to impose processing fees? Then instead of $250 it is $100k. And then hope courts agree this is valid.
No, it's much worse than that. There's a law (8 U.S.C. § 1182(f)) which says the president may exclude or restrict certain classes of aliens if they are detrimental to the interests of the United States. The proclamation uses that discretion to impose the fee -- it's a "restriction". The law does not mention fees. This is IMO the sort of thing the Major Questions Doctrine is supposed to rule out; you shouldn't be able to build an entire regulatory structure on what appears to be an emergency provision. I doubt the Supreme Court has the balls to go against Trump on this, though.
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The executive didn't seem very concerned with this with the Tariffs or with DOGE. Why start now?
The tariff case is at the Supreme Court now. IIRC, Trump won on most but not all of the DOGE things.
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Because turning off the tap doesn't prevent shitty employers from being shitty directly, while introducing proper employment protections and letting migrant workers switch jobs by right does this. Why go for the roundabout way where your stated preferred policy aims may be reified as a second order consequence when you can just legislate for it directly?
Regulations of workplace conditions being poorly implemented is so frequent that it is basically the iron law of workplace regulations. Your solution is akin to proposing amputation of a person's leg to solve their athlete's foot.
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Because shitty employers access to a virtually unlimited pool of willing foreign serfs enables much of the shitty behavior in the first place, and it’s a much simpler and direct way to put upward pressure on employment conditions by siloing off the pool of potential ‘employees’ that would accept them in the first place.
Cutting the Gordian knot is always preferable to some theoretical future action that is so complicated and conditional its chance of success is slim.
The perfect being the enemy of the good and whatnot.
I’ll state again; the H1B program and its consequences are uniquely unpopular with the Trump base and broadly unpopular in the American voting public, therefore this attack on it seems very politic and straightforward. Is there some special reason you’re defending it?
As an American, I’m puzzled as to why I should emulate European employment practices that have resulted in such a weak economy and society rather than seek to return to the health and dynamism of the American past? Or construct a uniquely American future based on our own values?
That's right. Bring Ellis Island back. As long as someone is not a felon, bigamist or anarchist and has a ticket to their ultimate destination and $1780 dollars per person, let them come and work without recourse to public funds.
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Americans by and large like at will employment. To the American mind a company should be able to fire who they like, unless they're discriminating or something, because otherwise managers will be less willing to hire(and it does seem basically true that the American labor market is more flexible and easier to find a job in compared to internationally. Illegals enjoy their higher wages but they also love the ability to find a new employer comparatively easier, for example).
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A lot of it is cultural. I really don’t mind third world elites, probably 85% of my apartment building consists of them and they are generally polite, comparatively well dressed, keep to themselves and keep communal spaces clean. Having grown up around rich Americans I can’t really say they are any less pleasant to be around.
But the last 30 years have seen large numbers of peasants come in, in addition to existing third world peasant populations like the Mirpuris in England, rural Anatolians in Germany and so on.
A few very rich westernized Bangladeshis in Mayfair and Chelsea doesn’t bother (almost) anyone. Tower Hamlets becoming a Sylheti Islamist ethnostate does. This is pretty simple stuff.
I understand that Canada and the UK have this problem, but I've never seen a South Asian ghetto in America. Perhaps a few neighborhoods in Queens come close, but in general Indian immigrant enclaves seem cleaner and more orderly than average, certainly compared to their Black or Latino equivalents. If there's some corner of Silicon Valley where H1-B's are shitting in the street while pretending to work entry-level code monkey jobs, I'm curious to know where that is.
My sister's neighborhood has recently hit a 30% ish tipping point, and now is a constant hotbed of HOA litigation whereas before there were no issues that took more than a piece of mail to resolve.
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I have, where I live has a very large Desi population and in my line of work I have to deal with a lot of relatively lower class Indians.
The negative effects on the social fabric are distinct from large scale Latino immigration but notable. There’s a clustering effect that I can see happening in real time.
Where I live they’re neck and neck with El Salvador as the major origin point of migrants, and now that El Salvador isn’t a violent hellhole but rather a stable and prosperous country, the flow of people from there to here is slowing down.
I mean, my metro features areas that are more Indian than white(like the city of Irving). The Indian parts are much nicer looking than the mexican parts, even if I prefer the mexican parts for a variety of reasons. I'm curious where these Indian ghettos are and what they look like- AFAIK there's simply not a lot of dalits coming to the USA.
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I'm not entirely opposed to the things you advocate for, but for me this is more of an object-level issue. I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians, especially when the field has relatively high unemployment at the moment.
Sure, that's a valid way to feel, but do you equally accept the arguments of liberal elites who want to exclude US citizen conservatives from being able to compete for elite jobs for the same reason, especially when elite overproduction means their children now have to work harder than they themselves had to for these sorts of positions?
Your culture provides no reciprocity, you advocate for competition because where you come from has nothing to offer us. You appeal to the spirit of competition in order to manipulate us into allowing you into our society. I just don't want to live with you; I don't want you in my neighborhood. I don't want to compete with you- I don't want my children to compete with you. I just don't want you around. You only care about competition because you only get upside from that arrangement, you have nothing at stake. I have my neighborhood at stake, and much more than that from the prospect of allowing millions of Indians to live with me "because competition."
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"I really don't want to have to have to compete against a billion Indians" isn't an argument, it's an expression of a preference.
@TheAntipopulist might have some kind of political principle behind his statement, but if he does, he hasn't expressed it. He's just expressed a preference to face less competition from Indians. As for me, personally, I just want to face less economic competition from people in general, it doesn't matter to me whether they're US citizens or foreigners.
Fair enough, that's actually defensible. I wouldn't agree with it but at least it is a logical reason.
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No, because citizenship actually means something. Which means that, in spite of the countless issues I have with our black underclass, I prioritize them over illegal Mexicans competing for their same jobs.
Citizenship means nothing to me. I just want to have less economic competition, whether it's from other US citizens or from foreigners.
You really ought to try to have some feeling of fellowship with your fellow citizens. At a minimum, pretending that citizenship means nothing is a big part of what allowed the woke madness (especially in regards to immigration) to take hold in the first place. But this (surprisingly coherent) video from Sam Hyde might help convince you for other reasons: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YvcUQI6gAaI?si=yIqiiZSn1C4nAos9
I don't see any reason to have a feeling of fellowship with my fellow citizens, specifically, as opposed to having a feeling of fellowship with groups defined in other ways. But I do see that in certain situations, it is best for society in general to at least pretend to have a feeling of citizenship.
So I think you do have a point about the woke madness.
For me one of the interesting things about immigration is that, I think that for the most part, neither wokes nor right-wingers have any real principles about it.
If most people illegally crossing the US border were white conservative Christians, the wokes would be demanding to build a border wall and the right-wingers would be setting up sanctuary cities.
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What if we don't want those things, because the market will naturally sort out good conditions if the Indians are gone.
What makes you believe it's the Indians causing poor employer behaviour rather than say pretentious US citizen rurals (or conservatives or whatever) who at the moment can also compete freely for these good jobs? Would you be OK with explicit policies that tried to limit their access to "elite" jobs because them trying to supply labour is little different than Indians trying to supply labour?
There aren't a ton of rednecks competing for these jobs, and while they have somewhat different workplace expectations, it's not India tier different.
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What if the Indian population goes back to their country of Origin, takes a moment of pause to help right the historical wrongs suffered by the Backwards castes and give them their moment in the sun instead of trying to dodge overseas to avoid the truly needful passing over of privilege.
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Objection, facts not in evidence.
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"I don't want H-1B workers because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs" can be said in most kinds of polite society, I think. It might make you seem selfish, but it wouldn't make you seem like a terrible person.
Your comment is analogous to "I don't want increased opportunities for US rurals because I would prefer, as much as possible, not to compete with other people for jobs which US rurals will do if they are given the same opportunities as me". If a liberal elite made such a comment in regards to elite jobs they'd be raked over the coals in the current zeitgeist and absolutely get called a terrible person.
They might be called a terrible person on social media, but it's not a statement I would be worried about making in polite company in person, like at a party or something, as long as I said it in such a phrasing and tone of voice as to make it clear that what makes me happy about having less competition is the having less competition part, not hurting others.
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I'm not specifying a particular group any more than you're specifying H-1B workers in your example. Would you be just as OK with someone who is a liberal elite and wanted to prevent conservatives (amongst others, like the poor) from being able to compete for elite jobs because that way there's less competition for them and their kids to overcome to get these elite jobs?
Sorry, I misread your comment. See my other reply. But to your question, yeah I'd be fine with it if it seemed like the motivation was just a global desire to avoid competition, not some particular hatred of conservatives.
By the way, I'm not a conservative, so your example might be a bit mis-targeted.
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