8 ms·

I don't understand why American workers would support this program at this scale. Furthermore, I believe universities and other similar researchy/affiliated non

I don't understand why American workers would support this program at this scale. Furthermore, I believe universities and other similar researchy/affiliated non-profits are exempt from the hiring caps. I just cannot imagine executives at tech companies/body shops having any positive ethical motivations. More like "they'll do what we say without complaining or they'll go home". There's no way it's not just a hugely abusive to both pools of workers. The whole thing really feels like another example of the imbalance between labor and capital in the US. Who originally wanted H-1B/etc? Rich people with money and power? Of course!

dominotw 6mo ago
workers dont. but dont speak against it either because they are scared of losing heir jobs from accusations of racism.
- moshegramovsky 6mo ago
  I work in Bellevue, WA, and there are a lot of Indians. How many are on H-1B? I I don't know. Anyway, I am a life long Democrat, but the Democratic Party needs to do something huge for American workers (like single payer healthcare) or we'll have Trump III or its equivalent or worse than that.
  - dudul 6mo ago
    I don't think "American workers" are the target demographic of the Democratic Party though. And yes, the next round will be "worse than Trump". The reality is Trump ran on certain principles that his voters adhered to, and he didn't deliver. The next logical step will be to support somebody even more "extreme".
    - moshegramovsky 6mo ago
      Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. Trump was never going to deliver because he's the living, breathing embodiment of two things: Dunning-Kruger, and the ethos of disgusting corporate greed/abuse that's ruining the country. Trump and people like him are the most dangerous anti-democratic force ever assembled in America.
dexwiz 6mo ago
Because our government is not run for the workers but the owners. Full stop.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  There are days I think what we need is a slightly bigger font for heavily upvoted comments.
- infamouscow 6mo ago
  Owners are a minority of voters, which raises an obvious question: why does the majority tolerate it? Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death. If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
  - ipaddr 6mo ago
    Wealth can be spent on influence. That includes news converage / ads / or donations.
  - dexwiz 6mo ago
    Because many people run on policies and then just don't follow up. Trump ran on "no more wars" and then started a war. Most people have such a team mindset they will choose denial over admitted they were duped, and then do it all again.
- skippyboxedhero 6mo ago
  To be clear too, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation. It can only end with disaster and more control/corporatism because lower-productivity workers does not produce higher long-term growth. Temporarily you are able to get your bonus and stock options from the spread between imported and native workers but, eventually, demand and supply stop (and the US reached this point a while ago, which is why central bankers and politicians have had to intervene heavily to keep it going). The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.
some_random 6mo ago
It was really easy to support when tech jobs were plentiful, well compensated, and fun.
- declan_roberts 6mo ago
  And before large language models.
fooker 6mo ago
There's not much preventing you from starting a company and not hiring immigrants. This is something I'd encourage everyone with strong opinions about work visas to try and accomplish. You don't change a system by crying about it on anonymous internet forums, you do it by competing against it and making it redundant.
- declan_roberts 6mo ago
  It's better to stop a bad program at the source and improve the lives all of American software engineers.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - fooker 6mo ago
    You are absolutely right! Good luck though.
- mtlynch 6mo ago
  That's missing the point. Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level. 150 years ago, if you told someone "oh if you want safer factories just build one yourself," that business would never survive because they'd get outcompeted by the less scrupulous factory owners who were happy to mangle their employees and just replace them with more desperate workers.
  - fooker 6mo ago
    Your factory analogy is great because that's exactly how it happened and we outsourced everything to China. It's significantly easier to outsource white collar work. And you can keep playing the regulation game until there are no companies left.
    - moshegramovsky 6mo ago
bottlepalm 6mo ago
One way or another H1B's got in the door, a lot of them. And at this point they're just hiring themselves. OPT's as well, they will stack the candidate pools with only OPT/H1Bs. Post any job and you will get a flood of thousands of spam resumes. If you ignore them then you put yourself at risk of being accused of discrimination.
pandaman 6mo ago
Most, if not all, politicians have a higher education of some kind. Higher education institutions make big money from international students, who only go for their overpriced education because of the possibility to work in the US. And it's not because the US employees prefer American education but because of OPT program, which let's one work in the country for 1/3 years depending on the degree (and it's cheaper to hire an OPT worker who is exempt from FICA taxes, paid by the employer for citizens and other visa categories) and then H1B. Schools are the main beneficiary of the program: there are 1M foreign students in the country, each paying full tuition and living expenses. Without H1B the number would have been orders of magnitude lower. For example, in China, where education is literally 10x cheaper, there are just 0.25M foreign students, because there is no immigration pathway for those. So any politician trying to clamp down on this program would have to explain to his or her alma mater why does he or she hate it so much.

dominotw 6mo ago

workers dont. but dont speak against it either because they are scared of losing heir jobs from accusations of racism.

moshegramovsky 6mo ago
I work in Bellevue, WA, and there are a lot of Indians. How many are on H-1B? I I don't know. Anyway, I am a life long Democrat, but the Democratic Party needs to do something huge for American workers (like single payer healthcare) or we'll have Trump III or its equivalent or worse than that.
- dudul 6mo ago
  I don't think "American workers" are the target demographic of the Democratic Party though. And yes, the next round will be "worse than Trump". The reality is Trump ran on certain principles that his voters adhered to, and he didn't deliver. The next logical step will be to support somebody even more "extreme".
  - moshegramovsky 6mo ago
    Unfortunately, you are 100% correct. Trump was never going to deliver because he's the living, breathing embodiment of two things: Dunning-Kruger, and the ethos of disgusting corporate greed/abuse that's ruining the country. Trump and people like him are the most dangerous anti-democratic force ever assembled in America.

dexwiz 6mo ago

Because our government is not run for the workers but the owners. Full stop.

iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
There are days I think what we need is a slightly bigger font for heavily upvoted comments.
infamouscow 6mo ago
Owners are a minority of voters, which raises an obvious question: why does the majority tolerate it? Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death. If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  Wealth can be spent on influence. That includes news converage / ads / or donations.
- dexwiz 6mo ago
  Because many people run on policies and then just don't follow up. Trump ran on "no more wars" and then started a war. Most people have such a team mindset they will choose denial over admitted they were duped, and then do it all again.
skippyboxedhero 6mo ago
To be clear too, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation. It can only end with disaster and more control/corporatism because lower-productivity workers does not produce higher long-term growth. Temporarily you are able to get your bonus and stock options from the spread between imported and native workers but, eventually, demand and supply stop (and the US reached this point a while ago, which is why central bankers and politicians have had to intervene heavily to keep it going). The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.

some_random 6mo ago

It was really easy to support when tech jobs were plentiful, well compensated, and fun.

declan_roberts 6mo ago
And before large language models.

fooker 6mo ago

There's not much preventing you from starting a company and not hiring immigrants. This is something I'd encourage everyone with strong opinions about work visas to try and accomplish. You don't change a system by crying about it on anonymous internet forums, you do it by competing against it and making it redundant.

declan_roberts 6mo ago
It's better to stop a bad program at the source and improve the lives all of American software engineers.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- fooker 6mo ago
  You are absolutely right! Good luck though.
mtlynch 6mo ago
That's missing the point. Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level. 150 years ago, if you told someone "oh if you want safer factories just build one yourself," that business would never survive because they'd get outcompeted by the less scrupulous factory owners who were happy to mangle their employees and just replace them with more desperate workers.
- fooker 6mo ago
  Your factory analogy is great because that's exactly how it happened and we outsourced everything to China. It's significantly easier to outsource white collar work. And you can keep playing the regulation game until there are no companies left.
  - moshegramovsky 6mo ago

bottlepalm 6mo ago

One way or another H1B's got in the door, a lot of them. And at this point they're just hiring themselves. OPT's as well, they will stack the candidate pools with only OPT/H1Bs. Post any job and you will get a flood of thousands of spam resumes. If you ignore them then you put yourself at risk of being accused of discrimination.

pandaman 6mo ago

Most, if not all, politicians have a higher education of some kind. Higher education institutions make big money from international students, who only go for their overpriced education because of the possibility to work in the US. And it's not because the US employees prefer American education but because of OPT program, which let's one work in the country for 1/3 years depending on the degree (and it's cheaper to hire an OPT worker who is exempt from FICA taxes, paid by the employer for citizens and other visa categories) and then H1B. Schools are the main beneficiary of the program: there are 1M foreign students in the country, each paying full tuition and living expenses. Without H1B the number would have been orders of magnitude lower. For example, in China, where education is literally 10x cheaper, there are just 0.25M foreign students, because there is no immigration pathway for those. So any politician trying to clamp down on this program would have to explain to his or her alma mater why does he or she hate it so much.