Everywhere I look the downturn is because of “outsourcing”, “India taking our jobs!!”, “cheap overseas labor” and never, never ever porky’s fault. It’s the dirty immigrant labor, not the guys who talk about having “properties”. I’ve always seen this shit floating around in white collar jobs as long as I’ve been working but it’s been really amped up the last few weeks. I am not surprised that people are just this racist on their own but at least some of it feels very manufactured.
People need to look at the number of CS graduates over the past 10 years. There's always the lingering question "why isn't there anyone over 50 in this industry?" It's not because of ageism (though maybe there is some truth to that) it's because there are way way way fewer people over 50 who can code. We went out and told everyone they need to learn to code and a lot of them did just that.
Anyway my point is that well first of all outsourcing doesn't even have anything to do with H1B but there are a confluence of things contributing to the issue of people getting jobs in the tech industry right now and pretending immigration is the one issue is reductive and will lead to disappointment. Congratulations you kicked out all the H1Bs now it takes you 14 months instead of 16 months to find a new job. Problem solved.
It's hard to see how adding 600k workers to the job pool doesn't make it less competitive, with higher American unemployment and lower wages being the inevitable result. Companies like to make jobs less appealing to American workers (or just fire them en mass) so that they can claim they can't fill positions and higher H1Bs, which they can pay far less and take advantage of the extreme leverage they have since it is much much harder for H1Bs to change jobs and if they lose their job they are forced to uproot everything and leave the country.
What's really interesting is that H1Bs fail on both sides of the immigration issue. They fit the anti-immigration "took our jobs" almost by definition, and they are a temporary visa that does not lead to permanent residency, so they don't even create full citizens with an investment in the country! It's complicated and I personally have a lot of conflicting feelings about them, but they really do appear to encourage replacing American workers with cheaper and easily abusable foreign workers in the name of corporate "progress" and profits.
If this were true, it'd be a strong argument against H1Bs. It would show a direct correlation between H1Bs and unemployment and mean that H1Bs are being abused to fill positions with cheap labor that can be easily filled with domestic labor, and Americans are facing higher unemployment as a result.
As you said, there is a confluence of things contributing to the issue of people getting jobs in the tech industry right now. That means that real solutions and progress do not look like 16 -> 0 months. They look like 16 -> 15.5 months. No one action is going to completely solve unemployment and wealth inequality. A 12.5% reduction on job lapse duration from a single change would be absolutely massive.
If we only did things that completely fix issues in one fell swoop, we'd never do anything.
This is a discussion to be had about the nature of H1B status, but the current arguments over it are not that. People are complaining about immigrants and not the exploitative nature of the H1B visa. If that's being discussed at all it's just concern trolling.
Well the only thing we seem interested in fixing is the immigration part of it, which as I said will not fix the problem.
I'll go ahead and disagree with the comment you're replying to then, ending H1B visas wouldn't reduce unemployment at all, it would push the companies that are exploiting migrant labor to just move overseas entirely. Why bring the cheap labor to the office when you can just put the office where the cheap labor is?
Labor is already significantly cheaper overseas than via H1B visas. There are many influences on business location besides employment costs. For example, Disney is a high-profile abuser of the H1B system, and I hopefully don't need to explain why Disney might want to remain in the US, even if it means paying workers a little more.
It's true that there's other factors, but the scales are currently in a precarious equilibrium. Taking away one of the few remaining things that gives a marginal benefit to companies to keep operating in the US after 1970s globalization (read: rise of finance imperialism) is a more significant force in the direction of getting companies to set up shop abroad entirely, rather than replace cheap labor with expensive labor.
I personally haven't seen people blaming the H1B workers in any circles I frequent. It's mostly that H1Bs are generally bad for both the American and Immigrat workers, but great for corporations that get the screw both of them over.
This is either written in bad faith or almost willful ignorance, I’m sorry.
You haven’t seen people blame South Asian immigrants? In ANY circle?
They're hanging out in third world Maoist circles that just shoot any krakkkers on sight then.
Lol, I'm genuinely confused by this. I have conflicting feelings on H1Bs and agree with the OP that it's the oligarchs' faults, but that doesn't automatically make them good or bad. The oligarchs like H1Bs because it lets them exploit the working class more effectively.
Also, and this is the most confusing part, are you implying that hating the KKK is a bad thing? Or is that supposed to be more nuanced, like "killing the KKK on sight is bad, they deserve a fair trial and punishment"? Either way, kinda bad taste tbh. There are plenty of other non-universally-agreed-upon evil things you could have used instead. It's just bad rhetoric.
The three K's are not directly referencing the Klan, it's a reference to "Maoist Standard English" and a joke.
Funkystuff is joking the reason you have not experienced the racism described above is because you have cloistered yourself with only the ideologically pure.
Sorry, didn't mean to be overly critical of what you've been saying. I disagree but you've been fair and I think you're arguing in good faith.
No lol I'm saying that all the white people I see online are being super racist towards immigrants on this particular issue, so I invoked the image of a group that doesn't let white people in. "kkkrakers" is Maoist Standard English for white people.
Ha, ok that makes more sense. I was like "this guy is saying reasonable stuff in other comments and now they're subtly pro-kkk?" Didn't add up 😂
No, not any circles. I said the circles I frequent, which tend to be more progressive towards immigration. I'm sure someone blames the immigrants themselves, but it's not a widespread/both-aisles belief like the post insinuates.
I've seen understanding and sympathy for the immigrants trying to better their lives and being given the ugly end of capitalism. Working for less pay than your peers and being under constant thread of deportation is no way to live. And if, as a country, we're so desperate for workers that we're bringing in people from overseas, we better be giving them a path to permanent residence since they're obviously beneficial to have around and they should have some skin in the game and the chance to be treated as equals rather than expendable cost-savers.