The Immigration Thing
There’s been a blowup on Twitt, er, on *X* that centers on the whole immigration debate specifically on H1B visas.
The argument from Elon (and from the other pro-H1B folks) is primarily that America needs the best and the brightest from every other country in the world, we need them to come here and work hard at our corporations and that’s how we’re going to become richer and more powerful in the future.
The argument from the MAGA coalition is something to the effect of “those jobs should be going to Americans instead!”
And you can pretty much guess how the argument develops from there. Accusations of racism on the part of the MAGAs, MAGAs pointing out that the whole “racism” accusation doesn’t exactly work anymore and it especially doesn’t work when you’re talking about prioritizing American citizens over those in foreign countries for American jobs, and back and forth.
What’s fascinating is that the debate was happening on X in real time and the anti-H1B folks started digging and digging and found the H1B Salary Database. (Go on it! Play with it a little.) The arguments being made by Elon (and the other pro-H1B folks) are being disputed in public and loudly and with data.
I mean, the steelman argument for the H1B is that we do, in fact, need as many Einsteins and von Brauns as we can get. We *SHOULD* be stealing the best of the best of the best from other countries to work hard at our corporations and invent new things and have everybody become richer.
But then you see that there are H1B visa requests for paralegals. Jobs with a median salary of $52,000. Is that what they mean by the best of the best of the best?
There are H1B visa requests for pickleball jobs. Social media managers. Video game designers.
I can certainly appreciate the argument that we need H1B visas to meet the inexhaustible demand for more tech workers but also insurance sales agents.
And then *THIS* chart started making the rounds:
So it looks like H1Bs, in practice, aren’t about bringing in the best of the best of the best, but about getting cheap labor.
And, I suppose, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to hire cheap labor. Heck, I’d like to hire some! But the argument wasn’t that we need H1Bs to suppress wages. The argument was that it was about hiring the best of the best of the best.
And this stuff has now been brought into the light. And people are really digging into the H1B data because they always believed that it was about the best of the best of the best… and now they’re seeing that, no, it’s about hiring cheap labor.
As someone who lived through the Overseas Outsourcing megatrend in the early oughts, I’m very interested in seeing what happens with the H1B visa program.
The New York Post did some actual journalism and called Trump and asked him about the H1B visa thing:
President-elect Trump told The Post Saturday he supports immigration visas for highly skilled workers, appearing to side with Elon Musk in the roiling intra-MAGA debate on the issue.
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said by phone, referring to the H-1B program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” added Trump, who restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first administration and has been critical of the program in the past.
And *THAT* is causing meltdowns all over Twitter as well. From the research into how Trump mostly uses H2B visas on his properties to MAGA folks screaming “it’s over” to lefties crowing about how Trump is already stabbing his followers in the back to a handful of liberal-types wishing that there was this much vigorous debate among the Democrats.
The debate continues. It looks like it’s going to keep going for another week at least.
Elon has suggested a fix for the H1B program:
You know what?
I would be 100% down with this.
The best of the best of the best should cost more. If you’re not willing to pay your new hire, oh, six figures or so, why in the heck do you think it might be a job that a citizen couldn’t do?Report
Increase the floor, have companies bid on slots… and then let the H1B recipient change jobs/industries whenever they want.
Basically it changes the system/incentives from finding workers for fewer $ who have fewer options to companies/industries bidding on expanding the talent pool without any guaranty that they will directly benefit. The visa itself can have a ramping 1-, 2-, 3-year term contingent upon employment. It becomes a high-skilled worker immigration application process that employers fund. Heck, if the need is great enough, the auction for slots could fund job training programs!
The problem with laws that set-up systems is that the systems become the thing that governs what they do, not the laws which specified intent. Plus… add sclerotic oversite and updating, and pretty quickly you have a ‘system’ that has incentives that the constituents then lobby *not* to change so as to exploit the growing inefficiencies.Report
I nod along with this but think it circles us back to the larger looming question. Can Congress adapt our laws to changing conditions anymore?
The populist impulse isn’t wrong, in the sense that the law is supposed to serve the American people. And to the extent benefiting big corporate employers also benefits the people more broadly, then there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but when it doesn’t, the state can and should act as a necessary corrective.
At the same time I think it’s probably wrong to believe we can win the 21st century by overly restricting ourselves. We should still want to be the top destination for foreign talent, and the last thing we should want to emulate is Europe’s combination of populism and competitive nosedive.
Roundabout way of saying it’s a hell of a needle we’re going to need to thread. I’m pretty pessimistic about the ability of the people we keep putting in charge to figure it out.Report
Sure, we’re living through a sort of congressional torpor that has multi-faceted causes. I don’t think the H1B issue will break us out of that… it’ll just be forgotten with the next thing.
But, Europe’s nosedive isn’t from populism, it is from the liberal apparatus that was unable to form a coherent position on immigration at all. Populism in Europe is a response to the nosedive; maybe not a good response, but a response nonetheless.
The US is cruising on the empire’s global reserve currency… our challenge is not to blow it.Report
I think we may be agreeing. At risk of restating what I’m trying to get at is that we do not want to emulate their loss of competitiveness. That goes well beyond the ongoing refugee issues they’ve dealt with over the last 15-20 years and hits the heart of the larger suite of protections they’ve instituted for themselves from competition, both from immigrants and outside the EU and it’s satellites. They have a lot of the things our economic populists dream of and the trajectory isn’t just bad, it’s shockingly bad given the near parity that existed between the EU and the US 20-25 years ago.Report
The only consolation is that we don’t need to do well on the question in an objective sense- merely better than our peers and competitors.Report
Very true. We can probably live with a C- if everyone else is getting Ds and Fs.Report
Yes, precisely, it’s a grade curve. If that is the objective grade outcome then, in political and human terms, we’d be the A+ nation and people will still be clamoring to come to the US.Report
Interesting to see you and Musk joining Bernie on the H1B reform. He’s been trying to pass similar reforms for years.Report
My attitude on the H1B was always that there were very few of them and it wasn’t a big deal and more elite human capital was a good thing.
Fiddling about on the website and seeing visa requests for video game journalists pissed me off.
If there’s one freakin’ thing that the US makes in abundance, it’s people willing to write about video games.Report
Steve Bannon goes woke and says we should cut off skilled immigration until Silicon Valley is 20% black and 20% Hispxnic.
I’m not sure whether he’s a blank-slater or is just giving a benchmark he knows is impossible to meet.Report
On a related note, here’s some nonsense from the most smugnorant man on the Xitter:
Americans have ample opportunity to get training. For the last decade, about 45% of US high school graduates have gone straight to a 4-year university. 45% of high school graduates is definitely more than have the aptitude for careers in STEM. Another 15-25% go to a two-year college, which admittedly is not the straightest path to a STEM career, but if you do well you can transfer, and save money. I’m not seeing any evidence that a significant share of students with the aptitude for STEM careers are being denied the opportunity to go to college.
There are also abundant resources for free learning on the Internet, and paid boot camps. I personally know some people who have transitioned into software engineering careers through these non-traditional routes.
Tech companies do train people who demonstrate that the have a good grasp of the fundamentals of software engineering but have no industry experience, such as new college graduates with degrees in computer science. What they don’t generally do is pay people to learn software engineering from scratch on the company dime, partly because there’s no reliable way to identify in advance who will actually get good at it, and partly because it’s a major investment into someone who can leave for a company offering higher pay at any time.
We have a perfectly adequate tertiary education system. The idea that companies should pass actually over qualified candidates in favor of people who chose not to take advantage of the opportunities available to them, and just hope for the best, is ridiculous.Report
What about the idea that companies pretend not to be able to find qualified Americans so they can hire a cheaper foreigner who is easier to push around, because if they lose the job and can’t find another one quickly they’re sent back? Do you think that might ever happen or no?
I personally think the H1B is in theory* one of the more defensible aspects of our broken immigration system but if you aren’t grappling with the above you aren’t responding to the criticism.
*In practice… well… look at the chart.Report
As someone who sat through the outsourcing megatrend, lemme tell ya, the whole “pass actually over qualified candidates” assumes a lot about the candidates who eventually end up answering the phone.Report
The “H1B” applications for pickleball etc aren’t real.
As in those applications aren’t for H1B but for other visa categories.
People downloaded the data from Department of Labor’s LCA (Labour Certification Application) system, which covers a ton of different Visa categories, not just H1B. Yes the non-govt website people are using claims these are H1B, but they aren’t.
Nobody making <$60,000 and doing a job that doesn't require a college degree can get an H1B. This is statutorily part of the law, you can't get an exemption from it.Report
Oh, so it is a visa job, just not an H1B job?Report
The debate had a lot of zombie arguments showing up.
The most popular one involved Pro-H1B people arguing that Americans are lazy and have bad culture and that’s why they’re not getting hired and then asking something to the effect of “triggered much?” when that view got pushback.
“These H1Bs are willing to work 80 hour weeks!”, the pro-H1B people were arguing. “They’re also not racist like you!”
And then the argument shifted to whether it’s racist to expect a country to prioritize citizens over non-citizens and, well, there was a *LOT* of heat generated.
Scott Adams was pretty much a weathervane on this issue, starting by arguing that Americans not getting hired by corporations was a skill issue (including a tweet in which he used easily misinterpretable language to explain that he preferred his Indian neighbors to his interlocutor) and it seems that he has pivoted to agreeing that, okay, we may merely have an order of operations problem:
Whether this will translate into the DOGE taking on H1B (and other visa) excesses remains to be seen (and there were some spectacularly awesome meltdowns from the pro-H1B folks when they learned that screaming “racist!” doesn’t work as well as it used to) but there seems to be a consensus forming that, at least, this stuff needs to be addressed rather than deflected.Report