“ someone always raises the concern that this benefit to foreign-born wage earners generates downward pressure on native-born wage earners.
But H-1 workers’ earnings are well above the national average, so they can’t be pulling down average wages.”
What? Matt brought up a concern and then answered a different concern. If an H1B comes in at $150k to a job that would ordinarily pay $200k, and into a country in which the average wage is $100k, then he is creating downward pressure on wages but increasing the average wage IF the position would have gone unfilled without an H1B. Otherwise he is creating downward pressure on BOTH native-born and average wages.
You’re forgetting his point about productivity. Also Matt left out the past that immigration leads to overall more economic growth. It’s likely a reason American economic growth has outpaced its peers and why we had disinflation without an accompanying recession (yet).
The fact that H1B migrants overall is a net positive to GDP growth is the missing piece here. It seems to me you’re falling for the “lump of labor” fallacy.
But the productivity point is irrelevant to the concern the OP is addressing. The question isn't "Is an Indian worker more productive in India or in America?" it's "Is the Indian worker more productive than whoever would get the job absent the H1-B Visa?" If the position goes unfilled then obviously yes they are. If it would be filled without the H1-B then the answer is less clear. I think it's still beneficial on net, but Matt just sidesteps the question.
The solution here is to auction off H1-B visas. Then the value of the increased productivity of immigrant labor goes straight into the public fisc and either provides more services for all of us or lowers our taxes. We all win!
To be clear, it's the employers who would be bidding for the visas?
I know, the cost of the visa affects the market-clearing wage, so some of the cost goes to the employee either way. I still prefer to have it set up so the employers are the ones placing and paying the bids.
Edit -- on second thought, maybe there's value in pricing-in the employee's idiosyncratic willingness-to-pay to move into the USA? Having the employee pay bids would price out the poorest and most desperate people, which would be a problem for an asylum program, but not necessarily for a "credentialed and high-earning worker who would be more productive if they moved to the USA for work" program.
To me that's more the case for not messing too much with it. We don't need to kid ourselves about how the program actually works or it's flaws but American tech has been the goose that laid the golden egg and the last thing you want to do is inadvertently kill it.
Good comments all around. You bring up a great point, the growth in tech is what is driving growth in America. And the fact that the best and brightest come here, including Elon, is a great benefit to us.
It's a massive growth industry and the benefits of leading the world in technology development are greater than the sum of the salaries of those who work in it. Even if you don't buy the economic case I think having those cluster(s) within the United States instead of somewhere else like China or India or even one of our military allies (most of whom are far more exposed than we are) is, under current geopolitical circumstances, becoming a matter of national security.
And its value to America is positive only to the extent that it hires existing Americans! Especially since its products have net-neutral value to society at best (Apple, Amazon positive; Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral; Google, Facebook, Musk negative).
Outside of Amazon, these companies don’t really employ huge numbers of people because they have very high labor productivity. All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway.
Sure, it’s good for strategic reasons that we have these industries here, though they produce too much in China. But we shouldn’t let them hire a 5th column or h1bs who can then take their knowledge back to China either, if that’s our argument.
I agree we should be careful about allowing H1Bs to become a fifth column that then take knowledge gained here to a strategic rival.
But I also think the argument that the only value of these companies to Americans is the salaries they pay is an overly narrow view of these things. Even without getting into debates over trickle down or trickle around economics there are serious benefits to being in the country where tech is produced.
Americans take for granted how much more 'high tech' our lives are and how efficiently our businesses run by virtue of easy access to this stuff for no other reason than that it was created in this country. You don't want to just give that up because of the vagaries of what software engineers or QC people (or whoever) are paid.
Wow, someone can reduce space launch costs by a factor of ten, be on track for doing so again, increase total world-wide launch tempo by a factor of five in five years, and provide reliable broadband worldwide at a decent price, and somehow still be net-negative in impact. Tough to imagine.
"All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway." This is sort of the point of Matt's post, heck his writing for 20 years and the riposte to Kevin Drum.
To unpack the Kevin Drum comment, he's usually lumped in with Matt and other "neoliberal shills" but he departs from them on housing. He's been a pretty big proponent of the idea that high housing costs are overblown as an issue by pointing out costs nationally. And then notes that housing costs are really only an issue in CA and NYC.
And (I suspect) Matt's response (and my response) is that's the whole point! CA and NYC are two the biggest economic powerhouses in American in the world; especially CA. I'd add in Seattle, Boston (and MA generally as economic powerhouses with high housing costs). As a proportion of the total population of America, this list is not that large. But as a proportion of both general economic activity, innovation and contribution to GDP growth? These place have extremely outsized impact. Which means making it difficult to build housing ends up having pretty large negative societal and economic impact. Working class wages are much higher in CA and NYC (and MA and Seattle) than in say Texas (the poster child for strong economy + cheap housing). But given high housing costs, it makes sense for working class people to move to Texas even though this likely results in lower wages.
To bring it back to this post, if you encourage more H1B visas to places like SF without expanding housing supply you're only going to exacerbate the trend I just described.
The criticism I have heard is this program isn't typically a path to citizenship, so there's some debate about whether this really constitutes immigration, or just temporarily filling jobs (either taking them from existing American workers or expanding the economy on net, depending if you're more glass half full or empty).
I think the program would be very defensible, to the point of expansion, if the salary floor was raised *and* it was structured so that most participants became citizens over a 5 or so year period.
This (citizenship) is the biggest thing. If a path to residency is quickly available then H1Bs can no longer be hired to depress salaries. They are able to negotiate a competitive salary. As an engineer and occasional hiring manager, I have only seen hires used to depress salaries when an overheated economy was causing rapid rises in wages (late 90's). The vast majority of the time it is used to get the best engineer available. When used that way, I think that it can generally be seen as raising all ships.
You can go from an H1-B to citizenship. There are other programs where it's meant to only be a temporary stay (H2-B, TN, etc). The path to citizenship for an H1-B holder would be H1-B to green card, wait 5 years then apply for citizenship. However, the problem for some people is that there is a per country cap on the number of people allowed to move from an H1-B to green card. This makes it so that citizens from countries with high inflow rates to the US in absolute terms have to wait a long time to get a green card. I'm from Canada and I had to wait less than a year to go from H1-B to green card. My coworkers from India are having to wait 10-20 years. So it's really this per country cap to move onto a green card that makes it hard for some immigrants to move from H1-B to citizenship, nothing really intrinsic to the H1-B itself.
The cited example seems like a somewhat superficial gloss of what that imported worker is doing. They're the US face of a larger pool of foreign workers. Their productivity has increased not because they, solo, can crank out better code more efficiently when they're in America, but because the _collective enterprise_ can do so if they have a forward-deployed engineer in the right timezone to collect requirements, triage bug reports, and otherwise efficiently dispatch work back to the team in India. This might well be beneficial from a productivity standpoint (I'll spare you grumbling about how software outsourcing works in practice versus balance sheets), but it means that you cannot consider the impact on demand for domestic labor just by counting the H1B worker's salary. Instead you need to somehow account for the downward pressure on wages created by that worker making outsourcing contracts more attractive for firms that use it to substitute for domestic labor.
Yeah, I came away from this article thinking that I broadly agree with the main point, but there was a lot of conceptual confusion in the details of the economic arguments.
Family in IT, despite being immigrants, are relatively critical of h1-b and how it is regulated. Every position they apply to is bombarded with applicants from other countries who are willing to work for way below the normal salary of that position, and while the legal process for approving an h1b apparently involves ensuring that the employer is paying competitive wage for that position relative to other similar positions in the local market, that rule is apparently easily flouted.
the US gives away 85k visas a year, and there are millions of IT workers. All those people "bombarding" the position application are just going to get filtered out by the employers' ATS and they aren't going to get past the resume stage. You know that question that asks if you will need sponsorship on a visa to to work there? Guess what answering "yes" does, at the vast majority of companies?
You are not actually competing with any of those applicants, unless you are applying at Fortune 500, in which case, sure, but those jobs are in high demand. Removing foreign applicants would have virtually no impact on the pool of your competitors.
After the scuffle on X, I did a little research on this topic. In 2018-19, UC Berkeley reported that only 6% of graduating seniors were “still seeking employment” when surveyed. By 2022-23, the last year this data is available, this number had nearly tripled to 15%. As a piece of anecdotal conjecture, I’d say this number has continued to worsen in recent years.
How can this trend in underemployment be taken as anything other than a sign that the software engineering labor market has already become saturated? To his credit, Matt acknowledges that we don’t need to be importing many new workers at the lower end of the salary scale, but I think the salary threshold needs to be raised more than some realize.
I continually will note until the cows come home; every piece of data on basically everything (crime, traffic deaths, inflation and yes employment numbers) from March, 2020 to basically summer 2023 should be treated as one "black swan" event outlier.
So yeah, for a lot of reasons, I'm a might skeptical of looking at 2022-2023 tech employment as some sort of data point we should hang our hat on.
Also one more thing, something like 5% of UC Berkeley grads are comp sci. Not sure how you can take employment numbers of Berkeley grads and extrapolate out any conclusions about employment with software engineering given vast majority of grads from this school aren't going into software engineering.
Is 15% of recent graduates still seeking employment what a labor market looks like when it is saturated, or when it is close to normal, or when it’s still supply-constrained? What does it look like for new entrants into the labor market in other fields in other years?
Didn't the tech companies do a ton of overhiring around the time of COVID and then were forced to lay off a bunch of people at that time? So maybe it was less of a trend than a one-off.
Yeah, and a bunch of people went into tech then. The market needs to deport the existing H1Bs and absorb the laid off workers and the new grads before we even think of letting in new H1Bs.
And it’s not a bad thing to have a lot of American kids going into SWE and other engineering if we have good jobs for them - in fact having good jobs for them should be an American priority. But if we’re going to have countries at all I believe that this is a fairly zero sum area, unless we’re like bringing in Mr. Tata to come build a car factory in Detroit (which isn’t happening)
Having done my share of hiring, many bootcamp graduates will not get hired in tech as long tech is focused on actual efficiency (adding them to a team is a net negative for the team). Training people on the job (from a low skill base) is not practical because once the person becomes skilled they can leave and work at your competitors. Also in this environment, the people who were previously on H1-bs are often the people starting new companies that increase hiring opportunities for native born engineers.
Yes, developers were pretty chill about H1B while hiring was good, but when troubles started, they didn't like as much. AI is causing a lot of stress (I'll avoid for now how accurate this stress is).
I watch programmer communities and as a rule they hate Trump but were "well, at least the H1-B stuff will stop spiraling out of control."
If by "communities" you mean online forums full of software engineering cosplayers, sure. Actual software engineers don't stress about H1Bs very much IRL
In a ten year career as a US-born software engineer the only time I've stressed about H1-Bs is... when my immigrant friends are in the H1-B lottery and I'm worried they won't get one.
I just know that The Seattle Times announced local companies laying off software engineers on a daily basis over the past couple of years, and it pisses me off that we would be importing cheaper labor to further flood that market, particularly since every kid starting college 2017+ was encouraged to study computer science.
All I can say is that, as an American, I want every last bootcamp grad and dropout from the Alabama State Agriculture and Incest University with middling Python proficiency hired by our tech industry before we even think of hiring people from overseas. And then we should be bringing in Mexicans and Central Americans before Indians and Chinese, because America legitimately fucked up those countries and we owe their peoples something.
But sure, if they want to dig ditches (for cut and cover metro lines!), pick crops, or be our domestic servants for less than federal minimum wage and no rights or labor protections, we could let in Indians and Chinese. Or if they won a Nobel Prize in engineering or have $100m and want to start a US business, we can let them in, no problem.
One of the great mysteries to me is why we people in the educated elite attract so much derision from other parts of the population. Sure is a head scratcher.
H1-B is *supposed* to be doing this. Filling jobs that you can't find an American for.
If there were a thousand H1-B's a year and they were auctioned off, I'd be pretty confident that whoever is paying for them already tried their best to find an American and couldn't. When there are 85000 and just randomly allocated, the business model is to just apply as many times as possible to get a big batch and then undercut local labor.
And maybe that's the right policy, to just bring in high-skilled workers that become American, but H1-B isn't supposed to be that.
One of the best suggestions I have seen for revising the system is to eliminate the lottery and just give the vias to the 85,000 positions with the highest salaries.
> with middling Python proficiency hired by our tech industry before we even think of hiring people from overseas
Plenty of people with just "middling Python proficiency" cannot be employed in tech. Attempting to would just burden their colleagues. It's unfortunate these individuals weren't given feedback early in their education so that could either shape up or change majors. Yet now they need to listen to market signals and either do sufficient independent study to become employable or they need to change occupations.
Avoiding these education/aptitude mismatches going forward is going to involve some serious reforms to higher education. Notably we need to dissolve the current “customer is always right” model that discourages flunking students out. Degree-granting institutions (and even bootcamps) need to feel some pain when their graduates fail to succeed in the labor market such that they’re incentivized to only grant credentials to students that have demonstrated sufficient aptitude and work habits to succeed in their field of study.
Or businesses could implement training programs for employees (ideally prior to higher education and the concomitant loans) to get Americans up to snuff rather than use foreigners. The people with middling Python proficiency aren’t necessarily going to be engineers, but there are roles for them at American companies.
But I’m a nationalist when it comes to American employment. I want to see people hired out of prison and trained on the job before we begin to think about hiring Indians and Chinese.
I largely agree, but that belief is no more useful than, "most people can be trained to run a marathon." Even if there is some truth at a physiological level, it doesn't change the fact that very few people are going to attempt training or are going to quickly give up. Whatever it is that gets some people to diligently go through the actions of training to the point where they can do a marathon—or program in an economically useful fashion—we don’t know how to replicate it. Likely some mix of innate strengths (and weakness), life experience, and happenstance.
That's cool for you, but as a person who actually has to work with the middling Python proficiency dev who constantly screws up shit costing everyone time and money, I'll vote that, well... I don't care what you want. I'll take "best candidate to fill the role regardless of where they come from" for $500, Alex
In this analogy, the H1B worker is definitely lowering wages in the industry they work in, but most likely raising wages in every other industry by increasing both productivity and demand.
I don't know about that. Very complicated. The workers displaced by the H1Bs flood other industries and increases supply. That depresses salaries. There are a lot of factors. It certainly helps people in the upper income brackets. It probably hurts people in the lower. But I would be hesitant to bet on any of that.
Alright I'll have to find research on this, but I'm pretty sure the net impact of H1B visas is a reduction in inequality. First off, first order effects are usually larger than second order effects, and secondly, you're still ignoring the increase in productivity and demand.
I believe in the increase in productivity. I'm mostly ignoring it because it really isn't the issue being discussed here.
I think there is widespread agreement that wealth is created here; it's just who gets that wealth, and who is being sacrificed to create it that are the issues.
Ok I thought I left a comment but it didn't go through. By productivity, I don't mean the productivity of the H1B worker themselves, I mean the productivity of everybody else. If some guy moves here and solves some computer glitch or something, that saves time for everybody who uses that program. They can do other things with their time. This boosts their wages.
As for distributional effects, again, I'd have to look it up, but my understanding is that large scale high skill immigration compresses the income distribution on net, mostly due to demand effects. Some guys making $150k will do stuff like go out to eat. That's more money for an industry that employs a lot of low wage workers.
We can agree that it is good for the world. Whether it’s good for the USA is complicated. What if that Indian H1B is sending most of his income back home to family?
I hired an Indian to an executive position making about $450k minimum (could be a lot more based on incentives). I had dinner at his house. It was about a $700,000 Houston house. It was very sparsely furnished. I got the impression of a family (1 kid) that scrimped on everything. Maybe they were sending a ton back home, or maybe just saving for the day they would return home. How that would work out for America isn’t clear to me.
It helps people like Musk in the really high salary brackets at the expense of those in the upper middle class salary brackets who have to compete against an army of Indian and Chinese workers for good middle class jobs.
I think that the “Musk is greedy” thing is overplayed. I use to own and operate a fairly good size engineering company (1800 employees), and we used the program some. It was never about saving money; it was always about getting the resources to fuel our projects.
We did offshore work, and that was primarily about lowering costs. But the H1Bs were about fueling our projects teams.
I mean maximizing output with minimum cost is the definition of productivity, so places will use it for both. To be sure, I think there was a greater need for an H1B program for SWEs back in the day, but I don’t think that’s the case any more, as a lot more students have gone into CS.
I think a key piece is this assumption, and assertion, that "a job that would ordinarily pay $200K". This part always goes unquestioned. The question is why this job is worth this much. Is it driven by applicant scarcity, propped up by lack of international competition? If so, at what stage would it make sense to offshore the process and incur additional management costs. The latter is a real outcome that happens in many places that OPs and others are missing.
Competition is good, be it for labor or for goods. We all love a good deal/ sale, and it's best to allow labor competition especially for higher wage jobs. A command-and-control approach to deciding that a "job would ordinarily pay $200K" is a recipe for poverty.
At a given point in time, and without H1B, the job has a real market value. The only assumption I made was to illustrate an example.
Your analysis, while correct, is missing the point. Everyone knows that competition is good and that it helps create wealth. The questions around this are, should the American workers, who are not skilled enough to simply “learn to code”, be forced to compete with an endless supply of cheap labor from underdeveloped countries? They are shareholders in America, and our policies should keep them in mind.
An example for highly skilled workers is from my own company. We opened an office in Bogota and have over 200 employees there. We make a lot of money on that cheap labor. Thus far, unless we are in a violent downturn, our engineering workforce has more opportunities than they need. But what if that begins to change? What if we are so successful growing foreign offices staffed with super cheap labor that we can start cutting back on American workers? Is that something our government should allow? It’s certainly good for the world; it’s good for Colombia; is it good for America?
But do note that what your company (and mine!) does in practice is move the jobs offshore if they cannot move the people onshore. Employers need to match the work and the talent, borders be damned. Having the skilled worker here has bonus spillover to the rest of our economy.
In principle you are correct on all points. This is what capitalism does; it destroys jobs and counts on the displaced to make rational decisions in the aftermath. And capitalism delivers the goods like no other ism.
The condition that is making me think we need to apply the brakes here is the nearly infinite supply of poor competitors in other nations. Eventually this won’t exist, and I’d agree with your post. For now, I think we need to control it for the sake of stability.
It's interesting that the key factor is less left or right thinking, but more about nationalism. I'm neoliberal enough to just think of people as people and not really care about nations, so I see this as mostly good.
But I confess I've been a bit shaken by China's recent nationalist turn, which makes me realize there's a Guns & Butter aspect to nationalism, where as soon as one strong party starts to care about their nation, you need to start to care about yours too.
Same exact thing happened to me. I always assumed that integration into the liberal western economic world would move a country toward liberal institutions. China proved this dangerously wrong.
First of all, I really appreciate your sincere response. Thank you.
To your first point, I think American Citizens, some of whom are workers in a given company, are better off if their company hires the best available talent. I do not foresee an endless supply of labor; at some margin, it would absolutely make business sense to train/ hire locally. My experience is that's what happens.
Your example is a great one. And I feel it will happen one way or the other. The right way of policy intervention would be tailor the supply pipelines through better information (what's the ROI of various college X degree) and market solutions (let student loan lenders price for risk).
And its value to America is positive only to the extent that it hires existing Americans! Especially since its products have average net-neutral value to society at best (Apple, Amazon positive; Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral; Google, Facebook, Musk negative).
Outside of Amazon, these companies don’t really employ huge numbers of people because they have very high labor productivity. All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway.
Sure, it’s good for strategic reasons that we have these industries here, though they produce too much in China. But we shouldn’t let them hire a 5th column or h1bs who can then take their knowledge back to China either, if that’s our argument.
Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral, and Google negative? I think you’re overcorrecting on the basis of a few prominent problems and ignoring the fundamental value all these things enable!
Tesla would be good if it were made in America by someone who isn’t Musk, but I think AI is mostly bad (but America making the best chips is good, so Nvidia is neutral), so Microsoft has Office and Bill Gates which are positive but canceled out by Windows and OpenAI which are bad.
I don’t like these vast data centers that employ very few people, use tons of power and water, to mostly do negative things like serve ads better, help kids cheat, and possibly disrupt existing job arrangements (creative destruction is mostly just destruction).
"Housing scarcity throws this off. Your $1,000 may just bid up my rent and leave me worse off."
Tangentially-related, this is basically the second reason I sometimes feel so personally peeved about student loan forgiveness (the first being that it is poorly targeted). I paid off my loans at the expense of saving up for a down payment. When I did ultimately buy a house (which I waited to do until my 40s), I had a very tight budget and could only afford a fixer-upper -- which I now actually can't afford to fix up. Like, we literally have a shower we haven't been able to use for over a year because the toilet leaked on the floor, the floor had to be removed to fix it, and I can't afford the additional renovations needed to put everything back into working order. (And no, Dad, I'm not competent to do it myself, nor do I have the time to teach myself plumbing, tiling, electrical, and flooring as the parent of two young kids with a full-time job.)
Considering that I'm pretty much smackdab in the middle of the population cohort targeted for loan forgiveness (older Millennial), it was hard for me to escape the feeling that my peers getting significant loan forgiveness wouldn't actually put me at a disadvantage when it came to competition in the housing/renovation market. So when people asked, "Why does it bother you if others get help?", my answer was, "Because it hurts ME!"
I probably wouldn't mind loan forgiveness at all if I personally wasn't struggling so much with housing costs as a result of paying off my own loans. Alternatively, if I could get retroactively reimbursed for loans that would have been qualified for forgiveness today, that would also make me feel better.
I've heard stories like this so many times in so many versions of people feeling like they're doing the right thing and getting punished for it. It also makes it really frustrating to explain to ardent pro-SLFers that regardless of the merits, the politics on it is utterly toxic.
Amusingly, my previous gripe on this was that with the holidays approaching, I was going to have to spend time listening to my sibling talk about their plan to get $50k in loans forgiven, while at the same time I know they've spent significant money (way more than $20k) on expensive vacations since COVID. (They qualify for PSLF, despite a joint income over $200k, because they work for a non-profit health care system.)
And it happened just as I foretold - they're planning another weeklong OBX vacation this summer, and possibly a fall trip to Amsterdam "with a few days in Paris if we can work it out."
With an example like yours and the continued screams supporting for SLF in future, it would be financially criminal to for anyone to pay a dime more than absolutely necessary towards their Student Loans. They should instead enjoy life, modeled after your relatives, and hope the next D administration will expand SLF.
I would encourage you to compare that to total compensation for CEOs at for profit companies with $5.7 billion in revenue - you'll find it far exceeds $3m.
loan forgiveness in their case sounds like a roundabout way of increasing wages for non-profit healthcare systems' employees, not a vacation subsidy.
i can understand your feelings, but would you be equally annoyed if they worked for the VA or something and the government just directly paid them higher wages, with no loan forgiveness?
I'm in this boat directly - relatively high earner tracking towards PSLF. This program has allowed me to plug my MBA and consulting experience into education nonprofits at wages that, while affording me a comfortable lifestyle, are at least 20%-30% lower than I'd have earned in the private sector and will be capped at a certain level as I advance in my career. PSLF was also part of my plan in taking on graduate school debt and in making my career choices; it was literally a part of the promissory notes I signed.
I would highly encourage folks to separate conversation around it from that around broader SLF.
Please note that they earn a combined income of well over $200,000. They don't work for some charity hospital just scraping by, but a MASSIVE health care system in the Midwest that had an operating revenue of $5.7 BILLION in 2023. The CEO has a salary of $3 million.
So, yes, I would absolutely be annoyed if the government decided to pay them higher wages directly. Their employer could probably also afford to pay them more.
I have no idea what VA employees make, so I can't say anything about how I would feel there
Somehow I don't think two doctors are representative of the typical PSLF recipient. Hell, they're not even representative of the upper-middle class! Anyways this is personal for me--my law school loans were forgiven under PSLF a few weeks ago, and unfortunately what that means in practice is that I can afford take on more debt to buy a new-to-me car (my current car is...sketchy at best) and finally start saving for a down payment on a two-flat (I will need rental income to be able to feel comfortable paying the premium for buying over renting). Oh, and in April I will be paying a $10k state income tax bill on phantom debt forgiveness income. I would LOVE to have a shower I owned even if I couldn't use it for a couple years.
I have too many cousins who are doctors, so I get why you're annoyed at your sibling, but I really think its familial jealousy as opposed to an actual critique of a public service wage subsidy.
Yep, I'm jealous and annoyed. They're human emotions to which I'm not immune. But if policies create such jealously and annoyance among family members who otherwise get along well, isn't that a sign that they are poorly designed?
But the claim that my family are not representative of PSLF recipients is unlikely -- physicians are common recipients of PSLF, and lots of them are married to other physicians. My family actually aren't physicians, though -- one is a manager and the other does research. If they were physicians, I imagine the debt being forgiven would be much more than $50k, and their income would be closer to $400,000. Because as I said, the health system they work for is very, very large -- and if we ARE looking at physicians, the internet says it employs about 35,000 with an average salary of $217K–$373K per physician. And their employer isn't even in the top 10 biggest non-profit health care providers in the country! That's a lot of folks making a lot of money who are eligible for PSLF.
FTR, my position isn't that NO ONE should get PSLF -- it's that it should be better targeted with some sort of income cap. Or, as noted in my initial post, that folks who paid off loans that would have been eligible for PSLF get some sort of similar benefit. I'm a fed who struggled financially because of law school loans, too, so I understand your frustration! But imagine if you had started working before PSLF was proven, paid those loans off before 2017 (when the first PSLF recipients were eligible), felt all the frustration you're currently feeling WITHOUT forgiveness, and THEN saw your cousin doctors who routinely jet off for vacation get PSLF. That's where I'm at.
This is a good point, and it’s the weakest argument in Matt’s article IMO: any good can potentially experience upward bidding pressure if other people get richer ceteris paribus. For supply-constrained goods this is obvious - the richer bidder at auction displaces the lowest bidder.
For at least those non-supply constrained goods (eg Netflix, Spotify), where the marginal cost of production (which in software services at least is often well-approximated by $0) is already well below the marginal cost to consumers, the pricing question (absent price discrimination, which is generally bad for consumer surplus anyway) is solely about what price extracts the highest average return. If your customer base gets richer, your capacity to charge a higher averager price (in view of decreasing marginal utility of money) also increases, pushing out the previous marginal customer and decreasing lower-income customers’ consumer surplus.
To be honest, I'm mostly operating on my own personal vibes here -- I'm not an economist or in tech, so I don't understand much of your second paragraph. I mean, I get your gist, but the terminology is unfamiliar to me. But I'll happily accept your observation that I've made a "good point." : )
A prominent example of what EG is talking about is child care. It's a sector that's very difficult, maybe unfeasible, to increase how productive it is, and when other sectors get more productive and generate more revenue, families use that revenue to drive up the bidding (and thus the prices) for child care.
And as Matt says in this article, an artificial version of this exists in the housing sector. But it's not because it's not possible to create more housing in in demand places, but that's we've made it illegal to do so.
With perfect price discrimination you end up with negligible consumer surplus. That is literally how (at least idealized) price discrimination works: abandoning uniform pricing allows companies to price a good or service at epsilon-less than the indifference point for each consumer.
You should be very angry, that program was offensive to everyone that followed the rules the same reason illegal immigration is offensive to all the legal immigrants here that followed the process and waited in line. Fortunately Harris isnt president, she would have doubled down on the insanity.
For the record, as much as the personally bothers me, I would absolutely accept this annoyance for the other benefits that would have come with a Harris presidency. I don't like it, but it's not worth giving the United States to Trump and his cronies.
Not the OP but I would describe that about Trump and not about Biden.
I would call a "crony" someone who is expecting personal handouts/corruption in return for working for the boss.
Hunter Biden isn't technically a "crony" since he's his son and doesn't do anything for him, but his pardon is the kind of thing you'd do for a "crony". However, as much as I disagree with it, it was the exception rather than the rule with Biden.
Trump has pardoned people who worked for him and did bad things on his behalf, and has acted in a corrupt fashion with, for instance, respect to having foreign governments "pay" him by spending time at his hotels etc.
And his tariffs will provide many opportunities for him to grant exceptions to his friends.
I think when you have a 'universal' policy(applied to all college grads with loans, that's a large group even if it's not everyone) that you announced during your campaign that happens to affect your staffers that's not really crony-ism.
Similarly, if you increased health benefits to _all_ federal employees that would certainly affect his staff, but I wouldn't call that crony-ism either.
If his staffers all went to Harvard, and he had a specific loan repayment for HARVARD, I'd call that cronyism.
Similarly, if Trump cuts the corporate tax rate _universally_, then while that's good for a lot of the corporate people who support him, I wouldn't call those people his crony's either. If he cuts it just for EV companies and
Rocket companies....
I'm not a fan of populist handouts like Democrats have done for unions, or student loan forgiveness (especially loan forgiveness, which I thought was wrong on the merits _AND_ probably hurt him politically on net, so it wasn't even politically savvy) but I file that under 'populism' not 'cronyism'.
Making airlines reimburse passengers for reimbursed flights isn’t a sign of cronyism. Investigating google and threatening to break them up isn’t cronyism. It is though the type of stuff that turns big tech against you which isn’t great for election winning.
What you’re arguing for is to just give everyone money. There are lots of ways to give people money, and there is no reason that student loan forgiveness should be anywhere near the top.
The student loan program is predatory af, and it’s not good for everyone to start their careers saddled with debt. But yes a part of the goal is to give everyone money in a good paternalistic way and not all at the same time so as to prevent crazy inflation
Simply forgiving the loans isn't fixing the problem. It's simply telling the people running the predatory system they're free to fleece their victims for more money, since that money will get forgiven, too.
I would be fine with student loan forgiveness if it was the universities paying them back rather than the federal government. That wouldn’t cost any tax money and would also incentivize reforms for universities
I mean, I think the main reason student loan forgiveness was so toxic (even though it’s obviously the right thing to do, and I say that as someone who has paid off over $200k in student loans so it would not benefit me) is its lack of universality. Pack $50k of student loan forgiveness with a baby bond for the same amount that can be used for education or retirement invested in an index fund with some kind of loss stop provision, and I think you could get some kind of broad based public support. The inflationary consequences could be a big deal if you disbursed the money all at once, so there’d have to be some system, and you’d want to take money out of the economy in other areas, first from the rich of course.
>Musk and other members of the newly ascendant right-wing faction of Silicon Valley went to bat for Krishnan personally and for skilled immigration in particular.<
I can't be the only liberal who finds himself conflicted between (1) the many really quite awful and frightening attributes of Musk and his public position, and (2) the hope that he'll genuinely be a moderating influence on Trump on one or two key issues—a barrier between the incoming president and his nativist base.
I don't think he'll be a moderating force and I honestly think he'll manage to stick around through the term. His goal will just be less to push for his favored policies, but rather to extract personal exemptions that will favor himself and his companies.
Musk will probably be able to line his own pockets but his influence over policy is grossly exaggerated. He has no real outside power base; his ability to successfully threaten primary challenges is unproven and questionable; and in any fight between Musk and Trump, Trump wins hands down. He sticks around only as long as Trump finds him useful (including as a lightning rod to distract people from what he's doing).
As we saw with Trump, the threat of a primary challenge is often enough to sway law makers. Even if you think you'll ultimately win, having an opponent who gets shit tons of money to spend against you, and might have the power of Twitter to influence people, would make your campaign miserable and precarious in a way that you just decide to avoid.
Also he does have his own power base, there are hundreds of thousands who view him as a genius and a seer in much the same, inexplicable to me, way that many people see Trump.
We'll see. Money obviously matters in politics, but so does having a viable organization to spend it; you can't just conjure up an effective primary challenger. Does Musk know how to do that? Maybe -- I'm dubious.
But in the end, if it came down to a contest of Musk's money and his "followers" and Trump's own preference, I have no doubt which would win. Musk will only be a threat as long as he's congruent with what Trump wants. If Trump decides he's no longer useful, what will Musk's big move be? To sic his minions on Trump? I think they'd respond, "Um . . . I dunno, Elon. . . "
Yeah. Good bet. Immigration lawyers who three months ago were saying "Get your application completed before Trump takes office" are now like "Get your application completed before Musk gets shitcanned."
You’re not the only one. I too am in the odd position of hating Melon Husk with the fiery heat of a thousand suns while agreeing with him on the merits in this specific case.
What awful and frightened attributes are you referring to, besides the fact that he doesnt have your political leanings? Try to respond and not make it political.
The man has the biggest social media audience in the world and he regularly uses it to push false information without retraction and bully members of Congress.
He's obviously done incredible things that have really improved the world, but you're trolling if you don't see this.
You can say that you think Musk is fundamentally right on the issues, but you can't deny that he posts actual false things on his incredibly widely followed social media account on the platform that he owns.
Lots of influential people post false information on social platforms. There is no lack of such on the left as Matt, to his immense credit, has noted repeatedly. The paycheck-to-paycheck misinformation from Bernie is a notable example. I do not think you, or others, reserve the same vitriol for these merchants of misinformation as you do for Elon.
Make no mistake, Elon does everything that you said he does. And the behavior is juvenile at best and quite embarrassing. Those should rightly be comdemned. But posting false things is, unfortunately, ubiquitious. And not everyone is willing to do a Matt - post things they got wrong and reflect on it. One reason many of us are subscribers to SB.
The internet is a big place, so it's very very easy to not see something on it.
"DID YOU SEE WHAT ELON DID ON TWITTER?" No. And it's not trolling to have a policy of not looking at Twitter, especially as I can't usefully read it without an account. (I am genuinely happy with Musk for doing this, it stops a lot of useless time-wasting.)
Before you share your very strong and very contradictory opinion about someone, I urge you to actually check out that person's main platform of communication!
Totally fine to not read what Elon says on X. But in that case, you shouldn't die on this absurd hill.
While I think Elon’s technology achievements have been incredible, his political contributions have been almost entirely bad:
- He’s a conspiracy theorist
- When congress was trying to pass a continuing resolution a few weeks ago, he relentlessly lied about its contents on X
- He endorsed AfD in Germany
- He does not seem to understand basic facts about how the government works
- He has shown a general contempt/disregard for the rule of law as shown by his inability to follow security clearance rules, his SEC issues and the fight over his Tesla pay package
- More personal, but there’s been extensive reporting that Elon has a significant drug problem
- When congress was trying to pass a continuing resolution a few weeks ago, he relentlessly lied about its contents on X
That is fair, the bill sucked and was a huge pork hand out, as head of DOGE, his job is to point those things out but maybe he lied
- He endorsed AfD in Germany
What specific policy proposals do you not like about AfD in Germany. They are basically an anti-immigration party as far as I can tell. Given the number of immigrants Germany has imported under Merkle and all the problems they are having with assimilation, it's hardly surprising a large swath of the population there isn't happy about it.
- He does not seem to understand basic facts about how the government works
Need more evidence of this one. Too broad a statement. Also, he isnt a politician and his job is to make the suggestions to Trump on how to make the government more efficient, so not sure why that matters, the constitution and the courts will prevent any illegal overreach
- He has shown a general contempt/disregard for the rule of law as shown by his inability to follow security clearance rules, his SEC issues and the fight over his Tesla pay package
The ruling over his Tesla pay package was ridiculous, and it's going to haunt Delaware for years to come. He was promised a certain compensation, he hit the targets (when literally everyone thought it was a joke because the targets were so unattainable) and then was not given the contractual compensation. THEN, the shareholders voted again and agreed to give him the compensation and the judge still said no - not sure you have a leg to stand on on this one. This is the most obviously wrong stance of all the points you have made.
- More personal, but there’s been extensive reporting that Elon has a significant drug problem
This is your personal opinion and just a rumor. It's completely irrelevant
He has been continually boosting vaccine skepticism around the COVID vaccines, for one.
But even more 'conspiracyish' is the now infamous "You have said the actual truth" tweet which was about immigration and anti-white hatred being a Jewish plot.
He is publicly pro vaccine for the vaccines that matter (the COVID boosters are no longer relevant). There is nothing wrong with being skeptical of the COVID vaccine or MRA vaccines in general in 2025. I agree in 2020 it was not the time be listening to Brett Weinstein, but now that the pandemic is over, there are lot of reasons to remain skeptical about this technology.
“I’m not anti-vaccine in general,” the social network CEO said. “I think we want to exercise caution with the use of vaccines, but in the absence of vaccines, there’ll be a lot more people that have died.”
"He cited vaccines for diseases like polio and smallpox as examples of their life-saving benefits. But he was quick to emphasize that vaccines should not be immune from questioning."
The fact that you're still talking about the COVID vaccines in 2025 like they are shinning example of effective vaccines is concerning
There's plenty of history of Musk retweeting conspiracy theories, especially since he's taken charge of Twitter. You can look this up if you want. Just because you have a shtick doesn't mean everyone else can't see through it.
Musk has an elementary understanding of American politics but it doesn't stop him from spouting off about it. The whole DOGE concept is predicated on the idea that most of the federal budget is bullshit that we could cut without anybody noticing and not stuff like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid that people actually care about and would be mad to see cut.
Do you not think there is a lot of waste to cut in the federal budget?
No one, including Musk has said "most" of the federal budget is bullshit, especially Trump. "Most" of the federal budget goes to entitlements, and anyone that said they were bullshit would not get elected.
There's waste, farm subsidies off the top of my head. Musk on the other hand I'm pretty sure would be incapable of drawing a piece chart of the federal budget without googling it.
He leads a team of people now (presumably more talented than the average government employee) whose full-time job is to go through the budget and highlight fat. I'm fairly positive you will be proven wrong about this in the coming months ... time will tell
I've seen the movie "Dave" so I'm excited to see what list of fat to be cut his brilliant group of people come up with. Per a previous comment, I'm also waiting for him to tell Joni Ernst etc about how farm subsidies is "fat." This will be fun!
Let us just say that "fat" is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah I'd willingly put money on the other side of that bet. I'd love to be wrong. There's a whole bunch of streamlining that needs to be done, but Musk doesn't know anything about it and assumes his skills are transferable.
This isn't the first time someone's thought of this.
Vivek has said that we should stop spending money on the FAA. He didn't know he was saying that, he just called the bucket it was in nuts, without knowing what was in the bucket he said should be defunded.
I think the federal government is a giant boondoggle of stupid stuff but it's a boondoggle of stupid stuff that the voters want.
Not OP, but some attributes I personally find concerning are his apparent lack of respect for the law. For example his frequent violation of SEC rules, his attempt to get out of purchasing twitter.
You can have it both ways, actually. It is both unfortunate that Musk controls Twitter and also a good thing that he was forced to follow through on a binding bid he made? Like, I don't form ad hoc opinions about business law based on whether a specific case-by-case outcome is good or bad.
Yes, I'm happy about that. Twitter deserves to die and he is escorting it to the grave. It still has lots of inertia and will always remain a home for the knuckle draggers, but I like the trend.
"Try to respond and not make it political." I don't understand why you added this. First, it sounds condescending, but secondly, this is an extremely political topic. The political aspects of Musk are what matter.
I added because its super annoying to me that lean leaning people overreact when talking about Elon Musk because they seem to view everything in through the lens of politics- its super sad and annoying. Look at what the man had done, and ignore who he voted for
For me, the thing that made Musk seem awful and frightening was when he started pushing Hyperloop as a supposedly cheaper and easier idea than high speed rail. This was an old idea people had been thinking about for decades, but he used his celebrity status to make it seem new and improved, and he was clearly pushing it because he wanted to prevent investment in non-car transport by deflecting it into something that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. This was around the time he also decided that he alone could solve tunneling (and while the Boring Company might have had some breakthroughs in the years since, his initial ideas were all about making tunnels less effective by using them for low-capacity transport like cars).
Ever since then, it’s become clear that this sort of thing is a pattern for him. He has some actual good ideas, scattered among a lot of zany hate-brained ideas, which is normal for an academic but abnormal for someone with as much power as he has, and he gets a lot of resources wasted on these ideas.
>But H-1 workers’ earnings are well above the national average, so they can’t be pulling down average wages.<
That’s not the framing the anti-immigration camp is making. They’re arguing that H-1 workers are pulling down wages for the domestic workers they’re competing against, not the national average.
The pro-immigration camp needs clear counter-arguments to this line of criticism. Vivek Ramaswamy was ham-fisted with his “Americans are dumb and lazy” rebuttal, but he was getting at something important: there isn’t _enough_ domestic talent to fill the demand for many H1-B job categories.
I work in tech and with lots of H1-B visa holders. The majority of them went to American universities (or, if not that, very elite universities outside the US), got good grades, and are experts at what they do. I’m certain there are not enough out-of-work Americans out there who could do the jobs they do.
The counter-factual to H1-B isn’t “these jobs would go to Americans and at much better wages”, it’s “these jobs wouldn’t exist and these businesses wouldn’t be forming in America.”
That is spot on and highlights how know-nothings like Musk toss off idiotic bumper-sticker arguments about topics like the federal budget, but suddenly get very nuanced when discussing skilled immigrants.
Anecdotally, I have friends and former colleagues who just wound up going back to India and China to start business and otherwise be super productive members of society when they faced visa friction after completing their PhD / postdoc / etc. And a sentiment I hear a lot is that they are doing just fine, but wish they could have stayed and would probably come back but for the even greater difficulty of securing a visa once you're out of the system.
I had a very good H1-B coworker get laid off next to me, and he ended up having to leave the country, and then founded a company back in the place he came from. It would've been awesome had he founded that company here instead so I absolutely know that an H1B *can* be positive-sum for everyone, at least in some cases.
This is a well-put comment. As you note, Matt’s “average wages” rebuttal was essentially non-responsive to the argument as made, although that doesn’t preclude different arguments in favor of the program. But worker-for-worker you genuinely are talking about an essentially zero-sum bidding issue, the “average wages” issue is non-responsive on that axis unless you stipulate that the highest-wage jobs have all already gone to natives, in which case worker-for-worker competition is moot. But that’s a very strong condition.
I'm not sure someone said the layoffs were because of H1-B, but the nominal rules of H1-B are that you're supposed to show you can't get an American to do it first, so you'd need to show those unemployed workers can't do the job before making new H1-Bs.
In the case of programmers, at least in the medium to long term, it seems very likely that more programmers coming to the US is good for programmers who already live here. There seems to be very strong agglomeration effects in tech, with a handful of hubs around the world. Immigration is key to making that agglomeration happen here, which is very good for people in the country it’s happening. Even clearer when the immigrant starts a new company.
I think that’s a pretty standard answer, but something else I was thinking about is the domestic market. The biggest buyer of tech services is often other programmers. A lot of startups are building other tools for startups. Programmers writing a new library or protocol or what have you benefit when there are more people/companies interested in using it. And B2B while less famous than consumer facing tech companies are an important part of the tech ecosystem. It’s much easier to sell technology services to businesses that have programmers, too. You could imagine this both ways (totally analog companies being dependent on the tech supplier and unable to replicate internally), but I suspect technologically sophisticated companies are more likely to want, need, understand, and able to implement vendor services.
I strongly second this as another software engineer. Software is all about leveraging upfront fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs at scale. Nothing gives an engineer more leverage than other software—both in multiplying the productivity of upfront development time and in minimizing operational costs. This includes cloud services and DevTools SaaS, as well as open-source, high-level programming languages and libraries. The only reason we engineers can earn so much in a financially sustainable way is that we have incredibly powerful tools developed by other engineers.
That includes other engineers at our employer; sometimes just our own past work. And when you’re “in the trenches,” you want the strongest current and past colleagues you can get. Even if they have a fancier title and a larger comp package than yourself, you desperately want the best tools and existing code you can get. The incentives also aligned financially—particularly our stock-base comp—in that the more productive we are in aggregate, the better our firm performs.
So software engineers—especially those of us who have worked with colleagues with a diverse range of competencies throughout our careers and can viscerally appreciate strong teammates—should be the strongest advocates for more software engineer immigrants.
I agree overall that skilled immigration is good, but there is no shortage of American or H1B software engineers in the US currently. Layoffs in tech have been huge over the last couple of years. I have several acquaintances who have been out of work for over a year. These are extremely qualified software engineers who cannot find work. This is a disaster and is probably what is fueling a lot of racist rhetoric around this topic online. People are getting desperate.
I'm not going to say this is false, I've read it a lot of places, but I've hired several software engineers for my small company in the past year or so, and it just doesn't seem true to me that the market is as bad as I've read. What is true is that you get hundreds of resumes for a position, but the vast majority of these resumes are just garbage, like non-starters or obviously fake / AI generated.
Unable to sort through resumes in a meaningful way, I just asked candidates to meet me at a coffee shop anywhere in NYC with zero filtering until afterward, only 3-5 candidates even did that. If there are so many experienced software engineers desperate for jobs... where are they?
Agreed as another engineer on the hiring side. Even before the AI generated slop, there was a general pray-and-spray approach that candidates took to applying. Eg, just mass applying to every single LinkedIn "easy apply" software job listing. That puts the impetus on the hiring team to filter and prioritize applications. Some of the filtered out candidates may even be a good fit, but with just a generic LinkedIn profile/resume designed for mass applying, we can't tell.
Asking candidates to meet in person does sound like a decent filter for serious candidates. I'm thinking anything that adds in some friction such that candidates have to decide whether this is a role that is a sufficiently strong fit for their experience/interests to be worth their time explore is helpful towards that end. Similarly, we on the hiring side need to provide a clear, concise, and specific description of the role and company in order for candidates to make that determination.
Ultimately hoping the whole engineering employment market structure will evolve from the current broken equilibria. For too long it seems like both sides of the market have been incentivized to embellish, and at times cheat and lie, with the assumption that getting to signed offer is all that matters. For the candidates, a lot of that is motivated by the reluctance of firms to fire for insufficient performance and the slow pace at which those decisions are made. Probably something similar on the firms side where it can be assumed hires will stick around for a year or two and even a demotivated employee is acceptable relative to keeping head count open.
I think another big aspect is that there are lots of in-person jobs and not nearly as many remote jobs but people don't want to relocate back to the Bay Area/NYC/Seattle.
Yeah I suspect some experienced engineers who have been out of work for a year were hoping to get the SF Google salary and live in Ohio and they're frustrated they can't find that. But that is a very different thing than the comment I was replying to suggesting lots of good software engineers are in the unemployment line.
Yes. The answer is complicated and you would want to discuss with immigration lawyers so it is nowhere near as easy as for a Green Card Holder/US Citizen but lots of H1B holders are able to start companies especially with the help of incubators/cofounders. The main risks are financial (and if the company goes under you need to get a new job).
Got it, wouldn't be for me to be clear. One of the commonly-cited benefits of immigration is that immigrants are on net job creators, so having a pathway that's less dependent on employment would probably offset some of the anti-H1B complaints that they're taking American jobs.
>the purpose of the H-1B program is “to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”<
The hard left is way out to lunch on this. H1B workers nearly all have university degrees (a huge percentage have postgraduate degrees), and the majority earn a six figure salary. BY DEFINITION adding them to the workforce upgrades its productivity, on average. And contrary to the popular perception (skillfully woven, I'm pretty sure, by resentful tech bros*), they're far from "slaves." H1B workers can leave their jobs for greener pastures if they like, and very large numbers do exactly that (though they do need to submit paperwork to the government, and this usually involves legal fees). Also, how many "slaves" WILLINGLY enter enslavement? The fact is, there's far more demand for H1B "slavery" than there are available slots.
I'm not suggesting the program is perfect. There are changes I'd make if I were king for a day (for starters I'd give H1B complete freedom to job hop without the aforementioned legal fees—just as citizens or permanent residents can do—after a modest probationary period. Call it six months). I'd also allow them to easily convert into green cards after an appropriate interval. But the biggest problem with the H1B program is that it's not nearly large enough. We could absolutely be CRUSHING IT in terms of attracting the world's best and brightest if we wanted to. But America is the king of own goals. Sigh.
*My own brother is a software engineer. He's given me leave to slag his kind.
I would love to see the stats on actual movement of H1-B holders. I think the vast majority of holders are effectively stuck. There are a number of people I have seen on various sites (LinkedIn, Mastadon, etc.) who are having to leave the country because they have been laid off and can't find new work within the 60 day window. If it was easy to move, then Twitter would be dead right now when its non H1B people left en mass after Musk take over.
This is to point that I think the vast majority of the benefit for the current H1B is to companies who get the lucky lottery winners not the public. The overall way companies have decided to focus on cost cutting with H1-Bs as a component of it is one of the overriding themes of management while they tell us a story of innovation.
Finding a job when you're unemployed is a very different proposition than finding a better gig when you're currently employed. I agree that the former situation is not ideal for H1B workers. That's one reason I'd like to see the change I suggested above. That said, there are work arounds: many H1B workers convert to student visas during periods of unemployment, in order to preserve their in-country eligibility.
And no, the statistics don't support your view that "the vast majority of holders are effectively stuck."
I think in large part, how one views immigration in general inevitably colors one's perceptions of the H1B program. If one believes (as I do) that growing our skilled workforce is a net benefit for the country, the supposedly nefarious intentions of Big Tech don't look so, erm, nefarious. Getting more skilled workers is good, even if Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg personally benefit.
the movement is restricted significantly more by country-based green card caps. once you apply for a green card, it's harder to move jobs (process restarts all over, and your place in line is f-ed).
if you change from EB3 to EB2 as you gain experience, and how your employer files your PERM - the request to recapture the priority date doesnt always work. i've seen multiple cases first hand.
I am curious about this too. I know a number of H1B visa holders who are spouses of grad students. Some of the stories they tell me likely break labor laws, but they don't want to report them because they are afraid of losing their job. There situation is a likely not standard in that they want to stay in the city their spouse is in, but it has given me a different outlook on the H1B visa situation.
Apropos of recent news regarding our neighbors to the north, it seems like Canada is showing us the dangers of welcoming more high skilled immigrants combined with bad NIMBY housing policy.
Given how long Trudeau has been in power, it’s honestly not surprising his time is up. But I do think Trudeau stepping down is maybe another data point in the “housing theory of everything”.
FWIW this wasn’t exactly what happened in Canada. In US language, there was a huge expansion of F1 student visas that drove a bunch of temporary work-based immigration since the hours cap was waived. Seems like a bad policy, but there wasn’t some huge increase in admitting programmers
Not if your point hinges on "high-skilled". The problem with the Canadian system is it led to a bunch of degree-mills that churned out nearly unemployable foreigners. That combined with the housing crisis has led to terrible outcomes.
"But you can’t make the country as a whole richer with these piecemeal handouts for everyone — the more you try to add up supply constriction, the poorer everyone gets."
I though we had that figured out by the 1950's at the latest. Where is the graveyard these zombie economic ideas a Krugman calls them keep coming from? I do not mean the naïve rent control is good for renters, or "protective" tariffs re good for the protected companies, but the organized Owen Cass/Bernie Sanders sort of proudly ignorant poses?
1) Democrats are like permanently stuck in a New Deal loop, even though America is a lot richer, more educated, and has a higher baseline productivity now than it did in the 1930s.
2) The Republican donor base are a bunch of rent-seeking small business owners.
No. Then again, I believe in parliamentarism, not our current mess of a constitutional structure. I'd be fine with a 16-year term limit on a PMOTUS, provided they could hold a coalition together long enough.
IMO the same underlying logic DOES apply to both -- you want *effective* politicians, and pushing them out just as they've gotten the hang of it is a bad idea. Obama would've made an EXCELLENT four-term president! Conversely, I've also seen first-hand what happens *under* term limits -- the MO legislature has turned into a cesspool run by lobbyists in the last 20+ years.
The split in my thinking RE executive vs. legislative term limits is due to the differential solutions to entrenched incumbency, which, after all, is the core problem The Rubes imagine term limits will solve. Multiparty parliamentarism ALREADY solves most of the incumbency advantage, because proportional and other non-plurality voting methods provide ample opportunities for challengers to win seats.
Thus, only the executive actually NEEDS term limits to address entrenched incumbency. After all, if you boil the innovative mission of democracy right down to it, it's basically to solve the problems of monarchy: (1) the infirmity and sapping of vitality that comes with old age, (2) the tunnel-vision that comes with being in power too long, (3) the unqualified-ness of underaged heirs, (4) the disqualified-ness of incompetent heirs, and (5) the instability of succession crises. We already have minimum age limits and the various methods of popular or parliamentary election to handle #3-5, but #1-2 need solutions.
A term limit solves #2.
And I favor age limits to solve #1.
NB - I didn't mention the danger of autocratic takeover, because autocrats tend to attempt their takeovers or consolidate power at the *beginning* of their rule, not the end. Other methods of constitutional design need to address these questions.
I'd be ok with abolishing the 22nd amendment *if* there were laws in place to make sure that senate-appointed positions have reasonable turnover. We have to make sure the J. Edgar Hoover problem does not recur.
If you don't figure out how to include the working class in economic growth productively, they will make you figure out how to cut them in on rent-seeking.
Or what they THINK is cutting them in? The Trump program of trade and immigration restrictions + higher deficits just reduces growth without helping the working class.
Your reference to "zombie economic ideas" reminds me of one my favorite darkly humorous comments about free trade from a 2003 Reason Magazine article:
"[I]t often seems as though free traders are trapped in a public policy version of Groundhog Day, forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade."
It should remind you of the idea that tax cuts promote growth and investment.
A strange quote to come from _Reason_ although I agree that proponents of freer trade often fail to point out a) that import restrictions tax exports and b) that much of the "damage" attributed to free trade is in fact the exchange rate effect of deficits.
I work in the software engineering field, and a lot of the people I directly work with are on H1-B Visas. If H1-B did not exist, the result would not be lesser-qualified native born Americans taking the jobs instead, it would be the jobs, themselves, moving to India or China, allowing the company to hire the more qualified people where they are. And, what jobs did remain in the U.S. would likely pay less because the quality of the average person taking them would be lower. So, if the idea that limiting immigration is suppose to boost the pay of native-born employees, it doesn't (at least not in the tech industry) - if anything, it would have exactly the opposite effect!
In the manufacturing world, government can counter the above argument with tariffs. But, you can't tariff software, and even if you could, our products are used all over the world, and the retaliatory tariffs that all the other countries would enact in return would just make it difficult for our company to sell its products anywhere.
One question is why aren't we training enough people. On the one hand you have a student loan crisis where everybody that majors in some less needed major, sports marketing, whatever, can get loans only to default on them when the salary is not there for that major, while we are not training enough software engineers.
I don't favor scrapping the loan program, but we need more government support for needed specialties and less for those that will not support the expense of the education.
I think if sports marketing majors were smart enough to graduate with a CS degree they would. Despite the protestations of the "just learn to code lol" crowd there is a baseline of talent needed to enter the field.
Not sure what CS is. I dont oppose bringing in people with needed skills, but I think more important is adjusting our educational system so that we are training enough people for the needs of the country.
I see it as problematic in the well paying specialties that we are bringing in people from abroad rather than training Americans for those jobs.
CS=Computer Science sorry. I saw your comment in another thread that in the medical field could use lower-performing (3.6 vs 3.7 GPA) US students instead of foreigners. As a consumer of medicine I would prefer to be treated by a smarter immigrant vs. a stupider person that happens to be American by your mileage may vary.
What you are being treated with includes dumber Americans who couldnt get into a US medical school so went to the Caribbean or the other common end run to go to osteopathy school which numbers equal to the foreign grads.
I dont know that there is any metric to compare intelligence of foreign grads, there are different systems and metrics but yes we could cherry pick the entire worlds smartest people and let them run the country like Saudi Arabia does, but I have the notion that we ought to take care of ourselves, and I don't think that somebody with a 3.6 average is unqualified. Let the Indian doctors treat their own country where there is one fifth of the amount of MDs per capita.
It is funny that the system we have now often compels foreign med grads to spend a year or two in poor areas in the US where they are coming from countries that are many times poorer and underserved medically.
To claim that Americans are not smart enough to supply their own doctors is an odd claim. Are we the new Saudi Arabia where we are incapable of supplying our needs and just rely on foreigners.
I am not anti immigrant. I would rather take poorer Mexican laborers who also are greatly needed here in the trades and can go from being in poverty to middle class, vs usually well to do foreigners who would be well to do in their countries but can make 250K a year here.
It seems from your comments that you work in the medical field, so what you're asking for is protection from immigrants who are willing to work for less money. The traditional backlash against immigration is not from doctors or tech bros but from blue-collar American workers for the same reason (source: https://youtu.be/APo2p4-WXsc?si=z4yQRxbLXJjFjaVv&t=60).
As a consumer, not a provider, of medical services I want more immigration of doctors probably for the same reason you want more immigration of tradespeople - you can hire someone that's more qualified for less money than if you were limited to hiring only American workers.
I'll note that CS majors are now (from memory) somewhere between 3-5x of the student body proportion at Stanford as they were in 2006. So we are definitely trying. The growth _in demand_ has just been insane.
Seriously though, this debate drove me insane. It wasn't just the nativists being racist, that's a given (although I was surprised how many people even have opinions about Indian people, the average redneck doesn't even run in to Indians frequently enough to have an opinion on them), it was the pro-H1B side of the debate basically accepting the zero-sum premise. Vivek Ramaswamay wakes up the day after Christmas and says "well you know what, you guys CAN'T compete with us because you're lazy and watch too much (very out of date) TV." Like what? Even if there's something to that, that is not the argument to use there! Why is nobody pointing out that immigrants both buy contribute to the American economy with their work and then buy stuff with the money they earn. Unless you're in direct competition with H1B workers, this is a win for you. Why is nobody pointing this out!
Also, one of these days I'm going to do a deep dive in to the numbers on how much it takes to cross the threshold of a) net taxpayer and b) net economic contributor. The bar for b is much lower than a and last I checked, I think pretty much anybody with a minimum wage job who isn't a criminal clears bar b. That's not to say we should alter our immigration system to maximize low skilled immigration, I just also get annoyed by the assertion that certain people who do have jobs and are not criminals aren't contributing in some way. They are, just less than somebody with a six figure salary would be.
1. At this point the H1-B program isn't really 'bringing' skilled programmers over to the US. It's a visa for relatively recent STEM grads who were educated at US universities. They might grow up to be skilled programmers (or scientists, or some other type of engineer), but the vast majority of the visas are going to 23-25 year old graduates of US STEM programs. I think that's fine, but just worth pointing out. As Matt has noted on Twitter, there was nothing in say Jensen Huang's background that would make you think he'd be exceptional in the future- he just graduated from a US college. The visa is more 'large scale importation of future potentially smart people'.
I mean, if your company really needed to hire say a smart 15-20 year specialized programmer who lives in India or Poland or Brazil now, you could just hire them remotely- no visa required
2. I take a much dimmer view of the consulting firms than Matt does, but related to point 1- you can't really raise the salary cap too much, because then no one would hire the H1-B new grads. If you make the minimum salary say $120k, then far fewer new Comp Sci grads with 2 years of experience are going to get hired. So I think we're stuck with a low salary. (Unless you do something weird like require their salary to be say $120k after 5 years here in the US).
The consulting firms give the H1-B visa a bad reputation, really add little value to corporate America, and the bodyshop ones are the biggest & most annoying email spammers on the planet Earth. ("Hello sir please see my hotlist of consultants on the corp to corp." If you're in the industry then you've seen ten hundred billion of these). I would just make hiring H1-Bs & then using them exclusively for consulting either illegal, or taxed at a way higher rate
The real issue (which is what Krishnan's tweet was about) are the country caps on converting H1-Bs into Green Cards. If you're from India or China, a decade or longer wait to get a GC isn't unheard of. The number of genuinely smart H1-Bs who come over here, don't get a GC, and end up back in their home country is sad. I'd raise or eliminate the GC gap before I did any reforms to the H1-B program.
Unfortunately, I think that's even more of a third rail in US politics. Plus, it would mean allowing more Chinese immigration specifically, which I think is good public policy but I understand is not going to be very popular these days
Is raising the green card cap a third rail? It seems like a way to make things better for people without actually increasing the number of immigrants, so it should be easier than most improvements to the immigration system, which would actually change the number of immigrants present.
I think so. As I mentioned, a significant % of H1-Bs are going to eventually return to their home country without ever having received a GC or citizenship here. So more GCs would ultimately increase the number of foreign-born residents, plus also increase the incentives to come here in the first place- now you know the GC is guaranteed. (Plus incentivizing diploma mill universities to crank out low-quality STEM degrees).
I think the US should just import a million super-smart Chinese engineers & scientists, but again I understand that the politics of this are uh looking worse every day
It's a shame because if you really wanted to undermine the CCP, picking out a million of their smartest young people and removing them from China when its population is already graying and shrinking would be a good way to do it.
I think it is something that can easily happen in a secret congress sort of way (if you just remove per country caps and don't change the number of Green Cards officially available), the problem is that neither side will be satisfied with this so any attention will prevent it from happening.
STEM OPT effectively gives 3 years of work authorization post grad (this has became more important as the H1B visa has got more random), but yes. Not deporting Caltech graduates who want to stay in the US seems like an important policy goal
This is correct, but it should be added that right now companies apply for an H-1B immediately to give people as many chances with the lottery as possible*. If we get rid of the lottery, as Matt argues, then, yes, we aren't talking about entirely entry-level positions anymore.
*If you wait until the end of the three years you get to participate only in one lottery.
How about not admitting a bunch of foreigners from hostile nations to CalTech in the first place? I know professors love Asian grad students because they can work them for 16 hours a day and they don’t complain, but is that really good for the US?
We need to reform the student visa process as much as H1Bs, the restrictions should be as early as possible bc it is dumb to let someone come here and get their degree and then make them vamonos
> I know professors love Asian grad students because they can work them for 16 hours a day and they don’t complain,
No, it's actually because they will treat it like both a job they are responsible to and an opportunity to take advantage of to launch their careers. American grad students often are using it as an extension of college to "find" themselves, have fun, and maybe do a little work. (broad strokes to be sure, but no worse than your comment.)
Grad school in history or English, sure, but not so much in STEM. Though academia can sure be dispiriting enough to flush out all but the biggest gluttons for punishment.
Increased salary caps would entirely freeze out postdocs, who have salary limits effectively imposed by the NIH and who are also often being trained for six figure positions. Perhaps academic H1Bs would be excluded, but it gets at your point that the current floor is in part there to allow people to build up from high skill to very high skill in industries that have lower prevailing wages.
Exactly, I left this out of my first post for brevity, but a lot of PhD scientists make less money than you'd think. Like, less than a software developer with the same amount of professional experience, certainly. If you have 1 salary cap that's based around engineers, then you're risking leaving out a lot of early career scientists
Speaking as a postdoc, the sense in which postdocs are theoretically being trained for six-figure positions is... very theoretical. Postdocs, along with grad-students, do the bulk of bench science but face an up-or-out labor market to advance, commonly compared to a pyramid scheme.
Postdocs certainly vary a lot, but in my (computational) lab, about 1/3rd of the postdocs are non-computational MDs who are learning to code and 2/3rds are computational people who are learning how clinical data works, so IMO there's genuine training happening and everyone typically exits to a six figure job of some sort; though the faculty market is obviously very tough and most people go to industry. I generally do not recommend people do a postdoc unless they are really passionate about the work they'll be doing, have a substantial amount of independence, or are actually being trained in a non-theoretical way.
Oh, I'm absolutely being trained. Just not in any expectation of a six-figure job down the line, LOL. I'm not actually sure my supervisor makes six figures.
I bet this varies by field/discipline, but a postdoc hired from abroad can come on a J-visa, which require them to return after some number of years. But if you come from abroad and do a PhD on an F-1 visa and then want to stick around for a postdoc, I imagine you need an H-1B (or some other visa that does not require you to return home before/after obtaining it).
Generally speaking, it is straightforward to get a postdoc or visiting scholar over on a visa for a temporary stay, but things get more complicated (and heavily scrutinized) when eventual permanent residence is in the table.
It's been a while since I hired a postdoc from abroad (ones with US PhDs just come on OPT), but when I did, she was brought in on a J-1. We eventually transitioned her to an H-1B, and then finally a green card.
> I mean, if your company really needed to hire say a smart 15-20 year specialized programmer who lives in India or Poland or Brazil now, you could just hire them remotely- no visa required
It's really hard to work with people across time zones.
Anecdotally, foreign workers based in foreign lands have had work that's needed a lot of remediation by the local team, sometimes enough to make the foreign team's contribution negative. But foreign-born workers who are living in the US and working from the office are really really talented. I don't know how to distinguish the selection effect (no one is going to pay to move the bad workers to the US) from the actually being co-located effect
“It's really hard to work with people across time zones”
Brazil is GMT -3, which is close enough, at least for east coast companies. Where I work (not a tech company) our IT folks use contractors in Argentina (same time zone as Brazil) and it works fine.
I lost that in the comments about Poland and India, but you're right. I work with Brazilians who are basically me, but probably for a quarter the cost, and their English is very good.
Brazil's population is close to the US, too, so it's not like we can just vacuum up a few thousand developers a year and then be done with it.
In an key way, Miami is a special case. When it comes to working with folks in Latin America, Miami, the capital of Latin America, is built for the job.
I don't have much to add, but to mention that in my experience, the alternative to H1B is not going to be "businesses hire American" -- it's "businesses offshore even more."
It is, the biggest hurdle is having to complete an American residency, which is not only a fairly humiliating ritual for someone who may have many years of experience, but is also just basically impossible for an older person who has a lot of family obligations due to the grueling hours and high levels of stress that are endemic to all U.S. residencies pretty much by design.
My wife's father is a doctor in his home country and currently does some sort of medical consulting work that I don't really understand, but which pays dramatically less than being a doctor. Now that his children are grown and the political situation in his homeland has stabilized, he intends to move back to his home country where he can live an upper-class lifestyle as a doctor. It's a big loss for America, as the man is very intelligent and a hard worker.
The policy failure is that we dont train enough doctors. More than likely that physician is needed more in their own country. The US has 36 MDs per 10K population. India, the largest source of foreign MDs in the US, has 7.3 MDs per 10K people. Yes, they make way more money here, but they are needed in India more which has 1/5 of the number of MDs per capita.
That suggests that our benefit is more important than their loss. Also, it is not our benefit that a US citizen has to go to Antigua or have a doctor emigrate because they only have a 3.6 grade point. Now, temporarily we may need to have immigration, but long-term we just need to train more doctors.
That would vary with the residency. I completed a Family Practice residency at age 30 with a child but FP is not known as the most grueling specialty like Surgery or OBG.
Why doesn't the US just train enough doctors to meet the demand rather than robbing the world of physicians who are likely needed more in their own country.
I think people here talk more about making it easier for doctors to immigrate because that would be easier to effect through pure policy change in a quick and "easy" way.
Training more homegrown doctors would involve investing in much more medical training.
With the way the world is aging, there probably should be a global effort to train more doctors.
The biggest issue is that we don't train enough doctors to fill the available residency slots. There are some 30% more residency positions than American Medical Graduates, so that these are filled by foreign trained MDs, both foreign born, and Americans studying abroad, mostly in the Caribbean.
Most all graduates pass their licensing, there just aren't enough graduates.
We left California when I was a kid because it was clear my mom would never be able to afford a house. The house my grandparents built after the war is now occupied by millionaires with no memory of what the neighborhood was like before all the fences went up and it turned into an enclave for Silicon Valley tech workers. Several decades later, I find myself again living between a booming metro area and farmland. Every day there is a headline in the newspaper about a company breaking ground on a project that will bring hundreds of new high-paying jobs to our community.
The similarities to California are striking. Nice weather (sun belt), good universities (R1's with teaching hospitals), people flocking here for new tech jobs, Republican government slowly drifting Democrat, starting in the metro areas. Also a new Indian grocery opening every six blocks and parents speaking languages I don't recognize at local youth soccer games.
This time around I am benefiting from and quite enjoying the explosive growth (about 500 new homes within 10 minutes of my house just this year) and influx of people from all over the world. But I am also deeply sympathetic towards the locals who have lived here for generations getting squeezed out of their neighborhoods. A lot of my own family became vehemently anti-immigrant (despite our own immigrant roots) and were radicalized by right-wing radio (and now send me links to bizarre "news" websites about the crazy stuff the libs are doing in California).
Despite the fearmongering and toxic political climate created by booming economies and the influx of immigrants, I think it's great for kids. I loved going to my friends houses and being introduced to new an interesting cultural practices (and food!) and my peers who stuck around, went to college and got into tech, real estate, etc. are all doing extremely well and are looking at comfortable retirements by 60.
This is probably one of the most underdiscussed value divides between cosmopolitan libs like myself and a lot of the people who subscribe to Slow Boring and 'normal people', which is that I have genuinely zero concern for people having to move to a more affordable neighborhood, as long as they are on net becoming better off I really don't care at all whether or not the people living in a place have deep familial ties to the land or if they are transplants who moved in yesterday. But I accept that for many people, this is deeply important.
Of course the California situation is very different. When housing supply is fixed, you can't just move to a more affordable neighborhood. If someone grew up in San Francisco they'd have to move a hundred miles away or more before they could find something that vaguely qualifies as 'affordable' to a low wage worker.
FWIW we were basically pushed successively further from SF until basically they ran out of dairy farms and orchards to build houses on. By the late 80's the only places we could have afforded to buy a house were so far from the bay that it made more sense to pick up and move to another state.
Where I live now (because it is in the South) the people being priced out are largely working class black families that settled here in a process of successively being pushed out of areas as they turn into suburbs and merge with metro areas. There are a lot of small houses on what used to be tiny little roads but are now arteries for people like me who commute into the city for work. Road-widening projects eat away at property and equity just as housing prices in all the newly-built subdivisions that feed those arteries skyrocket.
“as long as they are on net becoming better off I really don't care at all whether or not the people living in a place have deep familial ties to the land or if they are transplants”
What you may be overlooking here is that the loss of subjective utiles may exceed the market value without being legible. Assume I place a value of $X on characteristic A of my locality. Changes occur that destroy or devalue A but are uncompensated, while market values of my house increase by $Y. There’s no guarantee that $Y > $X.
More generally, the trouble with stating that it’s okay to ignore classes of preference is that it’s a fully generalizable argument with no natural limitng principle leading to natural incommensurability of arguments: one could just as easily say that they care a lot about ties to the land and familial proximity and place neglible value on a bunch of randos (or even them and theirs) potentially becoming moentarily “better off.” Indeed, the right to hold (or not hold) such beliefs is arguably enshrined in the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.
Good article. Where there is an obvious shortage of workers in a necessary field it makes sense to import workers. We have a nursing shortage that without a huge immigration of Filipinas would put hospitals in very bad shape.
But in my field of endeavor, medicine, I see a corrosive effect of favoring high end workers simply because public policy fails to educate enough qualified Americans.
I see the US tradition as taking the poor huddled masses like my grandparents coming in 1910 working in sweatshops and having their grandchildren rise through the ranks.
What the selective high end immigration does is take the cream off the top of countries that themselves don't have enough doctors, creating a brain drain. Often in countries that tend to have less social mobility than the US (at least previously, we have had decreasing mobility of late) often these people come from the privileged classes who could do well in their own country, and they create in this country a priviliged immigrant class with resentful Americans who have to take the low end jobs.
In the case of medicine, there are plenty of qualified American applicants, just not enough slots, Being the wealthiest country in the world, you would think that we would not need to rely on poor countries to steal their doctors.
On the other hand, on the low end, construction, farming, could not exist without foreign, primarily Mexican labor, and this affords immigrants who would have very difficult lives in their home country access to the American dream as opposed to the wealthy engineers and doctors from abroad. We may need the HB1s in the short term, but imo it is malfeasance to not train our own people for these jobs.
I couldn’t agree more. I think Canada made a few mistakes with their immigration changes, but one of the biggest and most underdiscussed was over focusing on “high skilled” immigration. When coupled with their housing crisis and inability to build, you had Canadians competiting against similar economically situated immigrants for housing. While I still think the country still may have benefited from them, it drove alot of resentment and alot of the issues we see with diploma mills.
What Canada didn’t do was also allow “lower skilled” immigrants to work in healthcare, childcare, agriculture, construction, and other “less skilled” fields.
I dislike the argument to switch to a fully points based or skill based system precisely because we also need a whole lot of people working in construction and other sectors too. And there are lots of immigrants who would be net contributors who aren’t just in programming.
Dave, yes, and I think the consequences is that you have a poor less skilled American or Canadian cohort, ex factory workers. miners etc. on the low end and resentful of the rich foreigners like you see in Vancouver buying up all the property and forcing out the locals.
I see immigration as both beneficial to the country, so I am OK with allowing certain skilled labor that is in a shortage, even on the high end, though it is the responsibility of the country to train enough high end workers, but also that immigration should be compassionate and bring people out of the poverty of their countries as with my grandparents.
I really want to know the thought process which says that instead of allocating Visas on merit or another objective criteria they should use a mix of randomness and fraud.
You see it quite often, New Jersey had got rid of objective literacy qualifications for teachers this week for instance.
The randomness doesn't seem necessarily wrong by itself to me.
You have to meet a minimum OBJECTIVE standard, and then we have a lottery.
Assuming you want to cap the number, but you don't want to set your standards so high you overshoot the cap and don't even let _that_ many in, how else would you do it?
If you try to make objective measures to rank everyone explicitly and take the top X, that's going to be gameable as well, right?
I think minimum objective standards and then randomize would be an improvement for giving out grants and some sorts of hiring. But for visas, you could just say that they go to the ones with highest salaries, because that is a measure that is going to be hard to fake and easy to measure, without creating too many perverse incentives.
There’s a perverse incentive when you set a minimum standard for grants, which is that the standard gets set very low, essentially that the proposal is not obviously harmful. This done to perpetuate claims that an area of research is underfunded to encourage greater funding. This occurs without lotteries but the rating process is valid enough that what gets funded is above average for the pool; lotteries would just lower that to average.
I’m not suggesting that you set a *low* standard such that you’re keeping basically the entire pool of applicants. I’m saying that if the committee has done the first pass of getting the strong ones, and the second pass of getting it to a short list, they’ll usually do better to randomize from the short list than to go over the files carefully and start finding minor issues to distinguish the remaining ones. No one is good at the kind of parsing that happens at that last stage, and it encourages writing defensively rather than proposing something interesting and new.
You’re not suggesting that but the incentives in the system would work that way. Perhaps if you ranked them all and only the top 25 or 30% entered the lottery.
I thought about that but I was wondering if that has too many issues where California now has an easy time getting them vs. Texas, because California has to pay a higher salary already due to cost of living.
Proficiency in math might be better if you are hiring mathematicians. In my 34 years of experience as an engineer and hiring manager, I would say that the better mathematicians tend to be worse engineers. (There are exceptions. Russia seems to produce great engineers who are also excellent at math.)
I am not saying that engineers are (on average) worse at math than brick-layers. Obviously we have all taken multiple semesters of calc and differential equations and such. But if you are interviewing someone, and they start to solve a math problem, it is almost certainly because they are failing to understand that there is a simpler way. Understanding these simple ways it what makes it possible to do the abstraction necessary to make engineering decisions.
I suspect that success in the Russian school system is highly filtered by testing. There could also be some of the, "studying 10x as hard because failure to succeed consigns you to a life of REAL poverty."
“ someone always raises the concern that this benefit to foreign-born wage earners generates downward pressure on native-born wage earners.
But H-1 workers’ earnings are well above the national average, so they can’t be pulling down average wages.”
What? Matt brought up a concern and then answered a different concern. If an H1B comes in at $150k to a job that would ordinarily pay $200k, and into a country in which the average wage is $100k, then he is creating downward pressure on wages but increasing the average wage IF the position would have gone unfilled without an H1B. Otherwise he is creating downward pressure on BOTH native-born and average wages.
You’re forgetting his point about productivity. Also Matt left out the past that immigration leads to overall more economic growth. It’s likely a reason American economic growth has outpaced its peers and why we had disinflation without an accompanying recession (yet).
The fact that H1B migrants overall is a net positive to GDP growth is the missing piece here. It seems to me you’re falling for the “lump of labor” fallacy.
But the productivity point is irrelevant to the concern the OP is addressing. The question isn't "Is an Indian worker more productive in India or in America?" it's "Is the Indian worker more productive than whoever would get the job absent the H1-B Visa?" If the position goes unfilled then obviously yes they are. If it would be filled without the H1-B then the answer is less clear. I think it's still beneficial on net, but Matt just sidesteps the question.
The solution here is to auction off H1-B visas. Then the value of the increased productivity of immigrant labor goes straight into the public fisc and either provides more services for all of us or lowers our taxes. We all win!
To be clear, it's the employers who would be bidding for the visas?
I know, the cost of the visa affects the market-clearing wage, so some of the cost goes to the employee either way. I still prefer to have it set up so the employers are the ones placing and paying the bids.
Edit -- on second thought, maybe there's value in pricing-in the employee's idiosyncratic willingness-to-pay to move into the USA? Having the employee pay bids would price out the poorest and most desperate people, which would be a problem for an asylum program, but not necessarily for a "credentialed and high-earning worker who would be more productive if they moved to the USA for work" program.
In theory, the market clearing price is the same either way. So sure have the employer, who probably has better access to cash and credit, pay.
Yeah, this is definitely something that works for H1-B visas, but not asylum visas.
To me that's more the case for not messing too much with it. We don't need to kid ourselves about how the program actually works or it's flaws but American tech has been the goose that laid the golden egg and the last thing you want to do is inadvertently kill it.
Good comments all around. You bring up a great point, the growth in tech is what is driving growth in America. And the fact that the best and brightest come here, including Elon, is a great benefit to us.
On what planet? Only for a tiny subset of the population
It's a massive growth industry and the benefits of leading the world in technology development are greater than the sum of the salaries of those who work in it. Even if you don't buy the economic case I think having those cluster(s) within the United States instead of somewhere else like China or India or even one of our military allies (most of whom are far more exposed than we are) is, under current geopolitical circumstances, becoming a matter of national security.
And its value to America is positive only to the extent that it hires existing Americans! Especially since its products have net-neutral value to society at best (Apple, Amazon positive; Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral; Google, Facebook, Musk negative).
Outside of Amazon, these companies don’t really employ huge numbers of people because they have very high labor productivity. All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway.
Sure, it’s good for strategic reasons that we have these industries here, though they produce too much in China. But we shouldn’t let them hire a 5th column or h1bs who can then take their knowledge back to China either, if that’s our argument.
"Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral"
you're crazy. Those have all been huge net positives.
I've used Nvidia video cards for years, they are great. And Excel is one of the most important programs for business.
I agree we should be careful about allowing H1Bs to become a fifth column that then take knowledge gained here to a strategic rival.
But I also think the argument that the only value of these companies to Americans is the salaries they pay is an overly narrow view of these things. Even without getting into debates over trickle down or trickle around economics there are serious benefits to being in the country where tech is produced.
Americans take for granted how much more 'high tech' our lives are and how efficiently our businesses run by virtue of easy access to this stuff for no other reason than that it was created in this country. You don't want to just give that up because of the vagaries of what software engineers or QC people (or whoever) are paid.
>Musk negative.
Wow, someone can reduce space launch costs by a factor of ten, be on track for doing so again, increase total world-wide launch tempo by a factor of five in five years, and provide reliable broadband worldwide at a decent price, and somehow still be net-negative in impact. Tough to imagine.
"All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway." This is sort of the point of Matt's post, heck his writing for 20 years and the riposte to Kevin Drum.
To unpack the Kevin Drum comment, he's usually lumped in with Matt and other "neoliberal shills" but he departs from them on housing. He's been a pretty big proponent of the idea that high housing costs are overblown as an issue by pointing out costs nationally. And then notes that housing costs are really only an issue in CA and NYC.
And (I suspect) Matt's response (and my response) is that's the whole point! CA and NYC are two the biggest economic powerhouses in American in the world; especially CA. I'd add in Seattle, Boston (and MA generally as economic powerhouses with high housing costs). As a proportion of the total population of America, this list is not that large. But as a proportion of both general economic activity, innovation and contribution to GDP growth? These place have extremely outsized impact. Which means making it difficult to build housing ends up having pretty large negative societal and economic impact. Working class wages are much higher in CA and NYC (and MA and Seattle) than in say Texas (the poster child for strong economy + cheap housing). But given high housing costs, it makes sense for working class people to move to Texas even though this likely results in lower wages.
To bring it back to this post, if you encourage more H1B visas to places like SF without expanding housing supply you're only going to exacerbate the trend I just described.
The criticism I have heard is this program isn't typically a path to citizenship, so there's some debate about whether this really constitutes immigration, or just temporarily filling jobs (either taking them from existing American workers or expanding the economy on net, depending if you're more glass half full or empty).
I think the program would be very defensible, to the point of expansion, if the salary floor was raised *and* it was structured so that most participants became citizens over a 5 or so year period.
It’s a dual intent visa! The Indian country cap is very bad, yes
This (citizenship) is the biggest thing. If a path to residency is quickly available then H1Bs can no longer be hired to depress salaries. They are able to negotiate a competitive salary. As an engineer and occasional hiring manager, I have only seen hires used to depress salaries when an overheated economy was causing rapid rises in wages (late 90's). The vast majority of the time it is used to get the best engineer available. When used that way, I think that it can generally be seen as raising all ships.
You can go from an H1-B to citizenship. There are other programs where it's meant to only be a temporary stay (H2-B, TN, etc). The path to citizenship for an H1-B holder would be H1-B to green card, wait 5 years then apply for citizenship. However, the problem for some people is that there is a per country cap on the number of people allowed to move from an H1-B to green card. This makes it so that citizens from countries with high inflow rates to the US in absolute terms have to wait a long time to get a green card. I'm from Canada and I had to wait less than a year to go from H1-B to green card. My coworkers from India are having to wait 10-20 years. So it's really this per country cap to move onto a green card that makes it hard for some immigrants to move from H1-B to citizenship, nothing really intrinsic to the H1-B itself.
Sure, like a $500k salary cap would make sense
The cited example seems like a somewhat superficial gloss of what that imported worker is doing. They're the US face of a larger pool of foreign workers. Their productivity has increased not because they, solo, can crank out better code more efficiently when they're in America, but because the _collective enterprise_ can do so if they have a forward-deployed engineer in the right timezone to collect requirements, triage bug reports, and otherwise efficiently dispatch work back to the team in India. This might well be beneficial from a productivity standpoint (I'll spare you grumbling about how software outsourcing works in practice versus balance sheets), but it means that you cannot consider the impact on demand for domestic labor just by counting the H1B worker's salary. Instead you need to somehow account for the downward pressure on wages created by that worker making outsourcing contracts more attractive for firms that use it to substitute for domestic labor.
Yeah, I came away from this article thinking that I broadly agree with the main point, but there was a lot of conceptual confusion in the details of the economic arguments.
I believe this piece still argues to increase the minimum salary threshold.
Family in IT, despite being immigrants, are relatively critical of h1-b and how it is regulated. Every position they apply to is bombarded with applicants from other countries who are willing to work for way below the normal salary of that position, and while the legal process for approving an h1b apparently involves ensuring that the employer is paying competitive wage for that position relative to other similar positions in the local market, that rule is apparently easily flouted.
the US gives away 85k visas a year, and there are millions of IT workers. All those people "bombarding" the position application are just going to get filtered out by the employers' ATS and they aren't going to get past the resume stage. You know that question that asks if you will need sponsorship on a visa to to work there? Guess what answering "yes" does, at the vast majority of companies?
You are not actually competing with any of those applicants, unless you are applying at Fortune 500, in which case, sure, but those jobs are in high demand. Removing foreign applicants would have virtually no impact on the pool of your competitors.
After the scuffle on X, I did a little research on this topic. In 2018-19, UC Berkeley reported that only 6% of graduating seniors were “still seeking employment” when surveyed. By 2022-23, the last year this data is available, this number had nearly tripled to 15%. As a piece of anecdotal conjecture, I’d say this number has continued to worsen in recent years.
How can this trend in underemployment be taken as anything other than a sign that the software engineering labor market has already become saturated? To his credit, Matt acknowledges that we don’t need to be importing many new workers at the lower end of the salary scale, but I think the salary threshold needs to be raised more than some realize.
I continually will note until the cows come home; every piece of data on basically everything (crime, traffic deaths, inflation and yes employment numbers) from March, 2020 to basically summer 2023 should be treated as one "black swan" event outlier.
Rising interest rates hits real estate and tech the hardest given how many start ups depended on cheap borrowing costs (see "the millennial subsidy" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-millennial-lifestyle-subsidy.html Turns out having a "burrito taxi" to bring you food is actually kind of expensive).
So yeah, for a lot of reasons, I'm a might skeptical of looking at 2022-2023 tech employment as some sort of data point we should hang our hat on.
Also one more thing, something like 5% of UC Berkeley grads are comp sci. Not sure how you can take employment numbers of Berkeley grads and extrapolate out any conclusions about employment with software engineering given vast majority of grads from this school aren't going into software engineering.
Even so, I think this “black swan event” demonstrates that it’s problematic that the H1-B program is unresponsive to shifting market conditions.
And I forgot to mention it, but the stats I shared above are specifically for EECS majors. If anyone is curious, the data is here: https://career.berkeley.edu/start-exploring/where-do-cal-grads-go/.
Is 15% of recent graduates still seeking employment what a labor market looks like when it is saturated, or when it is close to normal, or when it’s still supply-constrained? What does it look like for new entrants into the labor market in other fields in other years?
Didn't the tech companies do a ton of overhiring around the time of COVID and then were forced to lay off a bunch of people at that time? So maybe it was less of a trend than a one-off.
Yeah, and a bunch of people went into tech then. The market needs to deport the existing H1Bs and absorb the laid off workers and the new grads before we even think of letting in new H1Bs.
And it’s not a bad thing to have a lot of American kids going into SWE and other engineering if we have good jobs for them - in fact having good jobs for them should be an American priority. But if we’re going to have countries at all I believe that this is a fairly zero sum area, unless we’re like bringing in Mr. Tata to come build a car factory in Detroit (which isn’t happening)
Having done my share of hiring, many bootcamp graduates will not get hired in tech as long tech is focused on actual efficiency (adding them to a team is a net negative for the team). Training people on the job (from a low skill base) is not practical because once the person becomes skilled they can leave and work at your competitors. Also in this environment, the people who were previously on H1-bs are often the people starting new companies that increase hiring opportunities for native born engineers.
Yes, developers were pretty chill about H1B while hiring was good, but when troubles started, they didn't like as much. AI is causing a lot of stress (I'll avoid for now how accurate this stress is).
I watch programmer communities and as a rule they hate Trump but were "well, at least the H1-B stuff will stop spiraling out of control."
If by "communities" you mean online forums full of software engineering cosplayers, sure. Actual software engineers don't stress about H1Bs very much IRL
In a ten year career as a US-born software engineer the only time I've stressed about H1-Bs is... when my immigrant friends are in the H1-B lottery and I'm worried they won't get one.
I just know that The Seattle Times announced local companies laying off software engineers on a daily basis over the past couple of years, and it pisses me off that we would be importing cheaper labor to further flood that market, particularly since every kid starting college 2017+ was encouraged to study computer science.
All I can say is that, as an American, I want every last bootcamp grad and dropout from the Alabama State Agriculture and Incest University with middling Python proficiency hired by our tech industry before we even think of hiring people from overseas. And then we should be bringing in Mexicans and Central Americans before Indians and Chinese, because America legitimately fucked up those countries and we owe their peoples something.
But sure, if they want to dig ditches (for cut and cover metro lines!), pick crops, or be our domestic servants for less than federal minimum wage and no rights or labor protections, we could let in Indians and Chinese. Or if they won a Nobel Prize in engineering or have $100m and want to start a US business, we can let them in, no problem.
"Alabama State Agriculture and Incest University"
One of the great mysteries to me is why we people in the educated elite attract so much derision from other parts of the population. Sure is a head scratcher.
Dude, I’m in Mississippi, all we have is making fun of Alabama don’t take that from us!
North central Florida-born here so I feel you.
Heck, I know the joke whose punchline is “Hell no, son, if she’s not good enough for her own family, she’s not good enough for us.”
H1-B is *supposed* to be doing this. Filling jobs that you can't find an American for.
If there were a thousand H1-B's a year and they were auctioned off, I'd be pretty confident that whoever is paying for them already tried their best to find an American and couldn't. When there are 85000 and just randomly allocated, the business model is to just apply as many times as possible to get a big batch and then undercut local labor.
And maybe that's the right policy, to just bring in high-skilled workers that become American, but H1-B isn't supposed to be that.
One of the best suggestions I have seen for revising the system is to eliminate the lottery and just give the vias to the 85,000 positions with the highest salaries.
also need to make so that the H1B folks can switch jobs without fear of being deported
> with middling Python proficiency hired by our tech industry before we even think of hiring people from overseas
Plenty of people with just "middling Python proficiency" cannot be employed in tech. Attempting to would just burden their colleagues. It's unfortunate these individuals weren't given feedback early in their education so that could either shape up or change majors. Yet now they need to listen to market signals and either do sufficient independent study to become employable or they need to change occupations.
Avoiding these education/aptitude mismatches going forward is going to involve some serious reforms to higher education. Notably we need to dissolve the current “customer is always right” model that discourages flunking students out. Degree-granting institutions (and even bootcamps) need to feel some pain when their graduates fail to succeed in the labor market such that they’re incentivized to only grant credentials to students that have demonstrated sufficient aptitude and work habits to succeed in their field of study.
Or businesses could implement training programs for employees (ideally prior to higher education and the concomitant loans) to get Americans up to snuff rather than use foreigners. The people with middling Python proficiency aren’t necessarily going to be engineers, but there are roles for them at American companies.
But I’m a nationalist when it comes to American employment. I want to see people hired out of prison and trained on the job before we begin to think about hiring Indians and Chinese.
Most people can be trained to code proficiently, geez. It’s not some elite skill.
I largely agree, but that belief is no more useful than, "most people can be trained to run a marathon." Even if there is some truth at a physiological level, it doesn't change the fact that very few people are going to attempt training or are going to quickly give up. Whatever it is that gets some people to diligently go through the actions of training to the point where they can do a marathon—or program in an economically useful fashion—we don’t know how to replicate it. Likely some mix of innate strengths (and weakness), life experience, and happenstance.
That's cool for you, but as a person who actually has to work with the middling Python proficiency dev who constantly screws up shit costing everyone time and money, I'll vote that, well... I don't care what you want. I'll take "best candidate to fill the role regardless of where they come from" for $500, Alex
In this analogy, the H1B worker is definitely lowering wages in the industry they work in, but most likely raising wages in every other industry by increasing both productivity and demand.
I don't know about that. Very complicated. The workers displaced by the H1Bs flood other industries and increases supply. That depresses salaries. There are a lot of factors. It certainly helps people in the upper income brackets. It probably hurts people in the lower. But I would be hesitant to bet on any of that.
Alright I'll have to find research on this, but I'm pretty sure the net impact of H1B visas is a reduction in inequality. First off, first order effects are usually larger than second order effects, and secondly, you're still ignoring the increase in productivity and demand.
I believe in the increase in productivity. I'm mostly ignoring it because it really isn't the issue being discussed here.
I think there is widespread agreement that wealth is created here; it's just who gets that wealth, and who is being sacrificed to create it that are the issues.
Ok I thought I left a comment but it didn't go through. By productivity, I don't mean the productivity of the H1B worker themselves, I mean the productivity of everybody else. If some guy moves here and solves some computer glitch or something, that saves time for everybody who uses that program. They can do other things with their time. This boosts their wages.
As for distributional effects, again, I'd have to look it up, but my understanding is that large scale high skill immigration compresses the income distribution on net, mostly due to demand effects. Some guys making $150k will do stuff like go out to eat. That's more money for an industry that employs a lot of low wage workers.
We can agree that it is good for the world. Whether it’s good for the USA is complicated. What if that Indian H1B is sending most of his income back home to family?
I hired an Indian to an executive position making about $450k minimum (could be a lot more based on incentives). I had dinner at his house. It was about a $700,000 Houston house. It was very sparsely furnished. I got the impression of a family (1 kid) that scrimped on everything. Maybe they were sending a ton back home, or maybe just saving for the day they would return home. How that would work out for America isn’t clear to me.
It helps people like Musk in the really high salary brackets at the expense of those in the upper middle class salary brackets who have to compete against an army of Indian and Chinese workers for good middle class jobs.
I think that the “Musk is greedy” thing is overplayed. I use to own and operate a fairly good size engineering company (1800 employees), and we used the program some. It was never about saving money; it was always about getting the resources to fuel our projects.
We did offshore work, and that was primarily about lowering costs. But the H1Bs were about fueling our projects teams.
I mean maximizing output with minimum cost is the definition of productivity, so places will use it for both. To be sure, I think there was a greater need for an H1B program for SWEs back in the day, but I don’t think that’s the case any more, as a lot more students have gone into CS.
I think a key piece is this assumption, and assertion, that "a job that would ordinarily pay $200K". This part always goes unquestioned. The question is why this job is worth this much. Is it driven by applicant scarcity, propped up by lack of international competition? If so, at what stage would it make sense to offshore the process and incur additional management costs. The latter is a real outcome that happens in many places that OPs and others are missing.
Competition is good, be it for labor or for goods. We all love a good deal/ sale, and it's best to allow labor competition especially for higher wage jobs. A command-and-control approach to deciding that a "job would ordinarily pay $200K" is a recipe for poverty.
At a given point in time, and without H1B, the job has a real market value. The only assumption I made was to illustrate an example.
Your analysis, while correct, is missing the point. Everyone knows that competition is good and that it helps create wealth. The questions around this are, should the American workers, who are not skilled enough to simply “learn to code”, be forced to compete with an endless supply of cheap labor from underdeveloped countries? They are shareholders in America, and our policies should keep them in mind.
An example for highly skilled workers is from my own company. We opened an office in Bogota and have over 200 employees there. We make a lot of money on that cheap labor. Thus far, unless we are in a violent downturn, our engineering workforce has more opportunities than they need. But what if that begins to change? What if we are so successful growing foreign offices staffed with super cheap labor that we can start cutting back on American workers? Is that something our government should allow? It’s certainly good for the world; it’s good for Colombia; is it good for America?
But do note that what your company (and mine!) does in practice is move the jobs offshore if they cannot move the people onshore. Employers need to match the work and the talent, borders be damned. Having the skilled worker here has bonus spillover to the rest of our economy.
In principle you are correct on all points. This is what capitalism does; it destroys jobs and counts on the displaced to make rational decisions in the aftermath. And capitalism delivers the goods like no other ism.
The condition that is making me think we need to apply the brakes here is the nearly infinite supply of poor competitors in other nations. Eventually this won’t exist, and I’d agree with your post. For now, I think we need to control it for the sake of stability.
It's interesting that the key factor is less left or right thinking, but more about nationalism. I'm neoliberal enough to just think of people as people and not really care about nations, so I see this as mostly good.
But I confess I've been a bit shaken by China's recent nationalist turn, which makes me realize there's a Guns & Butter aspect to nationalism, where as soon as one strong party starts to care about their nation, you need to start to care about yours too.
Same exact thing happened to me. I always assumed that integration into the liberal western economic world would move a country toward liberal institutions. China proved this dangerously wrong.
First of all, I really appreciate your sincere response. Thank you.
To your first point, I think American Citizens, some of whom are workers in a given company, are better off if their company hires the best available talent. I do not foresee an endless supply of labor; at some margin, it would absolutely make business sense to train/ hire locally. My experience is that's what happens.
Your example is a great one. And I feel it will happen one way or the other. The right way of policy intervention would be tailor the supply pipelines through better information (what's the ROI of various college X degree) and market solutions (let student loan lenders price for risk).
And its value to America is positive only to the extent that it hires existing Americans! Especially since its products have average net-neutral value to society at best (Apple, Amazon positive; Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral; Google, Facebook, Musk negative).
Outside of Amazon, these companies don’t really employ huge numbers of people because they have very high labor productivity. All located in 2 places so it just gets sucked up by the local housing markets anyway.
Sure, it’s good for strategic reasons that we have these industries here, though they produce too much in China. But we shouldn’t let them hire a 5th column or h1bs who can then take their knowledge back to China either, if that’s our argument.
Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia neutral, and Google negative? I think you’re overcorrecting on the basis of a few prominent problems and ignoring the fundamental value all these things enable!
Tesla would be good if it were made in America by someone who isn’t Musk, but I think AI is mostly bad (but America making the best chips is good, so Nvidia is neutral), so Microsoft has Office and Bill Gates which are positive but canceled out by Windows and OpenAI which are bad.
I don’t like these vast data centers that employ very few people, use tons of power and water, to mostly do negative things like serve ads better, help kids cheat, and possibly disrupt existing job arrangements (creative destruction is mostly just destruction).
This is true, so it’s probably a mix
"Housing scarcity throws this off. Your $1,000 may just bid up my rent and leave me worse off."
Tangentially-related, this is basically the second reason I sometimes feel so personally peeved about student loan forgiveness (the first being that it is poorly targeted). I paid off my loans at the expense of saving up for a down payment. When I did ultimately buy a house (which I waited to do until my 40s), I had a very tight budget and could only afford a fixer-upper -- which I now actually can't afford to fix up. Like, we literally have a shower we haven't been able to use for over a year because the toilet leaked on the floor, the floor had to be removed to fix it, and I can't afford the additional renovations needed to put everything back into working order. (And no, Dad, I'm not competent to do it myself, nor do I have the time to teach myself plumbing, tiling, electrical, and flooring as the parent of two young kids with a full-time job.)
Considering that I'm pretty much smackdab in the middle of the population cohort targeted for loan forgiveness (older Millennial), it was hard for me to escape the feeling that my peers getting significant loan forgiveness wouldn't actually put me at a disadvantage when it came to competition in the housing/renovation market. So when people asked, "Why does it bother you if others get help?", my answer was, "Because it hurts ME!"
I probably wouldn't mind loan forgiveness at all if I personally wasn't struggling so much with housing costs as a result of paying off my own loans. Alternatively, if I could get retroactively reimbursed for loans that would have been qualified for forgiveness today, that would also make me feel better.
I've heard stories like this so many times in so many versions of people feeling like they're doing the right thing and getting punished for it. It also makes it really frustrating to explain to ardent pro-SLFers that regardless of the merits, the politics on it is utterly toxic.
Amusingly, my previous gripe on this was that with the holidays approaching, I was going to have to spend time listening to my sibling talk about their plan to get $50k in loans forgiven, while at the same time I know they've spent significant money (way more than $20k) on expensive vacations since COVID. (They qualify for PSLF, despite a joint income over $200k, because they work for a non-profit health care system.)
And it happened just as I foretold - they're planning another weeklong OBX vacation this summer, and possibly a fall trip to Amsterdam "with a few days in Paris if we can work it out."
*grumble grumble grumble*
Oh that's right, you're the one that had *those* relatives! My sympathies continue to be with you.
With an example like yours and the continued screams supporting for SLF in future, it would be financially criminal to for anyone to pay a dime more than absolutely necessary towards their Student Loans. They should instead enjoy life, modeled after your relatives, and hope the next D administration will expand SLF.
I would encourage you to compare that to total compensation for CEOs at for profit companies with $5.7 billion in revenue - you'll find it far exceeds $3m.
loan forgiveness in their case sounds like a roundabout way of increasing wages for non-profit healthcare systems' employees, not a vacation subsidy.
i can understand your feelings, but would you be equally annoyed if they worked for the VA or something and the government just directly paid them higher wages, with no loan forgiveness?
I'm in this boat directly - relatively high earner tracking towards PSLF. This program has allowed me to plug my MBA and consulting experience into education nonprofits at wages that, while affording me a comfortable lifestyle, are at least 20%-30% lower than I'd have earned in the private sector and will be capped at a certain level as I advance in my career. PSLF was also part of my plan in taking on graduate school debt and in making my career choices; it was literally a part of the promissory notes I signed.
I would highly encourage folks to separate conversation around it from that around broader SLF.
Please note that they earn a combined income of well over $200,000. They don't work for some charity hospital just scraping by, but a MASSIVE health care system in the Midwest that had an operating revenue of $5.7 BILLION in 2023. The CEO has a salary of $3 million.
So, yes, I would absolutely be annoyed if the government decided to pay them higher wages directly. Their employer could probably also afford to pay them more.
I have no idea what VA employees make, so I can't say anything about how I would feel there
Somehow I don't think two doctors are representative of the typical PSLF recipient. Hell, they're not even representative of the upper-middle class! Anyways this is personal for me--my law school loans were forgiven under PSLF a few weeks ago, and unfortunately what that means in practice is that I can afford take on more debt to buy a new-to-me car (my current car is...sketchy at best) and finally start saving for a down payment on a two-flat (I will need rental income to be able to feel comfortable paying the premium for buying over renting). Oh, and in April I will be paying a $10k state income tax bill on phantom debt forgiveness income. I would LOVE to have a shower I owned even if I couldn't use it for a couple years.
I have too many cousins who are doctors, so I get why you're annoyed at your sibling, but I really think its familial jealousy as opposed to an actual critique of a public service wage subsidy.
Yep, I'm jealous and annoyed. They're human emotions to which I'm not immune. But if policies create such jealously and annoyance among family members who otherwise get along well, isn't that a sign that they are poorly designed?
But the claim that my family are not representative of PSLF recipients is unlikely -- physicians are common recipients of PSLF, and lots of them are married to other physicians. My family actually aren't physicians, though -- one is a manager and the other does research. If they were physicians, I imagine the debt being forgiven would be much more than $50k, and their income would be closer to $400,000. Because as I said, the health system they work for is very, very large -- and if we ARE looking at physicians, the internet says it employs about 35,000 with an average salary of $217K–$373K per physician. And their employer isn't even in the top 10 biggest non-profit health care providers in the country! That's a lot of folks making a lot of money who are eligible for PSLF.
FTR, my position isn't that NO ONE should get PSLF -- it's that it should be better targeted with some sort of income cap. Or, as noted in my initial post, that folks who paid off loans that would have been eligible for PSLF get some sort of similar benefit. I'm a fed who struggled financially because of law school loans, too, so I understand your frustration! But imagine if you had started working before PSLF was proven, paid those loans off before 2017 (when the first PSLF recipients were eligible), felt all the frustration you're currently feeling WITHOUT forgiveness, and THEN saw your cousin doctors who routinely jet off for vacation get PSLF. That's where I'm at.
Extremely toxic during inflation. It said that Biden cared more about his constituency than bringing down grocery prices.
This is a good point, and it’s the weakest argument in Matt’s article IMO: any good can potentially experience upward bidding pressure if other people get richer ceteris paribus. For supply-constrained goods this is obvious - the richer bidder at auction displaces the lowest bidder.
For at least those non-supply constrained goods (eg Netflix, Spotify), where the marginal cost of production (which in software services at least is often well-approximated by $0) is already well below the marginal cost to consumers, the pricing question (absent price discrimination, which is generally bad for consumer surplus anyway) is solely about what price extracts the highest average return. If your customer base gets richer, your capacity to charge a higher averager price (in view of decreasing marginal utility of money) also increases, pushing out the previous marginal customer and decreasing lower-income customers’ consumer surplus.
To be honest, I'm mostly operating on my own personal vibes here -- I'm not an economist or in tech, so I don't understand much of your second paragraph. I mean, I get your gist, but the terminology is unfamiliar to me. But I'll happily accept your observation that I've made a "good point." : )
A prominent example of what EG is talking about is child care. It's a sector that's very difficult, maybe unfeasible, to increase how productive it is, and when other sectors get more productive and generate more revenue, families use that revenue to drive up the bidding (and thus the prices) for child care.
And as Matt says in this article, an artificial version of this exists in the housing sector. But it's not because it's not possible to create more housing in in demand places, but that's we've made it illegal to do so.
“…price discrimination, which is generally bad for consumer surplus anyway…”
Not true.
With perfect price discrimination you end up with negligible consumer surplus. That is literally how (at least idealized) price discrimination works: abandoning uniform pricing allows companies to price a good or service at epsilon-less than the indifference point for each consumer.
See also slide 12-8 here.
https://www.sfu.ca/~wainwrig/Econ201/6500/Perloff/12M_Perloff_8008884_02_Micro_C12.pdf
Patented Pharmaceutical Pricing 101.
201 covers price discrimination via rebating.
You should be very angry, that program was offensive to everyone that followed the rules the same reason illegal immigration is offensive to all the legal immigrants here that followed the process and waited in line. Fortunately Harris isnt president, she would have doubled down on the insanity.
For the record, as much as the personally bothers me, I would absolutely accept this annoyance for the other benefits that would have come with a Harris presidency. I don't like it, but it's not worth giving the United States to Trump and his cronies.
Generally curious here. Would you describe the past 4 years of the US run by "Biden and his cronies" ?
Not the OP but I would describe that about Trump and not about Biden.
I would call a "crony" someone who is expecting personal handouts/corruption in return for working for the boss.
Hunter Biden isn't technically a "crony" since he's his son and doesn't do anything for him, but his pardon is the kind of thing you'd do for a "crony". However, as much as I disagree with it, it was the exception rather than the rule with Biden.
Trump has pardoned people who worked for him and did bad things on his behalf, and has acted in a corrupt fashion with, for instance, respect to having foreign governments "pay" him by spending time at his hotels etc.
And his tariffs will provide many opportunities for him to grant exceptions to his friends.
I wasn't going to bother responding, but am glad you did so!
Here are some of Biden’s cronies:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zengernews/2022/11/15/top-biden-aides-among-those-who-will-benefit-from-student-loan-forgiveness-plans-they-helped-craft/
I think when you have a 'universal' policy(applied to all college grads with loans, that's a large group even if it's not everyone) that you announced during your campaign that happens to affect your staffers that's not really crony-ism.
Similarly, if you increased health benefits to _all_ federal employees that would certainly affect his staff, but I wouldn't call that crony-ism either.
If his staffers all went to Harvard, and he had a specific loan repayment for HARVARD, I'd call that cronyism.
Similarly, if Trump cuts the corporate tax rate _universally_, then while that's good for a lot of the corporate people who support him, I wouldn't call those people his crony's either. If he cuts it just for EV companies and
Rocket companies....
I'm not a fan of populist handouts like Democrats have done for unions, or student loan forgiveness (especially loan forgiveness, which I thought was wrong on the merits _AND_ probably hurt him politically on net, so it wasn't even politically savvy) but I file that under 'populism' not 'cronyism'.
No because 99% of Democratic politicians are good people and 99% of Republican politicians are pure evil
Solid, un-biased response, thank you Helikitty!
The truth is biased
No. So nice to get a simple question here on SB.
It sure isn't Biden who is running things...
Making airlines reimburse passengers for reimbursed flights isn’t a sign of cronyism. Investigating google and threatening to break them up isn’t cronyism. It is though the type of stuff that turns big tech against you which isn’t great for election winning.
Donny, you’re out of your element!
Yeah, loan forgiveness is good but you should get the same amount of money in other ways, probably in a 401k
What you’re arguing for is to just give everyone money. There are lots of ways to give people money, and there is no reason that student loan forgiveness should be anywhere near the top.
The student loan program is predatory af, and it’s not good for everyone to start their careers saddled with debt. But yes a part of the goal is to give everyone money in a good paternalistic way and not all at the same time so as to prevent crazy inflation
Simply forgiving the loans isn't fixing the problem. It's simply telling the people running the predatory system they're free to fleece their victims for more money, since that money will get forgiven, too.
Sure. I’m for price controls on everything, including college 😀
I would be fine with student loan forgiveness if it was the universities paying them back rather than the federal government. That wouldn’t cost any tax money and would also incentivize reforms for universities
That's going to get to be a very expensive program.
As it should be, just raise taxes
OK, then you have to make the case to a tax averse public that taxes should be raised for this purpose.
I mean, I think the main reason student loan forgiveness was so toxic (even though it’s obviously the right thing to do, and I say that as someone who has paid off over $200k in student loans so it would not benefit me) is its lack of universality. Pack $50k of student loan forgiveness with a baby bond for the same amount that can be used for education or retirement invested in an index fund with some kind of loss stop provision, and I think you could get some kind of broad based public support. The inflationary consequences could be a big deal if you disbursed the money all at once, so there’d have to be some system, and you’d want to take money out of the economy in other areas, first from the rich of course.
>Musk and other members of the newly ascendant right-wing faction of Silicon Valley went to bat for Krishnan personally and for skilled immigration in particular.<
I can't be the only liberal who finds himself conflicted between (1) the many really quite awful and frightening attributes of Musk and his public position, and (2) the hope that he'll genuinely be a moderating influence on Trump on one or two key issues—a barrier between the incoming president and his nativist base.
I don't think he'll be a moderating force and I honestly think he'll manage to stick around through the term. His goal will just be less to push for his favored policies, but rather to extract personal exemptions that will favor himself and his companies.
Musk will probably be able to line his own pockets but his influence over policy is grossly exaggerated. He has no real outside power base; his ability to successfully threaten primary challenges is unproven and questionable; and in any fight between Musk and Trump, Trump wins hands down. He sticks around only as long as Trump finds him useful (including as a lightning rod to distract people from what he's doing).
Yeah I disagree with the theory that Musk can just take out any member of congress who disagrees with him.
It seems like just being able to get and hold Trump's attention and put something in front of him is a significant form of power in itself, though.
As we saw with Trump, the threat of a primary challenge is often enough to sway law makers. Even if you think you'll ultimately win, having an opponent who gets shit tons of money to spend against you, and might have the power of Twitter to influence people, would make your campaign miserable and precarious in a way that you just decide to avoid.
Also he does have his own power base, there are hundreds of thousands who view him as a genius and a seer in much the same, inexplicable to me, way that many people see Trump.
We'll see. Money obviously matters in politics, but so does having a viable organization to spend it; you can't just conjure up an effective primary challenger. Does Musk know how to do that? Maybe -- I'm dubious.
But in the end, if it came down to a contest of Musk's money and his "followers" and Trump's own preference, I have no doubt which would win. Musk will only be a threat as long as he's congruent with what Trump wants. If Trump decides he's no longer useful, what will Musk's big move be? To sic his minions on Trump? I think they'd respond, "Um . . . I dunno, Elon. . . "
I still think it's more likely that their egos won't be able to coexist and that they'll part ways somewhere down the line.
Yeah. Good bet. Immigration lawyers who three months ago were saying "Get your application completed before Trump takes office" are now like "Get your application completed before Musk gets shitcanned."
You’re not the only one. I too am in the odd position of hating Melon Husk with the fiery heat of a thousand suns while agreeing with him on the merits in this specific case.
Look on the bright side, Henry Ford had even worse opinions and was still a huge positive for the United States.
What awful and frightened attributes are you referring to, besides the fact that he doesnt have your political leanings? Try to respond and not make it political.
The man has the biggest social media audience in the world and he regularly uses it to push false information without retraction and bully members of Congress.
He's obviously done incredible things that have really improved the world, but you're trolling if you don't see this.
Ben, I respect you coming into the comments here but just because I ask a question that you personally think is wrong doesnt mean I'm trolling.
You can say that you think Musk is fundamentally right on the issues, but you can't deny that he posts actual false things on his incredibly widely followed social media account on the platform that he owns.
Lots of influential people post false information on social platforms. There is no lack of such on the left as Matt, to his immense credit, has noted repeatedly. The paycheck-to-paycheck misinformation from Bernie is a notable example. I do not think you, or others, reserve the same vitriol for these merchants of misinformation as you do for Elon.
Make no mistake, Elon does everything that you said he does. And the behavior is juvenile at best and quite embarrassing. Those should rightly be comdemned. But posting false things is, unfortunately, ubiquitious. And not everyone is willing to do a Matt - post things they got wrong and reflect on it. One reason many of us are subscribers to SB.
The Bernie comment is dumb but it's not in the same universe as supporting anti-Semites, pushing the AfD in Germany, and so on.
This is beyond "juvenile" and embarrassing.
The internet is a big place, so it's very very easy to not see something on it.
"DID YOU SEE WHAT ELON DID ON TWITTER?" No. And it's not trolling to have a policy of not looking at Twitter, especially as I can't usefully read it without an account. (I am genuinely happy with Musk for doing this, it stops a lot of useless time-wasting.)
Before you share your very strong and very contradictory opinion about someone, I urge you to actually check out that person's main platform of communication!
Totally fine to not read what Elon says on X. But in that case, you shouldn't die on this absurd hill.
What’s wrong with bullying members of Congress?
While I think Elon’s technology achievements have been incredible, his political contributions have been almost entirely bad:
- He’s a conspiracy theorist
- When congress was trying to pass a continuing resolution a few weeks ago, he relentlessly lied about its contents on X
- He endorsed AfD in Germany
- He does not seem to understand basic facts about how the government works
- He has shown a general contempt/disregard for the rule of law as shown by his inability to follow security clearance rules, his SEC issues and the fight over his Tesla pay package
- More personal, but there’s been extensive reporting that Elon has a significant drug problem
Thanks for the response, here are my responses:
- He’s a conspiracy theorist
What conspiracies has he embraced?
- When congress was trying to pass a continuing resolution a few weeks ago, he relentlessly lied about its contents on X
That is fair, the bill sucked and was a huge pork hand out, as head of DOGE, his job is to point those things out but maybe he lied
- He endorsed AfD in Germany
What specific policy proposals do you not like about AfD in Germany. They are basically an anti-immigration party as far as I can tell. Given the number of immigrants Germany has imported under Merkle and all the problems they are having with assimilation, it's hardly surprising a large swath of the population there isn't happy about it.
- He does not seem to understand basic facts about how the government works
Need more evidence of this one. Too broad a statement. Also, he isnt a politician and his job is to make the suggestions to Trump on how to make the government more efficient, so not sure why that matters, the constitution and the courts will prevent any illegal overreach
- He has shown a general contempt/disregard for the rule of law as shown by his inability to follow security clearance rules, his SEC issues and the fight over his Tesla pay package
The ruling over his Tesla pay package was ridiculous, and it's going to haunt Delaware for years to come. He was promised a certain compensation, he hit the targets (when literally everyone thought it was a joke because the targets were so unattainable) and then was not given the contractual compensation. THEN, the shareholders voted again and agreed to give him the compensation and the judge still said no - not sure you have a leg to stand on on this one. This is the most obviously wrong stance of all the points you have made.
- More personal, but there’s been extensive reporting that Elon has a significant drug problem
This is your personal opinion and just a rumor. It's completely irrelevant
>What conspiracies has he embraced?
He has been continually boosting vaccine skepticism around the COVID vaccines, for one.
But even more 'conspiracyish' is the now infamous "You have said the actual truth" tweet which was about immigration and anti-white hatred being a Jewish plot.
He is publicly pro vaccine for the vaccines that matter (the COVID boosters are no longer relevant). There is nothing wrong with being skeptical of the COVID vaccine or MRA vaccines in general in 2025. I agree in 2020 it was not the time be listening to Brett Weinstein, but now that the pandemic is over, there are lot of reasons to remain skeptical about this technology.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/9/elon-musk-clarifies-his-stance-on-vaccines-reitera/
“I’m not anti-vaccine in general,” the social network CEO said. “I think we want to exercise caution with the use of vaccines, but in the absence of vaccines, there’ll be a lot more people that have died.”
"He cited vaccines for diseases like polio and smallpox as examples of their life-saving benefits. But he was quick to emphasize that vaccines should not be immune from questioning."
The fact that you're still talking about the COVID vaccines in 2025 like they are shinning example of effective vaccines is concerning
“The fact that you're still talking about the COVID vaccines in 2025 like they are shinning example of effective vaccines is concerning”
The MRNA covid vaccines are shining examples of effective vaccines.
As a general point-of-order, anti-vaccine people always start by saying "I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm just <X>".
Musk might be completely right in all his vaccine views, but you can't quote him saying he's not anti-vaccine to prove anything.
Then he gets surprised when his fans hate Indian people. He really thought they'd have a carve out for his employees lmao
did we find the new adrian dittman?
LOL, no, I just really have a problem when people let their political leanings cloud the obvious facts on the ground!
Literally the front headline at Slate today is about Musk embracing conspiracy theories:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/elon-musk-george-soros-biden-presidential-medal-freedom.html
There's plenty of history of Musk retweeting conspiracy theories, especially since he's taken charge of Twitter. You can look this up if you want. Just because you have a shtick doesn't mean everyone else can't see through it.
"The ruling over his Tesla pay package was ridiculous, and it's going to haunt Delaware for years to come."
agreed
My comment is overly simplistic but I don’t recall seeing Musk on the 2024 ballot regardless he is getting a ROI.
He isnt employed by the administration, but I think you know this.
Musk has an elementary understanding of American politics but it doesn't stop him from spouting off about it. The whole DOGE concept is predicated on the idea that most of the federal budget is bullshit that we could cut without anybody noticing and not stuff like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid that people actually care about and would be mad to see cut.
On budgetary matters he's either unbelievably ill-informed or unbelievably mendacious.
Once again, and as always, the Federal Budget Cutting Trilemma:
https://i.ibb.co/tLR7Txx/image.png
Do you not think there is a lot of waste to cut in the federal budget?
No one, including Musk has said "most" of the federal budget is bullshit, especially Trump. "Most" of the federal budget goes to entitlements, and anyone that said they were bullshit would not get elected.
There's waste, farm subsidies off the top of my head. Musk on the other hand I'm pretty sure would be incapable of drawing a piece chart of the federal budget without googling it.
He leads a team of people now (presumably more talented than the average government employee) whose full-time job is to go through the budget and highlight fat. I'm fairly positive you will be proven wrong about this in the coming months ... time will tell
I've seen the movie "Dave" so I'm excited to see what list of fat to be cut his brilliant group of people come up with. Per a previous comment, I'm also waiting for him to tell Joni Ernst etc about how farm subsidies is "fat." This will be fun!
Let us just say that "fat" is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah I'd willingly put money on the other side of that bet. I'd love to be wrong. There's a whole bunch of streamlining that needs to be done, but Musk doesn't know anything about it and assumes his skills are transferable.
This isn't the first time someone's thought of this.
Vivek has said that we should stop spending money on the FAA. He didn't know he was saying that, he just called the bucket it was in nuts, without knowing what was in the bucket he said should be defunded.
I think the federal government is a giant boondoggle of stupid stuff but it's a boondoggle of stupid stuff that the voters want.
Not OP, but some attributes I personally find concerning are his apparent lack of respect for the law. For example his frequent violation of SEC rules, his attempt to get out of purchasing twitter.
You cant have it both ways - are you happy he was forced to take control of twitter even though he tried to get out of it in 2025?
You can have it both ways, actually. It is both unfortunate that Musk controls Twitter and also a good thing that he was forced to follow through on a binding bid he made? Like, I don't form ad hoc opinions about business law based on whether a specific case-by-case outcome is good or bad.
Yes, I'm happy about that. Twitter deserves to die and he is escorting it to the grave. It still has lots of inertia and will always remain a home for the knuckle draggers, but I like the trend.
Elon's biggest public service ever is destroying Twitter.
Well yeah, but I give him great credit for jumpstarting EVs here. Now, of course, Tesla is falling apart and will give way to better competitors.
"Try to respond and not make it political." I don't understand why you added this. First, it sounds condescending, but secondly, this is an extremely political topic. The political aspects of Musk are what matter.
I added because its super annoying to me that lean leaning people overreact when talking about Elon Musk because they seem to view everything in through the lens of politics- its super sad and annoying. Look at what the man had done, and ignore who he voted for
>Try to respond and not make it political.<
I'd normally try to respond. But I very much doubt I'd be able to meet your towering standard of objectivity. So I won't bother.
Thank you for not wasting my time!
For me, the thing that made Musk seem awful and frightening was when he started pushing Hyperloop as a supposedly cheaper and easier idea than high speed rail. This was an old idea people had been thinking about for decades, but he used his celebrity status to make it seem new and improved, and he was clearly pushing it because he wanted to prevent investment in non-car transport by deflecting it into something that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. This was around the time he also decided that he alone could solve tunneling (and while the Boring Company might have had some breakthroughs in the years since, his initial ideas were all about making tunnels less effective by using them for low-capacity transport like cars).
Ever since then, it’s become clear that this sort of thing is a pattern for him. He has some actual good ideas, scattered among a lot of zany hate-brained ideas, which is normal for an academic but abnormal for someone with as much power as he has, and he gets a lot of resources wasted on these ideas.
Matt Yglesias seems quite bothered by Elon’s tweeting of inflammatory false things on X, the Everything App.
Yes, I agree he does.
>But H-1 workers’ earnings are well above the national average, so they can’t be pulling down average wages.<
That’s not the framing the anti-immigration camp is making. They’re arguing that H-1 workers are pulling down wages for the domestic workers they’re competing against, not the national average.
The pro-immigration camp needs clear counter-arguments to this line of criticism. Vivek Ramaswamy was ham-fisted with his “Americans are dumb and lazy” rebuttal, but he was getting at something important: there isn’t _enough_ domestic talent to fill the demand for many H1-B job categories.
I work in tech and with lots of H1-B visa holders. The majority of them went to American universities (or, if not that, very elite universities outside the US), got good grades, and are experts at what they do. I’m certain there are not enough out-of-work Americans out there who could do the jobs they do.
The counter-factual to H1-B isn’t “these jobs would go to Americans and at much better wages”, it’s “these jobs wouldn’t exist and these businesses wouldn’t be forming in America.”
That is spot on and highlights how know-nothings like Musk toss off idiotic bumper-sticker arguments about topics like the federal budget, but suddenly get very nuanced when discussing skilled immigrants.
Anecdotally, I have friends and former colleagues who just wound up going back to India and China to start business and otherwise be super productive members of society when they faced visa friction after completing their PhD / postdoc / etc. And a sentiment I hear a lot is that they are doing just fine, but wish they could have stayed and would probably come back but for the even greater difficulty of securing a visa once you're out of the system.
I had a very good H1-B coworker get laid off next to me, and he ended up having to leave the country, and then founded a company back in the place he came from. It would've been awesome had he founded that company here instead so I absolutely know that an H1B *can* be positive-sum for everyone, at least in some cases.
This is a well-put comment. As you note, Matt’s “average wages” rebuttal was essentially non-responsive to the argument as made, although that doesn’t preclude different arguments in favor of the program. But worker-for-worker you genuinely are talking about an essentially zero-sum bidding issue, the “average wages” issue is non-responsive on that axis unless you stipulate that the highest-wage jobs have all already gone to natives, in which case worker-for-worker competition is moot. But that’s a very strong condition.
that’s nonsense. Tech just laid a bunch of people off!
The recent layoffs in tech stem from over-hiring during Covid and the end of low interest rates, not from H1-B competition.
Also, I’d be interested to see the stats on how many of those laid off were H1-B holders themselves.
I'm not sure someone said the layoffs were because of H1-B, but the nominal rules of H1-B are that you're supposed to show you can't get an American to do it first, so you'd need to show those unemployed workers can't do the job before making new H1-Bs.
In the case of programmers, at least in the medium to long term, it seems very likely that more programmers coming to the US is good for programmers who already live here. There seems to be very strong agglomeration effects in tech, with a handful of hubs around the world. Immigration is key to making that agglomeration happen here, which is very good for people in the country it’s happening. Even clearer when the immigrant starts a new company.
I think that’s a pretty standard answer, but something else I was thinking about is the domestic market. The biggest buyer of tech services is often other programmers. A lot of startups are building other tools for startups. Programmers writing a new library or protocol or what have you benefit when there are more people/companies interested in using it. And B2B while less famous than consumer facing tech companies are an important part of the tech ecosystem. It’s much easier to sell technology services to businesses that have programmers, too. You could imagine this both ways (totally analog companies being dependent on the tech supplier and unable to replicate internally), but I suspect technologically sophisticated companies are more likely to want, need, understand, and able to implement vendor services.
I strongly second this as another software engineer. Software is all about leveraging upfront fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs at scale. Nothing gives an engineer more leverage than other software—both in multiplying the productivity of upfront development time and in minimizing operational costs. This includes cloud services and DevTools SaaS, as well as open-source, high-level programming languages and libraries. The only reason we engineers can earn so much in a financially sustainable way is that we have incredibly powerful tools developed by other engineers.
That includes other engineers at our employer; sometimes just our own past work. And when you’re “in the trenches,” you want the strongest current and past colleagues you can get. Even if they have a fancier title and a larger comp package than yourself, you desperately want the best tools and existing code you can get. The incentives also aligned financially—particularly our stock-base comp—in that the more productive we are in aggregate, the better our firm performs.
So software engineers—especially those of us who have worked with colleagues with a diverse range of competencies throughout our careers and can viscerally appreciate strong teammates—should be the strongest advocates for more software engineer immigrants.
I agree overall that skilled immigration is good, but there is no shortage of American or H1B software engineers in the US currently. Layoffs in tech have been huge over the last couple of years. I have several acquaintances who have been out of work for over a year. These are extremely qualified software engineers who cannot find work. This is a disaster and is probably what is fueling a lot of racist rhetoric around this topic online. People are getting desperate.
I'm not going to say this is false, I've read it a lot of places, but I've hired several software engineers for my small company in the past year or so, and it just doesn't seem true to me that the market is as bad as I've read. What is true is that you get hundreds of resumes for a position, but the vast majority of these resumes are just garbage, like non-starters or obviously fake / AI generated.
Unable to sort through resumes in a meaningful way, I just asked candidates to meet me at a coffee shop anywhere in NYC with zero filtering until afterward, only 3-5 candidates even did that. If there are so many experienced software engineers desperate for jobs... where are they?
Agreed as another engineer on the hiring side. Even before the AI generated slop, there was a general pray-and-spray approach that candidates took to applying. Eg, just mass applying to every single LinkedIn "easy apply" software job listing. That puts the impetus on the hiring team to filter and prioritize applications. Some of the filtered out candidates may even be a good fit, but with just a generic LinkedIn profile/resume designed for mass applying, we can't tell.
Asking candidates to meet in person does sound like a decent filter for serious candidates. I'm thinking anything that adds in some friction such that candidates have to decide whether this is a role that is a sufficiently strong fit for their experience/interests to be worth their time explore is helpful towards that end. Similarly, we on the hiring side need to provide a clear, concise, and specific description of the role and company in order for candidates to make that determination.
Ultimately hoping the whole engineering employment market structure will evolve from the current broken equilibria. For too long it seems like both sides of the market have been incentivized to embellish, and at times cheat and lie, with the assumption that getting to signed offer is all that matters. For the candidates, a lot of that is motivated by the reluctance of firms to fire for insufficient performance and the slow pace at which those decisions are made. Probably something similar on the firms side where it can be assumed hires will stick around for a year or two and even a demotivated employee is acceptable relative to keeping head count open.
I think another big aspect is that there are lots of in-person jobs and not nearly as many remote jobs but people don't want to relocate back to the Bay Area/NYC/Seattle.
Yeah I suspect some experienced engineers who have been out of work for a year were hoping to get the SF Google salary and live in Ohio and they're frustrated they can't find that. But that is a very different thing than the comment I was replying to suggesting lots of good software engineers are in the unemployment line.
Excuse my ignorance but can people on an H1B visa start their own company?
Yes. The answer is complicated and you would want to discuss with immigration lawyers so it is nowhere near as easy as for a Green Card Holder/US Citizen but lots of H1B holders are able to start companies especially with the help of incubators/cofounders. The main risks are financial (and if the company goes under you need to get a new job).
Got it, wouldn't be for me to be clear. One of the commonly-cited benefits of immigration is that immigrants are on net job creators, so having a pathway that's less dependent on employment would probably offset some of the anti-H1B complaints that they're taking American jobs.
>the purpose of the H-1B program is “to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”<
The hard left is way out to lunch on this. H1B workers nearly all have university degrees (a huge percentage have postgraduate degrees), and the majority earn a six figure salary. BY DEFINITION adding them to the workforce upgrades its productivity, on average. And contrary to the popular perception (skillfully woven, I'm pretty sure, by resentful tech bros*), they're far from "slaves." H1B workers can leave their jobs for greener pastures if they like, and very large numbers do exactly that (though they do need to submit paperwork to the government, and this usually involves legal fees). Also, how many "slaves" WILLINGLY enter enslavement? The fact is, there's far more demand for H1B "slavery" than there are available slots.
I'm not suggesting the program is perfect. There are changes I'd make if I were king for a day (for starters I'd give H1B complete freedom to job hop without the aforementioned legal fees—just as citizens or permanent residents can do—after a modest probationary period. Call it six months). I'd also allow them to easily convert into green cards after an appropriate interval. But the biggest problem with the H1B program is that it's not nearly large enough. We could absolutely be CRUSHING IT in terms of attracting the world's best and brightest if we wanted to. But America is the king of own goals. Sigh.
*My own brother is a software engineer. He's given me leave to slag his kind.
I would love to see the stats on actual movement of H1-B holders. I think the vast majority of holders are effectively stuck. There are a number of people I have seen on various sites (LinkedIn, Mastadon, etc.) who are having to leave the country because they have been laid off and can't find new work within the 60 day window. If it was easy to move, then Twitter would be dead right now when its non H1B people left en mass after Musk take over.
This is to point that I think the vast majority of the benefit for the current H1B is to companies who get the lucky lottery winners not the public. The overall way companies have decided to focus on cost cutting with H1-Bs as a component of it is one of the overriding themes of management while they tell us a story of innovation.
Finding a job when you're unemployed is a very different proposition than finding a better gig when you're currently employed. I agree that the former situation is not ideal for H1B workers. That's one reason I'd like to see the change I suggested above. That said, there are work arounds: many H1B workers convert to student visas during periods of unemployment, in order to preserve their in-country eligibility.
And no, the statistics don't support your view that "the vast majority of holders are effectively stuck."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/more-h-1b-visa-holders-are-switching-jobs-the-process-explained/articleshow/109460294.cms
Job switching among H1B workers is *very* common!
I think in large part, how one views immigration in general inevitably colors one's perceptions of the H1B program. If one believes (as I do) that growing our skilled workforce is a net benefit for the country, the supposedly nefarious intentions of Big Tech don't look so, erm, nefarious. Getting more skilled workers is good, even if Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg personally benefit.
the movement is restricted significantly more by country-based green card caps. once you apply for a green card, it's harder to move jobs (process restarts all over, and your place in line is f-ed).
Your place in line is not lost. When you change jobs you still retain your previous “priority date” for your green card.
if you change from EB3 to EB2 as you gain experience, and how your employer files your PERM - the request to recapture the priority date doesnt always work. i've seen multiple cases first hand.
I am curious about this too. I know a number of H1B visa holders who are spouses of grad students. Some of the stories they tell me likely break labor laws, but they don't want to report them because they are afraid of losing their job. There situation is a likely not standard in that they want to stay in the city their spouse is in, but it has given me a different outlook on the H1B visa situation.
agreed to all of this.
Apropos of recent news regarding our neighbors to the north, it seems like Canada is showing us the dangers of welcoming more high skilled immigrants combined with bad NIMBY housing policy.
Given how long Trudeau has been in power, it’s honestly not surprising his time is up. But I do think Trudeau stepping down is maybe another data point in the “housing theory of everything”.
FWIW this wasn’t exactly what happened in Canada. In US language, there was a huge expansion of F1 student visas that drove a bunch of temporary work-based immigration since the hours cap was waived. Seems like a bad policy, but there wasn’t some huge increase in admitting programmers
Fair enough, but it seems pretty clear my general point stands. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ircc-immigration-housing-canada-1.7080376
Not if your point hinges on "high-skilled". The problem with the Canadian system is it led to a bunch of degree-mills that churned out nearly unemployable foreigners. That combined with the housing crisis has led to terrible outcomes.
With the main problem being the criminally low amount of new housing constructed in Canada.
"But you can’t make the country as a whole richer with these piecemeal handouts for everyone — the more you try to add up supply constriction, the poorer everyone gets."
I though we had that figured out by the 1950's at the latest. Where is the graveyard these zombie economic ideas a Krugman calls them keep coming from? I do not mean the naïve rent control is good for renters, or "protective" tariffs re good for the protected companies, but the organized Owen Cass/Bernie Sanders sort of proudly ignorant poses?
1) Democrats are like permanently stuck in a New Deal loop, even though America is a lot richer, more educated, and has a higher baseline productivity now than it did in the 1930s.
2) The Republican donor base are a bunch of rent-seeking small business owners.
I want to know more about 2
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/dentists-are-bad
The GOP are the party of used car salesmen.
I wanna know where the zombie political ideas like term limits keep coming from.
Term limits are, in the newly Facebook-permissible parlance, fucking retarded.
I tend to agree with you for the legislature.
Do you think the same for the executive?
No. Then again, I believe in parliamentarism, not our current mess of a constitutional structure. I'd be fine with a 16-year term limit on a PMOTUS, provided they could hold a coalition together long enough.
IMO the same underlying logic DOES apply to both -- you want *effective* politicians, and pushing them out just as they've gotten the hang of it is a bad idea. Obama would've made an EXCELLENT four-term president! Conversely, I've also seen first-hand what happens *under* term limits -- the MO legislature has turned into a cesspool run by lobbyists in the last 20+ years.
The split in my thinking RE executive vs. legislative term limits is due to the differential solutions to entrenched incumbency, which, after all, is the core problem The Rubes imagine term limits will solve. Multiparty parliamentarism ALREADY solves most of the incumbency advantage, because proportional and other non-plurality voting methods provide ample opportunities for challengers to win seats.
Thus, only the executive actually NEEDS term limits to address entrenched incumbency. After all, if you boil the innovative mission of democracy right down to it, it's basically to solve the problems of monarchy: (1) the infirmity and sapping of vitality that comes with old age, (2) the tunnel-vision that comes with being in power too long, (3) the unqualified-ness of underaged heirs, (4) the disqualified-ness of incompetent heirs, and (5) the instability of succession crises. We already have minimum age limits and the various methods of popular or parliamentary election to handle #3-5, but #1-2 need solutions.
A term limit solves #2.
And I favor age limits to solve #1.
NB - I didn't mention the danger of autocratic takeover, because autocrats tend to attempt their takeovers or consolidate power at the *beginning* of their rule, not the end. Other methods of constitutional design need to address these questions.
I'll go with long prime number limits on Supreme Court Justices to prevent strategic resignations.
Why prime? Do you mean relatively prime so that one isn't a multiple of another?
I'd be ok with abolishing the 22nd amendment *if* there were laws in place to make sure that senate-appointed positions have reasonable turnover. We have to make sure the J. Edgar Hoover problem does not recur.
If you don't figure out how to include the working class in economic growth productively, they will make you figure out how to cut them in on rent-seeking.
Or what they THINK is cutting them in? The Trump program of trade and immigration restrictions + higher deficits just reduces growth without helping the working class.
Your reference to "zombie economic ideas" reminds me of one my favorite darkly humorous comments about free trade from a 2003 Reason Magazine article:
"[I]t often seems as though free traders are trapped in a public policy version of Groundhog Day, forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade."
https://reason.com/2003/10/30/lous-blues-2/
It should remind you of the idea that tax cuts promote growth and investment.
A strange quote to come from _Reason_ although I agree that proponents of freer trade often fail to point out a) that import restrictions tax exports and b) that much of the "damage" attributed to free trade is in fact the exchange rate effect of deficits.
Why is it a strange quote for Reason in your view?
It is a Libertarian mag and import restrictions are very much not libertarian.
Yes, and the article is pro-free trade -- the quote is a lament ("free traders are . . . forced to refute the same *fallacious* arguments") . . . .
Oops! I misread as _make_ the same arguments.
Yeah, this is the quintessential Reason pull quote.
I work in the software engineering field, and a lot of the people I directly work with are on H1-B Visas. If H1-B did not exist, the result would not be lesser-qualified native born Americans taking the jobs instead, it would be the jobs, themselves, moving to India or China, allowing the company to hire the more qualified people where they are. And, what jobs did remain in the U.S. would likely pay less because the quality of the average person taking them would be lower. So, if the idea that limiting immigration is suppose to boost the pay of native-born employees, it doesn't (at least not in the tech industry) - if anything, it would have exactly the opposite effect!
In the manufacturing world, government can counter the above argument with tariffs. But, you can't tariff software, and even if you could, our products are used all over the world, and the retaliatory tariffs that all the other countries would enact in return would just make it difficult for our company to sell its products anywhere.
One question is why aren't we training enough people. On the one hand you have a student loan crisis where everybody that majors in some less needed major, sports marketing, whatever, can get loans only to default on them when the salary is not there for that major, while we are not training enough software engineers.
I don't favor scrapping the loan program, but we need more government support for needed specialties and less for those that will not support the expense of the education.
I think if sports marketing majors were smart enough to graduate with a CS degree they would. Despite the protestations of the "just learn to code lol" crowd there is a baseline of talent needed to enter the field.
Not sure what CS is. I dont oppose bringing in people with needed skills, but I think more important is adjusting our educational system so that we are training enough people for the needs of the country.
I see it as problematic in the well paying specialties that we are bringing in people from abroad rather than training Americans for those jobs.
CS=Computer Science sorry. I saw your comment in another thread that in the medical field could use lower-performing (3.6 vs 3.7 GPA) US students instead of foreigners. As a consumer of medicine I would prefer to be treated by a smarter immigrant vs. a stupider person that happens to be American by your mileage may vary.
What you are being treated with includes dumber Americans who couldnt get into a US medical school so went to the Caribbean or the other common end run to go to osteopathy school which numbers equal to the foreign grads.
I dont know that there is any metric to compare intelligence of foreign grads, there are different systems and metrics but yes we could cherry pick the entire worlds smartest people and let them run the country like Saudi Arabia does, but I have the notion that we ought to take care of ourselves, and I don't think that somebody with a 3.6 average is unqualified. Let the Indian doctors treat their own country where there is one fifth of the amount of MDs per capita.
It is funny that the system we have now often compels foreign med grads to spend a year or two in poor areas in the US where they are coming from countries that are many times poorer and underserved medically.
To claim that Americans are not smart enough to supply their own doctors is an odd claim. Are we the new Saudi Arabia where we are incapable of supplying our needs and just rely on foreigners.
I am not anti immigrant. I would rather take poorer Mexican laborers who also are greatly needed here in the trades and can go from being in poverty to middle class, vs usually well to do foreigners who would be well to do in their countries but can make 250K a year here.
It seems from your comments that you work in the medical field, so what you're asking for is protection from immigrants who are willing to work for less money. The traditional backlash against immigration is not from doctors or tech bros but from blue-collar American workers for the same reason (source: https://youtu.be/APo2p4-WXsc?si=z4yQRxbLXJjFjaVv&t=60).
As a consumer, not a provider, of medical services I want more immigration of doctors probably for the same reason you want more immigration of tradespeople - you can hire someone that's more qualified for less money than if you were limited to hiring only American workers.
We seem to have a glut of software engineers at the moment.
I'll note that CS majors are now (from memory) somewhere between 3-5x of the student body proportion at Stanford as they were in 2006. So we are definitely trying. The growth _in demand_ has just been insane.
Edited to add "in demand".
So that's an additional, what, 250 kids a year? That's basically nothing.
Clarified my comment. I assume the same is happening across many places, so the supply side is changing, but the demand has been massive.
All of this may of course change as increasing AI capabilities & spread hit.
With the concomitant loss of productivity. You cannot argue that people in Asia (South & East) can be as productive doing work as on-shored.
(Yes, I too work in software, and the difficulties of coordinating and working with offshore teams are huge.)
Matt points out the obvious, an ongoing series:
Seriously though, this debate drove me insane. It wasn't just the nativists being racist, that's a given (although I was surprised how many people even have opinions about Indian people, the average redneck doesn't even run in to Indians frequently enough to have an opinion on them), it was the pro-H1B side of the debate basically accepting the zero-sum premise. Vivek Ramaswamay wakes up the day after Christmas and says "well you know what, you guys CAN'T compete with us because you're lazy and watch too much (very out of date) TV." Like what? Even if there's something to that, that is not the argument to use there! Why is nobody pointing out that immigrants both buy contribute to the American economy with their work and then buy stuff with the money they earn. Unless you're in direct competition with H1B workers, this is a win for you. Why is nobody pointing this out!
Also, one of these days I'm going to do a deep dive in to the numbers on how much it takes to cross the threshold of a) net taxpayer and b) net economic contributor. The bar for b is much lower than a and last I checked, I think pretty much anybody with a minimum wage job who isn't a criminal clears bar b. That's not to say we should alter our immigration system to maximize low skilled immigration, I just also get annoyed by the assertion that certain people who do have jobs and are not criminals aren't contributing in some way. They are, just less than somebody with a six figure salary would be.
"Even if there's something to that, that is not the argument to use there!"
True, but it is the argument you'd use in most Republican debates for the last nine years!
Well it's certainly how conservatives usually talk about Black people. It's just funny having the shoe on the other foot for once.
I saw someone summarize ramaswamy’s Christmas post as “Vivek is telling MAGA to pull their pants up” 😃
Some scattered thoughts:
1. At this point the H1-B program isn't really 'bringing' skilled programmers over to the US. It's a visa for relatively recent STEM grads who were educated at US universities. They might grow up to be skilled programmers (or scientists, or some other type of engineer), but the vast majority of the visas are going to 23-25 year old graduates of US STEM programs. I think that's fine, but just worth pointing out. As Matt has noted on Twitter, there was nothing in say Jensen Huang's background that would make you think he'd be exceptional in the future- he just graduated from a US college. The visa is more 'large scale importation of future potentially smart people'.
I mean, if your company really needed to hire say a smart 15-20 year specialized programmer who lives in India or Poland or Brazil now, you could just hire them remotely- no visa required
2. I take a much dimmer view of the consulting firms than Matt does, but related to point 1- you can't really raise the salary cap too much, because then no one would hire the H1-B new grads. If you make the minimum salary say $120k, then far fewer new Comp Sci grads with 2 years of experience are going to get hired. So I think we're stuck with a low salary. (Unless you do something weird like require their salary to be say $120k after 5 years here in the US).
The consulting firms give the H1-B visa a bad reputation, really add little value to corporate America, and the bodyshop ones are the biggest & most annoying email spammers on the planet Earth. ("Hello sir please see my hotlist of consultants on the corp to corp." If you're in the industry then you've seen ten hundred billion of these). I would just make hiring H1-Bs & then using them exclusively for consulting either illegal, or taxed at a way higher rate
The real issue (which is what Krishnan's tweet was about) are the country caps on converting H1-Bs into Green Cards. If you're from India or China, a decade or longer wait to get a GC isn't unheard of. The number of genuinely smart H1-Bs who come over here, don't get a GC, and end up back in their home country is sad. I'd raise or eliminate the GC gap before I did any reforms to the H1-B program.
Unfortunately, I think that's even more of a third rail in US politics. Plus, it would mean allowing more Chinese immigration specifically, which I think is good public policy but I understand is not going to be very popular these days
Is raising the green card cap a third rail? It seems like a way to make things better for people without actually increasing the number of immigrants, so it should be easier than most improvements to the immigration system, which would actually change the number of immigrants present.
I think so. As I mentioned, a significant % of H1-Bs are going to eventually return to their home country without ever having received a GC or citizenship here. So more GCs would ultimately increase the number of foreign-born residents, plus also increase the incentives to come here in the first place- now you know the GC is guaranteed. (Plus incentivizing diploma mill universities to crank out low-quality STEM degrees).
I think the US should just import a million super-smart Chinese engineers & scientists, but again I understand that the politics of this are uh looking worse every day
It's a shame because if you really wanted to undermine the CCP, picking out a million of their smartest young people and removing them from China when its population is already graying and shrinking would be a good way to do it.
I think it is something that can easily happen in a secret congress sort of way (if you just remove per country caps and don't change the number of Green Cards officially available), the problem is that neither side will be satisfied with this so any attention will prevent it from happening.
STEM OPT effectively gives 3 years of work authorization post grad (this has became more important as the H1B visa has got more random), but yes. Not deporting Caltech graduates who want to stay in the US seems like an important policy goal
This is correct, but it should be added that right now companies apply for an H-1B immediately to give people as many chances with the lottery as possible*. If we get rid of the lottery, as Matt argues, then, yes, we aren't talking about entirely entry-level positions anymore.
*If you wait until the end of the three years you get to participate only in one lottery.
Agreed - capping this glow via a random lottery is very bad and it’s possible a “fix” would make the problem worse
How about not admitting a bunch of foreigners from hostile nations to CalTech in the first place? I know professors love Asian grad students because they can work them for 16 hours a day and they don’t complain, but is that really good for the US?
We need to reform the student visa process as much as H1Bs, the restrictions should be as early as possible bc it is dumb to let someone come here and get their degree and then make them vamonos
> I know professors love Asian grad students because they can work them for 16 hours a day and they don’t complain,
No, it's actually because they will treat it like both a job they are responsible to and an opportunity to take advantage of to launch their careers. American grad students often are using it as an extension of college to "find" themselves, have fun, and maybe do a little work. (broad strokes to be sure, but no worse than your comment.)
Not at Caltech.
Probably less so, but it does happen there too (I can think of at least one example I know of).
Grad school in history or English, sure, but not so much in STEM. Though academia can sure be dispiriting enough to flush out all but the biggest gluttons for punishment.
Dude, I'm in STEM, I see it all the time.
Increased salary caps would entirely freeze out postdocs, who have salary limits effectively imposed by the NIH and who are also often being trained for six figure positions. Perhaps academic H1Bs would be excluded, but it gets at your point that the current floor is in part there to allow people to build up from high skill to very high skill in industries that have lower prevailing wages.
Exactly, I left this out of my first post for brevity, but a lot of PhD scientists make less money than you'd think. Like, less than a software developer with the same amount of professional experience, certainly. If you have 1 salary cap that's based around engineers, then you're risking leaving out a lot of early career scientists
Speaking as a postdoc, the sense in which postdocs are theoretically being trained for six-figure positions is... very theoretical. Postdocs, along with grad-students, do the bulk of bench science but face an up-or-out labor market to advance, commonly compared to a pyramid scheme.
Postdocs certainly vary a lot, but in my (computational) lab, about 1/3rd of the postdocs are non-computational MDs who are learning to code and 2/3rds are computational people who are learning how clinical data works, so IMO there's genuine training happening and everyone typically exits to a six figure job of some sort; though the faculty market is obviously very tough and most people go to industry. I generally do not recommend people do a postdoc unless they are really passionate about the work they'll be doing, have a substantial amount of independence, or are actually being trained in a non-theoretical way.
Oh, I'm absolutely being trained. Just not in any expectation of a six-figure job down the line, LOL. I'm not actually sure my supervisor makes six figures.
I thought post-docs are usually on J visas. Or are you referring to after they finish?
I bet this varies by field/discipline, but a postdoc hired from abroad can come on a J-visa, which require them to return after some number of years. But if you come from abroad and do a PhD on an F-1 visa and then want to stick around for a postdoc, I imagine you need an H-1B (or some other visa that does not require you to return home before/after obtaining it).
Generally speaking, it is straightforward to get a postdoc or visiting scholar over on a visa for a temporary stay, but things get more complicated (and heavily scrutinized) when eventual permanent residence is in the table.
All post-docs I know are on H-1Bs, but maybe different universities are doing things differently?
It's been a while since I hired a postdoc from abroad (ones with US PhDs just come on OPT), but when I did, she was brought in on a J-1. We eventually transitioned her to an H-1B, and then finally a green card.
> I mean, if your company really needed to hire say a smart 15-20 year specialized programmer who lives in India or Poland or Brazil now, you could just hire them remotely- no visa required
It's really hard to work with people across time zones.
Anecdotally, foreign workers based in foreign lands have had work that's needed a lot of remediation by the local team, sometimes enough to make the foreign team's contribution negative. But foreign-born workers who are living in the US and working from the office are really really talented. I don't know how to distinguish the selection effect (no one is going to pay to move the bad workers to the US) from the actually being co-located effect
“It's really hard to work with people across time zones”
Brazil is GMT -3, which is close enough, at least for east coast companies. Where I work (not a tech company) our IT folks use contractors in Argentina (same time zone as Brazil) and it works fine.
I lost that in the comments about Poland and India, but you're right. I work with Brazilians who are basically me, but probably for a quarter the cost, and their English is very good.
Brazil's population is close to the US, too, so it's not like we can just vacuum up a few thousand developers a year and then be done with it.
In an key way, Miami is a special case. When it comes to working with folks in Latin America, Miami, the capital of Latin America, is built for the job.
> you can't really raise the salary cap too much, because then no one would hire the H1-B new grads
That would be the point, yes
> the vast majority of the visas are going to 23-25 year old graduates of US STEM programs
I have never worked with anyone that young on an H1-B. In my experience they have been late-20s people with master's degrees.
My experience is that most first time H1-Bs are issued to master's student who are ~25, most people on an H1-B are in their late 20s early 30s
I don't have much to add, but to mention that in my experience, the alternative to H1B is not going to be "businesses hire American" -- it's "businesses offshore even more."
These visas protect US jobs at this point.
Also have more doctors immigrate to lower medical costs!
Isn't licensing the biggest issue with medical practitioner (not just doctors, also nurses, etc..) immigration?
It is, the biggest hurdle is having to complete an American residency, which is not only a fairly humiliating ritual for someone who may have many years of experience, but is also just basically impossible for an older person who has a lot of family obligations due to the grueling hours and high levels of stress that are endemic to all U.S. residencies pretty much by design.
My wife's father is a doctor in his home country and currently does some sort of medical consulting work that I don't really understand, but which pays dramatically less than being a doctor. Now that his children are grown and the political situation in his homeland has stabilized, he intends to move back to his home country where he can live an upper-class lifestyle as a doctor. It's a big loss for America, as the man is very intelligent and a hard worker.
The fact that your wife's father is unable to be someone's doctor in the United States' is a policy failure.
The policy failure is that we dont train enough doctors. More than likely that physician is needed more in their own country. The US has 36 MDs per 10K population. India, the largest source of foreign MDs in the US, has 7.3 MDs per 10K people. Yes, they make way more money here, but they are needed in India more which has 1/5 of the number of MDs per capita.
Both are true. We should train more doctors here, but we should also make it easier for them to immigrate and practice here.
America benefits from brain drain from other countries.
That suggests that our benefit is more important than their loss. Also, it is not our benefit that a US citizen has to go to Antigua or have a doctor emigrate because they only have a 3.6 grade point. Now, temporarily we may need to have immigration, but long-term we just need to train more doctors.
That would vary with the residency. I completed a Family Practice residency at age 30 with a child but FP is not known as the most grueling specialty like Surgery or OBG.
Why doesn't the US just train enough doctors to meet the demand rather than robbing the world of physicians who are likely needed more in their own country.
I think people here talk more about making it easier for doctors to immigrate because that would be easier to effect through pure policy change in a quick and "easy" way.
Training more homegrown doctors would involve investing in much more medical training.
With the way the world is aging, there probably should be a global effort to train more doctors.
Agree. MD training is expensive, but we are a well off enough country that we shouldn't be farming it out to Antigua and India.
Thats a state issue.
https://spectrumnews1.com/ma/worcester/news/2024/12/10/internationally-trained-physicians-to-practice-in-massachusetts
The biggest issue is that we don't train enough doctors to fill the available residency slots. There are some 30% more residency positions than American Medical Graduates, so that these are filled by foreign trained MDs, both foreign born, and Americans studying abroad, mostly in the Caribbean.
Most all graduates pass their licensing, there just aren't enough graduates.
We left California when I was a kid because it was clear my mom would never be able to afford a house. The house my grandparents built after the war is now occupied by millionaires with no memory of what the neighborhood was like before all the fences went up and it turned into an enclave for Silicon Valley tech workers. Several decades later, I find myself again living between a booming metro area and farmland. Every day there is a headline in the newspaper about a company breaking ground on a project that will bring hundreds of new high-paying jobs to our community.
The similarities to California are striking. Nice weather (sun belt), good universities (R1's with teaching hospitals), people flocking here for new tech jobs, Republican government slowly drifting Democrat, starting in the metro areas. Also a new Indian grocery opening every six blocks and parents speaking languages I don't recognize at local youth soccer games.
This time around I am benefiting from and quite enjoying the explosive growth (about 500 new homes within 10 minutes of my house just this year) and influx of people from all over the world. But I am also deeply sympathetic towards the locals who have lived here for generations getting squeezed out of their neighborhoods. A lot of my own family became vehemently anti-immigrant (despite our own immigrant roots) and were radicalized by right-wing radio (and now send me links to bizarre "news" websites about the crazy stuff the libs are doing in California).
Despite the fearmongering and toxic political climate created by booming economies and the influx of immigrants, I think it's great for kids. I loved going to my friends houses and being introduced to new an interesting cultural practices (and food!) and my peers who stuck around, went to college and got into tech, real estate, etc. are all doing extremely well and are looking at comfortable retirements by 60.
This is probably one of the most underdiscussed value divides between cosmopolitan libs like myself and a lot of the people who subscribe to Slow Boring and 'normal people', which is that I have genuinely zero concern for people having to move to a more affordable neighborhood, as long as they are on net becoming better off I really don't care at all whether or not the people living in a place have deep familial ties to the land or if they are transplants who moved in yesterday. But I accept that for many people, this is deeply important.
Of course the California situation is very different. When housing supply is fixed, you can't just move to a more affordable neighborhood. If someone grew up in San Francisco they'd have to move a hundred miles away or more before they could find something that vaguely qualifies as 'affordable' to a low wage worker.
FWIW we were basically pushed successively further from SF until basically they ran out of dairy farms and orchards to build houses on. By the late 80's the only places we could have afforded to buy a house were so far from the bay that it made more sense to pick up and move to another state.
Where I live now (because it is in the South) the people being priced out are largely working class black families that settled here in a process of successively being pushed out of areas as they turn into suburbs and merge with metro areas. There are a lot of small houses on what used to be tiny little roads but are now arteries for people like me who commute into the city for work. Road-widening projects eat away at property and equity just as housing prices in all the newly-built subdivisions that feed those arteries skyrocket.
“as long as they are on net becoming better off I really don't care at all whether or not the people living in a place have deep familial ties to the land or if they are transplants”
What you may be overlooking here is that the loss of subjective utiles may exceed the market value without being legible. Assume I place a value of $X on characteristic A of my locality. Changes occur that destroy or devalue A but are uncompensated, while market values of my house increase by $Y. There’s no guarantee that $Y > $X.
More generally, the trouble with stating that it’s okay to ignore classes of preference is that it’s a fully generalizable argument with no natural limitng principle leading to natural incommensurability of arguments: one could just as easily say that they care a lot about ties to the land and familial proximity and place neglible value on a bunch of randos (or even them and theirs) potentially becoming moentarily “better off.” Indeed, the right to hold (or not hold) such beliefs is arguably enshrined in the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.
Thanks for this.
"As long as they are _on net_ becoming better off..."
According to fucking who? Bring me a bucket of utils and we can talk.
Kade U knows nothing of what it's like to have a family graveyard.
Good article. Where there is an obvious shortage of workers in a necessary field it makes sense to import workers. We have a nursing shortage that without a huge immigration of Filipinas would put hospitals in very bad shape.
But in my field of endeavor, medicine, I see a corrosive effect of favoring high end workers simply because public policy fails to educate enough qualified Americans.
I see the US tradition as taking the poor huddled masses like my grandparents coming in 1910 working in sweatshops and having their grandchildren rise through the ranks.
What the selective high end immigration does is take the cream off the top of countries that themselves don't have enough doctors, creating a brain drain. Often in countries that tend to have less social mobility than the US (at least previously, we have had decreasing mobility of late) often these people come from the privileged classes who could do well in their own country, and they create in this country a priviliged immigrant class with resentful Americans who have to take the low end jobs.
In the case of medicine, there are plenty of qualified American applicants, just not enough slots, Being the wealthiest country in the world, you would think that we would not need to rely on poor countries to steal their doctors.
On the other hand, on the low end, construction, farming, could not exist without foreign, primarily Mexican labor, and this affords immigrants who would have very difficult lives in their home country access to the American dream as opposed to the wealthy engineers and doctors from abroad. We may need the HB1s in the short term, but imo it is malfeasance to not train our own people for these jobs.
I couldn’t agree more. I think Canada made a few mistakes with their immigration changes, but one of the biggest and most underdiscussed was over focusing on “high skilled” immigration. When coupled with their housing crisis and inability to build, you had Canadians competiting against similar economically situated immigrants for housing. While I still think the country still may have benefited from them, it drove alot of resentment and alot of the issues we see with diploma mills.
What Canada didn’t do was also allow “lower skilled” immigrants to work in healthcare, childcare, agriculture, construction, and other “less skilled” fields.
I dislike the argument to switch to a fully points based or skill based system precisely because we also need a whole lot of people working in construction and other sectors too. And there are lots of immigrants who would be net contributors who aren’t just in programming.
Dave, yes, and I think the consequences is that you have a poor less skilled American or Canadian cohort, ex factory workers. miners etc. on the low end and resentful of the rich foreigners like you see in Vancouver buying up all the property and forcing out the locals.
I see immigration as both beneficial to the country, so I am OK with allowing certain skilled labor that is in a shortage, even on the high end, though it is the responsibility of the country to train enough high end workers, but also that immigration should be compassionate and bring people out of the poverty of their countries as with my grandparents.
I really want to know the thought process which says that instead of allocating Visas on merit or another objective criteria they should use a mix of randomness and fraud.
You see it quite often, New Jersey had got rid of objective literacy qualifications for teachers this week for instance.
Well, if you give up on being able to evaluate merit, then you're mostly left with randomness
False. You can also evaluate based on bribes.
The economy of pull.
The randomness doesn't seem necessarily wrong by itself to me.
You have to meet a minimum OBJECTIVE standard, and then we have a lottery.
Assuming you want to cap the number, but you don't want to set your standards so high you overshoot the cap and don't even let _that_ many in, how else would you do it?
If you try to make objective measures to rank everyone explicitly and take the top X, that's going to be gameable as well, right?
I think minimum objective standards and then randomize would be an improvement for giving out grants and some sorts of hiring. But for visas, you could just say that they go to the ones with highest salaries, because that is a measure that is going to be hard to fake and easy to measure, without creating too many perverse incentives.
There’s a perverse incentive when you set a minimum standard for grants, which is that the standard gets set very low, essentially that the proposal is not obviously harmful. This done to perpetuate claims that an area of research is underfunded to encourage greater funding. This occurs without lotteries but the rating process is valid enough that what gets funded is above average for the pool; lotteries would just lower that to average.
I’m not suggesting that you set a *low* standard such that you’re keeping basically the entire pool of applicants. I’m saying that if the committee has done the first pass of getting the strong ones, and the second pass of getting it to a short list, they’ll usually do better to randomize from the short list than to go over the files carefully and start finding minor issues to distinguish the remaining ones. No one is good at the kind of parsing that happens at that last stage, and it encourages writing defensively rather than proposing something interesting and new.
You’re not suggesting that but the incentives in the system would work that way. Perhaps if you ranked them all and only the top 25 or 30% entered the lottery.
How do you measure salaries as opposed to what someone says on the application form is going to be their salary?
Do you deport people if a year later it turns out they earned much less than the salary their employer promised them? I suspect this happens a lot.
There would be a crazy amount of gaming the system.
But there's already some sort of salary link in some of these immigration programs, so apparently it works to some extent.
I thought about that but I was wondering if that has too many issues where California now has an easy time getting them vs. Texas, because California has to pay a higher salary already due to cost of living.
I agree it's hard to fake and easy to measure.
The randomness isn't that bad, but they could just give them a maths test and rank them using that, it would be significantly better than random.
Proficiency in math might be better if you are hiring mathematicians. In my 34 years of experience as an engineer and hiring manager, I would say that the better mathematicians tend to be worse engineers. (There are exceptions. Russia seems to produce great engineers who are also excellent at math.)
I don't think Oliver was suggesting that the math test should be on group theory.
Engineers also have to be good at math.
Almost certainly collider bias.
I am not saying that engineers are (on average) worse at math than brick-layers. Obviously we have all taken multiple semesters of calc and differential equations and such. But if you are interviewing someone, and they start to solve a math problem, it is almost certainly because they are failing to understand that there is a simpler way. Understanding these simple ways it what makes it possible to do the abstraction necessary to make engineering decisions.
Any idea how Russia does that? Could it be a filter in the immigration process or is it something in their culture or education system?
I suspect that success in the Russian school system is highly filtered by testing. There could also be some of the, "studying 10x as hard because failure to succeed consigns you to a life of REAL poverty."
Yes, that’s going to end well…