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Spot-on brother

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7dEdited

I think the H1-B issue is a distraction. We are talking about something numbered in tens of thousands of visas against an employment/engagement issue that involves millions. Adding another 10,000 H1-Bs or eliminating them all will not matter a hill of beans on the issues of rejuvenating the manufacturing/energy/infrastructure/etc. portions of the economy which will involve many, many more people -- mostly Americans.

We use H1-B visas to fill physician positions in places that we just cannot fill otherwise. We pay the H1-Bs exactly what we pay the US physicians -- at much higher expense to us because processing H1-Bs is a real pain. Every job is heavily advertised for US physicians...these days there just are not enough to do the work that has been done for decades (do not tell me about work/life balance, please...ugh...what an excuse factory) and some positions are in locations that physicians (or their spouses) consider too undesirable to locate. But they all need physicians. We can either let the people drive 100 miles every time they feel bad, or try to find a qualified physician who will go. This is neither wage theft (you would contend we should pay them $1,000,000 per year to go there -- the problem is, the government controls the payment rates and those just are not in the cards) nor anti-American.

The only people who are against the H1-B program I know are those who never had to fill a slot with a particular skill set and found irrespective of what they did they could not and had to go looking for a solution because the slot needed to be filled. None of the people I know (you may know different ones) prefer the H1-B, nor do the tiny numbers make a difference in the broad economic spectrum of things. We do what has to be done so the world can continue to move forward.

If wishes were horses...

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Having worked in IT for the past quarter century, I can tell you that in the tech sector the H1-B program is widely viewed as yet another scam by companies to gouge tech workers out of their pay.

And the data at both the macro and micro economic level shows that to be the case, particularly in the tech sector.

But the larger issue is not merely one of numbers, but the extent to which Big Tech and Big Business in particular game the H1-B (and other) visa programs to disadvantage workers. In that regard the H1-B program is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Even the Democrats implicitly concede that one side effect of the immigration levels this country has witnessed in recent years has been to suppress wages. Given that, pre-COVID, real wages rose under Donald Trump and have fallen for the bulk of the (Biden-)Harris Administration, it's not at all unreasonable to correlate lax immigration enforcement with a decline in real wages.

One reason we're seeing an increase in interest for unionization in this country is, I suspect, the growing realization of just how unbalanced and not level the playing field truly is in many labor markets, and how businesses are not at all shy about corruptly seeking ways to obtain and maintain market power over workers. When workers perceive they are powerless or less powerful than their employer, they are going to look for ways to rebalance that power dynamic.

In a true free market economy, no business has market power over any worker, while no worker has market power over any business. There is very little doubt that we do not have that situation today in any labor market. Eliminating H1-B visas won't, by itself, get us to a free labor market, but there is reason to believe it would help shift the power back towards workers.

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As I said, your experience (different sector) may (and apparently is) different. But for the uses in health care, it has resulted in no wage deflation for either the H1-B workers or for their American counterparts (if we could find them). As I intimated, the issue has to be way bigger than the tens of thousands of H1-B jobs out there...the numbers are really small and 20%-25% are physicians so the numbers in tech are smaller yet.

I am all for fixing the underlying issues and a great fan of hiring American so not trying to cut any slack for anyone. Just noting that, like ALL government programs, they are foundationally subject to abuse but generally started with a real need somewhere. Hoping that we recognize the real need is still there, irrespective of what happens to any particular program.

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