My uncle is a skilled immigrant to Canada (electrical engineer) and was never able to find an engineering job. They live in an immigrant-heavy subsidized housing neighborhood full of people in the same situation.
Plus one. My parents experience as well in Montreal. My dad could not understand why Canada bothered to move him and his family and the keep him on welfare. BTW - life on welfare in Canada was 5 times better than life as an electrical engineer in România. My parents never stopped thinking it was a really good idea to migrate to Canada.
I know it's not exactly the same. But would he consider becoming an electrician? Trade jobs are definitely getting more and more in demand, and the pay once established is definitely not worse than most engineer positions. Electricians in major canadian areas (e.g. Vancouver) charge 200$ per hour and more.
The big problem is that when issuing immigrant visas, the Canadian government uses a point system (age, degree, etc.) that never actually checks for employability. In other words, it doesn't ask, "Is someone willing to pay Canadian wages for these skills and credentials?"
The federal government will give extra points to an applicant with an engineering degree without ever bothering to check whether the immigrant's degree would be accepted by an accredited licensing board.
In some cases, it's possible to get accredited by passing a series of exams (the same ones given to 22-year-old new grads). Figuring out why the pass rates are so low for foreign applicants without a mutually recognized degree is left as an exercise for the reader...
He tutors math and science, my aunt (who also has a graduate degree) works in a daycare. Canadian welfare is also quite generous.
Their son is doing well, but I don’t see how it makes economic sense for Canada at that point. It boils down to a circuitous and expensive way to direct government dollars to smart people who are likely to have smart kids. You could save yourself a step and just give lower income kids in Canada IQ tests and throw money at the promising ones.
The US says they don't want them, the point of the article is the new visa requirements (surprise) aren't converting into hiring US citizens but instead pushing the roles offshore.
Well yes, what difference does it make to bring people over to the US vs them doing the work overseas?
Bringing people over has negative consequences in the US (housing demand goes up; water demand goes up; power demand goes up) and in the person's home country (money doesn't flow to the local country; good people leave who should be staying and building their own country).
Skilled is a subset of what the US gets, and that at the detriment to local workers (and to the countries the skilled immigrants originate from). Though to the local business owner's they're great - much cheaper.
the candidate for Canadian PR has to secure a job offer beforehand, so the Canada's plan is that US tech workers move their US jobs to Canada, and big tech employers expand their existing tech offices in Canada, rather than being forced to shell out $100k to Donny.
Why should US employers be forced to pay $100k to Donny or compromise for substandard smaller labor pool in the US and bear increased costs?
Put another way: why should American employers be forced to hire Americans? If the labor pool is indeed substandard, they arguably have a vested interest in improving the quality of that labor pool rather than simply giving up on it. The $100k (and its consequences) are putting a finger on the scale in a nationalist manner to prefer local products. It's tariffs for people.
It comes down to whether you have a globalist or nationalist mindset. Depending on which, you will come to a different conclusion about what to think. Should a government prioritize the individual success of citizens of its country, or the profitability of companies domiciled there (and therefore overall national economic performance)? Which approach, which tide lifts more boats by a meaningful amount? Which comports with a government's stated duties?
Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it. It is not employers' fault that US is unable to train tech workers, despite spending $30-40k per pupil in school system only to end up #27 in PISA ranking.
The problem with all anti-H1B discourse is Lump Of Labor fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy ). The loudest people are the least educated about the consequences of blocking high skilled immigration.
>Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it.
This is wrong. In practice, we bias toward this rule because it happens to align with benefit to society moreso than other rules (most of the time), but it is not the end, it is the means. The responsibility of employers (and all people participating in society) is to jointly maintain, and ideally improve, society. That's part of why government exists - to control harm-doers.
Also, "the loudest people are the least educated" is probably true on most topics, but it's not a great way to make an argument. You should address the smartest people who disagree with you, not the dumbest (and that way, you also avoid being perceived as believing you are better than other people, which damns so much socially-bisected discourse at scale).
there is no smart argument to ban H1B. Its all pure jingoism and racism. There is really nothing else here.
The fact that America is global tech leader is thanks to foreigners, all these FAANGs and MAG7s and OpenAI and Anthropic, the paper "Transformers is all your need", everything was created by highly skilled foreigners.
Without foreigners there is no tech sector, no sweet MAG7 and FAANG stock returns, America would be steamrolled in tech the same way Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, and Dodge were steamrolled by Toyota and BMW.
You dont know jack shit about how arbitrary the USCIS asjudication process is, thats first. Please dont ever comment on visa and paperwork matters, unless you went through that hell yourself.
Second, this admin (steven miller et al) and loud wignats supporting it, want to shutdown all immigration completely, starting with high skilled one.
So please lets stop pretending that wignats will accept any immigration. Just say you sont want brown people, and that will be honest at least.
A lot of H1Bs are more qualified than the O-1 just because its easier to get coming from top tier Ivy League school and phd
This is a genuinely depressing position to see on HN - the one place left on the internet I will willingly engage with. Not everybody who disagrees with you on policy is simply a racist. You are being uncharitable, and leaning on the drug of "all my enemies are stupid". Everybody is stupid. I'm stupid, you are stupid. Expertise is a fallacious bar for normal discourse. Honesty and curiosity are what actually constitute "smartness" - not knowledge.
Smart people are not arguing that we should have zero immigration forever. They are arguing that H1B should be reformed or replaced (e.g. with O-1, or something else), which, yes, is synonymous with destroying it in its current form. And they are arguing that offshoring should be punished unless actually necessary. This does not conflict with the historical case studies you are using as dramatic rhetorical example.
Maybe the people you are disagreeing with are wrong - you could simply argue that. But you are making a different argument. It's going to be very hard to convince Americans that Americans should not be protected by America, and that everybody suffering is just a stupid racist idiot who should accept what is happening to their homes and livelihoods instead of trying to comprehend solutions.
Economics is generally not a zero sum game. At least according to what they taught me in Econ 101, on a macroeconomic scale skilled workers tend to increase job availability. They spend a larger portion of their income on services, which has a positive multiplier effect.
> skilled workers tend to increase job availability
Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
> Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
Why would investments by employers result in higher compensation for employees?
Most of the 'squeeze' comes from things like housing and health care. The former driven by NIMBYs pulling the ladder up after them in so many desirable places.
The subcategory of NIMBY hate regarding overdevelopment of existing communities (as opposed to things like datacenters, multi-home owners concerned about investment, etc etc) is mostly hatred of the average citizen, which is not a great category of people to decide to hate. 90% of people would react the same ways in the same situations.
The obvious problem is that you can only develop a "desirable" area so much before you have fundamentally altered it. When there is a perception that the demand is driven in large part by people moving into the country, rather than by being born, that naturally engenders bitterness. When there is a perception that there are plenty of other areas available for development, which would then become desirable over time, but the developers want money and the government is focused on short-term goals, that further engenders bitterness. This is all very natural, and doesn't necessitate people to be unreasonably NIMBY to oppose it. Again, most people would.
It's not hate, it's just something that changed in the US in about the 1970ies. In the past, you'd have a booming area and people would build homes as a result and things weren't perfect, but kind of balanced out in terms of housing.
A huge amount of housing demand comes from immigration. You can't call people who like their neighbourhoods "NIMBYs" for not wanting their nice area to triple in population to solve a problem. They aren't the problem. The demand is the problem.
So lack of supply isn't the problem, it's the people who want a place to live who are the problem? Would you make this same argument if the increased demand was from people being born rather than immigration (because it is both)?
I think if you want to be able to block your neighbors from building denser housing on their property then that should only be enforceable if it was agreed to by everybody in advance when they bought the place (e.g. via an HOA contract or some similar type of restriction on the property deed). Otherwise this is tantamount to allowing Walmart to get a vote on whether to allow Target to set up next door.
> So lack of supply isn't the problem, it's the people who want a place to live who are the problem? Would you make this same argument if the increased demand was from people being born rather than immigration (because it is both)?
I totally agree it's both, although most first world populations have low birth rates (until you add in generational immigration from high birth rate cultures), so slow building works well.
Actually you can blame them because it was the done thing throughout US history to build more homes when people moved to an area. And there is nothing more American than moving to a place with better opportunities or amenities. "The pursuit of happiness" and all that.
Actual immigration from outside the US is a vanishingly small part of our housing problems, just as immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs".
Where I live in Oregon the conflict is almost entirely about other Americans moving here vs those pulling up the ladder - which doesn't, of course,stop anyone from moving here, it just means only the wealthy can, rather than teachers, nurses, firefighters and so on.
>immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs"
This is a pretty stark straw man. It's very normal to be critical of immigration policy without believing that immigrants will eat your pets, and it's petty to try to implicitly cast the person you're talking to into that camp.
This is true in the literal sense in which you are using the phrase, but the context is not realistic. This sentiment is used a lot in defense of bad policy.
Economics is a zero sum game, just not a static one. People are variables in the equation, which makes it non-trivial (after all, people are the entities splitting the sum, which is normally not part of the system of a "zero sum game").
The point is that the implication that "more people === better" is an oversimplification, to be point of being meaningless. In some contexts, more people makes everything better for everybody. In some contexts, more people makes everything worse for everybody. In most contexts, it's somewhere in between. Where the sparks really fly is when more people makes things better for the new people and worse for the existing people.
It's really dismaying how many people on this site seem to think immigration and the job market are a zero sum game... and that hasn't changed 12 years after I wrote this:
It's an oversimplification to portray the "other argument" as asserting that everything in society is strictly a zero-sum game. In some important ways, it is; and in some important ways, it isn't. People may be wrong about those details, but that's not the same thing as the common quip "it's not a zero-sum game", which essentially portrays the other side of the argument as dunderheads (a trap that well-meaning people who believe they are on the "right" or "moral" side of an argument very easily fall into).
I.e. no, it's not a zero sum game, but it is a complex system with inputs, outputs, some finite resources, and lots of human subjectivity and desires. Concrete harm easily comes from bad immigration policy (regardless of the "direction" of the policy's badness).
