logoalt Hacker News

lnrdtoday at 6:56 PM2 repliesview on HN

Never heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments. To think that H-1B developers can meaningfully shift the supply to the point that is felt by other people it's very shortsighted. The job market has been very difficult for years with vastly more supply than demand and its due to plenty economic, financial and political reasons. Interest rates itself affect it way more than any H-1B developer could ever do it. If you were to actually sit down and look deeply into it and look at the data, I'm sure that H-1B would be a small percentage of the problem and you would get fired up about so many other things.

But that's difficult and time consuming, if anything it's advanced economics and requires effort to decode what's happening. What it's very easy to do is getting angry at a group of people and to feel deep unfairness about it, then think that if that group of people were to leave, the problem would improve or be solved. That's exactly the kind of thought that seems to be so pervasive at all levels and yes, it is a scapegoat. Especially since that the only merit someone has over H-1B is to (by pure chance) having being born in a different place. I really feel that many people complaining against H-1B wouldn't even qualify for it if they were born somewhere else.


Replies

gadflyinyoureyetoday at 7:42 PM

There are approximately 250,000 to 300,000 H-1B workers in software development in the United States at any given year. No the general idea behind the program is that these hundreds of thousands of individuals are so highly skilled that there are no Americans able to fulfill the role. While I fully agree with you on all the topics about financing and interest rates, here’s my question: would there be as slow of a market for software development if those hundreds of thousands of individuals were not here? There was a court case that showed the H1B visas reduced salaries by about 30%. The court ruled that 30% is not a large enough number to say that it has a negative impact on the market. Others disagreed.

TMWNNtoday at 8:34 PM

>Never heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments.

Only someone ignorant of basic economic concepts—such as, in this case, supply and demand—would write the above.