This lines up with my analysis. Immigration isn't a top issue for me, but it's obvious that exploitation happens both at the legal and illegal levels. A certain type of purported liberal-minded or libertarian-minded business class person wants to undercut wages, and immigration is the best tool for that. Not to mention, as you noted, immigrants tend to be more pliant as workers because they have to be.
I too don't see anything particularly progressive about trying to build a serf caste stateside. Especially not via black markets (illegal immigration and open boards), but increasingly not via legalizing predatory arrangements either.
I've seen this at startups. The visa holders were all yes men because they could be kicked back in minutes. Their managers loved them because, as you pointed out, they could be exploited.
I didn't understand until an Indian (US born) pointed it out. They H1B were worked like slaves.
Hi Anuradha, it’s good to know that I’m not the only Indian-born person that can state the obvious about H1B abuse.
I’m a Canadian, and I’ve seen over the last 10 years how immigration has changed professional and service economy jobs. In professional fields, you have to be free to think, because it is assumed that you have a baseline level of competence and ethical standards.
The competence and ethics standards are both undercut by rampant cheating and the incentive towards servility as you described makes Indians on H1Bs akin to white collar slaves.
I’m glad to see another Canadian in the comments… the first thing that comes to mind is our contentious foreign worker program, that is on clear display as so many new immigrants end up in service facing positions - but few if any have the depth of language to properly confront what this is doing, and how it actually falls into place (this post sheds light despite being in a different country).
Just working my way through this article and wanted to say thank you. I knew that this objection..that some call racism.. has come from somewhere and I’ve been trying to get to the root of it.
"The reason we’re not Indian is straightforward — we didn’t grow up there and don’t have the cultural context, and our parents’ conception of India is frozen in the 1970s."
Interesting point. I think one sees something similar in many Americans of Vietnamese descent.
At my first IT job the company went to great lengths to hire immigrants to full time positions, yet had a huge bench of native born interns who had hypothetical future full time positions dangled in front of them.
Now I work abroad and see the other side. depending on an employer for ones legal residence status does tend to make one more docile in negotiation about salary, etc.
There is another aspect of this that I suspect many employers like that is equally true about skilled or unskilled immigrant labor - unfamiliarity with the justice system or workers rights in the country they have moved to.
"No one has the right to emigrate to a country to make more money. It’s fine if they want to and the country allows it, but cloaking anti-competitive systems in moral language is how the professional class captured most of the wealth in the first place."
Bingo. It is simply corporate profit maximization that is packaged and promoted as righteous morality and defended with fake racism claims.
However, there is one point about cheaper immigrant labor that always confounds me. Places in the US where people live have a ubiquitous cost of living. Housing, food, healthcare, entertainment, insurance, etc... it all costs the same no matter your ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. So then why do immigrants accept lower wages? It seems that they must be satisfied with a lower standard of living... obviously spending less on discretionary things and accepting lower quality, cheaper alternatives.
We hear this "immigrants do the work that natives won't do." Which certainly isn't true with most H1B workers as they are more often working in medium to high-skill jobs. But even low-skill service jobs... why would an immigrant accept lower pay when the cost of living is common for all?
This has always bugged me in forming a rational defense against immigrant labor, but then it seems to support a counter argument that domestic labor is too entitled, lazy and demanding to satisfy the business labor need.
I think the explanation is the tendency of people to measure their status to those they consider their peers... really a flaw with respect to rational behavior. Immigrants are using the peer group of their home country and are willing to accept lower wages because they are still making significantly more than that peer group. Domestic labor is not willing to accept lower wages because it puts them too far beneath their domestic peer group.
This behavior is ubiquitous in all humans, and probably connects to evolution related to survival... as falling too far behind a peer group would generally result in lower survival outcomes. Since it is ubiquitous we should just accept it and make it part of our policies related to immigrant labor. Immigrant labor should never be paid less than domestic labor for the same role/job.
That would be the great experiment to solve the question... are corporations just exploiting immigrants for cheaper labor, or is there an actual labor shortage that requires immigrant labor?
The problem with anything (and everything) government -- is that it always sets the baseline minimum requirements -- and therefore sets the standard.
The idea being that people won’t go below that minimum.
But, the minimum becomes the effective maximum, because there is no incentive to do more. As long as you can check the government box, it’s all good. You’re not going to be sued, you’ve met the requirements.
Most things that are regulated work this way. Employers are always going to do the bare minimum, and so, the regulations have a negative effect.
In other words, if there was no government set minimum requirement, companies might actually end up competing; however, because there is a hard limit on the minimum side, they’re all going to stay there, because it allows them to avoid competition, and screw over their employees -- while still avoiding lawsuits.
The same thing applies to people who are not immigrants.
Regulation of industry is largely what ruins it.
//
From the US worker angle, immigrants undercut US workers’ pay -- because their standard of living in the US -- even while being screwed over pay-wise -- is leaps and bounds higher than if they were to stay in their home country.
Everyone knows this, it’s nothing new.
Politicians love this, because they don’t care about the US citizens -- nor do they care about the immigrants. They do care about raising money, and building their personal wealth, and so, nothing changes.
Everyone is getting paid, except for the US workers, and the foreign workers.
The Somalis get paid well though, but that’s a whole different story.
Really good summary of the problem. I think this whole thing (which is essentially labor exploitation) needs to be talked about without it coming down to being an issue with xenophobia or race, but fundamentally about labor organizing and rights. Unfortunately popular debates about immigration come down to whether we should like or hate immigrants, when it is not really about immigrants as individuals, it is about the aims of a labor policy. I think the debate is being purposely obfuscated, and you did a great job of explaining why.
I studied and worked in an area (biostatistics for clinical trials) that was mostly made up of Chinese foreign nationals. My coworkers were nice enough, and I don't begrudge them wanting to come to the US to study and work, but I had huge doubts that not training or hiring enough Americans in this field wouldn't lead to problems. In my masters program I was one of the few Americans in many classes, and when I got into the workforce they were in the process of hiring fewer and fewer Americans and replacing them with foreigners.
There was/is a huge shortage of Americans in biostatistics, and going into a technically skilled job with a shortage, you would think that you would have some bargaining power in the workplace, but because of all the foreign hires, the industry was becoming a terrible place to work. The working conditions had changed a lot at the company I was at over time: according to some co-workers, it was originally started by American statisticians and was known for valuing work-life balance and employing a lot of parents. The company then got bought by venture capital and they started preferencing foreign hires, and cutting benefits, and you were expected to work very long hours off the clock. From what I heard, since I left, this company has now fired a lot of their American staff, and his outsourcing a lot of the statistics work to India. However, like I said, this is a difficult field to train and be competent in (it requires some graduate level theoretical math in addition to applied data analysis), and there is no real way of fully vetting the credentials of workers overseas. Apparently the quality of the work is now going down, which isn't great for society overall, because this work is in medical research.
I definitely think it is fine to fill some percentage of the labor market with talented foreign hires in scientific /medical research, but it becomes an issue when it reaches some critical threshold where workers lose collective bargaining power with their employers and have to accept suboptimal working conditions. And then the quality of the output can oftentimes go down too.
Interesting. There's been a lot of intraparty debate on this issue (especially on the right, I think). I have stayed pretty agnostic on the issue but I found this to be very convincing.
There are (as always) two different questions: whether H1B is justified, as a public policy... and the motivations and psychological impulses and incentives of its supporters. Unfortunately, there usually seems to be some element of artifice and hypocrisy with these things, and it's never acknowledged in the mainstream. We live in a strange and cynical age.
What is disgusting is when a job in IT is advertised at an obviously below-market rate and/or with above-market qualifications and duties, and it's obviously a play for the employer to go "well, we couldn't find any Americans to take the job, so it's H1-B time..."
I've been saying that H1-B is indentured servitude, there's no escaping that fact, and just because it's voluntary--well, indentured servitude centuries ago was voluntary as well.
The solution is to require market (or perhaps even above-market, say 110-125%) wages for H1-Bs. The $100K fee that Trump put forth is excessive, but it's directionally correct.
Thank you all for sharing that too Anuradha. Please also see/share our tips from Dr. Neumann, Uaifo Ojo, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Tatjana Romig, Manuel Garcia, Нація підприємців, Dr. Hare, Audrey Hatfield, Professor Tony Martin, Dr. Newman, Eugene Earnshaw and others. https://old.bitchute.com/video/jsHTV8JdIlAt/
This all makes perfect sense if you accept the communist or socialist viewpoint that voluntary labor contracts are "exploitation," it makes no sense at all if you don't. I'm sure that a lot of racists are cheering you on, but you'll quickly find that they're selective socialists, and are really driven by hatred of people with skin like yours.
That was Adam Smith’s viewpoint, and of Aristotle, and the Medieval Catholic Church, and so on, that there is such a thing as a fair wage (or fair price). So basically everybody who was not an extreme libertarian.
This was generally defined in the terms of social norms and customs, status-related. Smith wrote that if good workers can generally afford linen shirts (status), then it is unfair to pay a good worker so little as to not afford it.
In this context, a worker should be able to afford a house like their parents had, for example.
There is nothing socialist or communist about addressing H1B. The article mentions “labor arbitrage” but does not flesh out what is happening here. The arbitrage is the employer trades a life in America in exchange for lower relative wages compared to a similar American who possesses a life in America by birthright. Employers are selling something that they do not own as part of the compensation. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons. The role of the Government in a Capitalist system is in fact to prevent this.
This lines up with my analysis. Immigration isn't a top issue for me, but it's obvious that exploitation happens both at the legal and illegal levels. A certain type of purported liberal-minded or libertarian-minded business class person wants to undercut wages, and immigration is the best tool for that. Not to mention, as you noted, immigrants tend to be more pliant as workers because they have to be.
I too don't see anything particularly progressive about trying to build a serf caste stateside. Especially not via black markets (illegal immigration and open boards), but increasingly not via legalizing predatory arrangements either.
I've seen this at startups. The visa holders were all yes men because they could be kicked back in minutes. Their managers loved them because, as you pointed out, they could be exploited.
I didn't understand until an Indian (US born) pointed it out. They H1B were worked like slaves.
I should add, so were everyone else because they could be replaced by an H1B
If I had to choose Bernie Sanders or Ezra Klein to source my politics I would probably kill myself.
Hi Anuradha, it’s good to know that I’m not the only Indian-born person that can state the obvious about H1B abuse.
I’m a Canadian, and I’ve seen over the last 10 years how immigration has changed professional and service economy jobs. In professional fields, you have to be free to think, because it is assumed that you have a baseline level of competence and ethical standards.
The competence and ethics standards are both undercut by rampant cheating and the incentive towards servility as you described makes Indians on H1Bs akin to white collar slaves.
I’m glad to see another Canadian in the comments… the first thing that comes to mind is our contentious foreign worker program, that is on clear display as so many new immigrants end up in service facing positions - but few if any have the depth of language to properly confront what this is doing, and how it actually falls into place (this post sheds light despite being in a different country).
Just working my way through this article and wanted to say thank you. I knew that this objection..that some call racism.. has come from somewhere and I’ve been trying to get to the root of it.
The abuse of the H1Bs is all about depressing wages for native born Americans.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. It's wonderfully nuanced, balanced, and sensitive. I also discuss some of these issues in a series of essays about immigration and the not much publically discussed economic motives of its supporters and advocates. See https://tka1197764.substack.com/p/immigration-after-ai-why-the-old?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=20nu6g
"The reason we’re not Indian is straightforward — we didn’t grow up there and don’t have the cultural context, and our parents’ conception of India is frozen in the 1970s."
Interesting point. I think one sees something similar in many Americans of Vietnamese descent.
At my first IT job the company went to great lengths to hire immigrants to full time positions, yet had a huge bench of native born interns who had hypothetical future full time positions dangled in front of them.
Now I work abroad and see the other side. depending on an employer for ones legal residence status does tend to make one more docile in negotiation about salary, etc.
There is another aspect of this that I suspect many employers like that is equally true about skilled or unskilled immigrant labor - unfamiliarity with the justice system or workers rights in the country they have moved to.
Indeed, the system depends on people not knowing how to navigate institutions.
"No one has the right to emigrate to a country to make more money. It’s fine if they want to and the country allows it, but cloaking anti-competitive systems in moral language is how the professional class captured most of the wealth in the first place."
Bingo. It is simply corporate profit maximization that is packaged and promoted as righteous morality and defended with fake racism claims.
However, there is one point about cheaper immigrant labor that always confounds me. Places in the US where people live have a ubiquitous cost of living. Housing, food, healthcare, entertainment, insurance, etc... it all costs the same no matter your ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. So then why do immigrants accept lower wages? It seems that they must be satisfied with a lower standard of living... obviously spending less on discretionary things and accepting lower quality, cheaper alternatives.
We hear this "immigrants do the work that natives won't do." Which certainly isn't true with most H1B workers as they are more often working in medium to high-skill jobs. But even low-skill service jobs... why would an immigrant accept lower pay when the cost of living is common for all?
This has always bugged me in forming a rational defense against immigrant labor, but then it seems to support a counter argument that domestic labor is too entitled, lazy and demanding to satisfy the business labor need.
I think the explanation is the tendency of people to measure their status to those they consider their peers... really a flaw with respect to rational behavior. Immigrants are using the peer group of their home country and are willing to accept lower wages because they are still making significantly more than that peer group. Domestic labor is not willing to accept lower wages because it puts them too far beneath their domestic peer group.
This behavior is ubiquitous in all humans, and probably connects to evolution related to survival... as falling too far behind a peer group would generally result in lower survival outcomes. Since it is ubiquitous we should just accept it and make it part of our policies related to immigrant labor. Immigrant labor should never be paid less than domestic labor for the same role/job.
That would be the great experiment to solve the question... are corporations just exploiting immigrants for cheaper labor, or is there an actual labor shortage that requires immigrant labor?
The problem with anything (and everything) government -- is that it always sets the baseline minimum requirements -- and therefore sets the standard.
The idea being that people won’t go below that minimum.
But, the minimum becomes the effective maximum, because there is no incentive to do more. As long as you can check the government box, it’s all good. You’re not going to be sued, you’ve met the requirements.
Most things that are regulated work this way. Employers are always going to do the bare minimum, and so, the regulations have a negative effect.
In other words, if there was no government set minimum requirement, companies might actually end up competing; however, because there is a hard limit on the minimum side, they’re all going to stay there, because it allows them to avoid competition, and screw over their employees -- while still avoiding lawsuits.
The same thing applies to people who are not immigrants.
Regulation of industry is largely what ruins it.
//
From the US worker angle, immigrants undercut US workers’ pay -- because their standard of living in the US -- even while being screwed over pay-wise -- is leaps and bounds higher than if they were to stay in their home country.
Everyone knows this, it’s nothing new.
Politicians love this, because they don’t care about the US citizens -- nor do they care about the immigrants. They do care about raising money, and building their personal wealth, and so, nothing changes.
Everyone is getting paid, except for the US workers, and the foreign workers.
The Somalis get paid well though, but that’s a whole different story.
Really good summary of the problem. I think this whole thing (which is essentially labor exploitation) needs to be talked about without it coming down to being an issue with xenophobia or race, but fundamentally about labor organizing and rights. Unfortunately popular debates about immigration come down to whether we should like or hate immigrants, when it is not really about immigrants as individuals, it is about the aims of a labor policy. I think the debate is being purposely obfuscated, and you did a great job of explaining why.
I studied and worked in an area (biostatistics for clinical trials) that was mostly made up of Chinese foreign nationals. My coworkers were nice enough, and I don't begrudge them wanting to come to the US to study and work, but I had huge doubts that not training or hiring enough Americans in this field wouldn't lead to problems. In my masters program I was one of the few Americans in many classes, and when I got into the workforce they were in the process of hiring fewer and fewer Americans and replacing them with foreigners.
There was/is a huge shortage of Americans in biostatistics, and going into a technically skilled job with a shortage, you would think that you would have some bargaining power in the workplace, but because of all the foreign hires, the industry was becoming a terrible place to work. The working conditions had changed a lot at the company I was at over time: according to some co-workers, it was originally started by American statisticians and was known for valuing work-life balance and employing a lot of parents. The company then got bought by venture capital and they started preferencing foreign hires, and cutting benefits, and you were expected to work very long hours off the clock. From what I heard, since I left, this company has now fired a lot of their American staff, and his outsourcing a lot of the statistics work to India. However, like I said, this is a difficult field to train and be competent in (it requires some graduate level theoretical math in addition to applied data analysis), and there is no real way of fully vetting the credentials of workers overseas. Apparently the quality of the work is now going down, which isn't great for society overall, because this work is in medical research.
I definitely think it is fine to fill some percentage of the labor market with talented foreign hires in scientific /medical research, but it becomes an issue when it reaches some critical threshold where workers lose collective bargaining power with their employers and have to accept suboptimal working conditions. And then the quality of the output can oftentimes go down too.
Interesting. There's been a lot of intraparty debate on this issue (especially on the right, I think). I have stayed pretty agnostic on the issue but I found this to be very convincing.
There are (as always) two different questions: whether H1B is justified, as a public policy... and the motivations and psychological impulses and incentives of its supporters. Unfortunately, there usually seems to be some element of artifice and hypocrisy with these things, and it's never acknowledged in the mainstream. We live in a strange and cynical age.
What is disgusting is when a job in IT is advertised at an obviously below-market rate and/or with above-market qualifications and duties, and it's obviously a play for the employer to go "well, we couldn't find any Americans to take the job, so it's H1-B time..."
I've been saying that H1-B is indentured servitude, there's no escaping that fact, and just because it's voluntary--well, indentured servitude centuries ago was voluntary as well.
The solution is to require market (or perhaps even above-market, say 110-125%) wages for H1-Bs. The $100K fee that Trump put forth is excessive, but it's directionally correct.
Thank you all for sharing that too Anuradha. Please also see/share our tips from Dr. Neumann, Uaifo Ojo, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Tatjana Romig, Manuel Garcia, Нація підприємців, Dr. Hare, Audrey Hatfield, Professor Tony Martin, Dr. Newman, Eugene Earnshaw and others. https://old.bitchute.com/video/jsHTV8JdIlAt/
🐈
also here
https://odysee.com/@tidbitsfortruth:2?view=content
and here
https://old.bitchute.com/channel/NBu3vOs8kXFY/
🍂
It's all a science thing.
🦣
Thank you.
https://michaelatkinson.substack.com/
🦖 👀
This all makes perfect sense if you accept the communist or socialist viewpoint that voluntary labor contracts are "exploitation," it makes no sense at all if you don't. I'm sure that a lot of racists are cheering you on, but you'll quickly find that they're selective socialists, and are really driven by hatred of people with skin like yours.
That was Adam Smith’s viewpoint, and of Aristotle, and the Medieval Catholic Church, and so on, that there is such a thing as a fair wage (or fair price). So basically everybody who was not an extreme libertarian.
This was generally defined in the terms of social norms and customs, status-related. Smith wrote that if good workers can generally afford linen shirts (status), then it is unfair to pay a good worker so little as to not afford it.
In this context, a worker should be able to afford a house like their parents had, for example.
Yeah well we've learned something in the last three hundred years.
There is nothing socialist or communist about addressing H1B. The article mentions “labor arbitrage” but does not flesh out what is happening here. The arbitrage is the employer trades a life in America in exchange for lower relative wages compared to a similar American who possesses a life in America by birthright. Employers are selling something that they do not own as part of the compensation. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons. The role of the Government in a Capitalist system is in fact to prevent this.