One thing that a lot of people don't realize is how hard it is to start a company being on H-1b visa. It's almost impossible. I actually agree that "Immigrants overwhelmingly enter the labor market and drive down wages". I had to work for 4 years, taking less-than-market salary before I got lucky and got my Green Card. Next day I started a company and now I create jobs.
We need visas for entrepreneurs, we don't need more H-1b's
Before visas for entrepreneurs, how about we dal with the issues the locals have? Like health insurance and laws that favor tax breaks for bootstrappers and incubators. Nothing against foreigners, but more people dont fix anything if laws are not aligned for the benefit and interests of those involved.
This comes in time with the whole debacle of the H-1B lottery being triggered this year due to too many people applying within 5 days of the quota period, overflowing the 85k yearly quota by almost twice.
I've written about this before, and I like to impress upon you yet again that the majority of H-1Bs are taken by outsourcing / consulting companies that you might not have heard of, like WiPro, InfoSys, Satyam, Tata, Deloitte, Patni, which contribute the least to innovation, in my humble opinion.
Second in line is Microsoft, Google, et al. and the smallest group by far are startups and small businesses, which innovate the most and create the most jobs for the US.
Why not make work visas easier to get for small companies but limit visas per company? That'll make sure companies pick correctly and only people they need. Or maybe make it much more expensive. There is currently an additional (around 2k/appl iirc) cost for having too many H-1Bs, but it's not enough. The visa system heavily favours larger companies, because it was created and lobbied by them.
Besides, if you're worried about foreigners driving salaries down, you should quit targeting the H-1B which has a legitimate prevailing wage requirement (and we can argue for days whether the DOL does a good job of deciding what prevailing is, and I'll say it does, but that's a different issue).
The L-1 visa for employees of multinationals has almost as many people entering the country per year, but has NO prevailing wage requirements. Yup, I can bring in a person from another country and pay them federal minimum wage to be an engineer.
...
My opinion on calls to end the H-1B used to be pretty negative but maybe we do need a startup visa. My problem with the startup visa is that it's pushed by VCs and favours that model heavily. Want to bootstrap? Want to raise angel investment for a year or two? Good luck.
In any case, the US has a labour force of 150 million. We're talking about 85k a year.
Could we agree that letting small / medium businesses hire a reasonable number of H-1Bs easily would not demolish the the US economy or significantly? Let the cap be for the large ones.
They will drive salaries down by simple supply/demand (but that's not a reason to not to do it -- just like increasing the number of engineering graduates is a good idea regardless of wage effects).
Totally agreed on the cap for large companies and not small ones. There is a lot of precedent for small companies having different rules, and this is one where being small is a huge disadvantage.
In my case, it's because I might hire one H-1B in a year and can't take the risk that I will lose them to a lottery. A company hiring 100 can risk losing a % of that.
The government should auction the H1B visas to the highest bidder. This would encourage high value immigration. They could set a price floor of $100k to discourage low wage employers. They should also set a minimum salary for H1B holders of $100k.
There is already a visa for investors creating jobs so that is covered.
"There is already a visa for investors creating jobs so that is covered."
This visa (E-2 treaty investor visa) has deficiencies. Firstly, although there is no official minimum investment amount, in practice, as a founder you need to invest at least $50 to $100 thousand to have non-negligible chances of obtaining this visa. This excludes virtually all founders in this community who receive YC funding! Secondly, it requires the investor to own 50%+ of the company, hence it excludes most startups where the equity is roughly evenly distributed between 3 cofounders or more. Thirdly, only citizens of treaty countries can apply to this visa. This excludes about 110 countries in the world (only 80 countries on the list [1]).
That's actually a brilliant way to handle immigration.
Compute how many slots are available, based on national concerns (mostly, how many people can you easily integrate and naturalize per year). Then, auction off the slots to the highest bidder, and have a short-track naturalization process for the winners.
When you auction off the available slots you can be reasonably sure that the auction will benefit the winners (if self-sponsored) or the sponsors (if this is an H1B-style visa). But it may not be in the best interest of the nation as a whole. I note that most every other high-immigration country (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain) has a point system.
As a current H1B holder making below that number, I have one response for you. It starts with the letter "f" and ends with the letter "u."
(I am getting paid at or above the average salary for my profession, by the way. My company hired me because they literally could not find any qualified Americans for the position, either local or willing to move to the area.)
If you only want job creators to come to the country - how about just creating a visa to only allow that. On this visa, you can come to the US to consult, open a barber shop, found a startup, etc but you cannot work for anyone else.
A consulting visa would set up perverse incentives between employers and "consultants"; I don't see what the public policy difference is between someone working W-2 and someone working 1099, except that in the 1099 case the employer has an excuse not to pay FICA or offer health insurance.
A problem with startup visas is that nobody knows what a viable startup is, and countries have a strong incentive not to offer long-term residency to people who can't support themselves. So what we have to go on instead are proposals like "we'll allow you in if you're sponsored by a qualified venture capitalist", which creates it own set of perverse incentives.
All things being equal, public policy usually prefers employer-employee relationships over 1099. Tax collection is more sure, worker's comp and unemployment get paid (and the individual is covered), etc.
Probably the best way to deal with "startup visa" is to instead have a small-business visa. Small-business already has an understood (to the government) meaning, and there's already a lot of examples of slightly different rules for them.
Consulting visas, now that'd be useful! Right now I'm not even sure if it's legal to work with my american countries if I come for a visit. Sure, it's okay if I stay over here in Europe and work remotely, but the moment I set foot on american soil things get grey at best.
Job creation is the wrong metric. One could employ a million people digging ditches and then filling them up again, and ultimately nothing will have been accomplished save for some wealth redistribution.
Wealth creation is the key metric. While harder to measure, it's what actually moves society forward.
> One could employ a million people digging ditches and then filling them up again, and ultimately nothing will have been accomplished save for some wealth redistribution.
This is kind of obviously wrong. Just substitute "entertainment" for the ditch digging and it should become apparent why. Those people might have made their money in a silly way, but much of it will be spent, and that is important.
Wealth is goods and services people want. People want entertainment. People do not want ditches dug, then filled in again. Entertainers are generating wealth; a soft, fuzzy sort of wealth centered on meeting needs very high up the Maslow hierarchy, but wealth nonetheless, a luxury good. The ditch diggers and fillers are not.
I think the key thing (arguing the nuance re: wealth is hugely boring and unimportant) is that codex was arguing about "what actually moves society forward." His hypothetical ditch-diggers, unless they BURN the money they earn, will end up moving things forward when they spend their money.
(unless we're talking about a hypothetical society consisting entirely of hypothetical ditch diggers. again, boring)
No, that's looking at the wrong place. Yes, the ditch diggers may make money and that may go on to generate wealth, but at the point where we're paying the ditch diggers, we're burning wealth. We could either have gotten something for that money, or nothing, and we chose nothing. There's opportunity cost there. Quite significant, in fact.
A lot of people make this mistake, including the government and even it seems to me many economists, always looking to the next transaction and failing to think about this one. But this one is the one that counts right now. The mere fact that the dollar wasn't "destroyed" doesn't mean that it did anything good, and it certainly could have.
There's a discussion to be had about the "velocity of money" but this isn't really the place for it. The point is that if an economy is hydrolocked and nobody is spending, "throwing away" money can benefit everyone if it unlocks things.
The important metric is wealth creation beyond the wages the immigrants themselves capture. The picture right now is that immigrants to the USA clearly do produce wealth, however they capture all the benefits for themselves and it winds up a wash or net loss to the society at large.
Regardless of truth of the article, it looks like immigration reform is going to continue to be delayed. The whole "$100,000 in welfare then blow people up" message is going to take a lot of positive to overcome. It is possible to lobby past the event, but there doesn't seem to be a group willing to do that.
They don't seem to have the muscle to overcome the crisis. Neither has done the advertising to locals to push through a bill. They are not putting the money into the local markets to really count as a push.
I'm a current H1B holder. I would quit my current job and start a company if my visa status allowed me.
I've been working for over 4 years. As things stand, I have to wait for another ~5 years before I get my green card and start adding jobs to the economy. And that's assuming the US government does not delay it by making me jump through various hoops like they did with my H1B application.
You know that those two sentences are synonymous, right? (Immigrant [in the United States] from East Africa, and emigrant [to the United States] from East Africa.) You and MisterBastahrd pointlessly chose to read it as "immigrant [in East Africa] from East Africa", or are trying to point out that most people haven't personally migrated, when that was clearly not the meaning of either my comment, or the one I replied to.
Also, it's emigrant, now that we've gone full grammar nazi.
What percentage of immigrants start innovative businesses? I think it's negligible. Immigrants overwhelmingly enter the labor market and drive down wages.
The percentage of immigrants who start businesses is higher than the percentage of americans who start businesses.
Here is a data point: 40 Percent of Fortune 500 Companies Founded by Immigrants or Their Children: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2011/06/19/40-per... And because immigrants represent a minority of the people in america (12.6% as of 2007 [1]; and when adding their children this is likely still less than 40%), we can deduct they create more businesses per capita than americans.
Business creation is not a particularly useful metric. Note that I qualified with "innovative." That there are more restaurants and more people have their lawn professionally landscaped rather than cutting it themselves doesn't really create an argument for immigration.
The Fortune 500 stat smells pretty slippery and cherry picked. I mean, one co-founder had one parent born overseas and the company is counted as immigrant founded? This is meaningful? The vast majority of major companies were probably also founded by people who grew up in major urban centers. Immigrants are disproportionately likely to live in major cities. What happens when you control for that? I cast aspersions.
The link I provided is actually fairly rigorous in describing the effect of immigration as it is currently practiced in the USA: It drives down the wages of low earners and increases profits to the economic elite. It's probably a wash for the bulk of the middle class when measured in purely financial terms, but that ignores various psychic and ecological impacts. Did you know that current immigration rates projected out result in a USA population of over 600 million by the end of the century? Is it not obviously insane and ecologically criminal to allow that level of over population?
"Business creation is not a particularly useful metric"
Business creation is wealth creation. It is job creation. It is everything to the american economy.
"I mean, one co-founder had one parent born overseas and the company is counted as immigrant founded"
No it is not counted as immigrant-founded. The point of this statistic is to show that immigration has a positive effect on business creation. In other words, had the parent never immigrated, the child would not have founded a business (created wealth) in the USA.
I think the same is true in reverse: americans who emigrate are probably creating more businesses in countries they emigrate to, than citizens of these countries. Immigrants are risk-takers who want to take control of their working lives.
> Business creation is wealth creation. It is job creation. It is everything to the american economy.
Most new businesses are small businesses. The jobs associated with small business are significantly worse than those associated with larger business. You are oversimplifying this.
We need visas for entrepreneurs, we don't need more H-1b's