H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).
If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.
I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).
If they have direct family members that are citizens they should skip the wait apply through the family path, although they would need to be on good terms with said family member as they have to vouch for their welfare payments for 10 years
At least it that way about a decade ago, as I’m realizing things might have changed since then
The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.
This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.
And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.
1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.
Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.
I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.
I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.
There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.
(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.
Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?
Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.
I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.
*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.
that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.
and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.
100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.
I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.
The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.
If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.
Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.
At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.
It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
