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Australian IT Workers Concerned About Migrants
sien writes "In Australia it is being asserted that Australia's intake of migrants skilled in IT is taking jobs and lowering wages for Australian citizens. It appears that in all developed countries, not just the US, the case that immigrants are lowering wages for IT workers is being made. Would programmers in the developed world be better off without immigration that favors IT or is there an overall benefit for the industry with skilled workers going to the developed world and thus making the industry larger?"
Once again the boom bust cycle continues...
1. high demand results in increasing supply (more uni graduates and immigration)
2. demand deminishes resulting in supply being met
3. demand bottoms out => oversupply
4. low demand => less uni graduates and less immigration
5. demand begins to increase
6. goto 1
Either the skilled immigrants are taking our jobs (competing under our labor laws), or the skilled foreigners are doing our jobs remotely.
Either the poor immigrants are responsible for all the poverty and crime, or else the birthrate is too low.
Admittedly, I didn't RTFA before deciding to post, but i have read it now. Basically, it's all summed up in the title. Some immigration analyst interviewed by what appears to be a newspaper says that too much skilled labor is causing a glut. Nothing new, for those of you who follow this kind of news in America, or any other country, i guess. damned foreigners (not that it's not a legitimately difficult situation).
A single source gave them the gist. Then at the end, here's the kicker:
But Australian Computer Society chief executive officer Dennis Furini said that while there was possibly an oversupply of entry-level programmers, there was a shortage of specialists in areas such as e-commerce and network security.
An Immigration Department spokesman said it relied on information from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations to draw up the skilled occupation list.
"The Immigration Department has no information suggesting IT jobs should be taken off the skilled occupation list," he said.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
assuming equal proficiency, if someone will do for $10 what i want $100 for, then obviously the guy who will do it for $10 will get the job
whether he lives in bangalore, san francisco, or melbourne
go ahead and fight that, go ahead and wail about the injustice of it all
what are you going to do about it? what can you do about it?
are you saying it's exploitation of the guy who makes less? well he doesn't have to deal with the real estate market in san francisco... so rather than complain about how little the guy in india is getting paid, why isn't the problem that you are getting too much money for what you do?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When you have a high standard of living (USA, France, Australia) workers in high paying industries expect decent hours and good wages.
Foreigners from countries with lower standards of living (large parts of Eastern Europe, Africa, portions of Asia) tend to willing to work long hours for what we'd consider a shitty salary, but for them is relatively high.
The worker Visa program also creates something of a hostage situation (in the U.S. at least). If cheap foreign laborers start bitching about their wages or working conditions, they can easily get their Visa revoked and sent back home. Australia also has work visa programs, so I imagine it is somewhat similar.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations?
As an American (white male - lower middle class) I just want people to realize that immigrants aren't the real problem - foreign workers are the main problem. The best solution is to make it easier for those foreign workers to migrate here and get decent jobs here. We have minimum wage laws and free competition that other countries don't have. A large number of foreigners working for $2/hr would move here where they can make $20/hr. I'd sure as hell rather compete locally where all workers are under similar laws and living expenses than with someone that lives in a dirt hut and gets dirt pay. There would be a dip in wages as competition grew but it'd be much less drastic than the dip from jobs moving out of the country. What do we really think is going to be left as a source of income for us as companies keep migrating jobs? Blue collar jobs have been leaving us for years, white collar jobs have been following - what is going to be left?
Make it easier for those workers to move into our western countries and encourage buying products produced within our own countries. That's how to keep wages high. Not by slowing migration. We want to force foreign countries to raise their minimum wage, improve their working and living conditions, etc and compete on a level ground with us. Pretty simple.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Sometimes for whatever reason, a nation might produce fewer skilled workers per capita in an industry than another nation does. But the fact is that a nation does need to protect its citizens, and an unmitigated deluge of skilled workers in an area from a nation with great capacity to produce them (perhaps they have a population that is 30 times larger) can be devastating to the local economy.
I like this post, because you actually display more sophisicated reasoning here than most of the talk-radio types that usually complain about this phenomenon. But I would like to point out something important.
The costs of producing something have an impact of the price of what's produced. If steel suddenly becomes more expensive, you can expect to pay more for refrigerators and cars--not quite as much more as the literal cost impact, but something approaching it. (There's some economic analysis that underlies this, but it's not important.) If the costs of production decrease, you have the opposite effect, where the cost of the product/service decreases.
Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.
So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).
Since IT services are a cost of doing other types of business, the costs of producing everything that relies on IT will tend to fall, too. Whether and how much depends on those particular markets and how much of their total costs are IT-related, but there will be an effect. In the end, the costs to end-consumers across the economy will go down. And it doesn't take an economist to realize that to the consumer, lower costs are the same thing as having more money.
Like you pointed out (and this is the part I liked), this can be pretty messy if it happens overnight, because the original IT workers who are losing jobs and seeing less in their paychecks will just be SOL. Costs might be lower for everybody, but it may be a net loss the the family depending on a sysadmin's (now decreased) income. The breadwinner might have to retrain or change jobs into a new field in order to get back his/her original income level.
But modern, 1st-world economies can absorb these changes decently well. As long as the percentage of IT workers in your work force isn't too high, and the change doesn't come too quickly, the retraining and job-switching will happen incrementally and people will have time to adjust. And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.
Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices. If you let the market do what it wants to do, you let the IT people take a hit in the short-medium term in exchange for greater prosperity in the economy as a whole.
An unmitigated deluge of skilled workers ... can be devastating to the local economy.
Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.
The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.
Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.
This is a small planet people, and everyone is just trying to get through life as best as they can.
Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.
/ sha020404.htm
The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.
Yet again,
The shell game, you can get a different job, ad naseum .
How many degrees will you have to get to "keep getting new jobs",
When the old one is "SOLD OUT" .
When does the cost of the new degrees exceed the pay from
restarting your career everytime the "corpocracy" decides to
sell your job to ANYONE who will work for less .
Under this theory, if they can do any job for less, then they
will do ALL jobs for less, and thus their will be no jobs for
workers that are citizens .
Your grandfather or great grandfather may have died for your
country, but that doesn't matter anymore .
Business as usual, the bottom line is to be fed .
Greed wins again .
http://www.engology.com/E-News1375.htm
Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.
I don't need a job, I own my own company now .
I am not so moronic that I cannot see that total replacement of all citizens by
L1 visa workers living in corporate owned slums sending most of their pay back
to their home country would have a negative impact .
During this time my and other London guest worker's corporate housing was frequently without heat, hot water and electricity.
http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/108
I do not blame the ppl of other nations for wanting to get money to take care
of their families, but I think they and their country would be better off in the long run
fixing their country rather than picking the low hanging fruit off their neighbor's trees .
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
It's an extreme example, but we used to have laws that made it illegal for black people to learn to read. Why? God forbid a black person should achieve the same ability to do a job as a white person.
We can't (ethically) prevent other people on this planet from educating themselves. We shouldn't (economically) prevent them from doing so either - a world with 50 million educated engineers is better than a world with 50 million people who can't read.
Australians (and Americans) don't lose jobs to immigrants because of migration. They lose jobs to them because the other person is better at doing the job, despite the inherent advantages they have in language and culture.
I work with immigrant engineering workers on a regular basis. These guys wern't born in the US, their families didn't speak english natively, they didn't grow up in this country - if these guys can do a job in a foriegn (to them) language, in a foreign culture, and to it better than a native.... whose fault is that? Getting (and keeping) a job is a competitive effort. I'd much rather see someone lose because the other person is better at the job than see someone lose because they were born in the wrong spot or have the wrong skin color.
And, at least in America, immigration is GOOD. Immigration lets us get young people to help fix our demographics problem. The best way to pay for all these damned baby boomers is to let a whole bunch of 20-something, educated immigrants into the country to pay taxes to support them (instead of letting them work in India where we don't get the money for our social system.)
paintball
In both cases the people doing the complaining are themselves almost all immigrants, they just got there a bit earlier.
Probably things like disease, unstable political situations, difficulty of obtaining work visas, etc. Or maybe such a concept is too far outside their comfort zone to consider.
I know I would have to think long and hard before moving outside the US, even if I knew that there were no inherent risks. My friends and family are here, and I like the community in which I live.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.