If Immigration Reform Is Dead, So Is Raising the H-1B Cap

dcblogs writes: In a speech Wednesday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) declared immigration reform dead. He chastised and baited Republicans in Congress for blocking reform, and declared that winning the White House without the support of a growing Hispanic population will become mathematically impossible. "The Republican Presidential nominee, whoever he or she may be, will enter the race with an electoral college deficit they cannot make up," said Gutierrez. If he's right, and comprehensive immigration reform is indeed dead, then so too is the tech industry's effort to raise the cap on H-1B visas. Immigration reform advocates have successfully blocked any effort to take up the immigration issue in piecemeal fashion, lest business support for comprehensive reform peel away. Next year may create an entirely new set of problems for tech. If the Republicans take control of the Senate, the tech industry will face this obstacle: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee could become its next chairman. He has been a consistent critic of the H-1B program through the years. "The H-1B program is so popular that it's now replacing the U.S. labor force," said Grassley, at one point.

Comments

Unpopular opinion ahead

[i kan reed]

H1B is merging with the us labor force, not replacing. The overwhelming H1B workers I know have either become citizens or are eager to do so.

R's support lower H1B caps?

[mcolgin]

It's surprising to be that the R's support lower H1B caps. I've never really heard a position from the Dem's on this. I'm not exactly educated on this issue, but it seems that H1B directly compete with my ability to be a programmer; and large companies are the ones mostly vying for the talent H1B brings in. With barriers to competition being as low as a cost of a computer, why would we want increased H1B? I know they say there's not enough US workers for the tech industry.. but do they really mean, there's not enough CHEAP tech workers? What's the Dem's position on this?

Re:R's support lower H1B caps?

[TechyImmigrant]

You interest in having employment opportunities as a programmer is served by having a large programming industry in your locality.

Anything that makes it easy for people to move to where the programming jobs are entrenches that place as being where the programmers and the programming jobs will be.

If you aren't competing with immigrants, you aren't going to be competing for any jobs, because they'll be elsewhere.

Re:R's support lower H1B caps?

[NormalVisual]

If we were talking about metallurgists you'd have a point but most programmers I don't think size of local industry is their main obstacle to employment nor do I think the availability of workers is a driver for the size of the industry.

It isn't always, but depending on the kind of skills/work needed it can be. For instance, if you're primarily an embedded or industial automation developer, you're going to have an easier time finding work in an area that already does a lot of similar work, if for no other reason than there are non-trivial costs to running an embedded shop beyond just the software tools.

Simplest way to deal with H1 Visas

[gurps_npc]

Basically the argument is thus:

Employers: There is a shortage of good tech qorkers. Give us more H1 visas so we can get the work done.

Employees: These darn foreigners are taking our jobs! They work for much less than us people born in Amerika! (studys show about $13,000 less http://www.workpermit.com/news... )

The simplest solution is of course to offer unlimited H1 Visas - at the cost of $15,000, paid by the corporation, before the employee is hired.. (with inflation adjustments so this doesn't become abused).

This solves all real claims of not enough tech workers, it reduces the US budget, and gets rid of the financial incentive to refuse to hire perfectly good American tech workers.

Re:No, they're replacing.

[ShanghaiBill]

No, immigrants are replacing native workers.

This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed number of jobs in an economy. The number of jobs tends to expand when more workers are available. Liberal immigration policies are correlated with lower unemployment. When Poland joined the EU, most current members blocked immigration. The exceptions were Britain and Sweden, which subsequently had the lowest unemployment rates in Europe as Poles moved in, set up households, paid rent, bought furniture, and created plenty of secondary jobs.

The Center For Immigration Studies just released a report showing that all employment growth since 2000 has gone to immigrants

Just because A=B does not mean that A caused B. The number of jobs created would have almost certainly been even lower without immigration.

There is no general labor shortage.

Who said there was? But there are shortages in many areas. For instance, there is a big shortage of non-immigrant farm labor. Do you really believe that an unemployed white guy is going to pick lettuce?

He's speaking for me

[rsilvergun]

At least if we mean Republican Politicians, which is implied by the context. There's several cases where Republican leadership got caught saying they want to crash the economy so that people will blame the democrats. There's several (mostly on the Tea Party fringes) who believe the democrats policies are so damaging to the country that it'd be better to wreak the economy than to risk those policies.

So yeah, Grandparent's kinda trolling, but compared to what the Repubs are doing it's small potatoes.

Re:No, they're replacing.

[riverat1]

What you say is largely true. If somehow you could deport all of the people in the country illegally tomorrow it would plunge us into a massive depression from the drop in economic activity.