Relocation is helpful, but only to an extent. If the job is located in Bumfuck, Louisiana, how many tech people actually want to live in a place like that, even if the cost of living is cheaper and relo is compensated?
How do you propose to get power across the Strait of Gibraltar?
Morocco and Algeria aren't the most politically stable countries in the world either, and aren't far removed from the nations like Tunisia and Libya that just experienced violent uprisings. You want to make Europe's power and economy dependent on these nations? All it would take is a small terrorist attack against some transmission line towers to cause chaos and plunge parts of the continent into darkness. That seems like a rather stupid idea to me.
>You do understand that by holding these people out, you're just as well "allowing Mexicans to die in the streets", right?
What about Africans? What are you personally doing to help Africans who are starving? What about people starving in various places in Asia? How is it the US's responsibility to take care of every single indigent person in the whole world? And how would we, when there's 7.5B people on earth, and the US only has 310M? Why are the Mexicans more important than the Africans? And why isn't the Mexican government being called on to take care of their own people?
>These people aren't being forcibly captured and taken into the country: they come of their own will, they work for pay (such as they can find)
Yeah, they used to say the same thing about indentured servants. People willingly became indentured.
>and they are always free to leave.
And do what? Starve? That's not much of a choice.
>The whole point of legalizing immigration is to ensure that said labor force is not quite as cheap (since min. wage would apply and could actually be enforced),
And how does that help? Walmart pays minimum wage, and taxpayers are subsidizing them because Walmart's workers all have welfare and Medicaid. So why are you so interested in making taxpayers subsidize cheap labor for big corporations anyway?
You mean HVDC cables? They're installed all over Europe and are working fine, thanks. It would be pretty straightforward to have several of them piping solar power from the Sahara
I thought Europeans were supposed to be better at geography than Americans....
Take a look at a map. In case you didn't realize, there's a large body of water between Europe and the Sahara Desert; it's called the Mediterranean Sea. I've never heard of anyone building transmission lines over large bodies of water.
You could go around it I suppose, but aside from the even greater transmission losses from this extra distance, now you're talking about putting your critical infrastructure through countries like Syria. You don't think that's going to be a problem?
The latest thing I've seen from the Koch camp (I assume that's where it's from) is some picture about wind farms killing birds, and comparing them to gas and oil, and complaining that gas and oil companies have been fined for various practices yet they don't kill any birds (I guess they forgot about all the birds caught in oil spills).
H1-B aren't taking me and other Gen-Xers jobs, they're taking the millennial's jobs. And the Baby Boomers who pissed & shit in the punch bowl that used to hold the American dream don't care enough to do anything about it.
It's not just that. The Millenials have mostly drunk the immigration kool-aid sold to them by their corporate and political masters, and seem to be mostly in favor of open borders, meanwhile they advocate this from their parents' basements because they can't afford to move out on their own.
This country is completely screwed, and it's pretty scary to think what it'll look like in 20 years.
So you're going to allow Mexicans do die in the streets by denying them medical care because they haven't paid enough taxes? And you're going to use them as a cheap labor force with no rights? That sounds great. I guess that's the real Democrat motive here: they want to enrich business owners by giving them a bunch of laborers they can use as indentured servants. So things really aren't that different from the 1800s, when the Democrats were the ones defending slavery.
Or, we can give them all Medicaid and welfare and other social services, and we can bankrupt ourselves because there simply isn't enough work to go around in this poor economy (esp. for unskilled people who don't speak English). We're already subsidizing Walmart by giving their workers welfare because Walmart won't pay them enough; now you want to subsidize cheap labor for more big corporations? All along, the Democrats have been saying the Republicans are the ones in the pocket of Big Business, but it seems that it's really the other way around.
That was many generations ago. How are the Mexicans going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed against the Azteks and Mayans anyway? And how are those who have some Aztek descent going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed (they were known for human sacrifice)?
Unless you're willing to go back to the beginning of human existence (~2 million years) and figure out who wronged whom, and make reparations accordingly, then shut up about this stuff. When everyone involved is dead, it's irrelevant.
Finally, when the US seized Mexican territory, there weren't any people living there except Native Americans. How is it OK for the Mexican government (run by descendents of southwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim land lived on by Native Americans, but it's not OK for the US government (run by descendents of northwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim the same land lived on by Native Americans? Why do people like you have a bigoted bias in favor of descendents of people from Spain and Portugal, and against descendents of people from Germany and Britain and France (mostly Britain)?
All of the foriegn workers I know live in insular communities with others from their region of the globe, and adamantly refuse to let go of the majority of their native culture including language and customs.
You need to spend some time around tech workers. All the Indian and Chinese tech workers I've met speak English (Indians usually much better than Chinese, granted) and work pretty well with people of all ethnicities in the workplace. They're also usually pretty open to hanging out with others.
Yes, Mexicans are totally different from this. One of the big problems I see with the immigration debate is people conflating different groups of immigrants. Some groups are very good at integrating (Indians in particular) and contributing to the economy, other groups don't integrate well at all and are a big net negative to the economy. We could use some more of the former, and we don't need any more of the latter (and honestly, we can't afford it). The difference is usually correlated to education I think, but also some other cultural factors (English is basically a second language in India because of the effects of British colonialism, for instance, and both Indian and Chinese cultures very heavily emphasize education).
I sure haven't heard much from the Dems in recent years about labor unions. They seem to just assume the unions will support them, but I've seen zero actual support of unions from the Dem politicians. Instead, it seems their #1 issue is bringing in as many low-cost workers as possible, which seems rather contrary to the goals of unions.
If you make the offer, then it's only fair if you offer it to everyone worldwide, regardless of their ability to come here on their own. That means we need to offer relocation services to everyone worldwide who wants to come here, not just those who happen to live within walking distance and on the same continent.
When this happens, several billion people are going to want to come here and get social services. How are we supposed to pay for that? Them working and paying taxes isn't enough. We already have liberals complaining that Walmart is effectively getting subsidized workers because their employees are all making minimum wage and are on welfare and food stamps. So they're costing society more than they're chipping in. How is that going to work when you add tens of millions more, or several billion more?
Great, when some aliens come along who are more developed than we are, we can use your post to justify giving them the planet and putting all us humans into vaporization chambers.
Not really. This country was built upon the corpses of many of those immigrants. They were worked to death; there were no ERs to take care of them, no welfare or food stamps to make sure they weren't starving to death, and no worker protection laws. People died on the job routinely, either from accidents or overwork. They just hauled the bodies away and kept working. This happened well into the 20th Century.
Do you really want to go back to that?
We can't afford to give all these social services to everyone who wants them worldwide.
There were various Native American nations, you moron. The European "colonists" invaded, took over, and committed genocide against the people they displaced.
The Native Americans are a great example of the dangers of not securing your borders and allowing unlimited migration into your territory. Unfortunately, what's done is done, (and it's not like they stood much of a chance anyway) but that doesn't mean we have to make the same mistake.
No it's not, it's a discussion about both H1B and other legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants, because liberals and Democrats absolutely refuse to differentiate the two.
Routinely the best and the brightest of foreign nations come to the United States. We get the cream of the crop.
The poor, unskilled people coming over our southern border are NOT the "cream of the crop" and certainly not the "best and brightest". Yes, poaching other countries' smart people is a good tactic for a self-interested country, but you do that by bringing in highly educated people from elsewhere, not by bringing in dirt-poor uneducated people who immediately apply for government assistance.
You say that we need more workers to shore up Social Security; what about all the welfare payments going to these people? Liberals have been whining for a while now about Walmart getting subsidized workers because they're all on welfare because Walmart's wages are so low (in fact, this is true of just about any place that pays minimum wage). So how is bringing in even more minimum wage workers going to improve things? We'll have to pay out even more in welfare and Medicaid payments, so that we can subsidize more businesses to have minimum-wage help.
It's really weird how on one hand, liberals complain that minimum wage is too low and we need more jobs for low-end workers. But then on the other hand they want to bring in even more minimum-wage workers to compete with them for the few jobs left.
Ok, let me spell out my proposed tech-worker immigration system for you guys, because each of you keeps clinging to some mis-feature of our current law and pointing out how that'll ruin it all.
1) There are no limits to tech-worker immigration (or really, any immigration). The catch is that some company needs to put up a one-time fee to "sponsor" the immigrant to come in. The fee is high; how about $25K. We can reduce the bureacracy of the immigration office too by not screening immigrants very much (for things like job skills). Who's going to pay $25K to bring in some fruit-picker or janitor? But for a C++ programmer, it might be worth it to some company. They should screen immigrants for their criminal record, however, to make sure criminal gangs don't use it to bring in people.
2) The fee is one-time. Once the worker is in, they get a green card. It's good for life, but after 10 years they can become a Citizen if they want (not required) if they're in good standing, pass some citizenship tests, etc. to show they've been indoctrinated to US life and culture and speak English (if it's good enough for Canada, it's good enough for me). Or they can just stick with the green card if they want. The green card is just like the current one: you're basically just like a Citizen, except you can't vote, and you're not eligible for all the social services that Citizens are (this part is somewhat debatable). You can move wherever you want, you can change jobs whenever you want, you can't be deported unless you do something criminal and are convicted. Notice that there's no such thing as "renewing". Your green card is good indefinitely.
Basically, this means there's no such thing as "H1B" any more. There's only a green card. To get one, you just get some company to sponsor you. (Or, there's other avenues, such as having a pile of cash ready to deposit in a US bank.) Once you're in, you're in, and you can't be easily thrown out. That way, they can't be exploited any more than anyone else.
Of course, companies will complain about this system, because it prevents them from having indentured servants. Too bad. They'll complain that after fronting $25K (or more, maybe that number is a bit low), the immigrant could jump ship. Again, too bad; you better make sure you pay him well, and the job is good. If you're really that "desperate" for qualified workers, you'll pay up. If you're not willing to pay up, then you're obviously not as desperate as you claim, are you?
Yes, that's basically true, but if you bring in even more workers in a severely depressed economy, it just makes it even worse because of more competition for the few jobs that remain, and the downward pressure on wages/salaries that results.
No, if you make it so that the H1 visa holder change jobs and at any time after the initial $15k fee, then it would be utterly stupid for the initial company to underpay him.
>I think your solution leaves out that many of the H1-B visa applicants would be willing to work for less than the $13,000 gap, resulting in lower salaries all around, the same amount of displaced workers, and more exploitation.
I'm not so sure about that.
Remember, once one of these people comes over and works for $13k less for a few months, he's now in the country, so if some other country offers him $13k more, then he can just quit and go to work for the new place. Yes, the pool of workers being larger would have a downward trend on wages maybe, but everyone would be able to get market rate, and immigrants wouldn't be stuck working for the low-paying company under threat of deportation. Also, if the hiring company has to pay $15K to the government in immigration fees just to bring the foreign worker here, then it would be pretty stupid of them to pay significantly less than the market rate, since the worker could quit and go to the competition at any time.
Very good point. The H1-B program is great for employers, because they can bring in skilled workers and then pressure them to work themselves to the bone because they can't easily change jobs, making them indentured servants.
Somehow, you never hear the Democrats talk about this or work to change it.
Why does the US need a population infusion? All the new manufacturing in the US is heavily automated; in fact, the big fear now is that increasing automation is going to render many lower and middle-class jobs obsolete. We aren't going to need taxi drivers pretty soon, for instance, because of driver-less cars. The economy's in the shitter (except for the 1%), and good-paying jobs are drying up. So why again do we need a population infusion?
Are you advocating that we start treating workers the way they do in China, where they live in company barracks as virtual slaves and there's no minimum wage? This seems to be what the open-borders advocates are advocating these days: bringing in a giant number of easily-exploited laborers so that corporate profits can be increased.
I thought the Republicans were supposed to be the ones in the pockets of Big Business, but these days it seems that the Democrats are the ones more guilty of that.
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Relocation is helpful, but only to an extent. If the job is located in Bumfuck, Louisiana, how many tech people actually want to live in a place like that, even if the cost of living is cheaper and relo is compensated?
How do you propose to get power across the Strait of Gibraltar?
Morocco and Algeria aren't the most politically stable countries in the world either, and aren't far removed from the nations like Tunisia and Libya that just experienced violent uprisings. You want to make Europe's power and economy dependent on these nations? All it would take is a small terrorist attack against some transmission line towers to cause chaos and plunge parts of the continent into darkness. That seems like a rather stupid idea to me.
>You do understand that by holding these people out, you're just as well "allowing Mexicans to die in the streets", right?
What about Africans? What are you personally doing to help Africans who are starving? What about people starving in various places in Asia? How is it the US's responsibility to take care of every single indigent person in the whole world? And how would we, when there's 7.5B people on earth, and the US only has 310M? Why are the Mexicans more important than the Africans? And why isn't the Mexican government being called on to take care of their own people?
>These people aren't being forcibly captured and taken into the country: they come of their own will, they work for pay (such as they can find)
Yeah, they used to say the same thing about indentured servants. People willingly became indentured.
>and they are always free to leave.
And do what? Starve? That's not much of a choice.
>The whole point of legalizing immigration is to ensure that said labor force is not quite as cheap (since min. wage would apply and could actually be enforced),
And how does that help? Walmart pays minimum wage, and taxpayers are subsidizing them because Walmart's workers all have welfare and Medicaid. So why are you so interested in making taxpayers subsidize cheap labor for big corporations anyway?
You mean HVDC cables? They're installed all over Europe and are working fine, thanks. It would be pretty straightforward to have several of them piping solar power from the Sahara
I thought Europeans were supposed to be better at geography than Americans....
Take a look at a map. In case you didn't realize, there's a large body of water between Europe and the Sahara Desert; it's called the Mediterranean Sea. I've never heard of anyone building transmission lines over large bodies of water.
You could go around it I suppose, but aside from the even greater transmission losses from this extra distance, now you're talking about putting your critical infrastructure through countries like Syria. You don't think that's going to be a problem?
How exactly do you propose to connect giant transmission lines across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans?
The latest thing I've seen from the Koch camp (I assume that's where it's from) is some picture about wind farms killing birds, and comparing them to gas and oil, and complaining that gas and oil companies have been fined for various practices yet they don't kill any birds (I guess they forgot about all the birds caught in oil spills).
Really? Google+ has taken off? That is news to me and anyone working outside of Google.
It's their attempt at a Big Lie: a lie repeated over and over until everyone believes it's true.
H1-B aren't taking me and other Gen-Xers jobs, they're taking the millennial's jobs. And the Baby Boomers who pissed & shit in the punch bowl that used to hold the American dream don't care enough to do anything about it.
It's not just that. The Millenials have mostly drunk the immigration kool-aid sold to them by their corporate and political masters, and seem to be mostly in favor of open borders, meanwhile they advocate this from their parents' basements because they can't afford to move out on their own.
This country is completely screwed, and it's pretty scary to think what it'll look like in 20 years.
So you're going to allow Mexicans do die in the streets by denying them medical care because they haven't paid enough taxes? And you're going to use them as a cheap labor force with no rights? That sounds great. I guess that's the real Democrat motive here: they want to enrich business owners by giving them a bunch of laborers they can use as indentured servants. So things really aren't that different from the 1800s, when the Democrats were the ones defending slavery.
Or, we can give them all Medicaid and welfare and other social services, and we can bankrupt ourselves because there simply isn't enough work to go around in this poor economy (esp. for unskilled people who don't speak English). We're already subsidizing Walmart by giving their workers welfare because Walmart won't pay them enough; now you want to subsidize cheap labor for more big corporations? All along, the Democrats have been saying the Republicans are the ones in the pocket of Big Business, but it seems that it's really the other way around.
That was many generations ago. How are the Mexicans going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed against the Azteks and Mayans anyway? And how are those who have some Aztek descent going to make up for the atrocities their ancestors committed (they were known for human sacrifice)?
Unless you're willing to go back to the beginning of human existence (~2 million years) and figure out who wronged whom, and make reparations accordingly, then shut up about this stuff. When everyone involved is dead, it's irrelevant.
Finally, when the US seized Mexican territory, there weren't any people living there except Native Americans. How is it OK for the Mexican government (run by descendents of southwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim land lived on by Native Americans, but it's not OK for the US government (run by descendents of northwestern European colonists who stole the land) to claim the same land lived on by Native Americans? Why do people like you have a bigoted bias in favor of descendents of people from Spain and Portugal, and against descendents of people from Germany and Britain and France (mostly Britain)?
All of the foriegn workers I know live in insular communities with others from their region of the globe, and adamantly refuse to let go of the majority of their native culture including language and customs.
You need to spend some time around tech workers. All the Indian and Chinese tech workers I've met speak English (Indians usually much better than Chinese, granted) and work pretty well with people of all ethnicities in the workplace. They're also usually pretty open to hanging out with others.
Yes, Mexicans are totally different from this. One of the big problems I see with the immigration debate is people conflating different groups of immigrants. Some groups are very good at integrating (Indians in particular) and contributing to the economy, other groups don't integrate well at all and are a big net negative to the economy. We could use some more of the former, and we don't need any more of the latter (and honestly, we can't afford it). The difference is usually correlated to education I think, but also some other cultural factors (English is basically a second language in India because of the effects of British colonialism, for instance, and both Indian and Chinese cultures very heavily emphasize education).
I sure haven't heard much from the Dems in recent years about labor unions. They seem to just assume the unions will support them, but I've seen zero actual support of unions from the Dem politicians. Instead, it seems their #1 issue is bringing in as many low-cost workers as possible, which seems rather contrary to the goals of unions.
If you make the offer, then it's only fair if you offer it to everyone worldwide, regardless of their ability to come here on their own. That means we need to offer relocation services to everyone worldwide who wants to come here, not just those who happen to live within walking distance and on the same continent.
When this happens, several billion people are going to want to come here and get social services. How are we supposed to pay for that? Them working and paying taxes isn't enough. We already have liberals complaining that Walmart is effectively getting subsidized workers because their employees are all making minimum wage and are on welfare and food stamps. So they're costing society more than they're chipping in. How is that going to work when you add tens of millions more, or several billion more?
Great, when some aliens come along who are more developed than we are, we can use your post to justify giving them the planet and putting all us humans into vaporization chambers.
Seemed to have worked out fine
Not really. This country was built upon the corpses of many of those immigrants. They were worked to death; there were no ERs to take care of them, no welfare or food stamps to make sure they weren't starving to death, and no worker protection laws. People died on the job routinely, either from accidents or overwork. They just hauled the bodies away and kept working. This happened well into the 20th Century.
Do you really want to go back to that?
We can't afford to give all these social services to everyone who wants them worldwide.
There were various Native American nations, you moron. The European "colonists" invaded, took over, and committed genocide against the people they displaced.
The Native Americans are a great example of the dangers of not securing your borders and allowing unlimited migration into your territory. Unfortunately, what's done is done, (and it's not like they stood much of a chance anyway) but that doesn't mean we have to make the same mistake.
Also I hope you at least feel sorry for somebody who crossed the border as a child (as in, their parents took them).
Fine, they can stay, but their parents get deported. If they don't want their family "torn apart", they can bring the kid with them.
This is a discussion about H1B workers.
No it's not, it's a discussion about both H1B and other legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants, because liberals and Democrats absolutely refuse to differentiate the two.
Routinely the best and the brightest of foreign nations come to the United States. We get the cream of the crop.
The poor, unskilled people coming over our southern border are NOT the "cream of the crop" and certainly not the "best and brightest". Yes, poaching other countries' smart people is a good tactic for a self-interested country, but you do that by bringing in highly educated people from elsewhere, not by bringing in dirt-poor uneducated people who immediately apply for government assistance.
You say that we need more workers to shore up Social Security; what about all the welfare payments going to these people? Liberals have been whining for a while now about Walmart getting subsidized workers because they're all on welfare because Walmart's wages are so low (in fact, this is true of just about any place that pays minimum wage). So how is bringing in even more minimum wage workers going to improve things? We'll have to pay out even more in welfare and Medicaid payments, so that we can subsidize more businesses to have minimum-wage help.
It's really weird how on one hand, liberals complain that minimum wage is too low and we need more jobs for low-end workers. But then on the other hand they want to bring in even more minimum-wage workers to compete with them for the few jobs left.
Ok, let me spell out my proposed tech-worker immigration system for you guys, because each of you keeps clinging to some mis-feature of our current law and pointing out how that'll ruin it all.
1) There are no limits to tech-worker immigration (or really, any immigration). The catch is that some company needs to put up a one-time fee to "sponsor" the immigrant to come in. The fee is high; how about $25K. We can reduce the bureacracy of the immigration office too by not screening immigrants very much (for things like job skills). Who's going to pay $25K to bring in some fruit-picker or janitor? But for a C++ programmer, it might be worth it to some company. They should screen immigrants for their criminal record, however, to make sure criminal gangs don't use it to bring in people.
2) The fee is one-time. Once the worker is in, they get a green card. It's good for life, but after 10 years they can become a Citizen if they want (not required) if they're in good standing, pass some citizenship tests, etc. to show they've been indoctrinated to US life and culture and speak English (if it's good enough for Canada, it's good enough for me). Or they can just stick with the green card if they want. The green card is just like the current one: you're basically just like a Citizen, except you can't vote, and you're not eligible for all the social services that Citizens are (this part is somewhat debatable). You can move wherever you want, you can change jobs whenever you want, you can't be deported unless you do something criminal and are convicted. Notice that there's no such thing as "renewing". Your green card is good indefinitely.
Basically, this means there's no such thing as "H1B" any more. There's only a green card. To get one, you just get some company to sponsor you. (Or, there's other avenues, such as having a pile of cash ready to deposit in a US bank.) Once you're in, you're in, and you can't be easily thrown out. That way, they can't be exploited any more than anyone else.
Of course, companies will complain about this system, because it prevents them from having indentured servants. Too bad. They'll complain that after fronting $25K (or more, maybe that number is a bit low), the immigrant could jump ship. Again, too bad; you better make sure you pay him well, and the job is good. If you're really that "desperate" for qualified workers, you'll pay up. If you're not willing to pay up, then you're obviously not as desperate as you claim, are you?
Yes, that's basically true, but if you bring in even more workers in a severely depressed economy, it just makes it even worse because of more competition for the few jobs that remain, and the downward pressure on wages/salaries that results.
No, if you make it so that the H1 visa holder change jobs and at any time after the initial $15k fee, then it would be utterly stupid for the initial company to underpay him.
>I think your solution leaves out that many of the H1-B visa applicants would be willing to work for less than the $13,000 gap, resulting in lower salaries all around, the same amount of displaced workers, and more exploitation.
I'm not so sure about that.
Remember, once one of these people comes over and works for $13k less for a few months, he's now in the country, so if some other country offers him $13k more, then he can just quit and go to work for the new place. Yes, the pool of workers being larger would have a downward trend on wages maybe, but everyone would be able to get market rate, and immigrants wouldn't be stuck working for the low-paying company under threat of deportation. Also, if the hiring company has to pay $15K to the government in immigration fees just to bring the foreign worker here, then it would be pretty stupid of them to pay significantly less than the market rate, since the worker could quit and go to the competition at any time.
Very good point. The H1-B program is great for employers, because they can bring in skilled workers and then pressure them to work themselves to the bone because they can't easily change jobs, making them indentured servants.
Somehow, you never hear the Democrats talk about this or work to change it.
Why does the US need a population infusion? All the new manufacturing in the US is heavily automated; in fact, the big fear now is that increasing automation is going to render many lower and middle-class jobs obsolete. We aren't going to need taxi drivers pretty soon, for instance, because of driver-less cars. The economy's in the shitter (except for the 1%), and good-paying jobs are drying up. So why again do we need a population infusion?
Are you advocating that we start treating workers the way they do in China, where they live in company barracks as virtual slaves and there's no minimum wage? This seems to be what the open-borders advocates are advocating these days: bringing in a giant number of easily-exploited laborers so that corporate profits can be increased.
I thought the Republicans were supposed to be the ones in the pockets of Big Business, but these days it seems that the Democrats are the ones more guilty of that.