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I hate it when anyone on any side politically talks about immigration. The libertarians and billionaire class appear to be pro-H1B because we are workers who feed their money machines and can’t easily quit or unionize. The liberals think we are privileged immigrants who take their tech jobs and we don’t need help in this utterly broken system.

The leftists who think we are cheap labor who take American jobs, you all suck too.

Adrianna Tan

I’ve seen a number of people advocating for H1B to be restricted because the job market is so bad now, they don’t want the extra competition. They also feel it’s unfair; and think employers always choose H1B workers. H1B workers who are struggling to find new jobs to replace the ones they lost in the same layoffs, and having to give up their entire lives if they fail, will be surprised to hear this.

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io my mother, who has a degree in urban design, had to turn down a dream job offer from san josé city bcause they wouldn't sponsor her visa- instead, she designs offices.
it kinda severely limits your job options

@skinnylatte
I have a lot of thoughts in support of immigrants whether sponsored or not. It seems like the hardest thing to do is to be displaced, even if it's voluntary. With the current president elect I don't want to be part of this country anymore but figuring out a different option is so complicated.

@Adventurer if it helps, it’s the same everywhere else right now

@skinnylatte They don't want H1B workers but they also don't want to invest in education. 🤡

@ilias @skinnylatte US women are not going to make enough babies to float a consumer-based system.

Economically we're hosed if we don't have immigrants (just like most of the global North countries with birth control and educated women).

The push for forced pregnancy, tradwifery, and deportation embodies every kind of failure: it is sexist & racist AF, inhumane, eugenicist, immoral, unpopular, hypocritical beyond belief, and it recreates a past failure condition.

@ilias @skinnylatte Higher ed requires international students paying foreign student rates. Literally the potential immigrants are funding education here.

Both immigrants and students are captive to employers, so employers should fund both.

@skry @ilias @skinnylatte this is an excellent point! Especially the Higher Ed in California since it’s really affordable for in-state students. It makes sense they would need to price gouge international students to balance the budget.

@skry @ilias @skinnylatte For the record, there is only one state in Germany (Baden-Württemberg) where international students are charged more than German or EU students.

In the 15 other states, international students pay no tuition fees, same as everyone else.

@juergen_hubert @skry @skinnylatte Ok? But we are talking about he US here not Germany. International students should pay more though, German tax payers shouldn't be paying for the education of foreigners.

@ilias @skry @skinnylatte Why not?

I mean, either they will stick around in Germany after graduation and add to Germany's work force and tax payers, or they will return to their home countries, in which case they will become valuable contacts for German business later on - and Germany exports _lots_ of stuff around the world.

It's a win-win situation, really. The American strategy of squeezing every last dollar out of both domestic and international students never made much sense to me, though I suppose you can get away with a lot if you are the dominant political, cultural, and economic hegemon on the planet.

@juergen_hubert @ilias @skinnylatte Every last dollar out of everyone, sadly.

University should be freely available to all, because we all need educated neighbors.

America's mistake was creating a robber-barony by privatizing things that should be public services or human rights.

Modern neofeudalists believe that if commoners aren't desperate they won't contribute to society. The price of education is the steep incline on the escape path.

@juergen_hubert @ilias @skinnylatte In the US, some states pay off student loans for workers who stay in that state after they graduate.

On a national scale, that might be the way to enjoy both cosmopolitan campuses and the benefit of top immigrant talent, while making the tax fairness work itself out by adding a high-salary taxpayer.

@skry @juergen_hubert
Maybe they should allow Americans to go to college without drowning in debt. Then you won't need any h1b workers in the first place.

@ilias @skry There is nothing wrong with immigration as such, but allowing people to get an education without getting into debt is a worthwhile goal in its own right, independent of the topic of immigration.

@skinnylatte The rules for TN are even worse. I ended up TN after my L1B ran out and my employer bungled the H1 process and it's an even more precarious set of golden handcuffs. One of the worst stretches of my professional life ever.

@skinnylatte but hiring someone on a visa is more work for the employer, so why would they want to favor an H1B worker if they can have an equally competent USian?

@krazykitty @skinnylatte for one thing because it's unethical to discriminate

For another thing, because I hired the best person for the job, with extraordinary expertise I didn't find from other candidates. (I don't believe that someone HAS to have extraordinary talent or knowledge to move to a different country, that's just the slice of jobs I hire for)

That it's "more work" to hire someone on a visa is borderline dehumanizing. The questions they ask for "justifying" a visa are almost infantilizing. As a manager, I shouldn't be involved in a visa beyond verifying that yes this person works here with this job, title, etc.

Adrianna also addressed the abusive capitalist motivation for hiring visa workers (holding onto someone who can't easily leave or take another job), but I hope you can see the ethical issues with limiting someone's autonomy

@saraislet I certainly wasn't trying to convey *my* point of view, sorry, of course my tone was not clear. I've worked in the US exclusively on visas, and I now live in France where I regularly hire foreigners with no consideration for the potential administrative burden (it would be really rich to complain of the extra paperwork for me when they're the ones being treated as less than human) @skinnylatte

@krazykitty @skinnylatte But it’s not. It might be more work for the HR employee they have hired, but Elon Musk isn’t doing any extra work for Visa holders who come here to work at Twitter. They have wage slaves for that!

@maggiejk @krazykitty @skinnylatte you mean the Elon who violated the terms of his own visa? That Elon?

@CatDragon @krazykitty @skinnylatte of course, the rules don’t apply to white men in Amerikkka.

@maggiejk FYI that's not entirely true. It has to be the visa holder's manager who answers specific questions about the role, the title, the expertise needed, etc. HR and Legal help where they can but the manager has to answer some simple questions

@krazykitty @skinnylatte same reason they would rather hire parents than single people even though they complain that parents have to take time off when their kids get sick.

I don’t have kids, when I was building my career I could quit my job and move to the other side of the country and have a new job before I even got there. They don’t want us to have any freedom that’s why they fought so hard to have our healthcare attached to our employment.

That way most people can’t just quit. Those Visa holders are trapped at those jobs in most situations. They can’t just quit.

@maggiejk there's also rampant employment discrimination against women who might take parental leave

So women with children over 5 are less likely to have more children and are the most likely women to be hired. But there's also rampant discrimination against mothers because they may need extra time off for caretaking, no school days, sick children, etc. Not to mention rampant discrimination against older women (ageism+misogyny).

It's all misogyny, and it's all illegal in the US (and even more illegal in many other places like the EU) — but it unfortunately DOES still happen regularly 😞

@skinnylatte respond with this every time you see it

@skinnylatte The reality is H1B and immigration in general are a minuscule drop in the competition ocean for IT and software engineers. In most cases, all those layoffs aren’t replaced by direct hires of any sort — they’re replaced by vendor contracts. The consolidation of tech services to a handful of contracted firms is what’s squeezing tech workers (globally) right now.

@skinnylatte From a policy standpoint, if there is more need than workers, H1B should increase, right? How about the opposite: if there are more workers than jobs, should H1B go down? Isn’t H1B status temporary?

I personally believe H1B is good for us, and have many H1B friends/colleagues, but if the reality is a shrinking market, I’d side with protectionism.

@reiterator not ok. US immigration controls will never respond quickly enough to economic cycles. It’ll be 4+ years or maybe even before any substantial change happens. Using this as a lever for managing demand does not work. It’s already heavily restricted, only 1 in 4 people applying for a H1B get one. It’s also a tiny drop in the bucket. I hope people can stop seeing H1B as just a macro thing and truly understand the individual level harms it does to people, regardless of their citizenship.

@reiterator there is a case to be made for restricting H1Bs for contractor shops like Infosys. Those really do ‘take American jobs’ without adding much value. The contractors are treated so poorly they tend to end up not being the ones who get to stay and bring their skills and become citizens. Unfortunately at this moment they’re in the same pot and things that they do have an impact on other people who are just trying to live and work here.

@skinnylatte It sounds like you favor reforming H1B? That’s reasonable. I doubt it’ll happen in the next 2 years for political reasons.

@skinnylatte Fair. I mean US immigration is horribly broken, and the next president will only make things worse. And I agree the human impact is terrible, I have had friends who had to leave the country. But my question is: is it fair to protect *guest* workers *over* citizens?

IMO blame belongs with republicans who never will agree to fix immigration, billionaires who exploit chaos, and a lot of people who vote against their interests. I wish there was a workable solution.

@reiterator no one is advocating for protecting foreigners over citizens. Citizens have many other areas of improvement they should seek. Shitting on foreigners in any class of visa or no visa doesn’t do anything other than shift the blame onto them rather than the actual policy improvements that can be made. H1B workers aren’t getting special treatment or privileges or anything.

@skinnylatte It seems like Ramaswamy and Musk are leaning that direction with their rhetoric (by denigrating US workers). Anyway I’ll stop now, I hear you.

@reiterator@mas.to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io I think that it's not a good thing to view it as "guest workers vs. citizen workers"; that's a reductive line of thinking (the problem, as you point out next, is due to policy creation and enforcement that creates and reinforces this). That draws a boundary between two groups of people and starts setting them up as unequal and that's a bad path to go down.

Consider: where do we draw the line? Should medical care be allotted differently based on citizenship (I mean... if medical care was allotted at all).

I don't mean to say that citizens shouldn't be taken care of; quite the opposite, in fact, I think we need to take care of more people. The problem isn't that it's "guest workers vs. citizen workers" so much as it is "oligarchs and labour" as you hinted at, and citizens + H1B holders both fall into the latter category (and both are abused in a lot of the same ways, even if the consequences aren't always the same).

As a sort of counter-example to prove it, I don't think it's a good thing that we allow foreign oligarchs to 'invest' in property in the US. But I also don't think it's a good thing that we allow
domestic oligarchs to do it, either. So it's not really a question of foreign vs. citizen so much as inequality and power dynamics. The shifting of this into "citizen vs. foreigner" just helps the right wing rhetoric gain traction, I believe.

@reiterator@mas.to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io My understanding based on what I've heard from people holding an H1B is that it's an incredibly difficult and fragile position they're put in. We're all nominally protected by laws, but H1B holders can be illegally fired and have to leave the country. I can't imagine that's conducive to defending the rights they're supposed to have.

Similarly, US citizens can be illegally fired and simply lack the money, housing, and medical care that is necessary to defend and assert the rights they're supposed to have. We don't require sponsorship and obviously we can't be deported (theoretically) so we have more latitude in terms of finding work again but the reality is that both residents and citizens face a lot of the same problems and viewing it as a labour and rights problem, which is what it is, will almost certainly lead to better outcomes for everybody.

@reiterator @skinnylatte So if the job market goes down, you get both fired and deported, but still get to pay the mortgage on your house in the US I guess?

@reiterator @skinnylatte longtime ago but I was at my mid point mostly automatic renewal for my H1B when congress shouted at INS to approve more new H1Bs and they quietly just stopped doing renewals and let peoples visas expire instead. My lawyers advice at the time still sticks with me „contact your congressperson“. as though I had one. Can you think of a scenario where the US is better off not attracting the top 1% of the worlds population in critical technical fields ?

@skinnylatte I've worked with a few people on H1B, and briefly was roommates with a couple. They were literally in terror all the time: afraid of their bosses, afraid of their landlords. A few times I started talking to a co-worker, and I could almost hear a "click" when they decided they could trust me, and their demeanor and diction would change, and they'd start telling me about all the pressures they were under.

People don't talk much about how brutally stratified tech workers are.

@skinnylatte the H1B system is so twisted. The visa should not be so tightly tied to a single job

Because of the rest of our immigration mess, H1Bs discriminate by country as well. If you are from the “right” country, your path to residency is easy, otherwise you wait almost forever. I especially feel for kids who came here young and have friends and social lives here.