Yeah, I’d Like To Live in California, Too*
(This is a draft copy at the moment)
There was an article in the NYTimes over the weekend discussing the issue of recruiting in the tech sector as it relates to immigrants and temporary work visas.
There is no better example of an intersection of both our screwy economy and our screwy immigration system than the tech industry, which hogs up all the H1-B visas every year to recruit highly skilled programmers outside of the U.S. and claims that, with unemployment nearing double digits in the U.S., the talent needed for these positions simply doesn’t exist in our labor pool.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
First, the article warns that Sanjay Mavinkurve could be “a self-entitled immigrant”, and that’s absolutely correct. He comes across as a child. I’m glad that he’s Canada’s problem and not ours. (I hear that one could start a new company there, too, if it were important enough to him/her.) “He thinks America should embrace him, given his contributions and taxpaying potential.” Eh, go fuck yourself. Now with that out of the way…
Silicon Valley is filled with crybabies who predict doom for the industry if they don’t get their way. They’ve muddied up the argument quite a bit by entitling themselves to operate entirely within the borders of the United States (and ideally within the metropolitan areas where a strong tech industry presence already exists) while recruiting globally. The government entitles NO company to do that freely, and has good reason to maintain limits on work visas for guest workers of all types: it is in the public interest of the citizens of the United States, and the interest of the citizen population trump that of both corporations and non-citizens.
Let’s do a little math here, and keep in mind that this explanation also works on the opposite end for all those “jobs no one will take” in the bottom skill percentiles of the labor force: There are 300 million United States citizens, and approximately 6.8 billion people worldwide. For simple rounding purposes, let’s say it’s really 6 billion people who exist and are not U.S. citizens. Our labor force is equivalent to 5% of the remaining labor force worldwide. So… if you completely and freely opened up work visa eligibility in the U.S., you could conceivably take EVERY JOB IN THE UNITED STATES employing a U.S. citizen and replace them with someone from the top 5% in the remaining global workforce. If salaries were held constant and everyone was blandly non-cultural (guaranteeing business-as-usual, no language barriers or ethnic hate or anything like that), you’d end up with a U.S. workforce with better skills and experience than what existed before. Adding this population to the residents of the United States, you’d now have 600 million people living here, and 300 million of them would be outraged, having just lost their jobs and any chance of ongoing survival.
This would never happen, of course, but within specific industries, this sort of one-to-one replacement as a zero-sum game is exactly what’s happening. Capable workers in the U.S. are often disregarded for computer-based technical positions in favor of better skilled workers overseas, who will always exist because of the sheer numbers of the global workforce outside the U.S. For any one of these highly skilled roles, if you can locate one person in the U.S. who can handle it, you can likely find at least 20 other people in the global workforce who are statistically identically capable, and a whole lot of people above that level who would probably find a U.S. job and a U.S. lifestyle strongly appealing. This potential competition has a dilutive effect on the U.S. workforce, pushing citizens downward in the labor pool. Imagine 5 people standing on a ladder, and the top person suddenly slips and impacts the person directly beneath, causing a chain reaction… Every programmer working in a clerical temp job means that an office temp is working at Best Buy, and the electronics salesman is working at Wendy’s, and the dude who would have worked at Wendy’s is now at home drawing welfare.
Is there any downside for global corporations to take this to the extreme? Nope. And we’ve learned this in other industries, where significant quantities of labor roles were shipped across borders and overseas to places where equivalent work could be done by a cheaper labor pool, the second that such work became economically feasible and advantageous. Tech companies have shown in particular that they really REALLY like taking on H1-B workers here in the U.S. under similar motivations, and that program in particular has had a history of enabling labor abuses against the guest workers who participate in it because of its strict terms on those workers. (This really isn’t anyone’s problem but the guest workers’, but it is a key reason why these companies do not consider U.S. citizens to be of equivalent labor value. They will do what they can get away with, it seems.)
This leads me to a fair proposal: You can and should increase the number of visas if you can demonstrate that the U.S. labor pool is expanding to accommodate them. Want to be generous? One extra visa spot for every 5 U.S. jobs created. Want to be stingy? One visa for every 20 jobs created. This would limit most of the destructive qualities of guest workers. And none of this prevents U.S. companies or investors from expanding global subsidiaries with international locations, in which case they could likely hire citizens from any country as long as there was a “home turf” presence for that particular labor pool.
Other than that, the H1-B program needs reform more than it needs expansion. The U.S. government needs to worry about finding work for its own citizens before it finds any more work for people like Sanjay (unfortunate for him, but fair to all). And don’t listen to anyone, particularly those with both salary and net worth in the tens of millions of dollars, who tells you that their industry will collapse if the government doesn’t help it rig the economy further against the middle class in this country.