Empirical Rationalism and Other Oxymora
We Don’t Wont Yer Kind [of Jobs] ‘Round Here
A report by the National Venture Capital Association that was delivered to members of congress last Wednesday suggests that immigrants started one in four venture backed companies in the US since 1990, and that companies started by immigrants have market valuations in excess of $500 billion and employ 220,000 in the US. I am sure that this is no consolation to the software engineers that have seen their jobs go overseas, but it is an important reminder that the immigration and off-shoring debate needs to be balanced. We as a country want to be able to purchase $30 DVD players, but expect to make $18 per hour working in factory that assembles those players. We also expect to make $100k as a senior software engineer developing software that competes in a global market — the same global market where Foriegn competitors can pay software engineers $7k per year. There is plenty of discussion on why top engineers produce multiples over the bottom, but we as a country need to earn our 14x differential. We also need access to the best talent in the world — wherever that talent happens to come from or happens to live. If we are going to be an innovation leader, the answer is not protectionism and arbitrary barriers, it is investment. Today we need to import top talent because we are not developing enough of it organically. If we are going to increase H1B visas, let’s also dramatically increase our investment in math and science education — at all levels, from primary school through university. Let’s increase student aid for people studying math, science and engineering. Let’s increase investment for displaced workers. Let’s also increase our national investment in technology-based businesses and R&D funding. Foreign entrepreneurs are going to start businesses, and I believe that we want them to start them in the US — blocking that or making it more difficult just doesn’t make sense unless we plan on becoming strickly a service and entertainment economy.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Andrew on November 20, 2006 at 10:20 am, and is filed under Economics, Human Resources, Innovation, Politics. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 3 years ago
The H1-B visa program needs to be sharply curtailed, not increased. There’s no “shortage” of US-trained engineers and scientists willing to work in tech jobs– there’s merely a shortage of people willing to do these jobs at slave wages, which is the real objective of H1B.
The H1B isn’t something that in any way assists the US economy– it only introduces yet another drain on jobs and wages for those who have been trained in the USA in technical fields. US-trained engineers have often over $100K in loans, yet the H1B visa program makes sure to push wages for them down far enough that they can’t even pay their rent, let alone pay their obligations, locking them in permanent indentured servitude status.
It’s an arrogant, incredibly damaging way to treat hard-working US-trained scientists and engineers, and the practical effect is that bright students in US universities don’t want to major in science and engineering, if they think (with good reason) that they’ll be screwed later on when they try to find a job. We’re thereby ruining our own domestic technical industries by making them incapable of paying even a living wage to very highly-trained people.
If we want more Americans to go into the sciences and engineering, the supply is there– we merely need to pay graduates a living wage, and to cut the H1-B visa program by 50-75%. If you pay them fairly, they will happily come, and restore our domestic industries somewhat. Any politician stupid enough to encourage expanding this wretched H1B visa program would be committing political suicide, because they’d be hounded forever by millions of angry US-trained workers and their families. It’s very simple– curb the H1-B, and just ensure that American graduates are paid a salary they can live on. We’ll then strengthen our own tech industry and make science and engineering majors more attractive to trained Americans.