Been hearing from both sides on the H-1B issue. • For H-1Bs (and Romney’s position):
Dear John,
You ask: “why would anyone with a rational approach to economics hold the view that ‘we need more H1B visas, not less’”?
I live and work on the periphery of Silicon Valley. This is more than a simple linear supply/demand issue and a good example of how globalization requires a change in thinking on this type of national policy question. The reaction of many companies to their inability to legally bring highly skilled and specialized foreign employees to the US is not to suddenly hit American campuses in a recruiting blitz. They look at it as a business problem to be resolved by the most effective means possible. For more and more of them it makes greater business sense to set up an offshore location where they can take full advantage of highly skilled personnel, avoiding the cost, uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in “importing” brainpower.
Companies see further upsides in this activity because it gives them bases in faster-growing emerging countries, helps develop a better understanding of local markets, bypasses other barriers to trade, etc. The good thing from an American point of view is that the profits, ability to compete and global presence of these companies are enhanced. But you won’t see the economic effect you predicted and might expect from a more autarkic (Derbian?) model. To achieve the outcome you desire would require combining your immigration stance with curbs on free trade. Perhaps an unforeseen consequence it would be better to avoid? My personal take is that (from a strictly US-centric point of view, and I am not American) raising the H-1B intake is a good compromise.
Yours rationally,
One of Globalization’s Content
• Against H-1Bs (and so against Romney’s position):
Derb: I spent my “career” in industry. I worked as a designer of unique and specialized machinery dedicated to the manufacture/assembly/packaging of stuff. Essentially all these machines were controlled to one extent or another by programmable controllers, particularly in the last twenty-five years or so. Thus did I work on a daily basis with the control engineers. … I am familiar with the kinda folks who gravitate toward computer-related employment.
Within the last ten years or so, industry has become saturated with the H-1B people, almost all of whom seem to come from India. This was not a move by management to fill jobs for which there were no Americans available or qualified. It was almost without exception an effort to reduce costs by hiring those who would work cheap. By cheap, I mean less than half what an educated, qualified American youngster fresh from college would bring, many times even less. It’s the exact same thing we see with the flood of Mexican laborers … employers are cutting the financial throats of American workers strictly to chop the bottom line. It is so obvious to those in da bidness that it’s almost laughable, if it weren’t so pathetic.
It has two serious effects. The most obvious is that young engineer-types are rapidly losing ground, and the other is that it makes them wonder why they went to the trouble to get that education if they will be passed over for someone who barely speaks English and works for peanuts. I am certain it will have an effect on engineering school enrollment.
Granted, I have only seen the effect within my sphere of experience, but I cannot believe it’s much different elsewhwere.
[Me] My head, I’ll admit, feels some attractive force from the logic of the first (pro-H-1B) argument, but my patriotic heart is entirely with the second, and not from any Kim Il Sung-ish yearning for economic autarky, which I know is a pipedream, and not even a desirable pipe-dream.
The problem for me is that all this comparative-advantage logic will end up with the withering away of our university math and comp-sci departments. Smart youngsters will drift away into junk disciplines — or worse yet, into Law School, adding to our already way-overstock of verbal-ability parasites, and piling yet more nuisance lawsuits on the ever-shrinking productive part of our economy.
That’s not just a national negative, it’s a personal one for bright young people who love the challenge and excitement of info-tech work but can’t make a living at it. What are they going to do, emigrate to India?
The economists can say what they like, but we can’t be a consequential country with a decent standard of living if all our young people know is how to sue each other, how to make car-chase movies, and how to buy and sell ever more exotic varieties of IOUs. That’s not an economy, that’s not a nation; and it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the tinkering, inventive, can-do America that we still were just a generation ago.
The shipwrecked 1860-something balloonists in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, being Americans, soon have eveything shipshape: “With the knowledge of the brilliant engineer Smith, the five are able to sustain themselves on the island, producing fire, pottery, bricks, nitroglycerin, iron, a simple electric telegraph, a home in stone called the ‘Granite House,’ and even a sea-worthy ship. They also manage to find their geographical location.” (The Wikipedia article omits to mention that the Americans even made an elevator for access to that granite house!) An equivalent bunch of shipwrecked Americans nowadays would sit around trying to call their lawyers and brokers on Made-in-China cellphones. Something has been lost.