H1B vs 80-20

The current discussion of H1B visas gets everything wrong. Musk and Ramaswamy see the problem from Mahogany Row. The writers who cover it arem't tech workers, they're writers, in fact, bad ones. I spent a career in tech. Here's an example of what everyone gets wrong:

For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.''

Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work.

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

The piece gopes on to quote 2015 remarks from Trump:

“We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump wrote.

This conflates several issues. In my experience, US-born workers at the coding or other hands-on level in tech generally don't have four-year degrees, in STEM or anythng else. It's worth noting, though, that a requirement for an H1B visa is that the foreign applicant hold a bachelor's degree. I would say that employers over several decades have decided those aren't necessary, and outside of certain highly specialized areas, the degree they want is an MBA -- but that's not for coder-level workers.

All I can think is that the employers are also discounting the value of any bachelor's degree anywhere, or they're finding ways around the requirement.

So the image of H1B workers displacing US-born people with four-year degrees just isn't accurate, and the problem there is less a question of foreign workers displacing US-born ones with degrees than it's a question of the declining worth of a four-year degree. Four-year degrees aren't needed for the work the employers have available, and probably never have been.

Consider the level of skill carpenters, masons, draftsmen, and machinists have always had to demonstrate without four-year degrees. Hands-on tech jobs are at that level. The basic question goes to whether workers at that level can have a middle-class lifestyle. For much of the 20th century, they could, without four-year degrees. What we're beginning to see is the grand failure of the social experiment that expanded demand for a four-year degree.

On the other hand, the people who claim substituting workers from Asia who are paid less than US-born workers depresses wages overall have a real point. But added to that is that H1B visas are a form of indentured servitude, whereby a person was oblgated to work for an employer in exchange for passage to the colonies, which represented the potential for advancement in the new environment.

The servitude is enforced in this modern environment by the fact that under an H1B visa, if you lose your job, you lose your immigration status. Thus H1B workers have a powerful inducement to do things that US-born workers won't, including working unpaid overtime, putting up with workplace abuse, doing what they're told, and so forth -- and just as important, even if they display exceptional talent, they aren't a threat to mediocre bosses, since they're only in their jobs for six years and can be replaced when their visas expire.

This not only depresses wages for US-born workers, but it keeps their working conditions low, and it limits their ability to find new jobs if they're competing with other H1B workers in the job market.

But there's another factor involved, the so-called "80-20 rule", the intuitive observation that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Given the indentured conditions of the H1B visa, those workers are almost guaranteed to be among the 20% of top performers --they have incentives to keep their jobs that US-born workers don't necesssarily have. A US-born worker can simply update the resume, tell the boss to go to hell, and find a new job. If an H1B worker quits, it's back to Bangalore.

And consider all the factors that let the 80% low peformers keep their jobs. DEI has been, and continues to be, a major factor. So is regression to the mean and the incentive among all workers, including the supervisors, to keep the curve low. Then there's sleeping with the boss. I don't think I ever worked in an office environment where this wasn't taking place, and not just a little bit. Consensual sleeping with the boss is a major unspoken problem.

So I can't really disagree with Elon and Vivek, looking at the situation from Mahogany Row, that H1B is a way around the 80-20 rule, but in doing that, it lowers working conditions for everyone. Remember that Henry Ford's great insight was that if he wanted to sell cars, he needed to make the workers who built them prosperous enough to buy them for themnselves.

There needs to be a major reform of incentives. In part, this won't take place until the Savior returneth; how the wicked proper is a subject for the psalmist. But the job is nevertheless to restore justice for the workers, and leaving H1B in its current state won't help.