They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I am not disputing the details of anything you are necessarily saying, what I am saying is that you are even still leaning into the lie that there isn’t enough decent work to gone around for all of us.
You need to get that out of your head, fundamentally, before we can begin to envision a humane path forward for tech work in the US, either for immigrants or people born and raised in the US.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Last part of the last paragraph, we agree.
We need wage increases across the board, not importing new workers to fill roles at lower wages because we have plenty of workers that only need higher wages to fill those vacant roles.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
You aren’t understanding me, you keep trying to debate from the axiom that this is a zero sum game.
In otherwords when I say
You hear
I did not say that, you are applying the axiom that those two MUST be inextricably linked because if there is even a remote chance we can improve the wages and general quality of life of tech workers in the US than the logic of applying that axiom becomes fundamentally questionable.
That is what you don’t realize or refuse to realize.
This is NOT a zero sum game between tech workers who want to immigrate to the US and tech workers who were born and raised in the US.
The future is a shared solidarity not an increasing division, don’t take my word for it, notice rather that large corporations favor this kind of atomization of workers into nationalisms, it makes the job of people oppressing workers in the US and abroad far easier.