They see their jobs being done rather badly by people and their bosses replacing them with cheaper talent.
Not a rhetorical question: is that their actual lived experience, or is it just what they want to see? How often does it occur that the boss drops by to say, "John, meet Ashook. He's your replacement. Clean out your desk"?
I'm sure it has happened, but it seems to me very easy for people to generalize what happened to that guy to account for any reason why they personally didn't get the job they wanted. Were you really smarter than that H1-B, or are you just telling yourself that? Does he actually suck at that job, or are you just assuming that everybody from his country is bad at it?
Like I said, I mean this sincerely. I'm not in Silicon Valley so I'm not seeing this firsthand. But what I do see (here on HN) is an awful lot of culture war, making it easy to believe that a huge amount of chowder is being made out of the scraps of an oyster.
Enough of it happened that people felt it personally. Disney being a notorious example[0]. ConEd[1], AT&T[2], there are others. I generally discount the stories from anti-immigration sources like CIS because they dislike all immigration on principle[3], but even the AFL-CIO cover these cases.[4]
However, you raise a second point, about locals being outcompeted by immigrants already on staff for new positions, promos, etc which is slightly different. It's quite possible that an H1-B holder could (legitimately) outcompete a native citizen. It's also quite possible that a native citizen who got the job that the H1-B got instead could have learned enough on the job to outcompete the other citizen. Hard to tell. Again, none of this is the fault of the immigrant - the engine of these issues is (imho) is the relentless drive by corporations to lower the costs of labor.
UC San Francisco[5] shows what the logical conclusion of this drive would be, even in light of the today's Administration's extremely anti-immigration stance. UCSF brought in H1-B labor to learn the tasks and then offshored the labor.
To me this is the obvious issue that must be solved: if there is no source of cheap immigrant labor, corporations will not say, "oh ok, we'll go back to hiring local citizens at $150K/year with healthcare and a 401k". They will simply automate what they can and offshore the rest.
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They see their jobs being done rather badly by people and their bosses replacing them with cheaper talent.
Not a rhetorical question: is that their actual lived experience, or is it just what they want to see? How often does it occur that the boss drops by to say, "John, meet Ashook. He's your replacement. Clean out your desk"?
I'm sure it has happened, but it seems to me very easy for people to generalize what happened to that guy to account for any reason why they personally didn't get the job they wanted. Were you really smarter than that H1-B, or are you just telling yourself that? Does he actually suck at that job, or are you just assuming that everybody from his country is bad at it?
Like I said, I mean this sincerely. I'm not in Silicon Valley so I'm not seeing this firsthand. But what I do see (here on HN) is an awful lot of culture war, making it easy to believe that a huge amount of chowder is being made out of the scraps of an oyster.
Enough of it happened that people felt it personally. Disney being a notorious example[0]. ConEd[1], AT&T[2], there are others. I generally discount the stories from anti-immigration sources like CIS because they dislike all immigration on principle[3], but even the AFL-CIO cover these cases.[4]
However, you raise a second point, about locals being outcompeted by immigrants already on staff for new positions, promos, etc which is slightly different. It's quite possible that an H1-B holder could (legitimately) outcompete a native citizen. It's also quite possible that a native citizen who got the job that the H1-B got instead could have learned enough on the job to outcompete the other citizen. Hard to tell. Again, none of this is the fault of the immigrant - the engine of these issues is (imho) is the relentless drive by corporations to lower the costs of labor.
UC San Francisco[5] shows what the logical conclusion of this drive would be, even in light of the today's Administration's extremely anti-immigration stance. UCSF brought in H1-B labor to learn the tasks and then offshored the labor.
To me this is the obvious issue that must be solved: if there is no source of cheap immigrant labor, corporations will not say, "oh ok, we'll go back to hiring local citizens at $150K/year with healthcare and a 401k". They will simply automate what they can and offshore the rest.
[0] https://labor411.org/411-blog/disney-fired-employees-after-m...
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1628728/southern-calif...
[2] https://www.axios.com/2019/12/29/trump-att-outsourcing-h1b-v...
[3] https://cis.org/Report/Untold-Stories-American-Workers-Repla...
[4] https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/guest-worker-visas-the-...
[5] https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf...