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As measured by actions rather than words, FWD.us doesn’t care about us too much anymore and seemingly nor does the Democratic Party. I went to a FWD.us event in San Francisco earlier this year where they invited tech professionals, but Todd Schulte spent almost the whole time just talking about undocumented immigrants, which is a fine thing to focus on but is irrelevant to the vast majority of us. Anyone interested in starting a website, Twitter account, etc focused on the SINGLE issue of high-skilled immigration rather than trading favors? Elon Musk quit FWD.us precisely because they started trading favors. Specifically, here’s the initial platform: (1) Neither support nor oppose anything other than what’s mentioned below. I’m thinking we could have an FAQ response to “what about undocumented immigrants” as: “go to FWD.us” 😛 (2) Replace the H-1B lottery with a salary-based system, but keep the same numbers for political expediency. Pick the top 20,000 salaries for those with masters’ degrees, plus the top 65,000 salaries for everyone else. These are the same numbers as the current system. The federal government has a strong incentive to do this: higher salaries means more federal income taxes. Additionally, this does not require congressional approval, which means it can happen very quickly. I personally disagree with these numbers, but changing the numbers would require congressional approval, and plus we want to minimize the reasons why anyone would oppose our proposals. (3) Support HR 392 for green cards, which already has some bipartisan support. We could focus on other immigration issues we face AFTER we achieve these basic improvements, in order to avoid becoming another FWD.us (spreading ourselves too thin and basically achieving nothing). We could start by hosting a website on Squarespace, which costs $5/mo that I am happy to pay out of pocket. And we could use a subreddit for discussion. We do have some people on here who understand these issues more deeply than I do. Eventually we can set up a legal entity and so on, but for now all we need is people’s time to create and review content. Once we have a website with enough content, we could post on Hacker News, etc to reach a wider audience and get more traction. Let’s not ask for monetary donations until we set up a legal entity.
TL;DR: Fitbit/mahalo2’s claim is that: Top H-1B salaries are only concentrated in “the valley”. I crunched the data: (1) California’s representation increases from 20% to 31%. This is by no means “all”. (2) Massachusetts, Washington, New York, Hawaii, DC, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Alaska would actually be better represented. (3) Some territories would be better represented (Guam, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands). The numbers are small so they probably don’t matter. Additional number-crunching: - This would increase the average salary by around $20,000 each - from 94,000 to 125,000. - The marginal tax rate at that level is at least 28%, suggesting the government would receive at least $500M the first year in federal taxes alone. - During year 2, the benefit is twice as big (two cohorts). So, this yields at least $0.5B, $1B, and $1.5B in US taxes in years 1, 2, and 3. - Cumulatively over 3 years (the nominal length of an H-1B), this change would yield at least $3B in US taxes.
Helping talented people stay in the US is not as woke as helping randoms.
Thing is h1b holders don't vote, so have no power
Pretty funny to see tech employees support policies that will drive down their wages. Take your fwd.us bullcrap and shove it bugman.
What drives down wages is the current system of applying for green cards. It prevents people from switching jobs during the (many years long) application process. If your employer knows you won’t switch jobs in all likelihood, they have no reason to raise your salary. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google all already have software development offices all over the world. The current system already incentivizes them to invest and hire outside the US, since any US investment comes with a 35% tax penalty. Would you rather prefer that people who are currently on visas in MTV/SVL moved to one of Google’s many offices overseas? Because that’s the alternative. IBM already has more staff outside the US than in the US.
Download the H-1B disclosure data from doleta.gov, it’s a ~165MB Excel sheet. This data is, by definition, a uniformly selected random sample of all applicants, since they were selected by lottery, so it is representative. There is already a healthy geographical mix at all levels. The data does NOT support your claim that the top salaried petitions are for Bay Area companies only. It is already the case that skilled immigrants, like skilled employees generally, are concentrated in certain areas (NYC, DC, IL, TX, WA, CA). That will not change. And people can continue to change jobs and move to an area with higher cost of living. Unless you are proposing work permits that only allow certain states to be the place of employment, I don’t see how that can be changed. In any case, this will make it *easier* for companies outside major metro areas to hire senior employees since there’s no more lottery. Typically new grads get a raise 2 years in, which means they should be better off hiring international students as well, because OPT is 3 years long.