Reply to Hate towards H1-B visa holders

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Did Elon not know what he was buying when he spent $250 million on Trump and MAGA?

Is he going to demand a refund if Trump and MAGA continue to pursue their anti-immigrant rhetoric?

I partially agree with an earlier poster that it is a complex issue.  I am a natural-born US citizen who works in tech.  I agree that there are not enough US citizens in tech, and that not enough American kids are pursuing STEM fields, and that our math and science K-12 education could probably be better.  Where there are genuine shortages, I think immigration and bringing in the best and brightest from other countries is worthwhile.

BUT that said, I also think that many qualified, competent and capable American tech workers are being passed over in favor of cheaper immigrant workers, my son is a recent grad in tech (degrees and concentration in computer science, data science and geospatial analysis) and right now the job market is tight, he's submitted application after application after application for months with nary any response.  When our own kids, home-grown STEM majors are having a hard time, we can and should slow down on visas.

I also see cases where US companies (including Tesla) are asking for visa workers to fill positions that should be easy for American workers to fill, except they expect visa workers to do the work for $70k that US citizen workers get paid $95k for.  The visa program undercuts salaries in tech, and that also needs to end.  Getting foreign workers because they are cheaper was never the intent of the visa program and companies abuse it.  The intent is to fill genuine shortfalls in the labor pool.  The corporate abuse of the visa program and undermining of American workers needs to end.

We need a better system, maybe one that is directly tied to the job market, where companies should first be required to advertise available jobs with full transparency on job qualifications and expectations, matching current prevailing salaries and benefits, and for those job postings to go unfilled for several months before being allowed a visa so that American citizens get first dibs on those jobs.  The same should be done in other sectors with labor shortages like farming, construction, hospitality industry and so on.[/quote]
Thank you for this thoughtful reply.

I think one thing that gets mixed up in the conversation is quality vs. quantity in STEM work.  Yes, there are a lot of STEM graduates that are having trouble finding jobs.  But simply doing the coursework and getting a degree isn't sufficient.  I suspect the strong demand in Silicon Valley is for people who have genius-level talent at algorithm design, circuit design, quantum computing, AI, etc., and those people are very rare whether foreign-born or native.  I worked for a NASA center for 25 years, and I'd say 10% of our engineering workforce provided 90% of the real technology innovation for missions.   Another 40-50% was capable of doing good, more pedestrian work, and the remainder were shuffled around from project to project, mostly working on paperwork.  The frustration among hiring managers is that you have to cast a very large net (including foreign born experts) to find that golden 10% of the STEM workforce that will really drive innovation.[/quote]

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