WHY BERNIE IS RIGHT ABOUT H1B VISAS...

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[stepaioneldon]

Also I love how the neolibs are saying Bernie is bad for this take when they were spending the entirety of October talking about how Trump should have taken their advanced deportation bill and how Kamala Harris would be tougher than Trump on the border.

[TheCow]

As someone with a spouse on an H-1B visa, the exploitation would be highly reduced if they increased the period to find a new employer from 60 days to 120 days. Anyone on an H-1B who loses their job is shitting themselves if they don’t get a job immediately, so they accept terrible wages just to stay in the country. Anyone who is on an H-1B is willing to put up with garbage employers to avoid that 60-day time limit to find a new employer. For context, some employers don’t even hire within 60 days if everything goes well, because hiring can be a slow process.

[rubybahamut]

Could have had 8 years of the Bern already

[TheVillainOfTheYear]

I'm a nurse. H1B visa labor not only depresses American nurse wages, but even if you guaranteed wage and benefit parity, it wouldn't matter. You can always cut back on working conditions like nurse:patient ratios. Fill units of the hospital with H1B nurses (already happening), and then bump up their ratios from 5:1 to 8 or 9:1 (I've seen this myself) and it's just like paying them less. Their productivity is something like 200%. When they accidentally kill someone, the narrative becomes, "it's those awful foreign graduates' fault. Americans don't want to work anymore."

[armashuvitz]

This is exactly why Bernie could have won the rightoid vote while maintaining left and libs. We are in the worst timeline

[orchidrose]

My brother in law is one of those high skilled workers who literally trained his replacement without realizing it. He was sent to India for 3 months by this major tech company in Silicon Valley, once he came back he was laid off via email. It took him two years to find solid work again because it wasn’t just his firm that was doing it. Now, he is lucky if he’s with a company for more than 6 months

[shinjinobrave]

I was 100% with Felix freaking out about this on Twitter:
"which is it? is it “we’re going to save the the kids in cages, ” “Trump won’t let us pass his border bill, ” or “any criticism of the current immigration system is fascist?” you can’t have all 3"

[adnkanlegacy]

I'm glad someone like Bernie is coming out with this but unfortunately I think it will be ignored by both sides because it comes from him.

I have also felt conflicted about this entire issue. As a black tech worker, raised by a Latina immigrant, I empathize with H1B visa holders. I also don't like how this is being used by some who see this as an opportunity to attack Indians and Indian-Americans. They didn't create this policy and workers should never be pitted against one another. The H1B visa program is being abused though and everyone suffers except the ones at the top of the chain.

[mrtobiastaylor]

Jeremy Corbyn took a very, very similar stance in the UK - and it was only the usual suspect (Liberals/Centrists) obviously immediately called it racist e.t.c, not because they cared but only because it was a good stick to beat him with. Would wager the same criticism is being leveled toward Bernie here.

Corbyn's issue was more around firms hiring staff under foreign employment contracts, and utilising EU laws to allow them to work in the UK for extended periods of time (this was rife in construction, but also applied to tech and other industries) - it was designed to prevent companies carrying out exploitative working practices.

Musk's only reason in advocating for this is because he has a new found keen interest in AI, and has discovered that to make that work you need many, many talented engineers beyond developers. You need infrastructure people, you need network people, you need platform people - the US pays well for this type of work (I myself am a UK tech leader, and a trained network architect in the UK) and Musk wants it done on the cheap and also importantly without the ethics that come with US/UK senior tech leaders who are generally left wing and not going to do things that lead to exploitation at this sort of level.

Bernie is entirely right to reject this without serious implications on both cost, and regulation and anyone crying about this needs to see the bigger picture and those that are pushing it.

[Mr.Redink]

People who are constantly under threat of deportation or jail, cant unionize and can be paid less and work in worse conditions.

People that arent immigrants, now have to compete with them for jobs. This allows for reactionary, centrist and liberal union leadership to fall (with varying degrees of doing it voluntarily or consciously) into the trap of management which can now move the goal post by having more leverage against them.

Instead of striking for 30$/hr, they end up striking for 20$/hr and then get told to blame the immigrants for this difference. How do you expect the capitalists not to jump at this opportunity and laugh all the way to the bank ?

[seanabbott]

If there aren't enough American workers for these positions, maybe investment into secondary education should be a nationwide mandate.

[sonyamaksymenkova]

I am a Ukrainian native that is trying to get an H1-B Visa. I graduated from an American university with a Bachelors in Computer Science in 2023. You will not believe me when I say that it is so freaking hard to find an employer that will hire you when they hear that you will need a Visa sponsorship in the future. Most online applications make you answer a question about future sponsorship straight off the bat, and if you click "yes", you will simply not get picked even for a screening call, you can literally dream about an interview. I wholeheartedly agree about the fact that an international worker will put up with more bullshit than an American. I stayed at toxic workplaces where I was severely underpaid because I simply could not be unemployed. Being unemployed means going back to a literal warzone. H1-B needs a reform for the sake of everybody. MAGA likes to scream about illegal immigrants, but there is no reasonable way for people to immigrate to this country besides marriage (maybe this was the goal all along). Plus the fact that H1-B is literally a fucking lottery is just absurd.

[JP_Names]

The unfortunate part about that tomato picker story is in order to make tomatoes pickable by machine, you have to genetically engineer them to have a tougher texture and surface, which makes the tomatoes blander. Sadge

[wynnefox]

I had a Mexican supervisor at a job and I asked him what he thought of this whole immigration thing. He stated that undocumented movement on the southern boarder is a serious problem and needs to be stopped, not because people shouldn't be coming here but because it opened those people to exploitation. Citizens have more protections and support while undocumented are little better than slaves.

[marcosolis]

I didn’t even know H1B visas had all these loop holes

[AudibleFist]

What would be less “racist” would probably be saying H1B Visa’s should probably be phased out in order to give immigrant workers more rights through a different means.

[largeboinuggets]

"Nobody wants tp work anymore! guess we will just have to use prison labor!"

[kingkuzy]

Bernie is absolutely correct. I'm a manager of a fortune 500 tech company that has interviewed H1B candidates. Thankfully, I'm at a company that does not (at least yet) push for these hires, those conditions are absolutely correct. There may be some debate on the candidate pool depending on the location and tech company itself, but there are U.S. tech workers available especially after the more recent layoffs across the board.

[rickschricter]

I work with an H1B and he tells me straight up he doesn't feel comfortable challenging management the way I can because of his status. Management 100% knows that H1Bs will not challenge them. This plus the cheaper worker...case closed.

[anmolt]

"Why India?"

1. (Young) Population. India has 1.5 billion people, about 2/3rds are working age - that's a billion workers. If you consider the top 10 percentile, that's a 100 million eligible workers - and we all speak english. Even top 1 percentile is 10 million
2. Cheap undergraduate education in STEM fields - This is the first place where the currency rate factors in. Indians can get an undergraduate STEM degree without breaking the bank. Some of our universities are even geniunely good (several in top 100-500 worldwide, and the best ones are all *state-run* and relatively cheap). This allows young Indian STEM professionals to take out loans to enroll in Masters programs in US universities
3. Money. This is the simplest part - H1b programs offer more money than they can get back home.