Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear

On Tue, 29 Oct 2024, Cryptoengineer wrote:

On 10/29/2024 4:53 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> writes:

On 10/28/2024 9:59 AM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

 Anyone who has done a honest study on illegal immigration in the US has
concluded that the American economy is DEPENDENT on the labor of
illegals.  Our economy would crash without them.

 This is likely true.  The food service and agricultural industries depend on
low-wage labour and much of that has been provided by immigrants willing to
take low-wage low-skill jobs.  When immigration started to go wrong in the
eighties and it became impossible for people to legally immigrate to do this
work, it began to be done by illegal immigrants.
 Traditionally there were a lot of people from Mexico who came to the US to
work the fields during harvest time, and who moved back to Mexico after
the season was over.  That was disrupted long ago.
 People on the right hand side of the aisle will claim that citizens would be
taking these jobs if there were not illegal immigrants to fill them.  But the
fact that in spite of all attempts to restrict immigration, citizens still
refuse to take these jobs, indicate that this is not the case.
 

Nice try, nope.  Illegal immigrants allow employers to cut the salaries
of legal USA citizens.  I have seen it done many times in the
engineering industry, especially software engineering.

 There are very few, if any, illegal immigrants in the software engineering
field.  There are a lot of legal immigrants in the software
engineering field, and federal law requires they be paid
the same as domestic engineers.

 This is referring to a different and just as severe immigration problem. The
US has a system called the H1-B visa which exists in order to allow experts
in their field to come to America for work.  This is for people who really
are experts, people who can't be replaced by American citizens because there
are so few people in the world able to do their job.  When it was set up it
was a good system.
 However, this system has been hijacked by a number of large companies which
have figured out how to game the system and which are using H1-Bs to bring
in moderately-skilled technical people and hold them hostage with the threat
of removing their visa.  This has caused a total disaster in the software
engineering field.  These people ARE legal immigrants, but if the system was
not broken, they would not be.  What is worse, because large companies with
huge legal departments are stuffing the box as soon as slots open up, people
who really are experts, the people for whom the system was intended, are
unable to get the visas that Congress intended for them.

>
As a recently-retired software engineer I can attest to this. Americans
would be laid off at the same time as H1-Bs were being brought in.
>
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-continue-to-exploit-the-h-1b-visa-program-at-a-time-of-mass-layoffs-the-top-30-h-1b-employers-hired-34000-new-h-1b-workers-in-2022-and-laid-off-at-least-85000-workers/
>
https://tinyurl.com/mr3zuvcs
>
"Since employers aren’t required to test the U.S. labor market to see if
any workers are available before hiring an H-1B worker or pay their
H-1B workers a fair wage, employers have exploited the program. Rather
than turning to the H-1B program as a last resort when U.S. workers
cannot be found, most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be
underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer. This is evidenced
by government data showing that technology companies continue to hire
H-1B workers in large numbers while significantly reducing the sizes of
their workforces."
>
I saw this happening before my eyes. I eventually gave up and moved to
working for defense contractors, who paid worse, but were required to
hire US citizens.
>
pt

This raises questions about the future job of programmers. Do you believe that the field will be split into simple code-monkeys where salaries with the help of AI, will decrease more and more over time, and the "elite" who actually are the ones who develop new algorithms, tools and AI that serve to reduce the salaries of the code-monkeys?