Re: H1B visas. Should most Americans support an increase in them?
https://www.reddit.com/r/trump/comments/1hn8lwr/dont_get_coopted_viveks_and_elons_support_of_h1b/
https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1hn2br4/according_to_vivek_ramaswamy_a_lot_of_yall_cant/
Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy recently got into trouble for wanting to increase H1B visas to the US, which allows for higher skilled workers from foreign countries to come into the US and get jobs. The Trump supporters got really upset, and so did a lot of Americans in the Computer Science subreddit. I get the impression that many Democrats are not huge fans of H1B visas either.
but from an Austrian economics point of view, should most Americans really care about protecting US-born engineers from immigrant engineers?
Most Americans are not engineers and never will be. 66% of adult Americans have an associate’s degree or less. What are the financial incentives for that 66% of Americans to even want to protect US-born engineers from immigrant engineer competition?
If US companies have a smaller pool of engineers to hire from, the engineers will have higher bargaining power, and thus get paid higher salaries.
Why should an associate’s degree American, like a technician, care if an engineer in his company makes more money? That money does not go to him anyway. Now the company has less profits, because it is paying the engineer a higher salary. That hurts the shareholders, but can also impact the cash on hand that could possibly be used to pay the technician a higher wage too.
If the technician was hoping to get a promotion to an engineer job, that’s a different story.
To complicate things further, at many companies, engineers are tasked with reducing the number of technicians on the payroll, by creating more efficient work practices, and creating automation and so forth.
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