I wish the professor had mentioned that HB1 visas limit the employment flexibility of the recipient making it an indentured servitude arrangement for the employer. ✌️
I don't comment on Substack often, but came here to say this exactly. H1b visas are the modern version of indentured servitude that only benefit the plantation owners.
That is not universal. Indeed it varies by employer with some being much more willing to support and others (e.g. Amazon) being more prone to exploit by promising and failing to deliver the support or making it hard to shift. In the end the program as run allows for and is rife with abuses though not everyone is abused.
Also, most sources suggest the typical wage of these workers is well north of $100k. While I don't dispute Paul Krugman's observation that *some* native US workers likely experience downward wage pressure courtesy of the existence of the H1B visa, H1B workers themselves clearly are doing ok (else it's unlikely there'd be so much competition for the highly limited number of annual H1B slots). Also, the number of H1B visas granted annually—only 85,000—is barely a rounding error in a nation with a third of a *billion* souls producing nearly $30 trillion in annual output. It's just not that big a deal either way.
Anyway, the "indentured servant" meme is clearly a myth ginned up by, well, tech bros.
After working with many H1B visa holders over the past 8-9 years I disagree that these people can easily switch jobs. All must have a “sponsor” here, and the great majority of tech companies don’t want to be their sponsor. To get around this there are many recruiting companies that act as sponsor, AND keep a huge amount of the visa holder’s earnings. Unlike recruiters that are native here in the US (Robert Half, Mason Frank, etc.,) they keep the actual wages, and negotiate salaries below what US citizens earn. If a visa holder wants to leave that job, the sponsor has to agree to find them another job; if the visa holder wants to leave that sponsor, they usually have to pay out their contract with the sponsor. The companies willing to sponsor a visa holder outright often are companies started and run by immigrants themselves, or even based in India.
I have worked with knowledgeable, talented visa holders, but I’ve also worked with others who are limited by their culture or language skills, e.g. too timid to speak with users for needs gathering or not able to ask the questions to solve for the users needs because they don’t understand what they’re hearing from them. The nuances one needs to pick up from users who cannot articulate the issues in tech-speak go way over the visa holders head. I’ve also worked with scammers, visa holders trying to do more than 1 full time job, or having 1 person interview for the job but another actually taking the job (they all look alike to us? How insulting - for the visa holder.) Then, I’ve also been lucky and worked with some who are fantastic team mates, more so than their US born counter parts.
It’s a system that need reform, but not for ANY of the Musk, Looner, Bannon, or Rama… reasons.
I hate scammers, but I fail to see how they would be “their own countrymen.” They would have to be a skilled, scamming American who came from the same country as the immigrant who wants to use the visa to secure employment, possibly future citizenship.
Here is an article and a quote. Infosys and Tata are Indian companies.
“The IT outsourcing firms Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services contracted with Southern California Edison (SCE), an energy provider, to replace hundreds of SCE employees with H-1B workers who were paid less to do the same jobs, with the U.S. workers being required to first train their H-1B replacements.”
Thank you for the link. Given the xenophobia amongst them, I do not feel X users are clamoring for jobs at Indian multinationals. They seem to be upset at h1b visas for Apple, Google, Tesla, etc.
Additionally, I do not understand how EPI can claim “DOL is in effect subsidizing the offshoring of high-paying U.S. jobs,” when the report explicitly states their business model depends on underpaying H1B visa recipients.
However, none of this has to do with what I replied to you about. I replied specifically about the interview process of H1B visa receipts. Moreover, the discussion now switching to Indian founded multinationals with offices within our borders further complicates that point.
How could “we all look like,” be happening when these multinationals led by Indian-American businessmen, 1st thru 3rd+ gen, are the ones negatively harming H1B visa holders by assuming “they all look alike.”
I do agree with the notion that white collar crime is widespread and not enforced enough. It’s shameful.
I must add that the DOJ just brought charges against the Adani Group and eight executives, including a prominent multibillionaire, so they are certainly watching. White collar prosecutions are about to fall to the floor under 47.
>After working with many H1B visa holders over the past 8-9 years I disagree that these people can easily switch jobs<
As I mention on this very thread, such workers require a bonafide, H1B-eligible job offer to leave their current employers, and they must invariably pay immigration lawyers to process the paperwork. So, switching jobs does indeed require effort and money on the part of H1B workers. No argument from me! But nonetheless this is very far indeed from impossible. It's actually relatively common. "Easy" (your descriptive) isn't a technical term. But nonetheless publicly available information suggests about 20% of H1B holders switch jobs annually:
My experience from 30 years ago was that some of the original beneficiaries learned the system, got their green cards, and became the recruiter/sponsor/skim a lot off the top from those that followed.
Likely true. But how many of these workers are worse off for coming here than if they stayed in their home countries? After all, they are free to return.
I beg to differ a little. Flexibility to change jobs is not technically impossible for some H1B visa holders, but arrangements to do it are overly complex. Many visa employees are limited by their original subcontracting arrangements back home, and also their lack of knowledge about US labor laws.
Changing jobs isn't remotely "impossible." No need to use the modifier "technically."
I'm not claiming that changing jobs is a piece of cake for H1B workers. The H1B holder is required to receive a qualifying job offer and submit paperwork to the government. This will almost certainly be handled by lawyers. And lawyers in America don't work for free. So yeah, there are some hoops to jump through and costs to bear. As I said at the outset, I favor changes to the H1B program (why not allow H1B holder completely unfettered access to the labor market—no need to seek government approval to change jobs—after six months?).
Still, the "myth" that H1B workers are practically slaves—or that the program itself is nothing but a sop to tech overlords—is just that, a myth.
The H1B program allows more skilled workers to immigrate to the United States than would otherwise be the case, and as such it's a win for America. Full stop.
Agreed to essentially everything you said. But… the ugly flip side is that I’ve personally seen HB1 visa holders arranged ONLY because American citizens expect to be paid more for the same work. HB1 visas effectively lower the average salaries of ALL the similar employees within any given industry. Let’s not fool ourselves about why Tech Bros are enamored with its use.
A sign of the times how explicit language dumbs the dialogue. To equate H1B or H2B to indentured servants basically ignores the ideal of America; post-Civil War, post two World Wars, post civil rights era, and post-Obama America in motion that more and more lives up to the ideal of being the land of the free.
Your thoughts are very well taken and true. However, the playing field must be fair in every way for actual citizens to compete for the same jobs. The point is that it is not fair right now.
I agree with you on your sentiment about actual citizens needing to be the priority. And yet, in a nation with a third of a billion people, the annual h1b visas is not a productive focus. There are less h1b visa recipients yearly than net jobs **created** monthly.
Additionally, American citizens are partially protected (as well as the corporations) through the inflexibility of h1b holders. So i am unsure why their inflexibility is used as a justification for their supposed double sided corruptness.
Paul took a positioned stance because work done by him, Joseph Stigiliz, and most importantly David Card confirmed the value of low to high and everything in between type of immigration.
Although what I am about to outline would hurt more than help, cutting off the legs of h1b visas is not enough to “Americanize” the workforce. It would require the disembodiment of international students at all of our universities, which would amount to weakening alliances with all our allies around the world. Thus, leading to poorer economic welfare.
“More and more lives up to the ideal of being the land of the free.”
Wow! Do you pretend to believe that or did you copy it from some cult newsletter?
The GQP has spent the last 40 years working to deny votes, gerrymander so that a minority can control government, gut civil rights, and give power to the ultra rich. It’s the land of the “free” for oligarchs and screw everyone else… but we will keep yiu fired up and pliable with”culture war” stories and the best propaganda the Russians can manage.
Hey lady. I am a first generation “Minority” American who grew up in *gasps* Florida and graduated from an Ivy League school along with my sister. Myself, my sister, and my parents have never once voted for a GOP presidential candidate.
Just because there are still substantial problems in this country, doesn’t mean that SALARIED WORKERS are comparable to SLAVES — seeing as I descend from SLAVES I do loathe language that weakens the brutality of SLAVERY.
Since I’ve read American history, I’ve read otherwise smart 1800s white men offer up ludicrous explanations of why slavery needs to remain in place because black people are a substandard type of human being.
I’ve read the optimism of Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, during tougher times than mine, who would be shocked at the trivialization of the first black President all while claiming this nation hasn’t progressed.
I know dam well about the insatiable rich, and Im damn proud of Lina Khan and Tim Wu’s work to improve the American economy. Obviously Trump & his trustees are going to screw everyone over & turn the Oval Office into eBay.
That doesn’t mean I have to be blind to the progress of a country that posed integrated schools, families, and sports were a threat to civil society just over 75 years ago.
The companies pay far below market rates for the roles. Yes, our immigration system is so broken that an H-1B visa looks good. My objections is that there's no portability, and it's hard to convert to a green card, it's for training future offshore workers. It's all bad for American workers, I'm fine with letting them become American workers.
>The companies pay far below market rates for the roles. <
Lack of cite duly noted.
>My objections is that there's no portability<
This, quite simply, is false. *Millions* of H1B workers have voluntarily shifted to better opportunities.
>and it's hard to convert to a green card<
Well, on this we agree: H1B visas should easily convert to permanent residence. I'd suggest three/four years of law-abiding, gainful employment with full payment of taxes means your H1B converts into a Green Card.
Yeah, sorry, I don't work there and didn't take notes at a previous job where I had easy access to that data. But we were advertising roles that I'd expect to make far more than my salary at the time, for far less money. It was clearly a fake posting, to justify an H-1B hire. They are a cheap way to get mid level and junior people, and cripple the development of senior people. But, they save money for the super rich. This probably explains why tech hasn't had a good idea in 15 years.
I think when people speak to H-1B numbers, it should be taken in context of the labor markets in which they are concentrated. Not simply over a single year but over a span of time.
A large concentration of current and former H-1B workers can be found in metros like SJ, SF, and NY. With new tech hubs in Texas following suit.
I agree, not surprising at all. But my point is that concentrated in these tech hubs, the number of H-1B workers is not trivial nor a drop in the bucket.
Because the labor supply for high skilled and high paid labor is so large in these tech hubs, cost of living has been impacted tremendously. Much of that is due to excessive regulations around housing and zoning, but the impact is nonetheless a general increase in demand, fueled by high incomes, for limited housing which is pushing locals out. I personally pay market rate for bay area housing built in the 1980s!
California has been steadily losing population under these conditions as cost of living has increased. We only recovered population in the last couple years because of
1) A decrease in Covid fatalities.
2) Increases in legal immigration.
California is set to lose electoral votes in 2030 if these trends continue!
I confess I don't follow the thrust of your argument. You're claiming that high housing costs in California are due to immigrants (and not the fact that California allows municipalities to deny building permits)?
The fact that the recent rate of population growth in California is literally the lowest in its entire history suggests the blame for lack of affordability lies squarely on NIMBYism.
I’m saying it’s many things, but both issues contribute to varying degrees. My point is that where H-1B numbers, and tech workers in general, are concentrated matters. Again, these numbers are not trivial.
I agree that NIMBYism has created artificial scarcity, but nonetheless the real impact of increased demand is still high housing costs that not everyone can afford. Both of these things can be true at the same time.
One difference is that the land is already built up in California. When you run into the ocean you are kind of forced to stop building. So demand increases and housing costs rise. Austin Texas isn't bound up by an ocean. There's prairie for miles and miles.
Austin has still had issues related to housing price increases.
The rest of the state somewhat though still affordable. Notably, the rest of the state isn't really a tech hub -- there's some stuff in the north Dallas suburbs but not really the Silicon Valley kind of "tech."
As a H-1B visa holder you are limited to the employer that hired you for the job you were hired to do. That means that you cannot change employers or even job title with a lot of red tape. There were people who previously worked for Twitter had to leave the country, some with their families.
If they truly cared about the supply of STEM employees, they should make the H-1B visa a time limited work visa that allows you to work in the USA but doesn’t limit who you can work for.
Yes, the problem with H1Bs is that it creates a caste of second-class workers, who face deportation if they don't accomodate abusive practices by the employer, and that undermines the bargaining power of the whole workforce. If somebody is good enough to work here on an H1B, they're good enough to work here, period, end of story, and they should be able to quit and seek other employment without the threat of being deported in a few months.
1) being a politician (not to say a Statist) is so different from being a (supposedly) clever businessman (even if we assume DJT and Musk come close to this definition);
2) Xi and Vlad are surely watching very closely. I am afraid they were the actual winners of the last US elections, and it is really a pity as the Biden administration in my view made almost a miracle keeping the western alliance together (with enormous sacrifices for allied countries) as compared with the great difficulties in China and Russia (financial, political);
No question Putin and Xi benefited. They also “helped.” Putin (and the Saudis) helped musk buy Twitter. Remember all the talk about how ridiculous the final cost was? Petty cash to win the prize they did—an unparalleled propaganda tool. And the cult followers praise musk for being a “freedom of speech” champion. Orwellian, even if they don’t have a clue what he wrote.
Finally, someone mentions education in this ridiculous dichotomy between greedy corporate tech bros and racist nativists/nationalists. The American education system is failing children, especially those from low-income backgrounds, robbing some of the opportunity to pursue STEM careers as engineers and scientists. I grew up poor and became a successful engineer in the robotics industry, in some ways in spite of the education system rather than because of it.
1) K-12 outcomes are inconsistent across the country, even in wealthy states like California. Underpreparing students for the rigor of undergraduate STEM education.
2) Higher education is expensive. The tech labor shortages are most acute in areas requiring advanced degrees. The median costs for an undergraduate degree (about $40,000) and an advanced degree (about $60,000) saddle students with nearly $100,000 in unforgivable debt!
Higher education skyrocketed in cost after 1980, which was also the year Reagan was elected president of the country. Led by John Silber at Boston University, colleges started being run “like a business”, which turned out to mean not sensible management but profiteering at the expense of students and staff. Students became customers to exploit, faculty workers to dominate and exploit. Academic departments became cost centers, housing a profit center. Tuition doubled over and over. Student loans, already having burdensome interest, became heavier.
Then came attacks on public schools at all levels. Funding went down. Teachers got blamed instead of supported. State wide testing, poorly implemented, created a “teach to the test” system that made it much harder to teach the students, to address individual needs, to teach kids how to think for themselves.
Thanks Joan. This speaks to controversial tuition increases I saw as a student in community college and public university in California.
Theres also something to be said about the growing reliance on full-tuition paying students from other states and from abroad. I personally valued that multi-cultural experience, with friends from Texas, the Carolinas and more exotic places like Italy and Hong Kong. But I became increasingly aware that the public schools I went to relied on their large tuition expenses to subsidize my education. I wish more funding went to schools.
Thank you, Joan. Truer words were never spoken, I say, as I labor in a cost center filled with anxiety unless we ( sound the trumpets) Get More Majors!
Thanks Joan simple but astute. Clear as the. Ode on our face. Without education america is a 5th rate country. What’s the very 1st thing Mr fatass dictator attacked?? Dept Education
What you’re saying resonates with me. Higher ed seems to be oriented around money and not students or research. I also think structural factors have contributed to rising tuition costs.
Demand for college education sky rocketed with Millenials, which were both the largest generation and the most educated. The supply of higher education is inelastic since professors take many years to train. A huge price increase in tuition feels somewhat inevitable under the circumstances.
Now that the crop of new students is shrinking, I expect a lot of financial strain in higher education.
Reagan sold US ALL OUT, to corps. For Money. Reagan ruined America 🇺🇸 for WE the PEOPLE, to enrich himself - Further. Greed begets Greed, look at the oligarchs, $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$ who still want IT ALL!
I went to UCSB and a few years after graduating in 89 the once palatable and cheap food outlets there were all privatized and bought out by fast food companies.
I picked up a salad from one campus center outlet and found a fly in it about half way through.
That was the last time I ate there. The community near the campus, Isla Vista (aka Oily Vista), had restaurants but they were even worse.
One deli on campus used to serve a pickle wedge along with cracked green olives. I always request more olives instead of the pickle and was rewarded with some of the best olives I've ever eaten.
Strange how even in the 90s things were better. Looks like the US's golden age was during the 60s and 70s.
The whole ecosystem for STEM education in the USA is struggling. My wife couldn’t find enough postdocs for her medical research lab without having access to H1Bs. Our son got a science degree and has started his science career, in large part thanks to a local public school system that values STEM and has one of the nations top STEM magnet programs.
Yes.... the key word your are not undersanding the implications of is POST..... what is the career path for those doctorte holding tech workers? err... they are trained... they have a doctorate... BUT they require more trainting... ergo post doc.... Pray tell WHAT are they TRAINING for? She is simply hiring lab techs at a discount....and they are disposobale if her funding declines. Most US trained STEM workers.... start in the career.... see this pathway and say.... NOPE.... out of here!.... Check in with your son after 3 years post training... (BS, Masters, PhD. )
💯 Mark. My daughter was getting her PhD in a STEM field but 'mastered out' instead because she was teaching a lab PLUS doing R&D for the professor in order to earn her stipend. In the meantime, the work she needed to do to complete her PhD suffered. The stipend barely covered food and rent so The Bank of Mom and Dad covered car insurance and health insurance after she turned 26. The foreign students are strapped even more because if they quit school, they have to leave. They are disposable.
This quote perfectly encapsulates much of America: "I grew up poor and became a successful engineer in the robotics industry, in some ways in spite of the education system rather than because of it."
I do want to say that I am grateful for my public education, for the teachers and professors I had. The lab spaces I had available to learn important ideas in physics, electrical engineering and robotics.
The ways I feel I succeeded in spite of the higher education system have to do with ridiculous tuition costs (especially graduate school), difficulty in securing loans in community college to cover housing/living expenses as an independent adult and full time student with an unpaid STEM internship, a distinct lack of STEM opportunities for community college students, ignorance and discouragement from career counselors early on (leading me to figure out my career path and curriculum for robotics on my own).
How K-12 made my education difficult involves issues like indifference from counselors/administration, undeterred bullying, prejudice, and gatekeeping of academic opportunities.
There is also a lot of culture involved. I did a STEM program for an elementary school a few years ago. The school was very mixed. Lots of white kids, some Asian kids, some Indian kids, some Mexican kids, some black kids. The school had relegated STEM to an after school program and used volunteers from industry, like me. Every kid in the after school STEM program was Indian or Asian. The other kids just didn't find that stuff important enough to pursue.
I don't want to jump to conclusions here, but your story does remind me of something I noticed growing up.
Culturally, middle class and upper middle class American families, from my experience, tend to groom their children for professional careers like law, medicine, business. Until recently, STEM was not as prestigous among traditional middle and upper class professionals. I say this because the richer peers I was raised amongst went into traditional professional careers and I am among a handful that became engineers/scientists. I am probably the only one that can claim to have worked at NASA and FAANG, nevermind turned down an offer at a DOE lab.
In the last 5-10 years, I've seen a push from young middle and upper class families to groom their children for STEM careers. I get questions from them all the time, can you review my childs resume, can you talk to my kid, how did you do it, what did your family do? The irony is I was raised by a single mom working as a fry cook in the downtrodden parts of a suburb in LA. Anyhow my point is that things have changed I suspect since your anecdote, the middle and upper class (at least in CA) aspire to STEM professions and pass that on to their kids. Culture doesn't matter as much as you think it does, it didn't for me. I think that gives me hope for the American culture I grew up in, no matter how dumb others might think it is at times.
I think there is a missing point highlighted by your anecdote; STEM folks are probably drawn to the field from interest and self-motivation. The more we try to groom people into high level positions, the more we may be fighting against nature. I have always been more in favor of a vision of society where failure is expected, inevitable even, but there is always a cushion to pick yourself back up and try again.
Humans live long lives, now. We still pace our society like we are expecting most people to crap out in their 50's and 60's due to heart attacks, accidents, etc. Most people live into their 80's, now, and our entire economy is now built so people hit their stride in their late-30's and 40's, rather than their late-20's and 30's as it was in prior gens.
I am an Infection Preventionist, now. I grew up in a single parent household in my earliest years, and then had a step father for my formative years. I flaked a lot in school, and even was homeless for a few years in my early 20's. It is brick stupid to demand that everyone have their shit together by the end of their teens when we live so long, and the circumstances which demanded us to rush kids through their childhood to potentially reach some rat race, upper middle class job may harm the kids more than anyone else. Maybe the toxic part of our culture that desperately needs to change is that we need to accept that our ideas about progression, where we should be at what point of our lives, are outdated.
Personally, I think that so much of our current education system is meant as a tool for the ruling class to turn out useful products rather than a public good meant to make good citizens of the republic. That is the first thing which should change, and all other changes will come from there. Policy and government is downstream from culture, right?
I think culture doesn’t matter until it does. For example, medical schools are FULL of second generation future physicians. It’s like we’re creating family dynasties in medicine. If and when the upper class turns away from professions like law and medicine and towards STEM, then STEM will also be colonized by the wealthy.
I have kids in a school, near Silicon Valley, and their friends are all pushed/encouraged into STEM studies during the week and weekends regardless of interest. Kids interested in humanities or the like? Not allowed to pursue it or even consider studying it in college.
It will be interesting to see how these first generation kids, who are heading off to college and careers, end up changing the field. Will we need as many visa holders in 20 years to fill the tech gaps?
In China and India STEM education must be like a political movement. They want to outdo “dumb” Americans and literally take our jobs and come up with technology better than in USA. It's like the arms race, but instead in STEM education over there. America should not ignore this fact. We have to compete with them too.
Der Prof Krugman, I liked your off-hand reference to the "Polish Plumbers," which caused such an anti-immigrant uproar in the UK 20 years ago. Thank you for your well-thought-out writings. I'm glad you left the Times.
This reminds me that I should brush up on my Polish before my visit to London next month. Last time I was there I kept running into Poles. Or maybe now it'll be Romanians and Moldovans. (I've studied both languages, but to tell the truth I'm long past being able to recover any of that vocabulary, although they might get a kick out of a "thank you". In the meantime, they're all getting along fine in English.)
The drive, ambition and resilience of those who left/leave for a better life in the West continue to astound me. This is one reason I'm happy to have recent immigrants mixing into my society.
We are so glad you've liberated yourself from the NYT Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What a gift that you suddenly appear unadorned in my mailbox whenever you please. Thank you!
I am hardly anti immigrant or against H1B visas in general but as a former employee of the corporate high tech industry, I believe it must be emphasized that people like Musk are after cheap labor, as others have noted here.
Although H1B visas can certainly bring in motivated and innovative people into the high tech labor force, there is not a shortage of capable labor in this country. In fact, I would say there is more of a shortage of interesting jobs which can challenge the well trained domestic labor we already have.
Krugman has ably described the pluses and minuses of immigration but the fiction of America somehow having an undereducated high tech labor force is something that needs to be dispelled to the general public.
"Interesting jobs" is the key. I was a Fellow in Lockheed Martin's organization. Most engineering organizations have a Fellows program. It's the top of the tech ladder and generally intended to parallel endowed chairs in academia. I received excellent performance reviews each year, and every year I would tell my supervisor (who was the site manager), "I don't need a raise. What I would prefer is more interesting work." Each year he would respond, "but more money we got...".
Hard to believe those billionaire geniuses could be that stupid and arrogant. Reminds me of Steve Jobs, a genius who thought he was smarter than his lying doctors and believed the quacks who peddled him "alternative" medicine until it was too late for the medicine that works to save him. Maybe we need to import a better class of billionaire - oh wait . . .
I’ve found in my career as a CPA that generally, folks who make an extremely successful business, or climb to the peak of their profession, suddenly feel they know everything. Steve Jobs and others have discovered the truth too late.
Is there a difference between "I'm smart and successful so I know everything" and "I'm smart and successful so, if I don't know something yet, I'll be able to learn enough about it on my own to make good decisions"?
Often enough, if you have a rare disease (of which there are lots), the doctors you're seeing won't be experts in treating your particular problem - and you'll usually have a lot more time to do things like search Google Scholar for promising new treatments than your typical doctor will. So it's entirely possible for you to end up knowing something important that your doctor wouldn't have learned on their own.
1. The lower wage tech worker or plumber being passed on as savings to average worker in general economy using those services and hence higher net income for them falsely (or at least incompletely) assumes that the employer/business owner employing engineer/plumber passes those savings. That may work in "economics" but in reality the owner keeps it for themselves; becomes billionaire, buys yacht and leases politicians. Similar to how greedflation since 2020 was real.
2. How about we invest in affordable univiversal quality comprehensive reality based education for all persons living in America, and reduce "need" for brain-draining other countries.
You are talking about idealistic & fair concepts - something you might have noticed does not tally with what Republicans desire !!! They have ZERO interest in helping any 'lower class' kid get a helping hand to step up into what they see as 'their world'. Of course all the idiots who vote Republican have no real idea what those already well-to-do 'upper level' people actually believe about them ! I'm a Brit where the class structure is very obvious, but here in the US it's actually much the same except that everybody claims it is not !
One of the issues I have with all of this is that US companies that require mid-tech workers hire Indian workers under the assumption that they are better educated. But cheating is a huge issue in Indian education. I don't think I'm saying this in a bigoted way. My business partner is Indian, and he is very well educated. But in India, cheating has become institutionalized. I'll leave a link at the end to a story in Business Insider, but there are many other stories on this. Parents, teachers, and whole school systems participate in the cheat. In many cases, some family members serve as runners to run questions out of the classroom to other family members who use laptops to search the Internet for answers so that the runners can run the answers back. And it's not just one family doing this here or there. There may be hundreds of people with laptops on the lawn next to the schoolhouse all searching for exam answers to feed the runners, all at the same time. No one stops this because the schools accept and often encourage cheating because it elevates them in the national rankings, and the level of cheating makes it impossible to judge the quality of the student based on grades and exam scores.
Unfortunately, the cheating habit comes to America along with the students who cheat. I can speak to that. I am a computer scientist. I take university classes to stay current. Several years ago I was in an advanced (senior undergrad/first year grad) class in computer science. There were about 25 people in the class. I was the lone white guy. The rest were Indian. So, to be sure, the Indian students were unafraid to take a very difficult class. They valued the material the class taught and were generally capable students, but couldn't afford low grades, which might have their scholarships withdrawn and force their return to India. In a class with such difficult material, the only meaningful way to conduct exams was take home, and those exams were hard!!! The questions were unique, written entirely by the professor himself. After the first exam was given, the professor searched the Internet sites where people pay the lowest bidder for solutions to exam questions. He found all of his exam questions, word for word, spread across the sites. He even bid on some of them himself. Many/most/perhaps all of the questions were repeated multiple times and on the same sites. He was able to conclude through frequency of repetition that at least half of his class and probably much more were engaged in open cheating. He addressed this with some disgust when he returned the exams, but he concluded that there was little he could do about it. It was really a shocking moment. As for myself, I spent about 40 hours answering the exam questions. And until the professor took us on a tour of those Internet cheating sites, I was unaware that they existed. I thought I did very well on the exam, but several students earned even higher scores. The problem is that I don't know if they are superior students and earned those scores on their own merits, or if they purchased answers to the exam questions and submitted the work of others. There is no way to evaluate my classmates, and if I was hiring, their performance at school would not help me in making hiring decisions. American companies hiring mid-tech workers on H1 visas are in the same predicament whether they know it or not.
To be fair, this kind of cheating isn’t limited to Indians and STEM classes. We had a similar experience back in 1989 at the university where I was a graduate teaching fellow. When 75% of students turned in papers that were fundamentally identical, it was clear they had purchased a paper from an answer bank kept by a fraternity. Unfortunately, the paper most students chose to turn in did not even remotely address the assignment.
As for the Loomer/Miller/Bannon/Fuentes MAGAt faction’s underlying motivation (racism), it’s worth noting none of the Black students cheated in 1989. They did their own work.
It’s well known that code can be generated in ChatGPT these days. My friend just went through a year of getting 3 coding certs state side in a program & she verified code with ChatGPT. I didn’t think that was right, but I’m old. I taught myself SQL in my late 40s on my job. I grabbed every opportunity I had to learn any software only to have it taken away from me & given to a younger male colleague once I’d worked out the bugs. No lie. Then I’d have to write up the process manuals. Cuz old women can’t code. We all got outsourced to HCL anyway. It’s funny, & probably because I’m old, or wouldn’t occur to me to cheat or use ChatGPT for anything.
Oh God if all ChatGPT does is eliminate tech jobs when they tried to tell the humanities majors that ChatGPT would render them irrelevant, that will be glorious.
All you have to do is tell humanities kids that they prolly wanna be unique & different & not auto-generated & they’ll write their own pablum. But code is also fun to write.
The point of a lot of modern STEM education is to get students to the point where they can tell if the computer is giving them the wrong answer.
The obvious way a computer can give someone the wrong answer is a typo, but another cause is when computer models make assumptions that don't hold in the real world. For example, if you ask a simulation program what will happen if you put a million volts across a one-Ohm resistor, it will use Ohm's Law to calculate that you'll get a million amperes of current flowing through that resistor, but if you try anything like that in real life, you'll get *zero* current because the resistor will get hot enough to burn itself out.
I looked at code like music. I could always hear if someone was “off” in a chord or harmony, or if my fingers weren’t striking the right notes on the piano. Or if I was writing a song if it was “off” as well. If you go back to medieval times you’ll see that math & music are studied together. I also thought music theory & calculus & trig were same. Those weird scales. Mathematical. Physics is music. So when I learned coding it wasn’t diametrically opposed to musical theatre, which was my BA. Also dance is movement through time & space. If that not physics, I don’t know what is! I stayed away from coding until I needed it for a job then I ran with it. If I can do it, anyone can.
I left a Big 4 consulting firm because its managers treated H-1bs like indentured servants. Not willing to work 18 hours a say 7 days a week? Ship ‘em back to India. The sad part is the most inhumane were Muskaswamy types—first generation immigrants who became citizens.
Muskawamy might be my new favorite word. (Vivek went to the local Jesuit high school. He missed the classes on being "men for others" which emphasizes service to others. To see him become so grotesquely Muskian is depressing).
Really appreciate Krugman’s perspective on MAGA dynamics. hope you keep it up, Paul. Let’s have training for Americans AND the visas for foreign engineers.
I think that there is one subtlety going on with native-born tech workers. People with tech skills don't get paid much compared to bosses. So those with both tech and boss skills move to bossing. And a lot of people have both sets of skills. Indeed, I would hazard that most of the boss people could be tech people, and may have been if tech paid better.
But there is one pool of tech talent that cannot easily exercise their latent boss skills--immigrants, due to social constraints. Some of them can, and maybe eventually become bosses. But the rest are relegated to tech, regardless of their innate boss skills. It's just too damn hart to surpass various cultural and language barriers--coding is easier for most. The same would be true for an American tech worker dumped in, say, Japan.
This isn't unprecedented. Think of women before the 1980's--all kinds of amazing skills channeled into nursing and teaching--at low pay!--because of gender bias. What's different here is that the pay is the independent variable and the channelling the dependent variable.
I wish the professor had mentioned that HB1 visas limit the employment flexibility of the recipient making it an indentured servitude arrangement for the employer. ✌️
I don't comment on Substack often, but came here to say this exactly. H1b visas are the modern version of indentured servitude that only benefit the plantation owners.
The indentured weren't allowed to leave their employment.
The H1B workers are punished by being forced to leave when they aren't subservient or productive enough.
More desperate scab than indentured slave.
>>That only benefit the plantation owners.<<
Sure. A worker from India or China who experiences a nine-fold salary increase doesn't benefit AT ALL.
I respectfully suggest that you missed the true point of this essay.
But working 80 + hours a week, just what does it mean to him? If he doesn't like it, his alternative is to leave.
The alternative is for them to find a new sponsor, this happens all the time in both the Tech and Medical fields.
H1B not indentured servitude!
You can transfer an H1B to another employer relatively easily.
And many employers hiring via H1B will include wording in the offer letter that they will suppport a Green Card application.
That is not universal. Indeed it varies by employer with some being much more willing to support and others (e.g. Amazon) being more prone to exploit by promising and failing to deliver the support or making it hard to shift. In the end the program as run allows for and is rife with abuses though not everyone is abused.
That's not quite accurate. While the H1B program could do with some reforms, H1B workers can, in fact, switch employers, and many do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgKFEQtr4aA&pp=ygUFI3BoMWI%3D
Also, most sources suggest the typical wage of these workers is well north of $100k. While I don't dispute Paul Krugman's observation that *some* native US workers likely experience downward wage pressure courtesy of the existence of the H1B visa, H1B workers themselves clearly are doing ok (else it's unlikely there'd be so much competition for the highly limited number of annual H1B slots). Also, the number of H1B visas granted annually—only 85,000—is barely a rounding error in a nation with a third of a *billion* souls producing nearly $30 trillion in annual output. It's just not that big a deal either way.
Anyway, the "indentured servant" meme is clearly a myth ginned up by, well, tech bros.
After working with many H1B visa holders over the past 8-9 years I disagree that these people can easily switch jobs. All must have a “sponsor” here, and the great majority of tech companies don’t want to be their sponsor. To get around this there are many recruiting companies that act as sponsor, AND keep a huge amount of the visa holder’s earnings. Unlike recruiters that are native here in the US (Robert Half, Mason Frank, etc.,) they keep the actual wages, and negotiate salaries below what US citizens earn. If a visa holder wants to leave that job, the sponsor has to agree to find them another job; if the visa holder wants to leave that sponsor, they usually have to pay out their contract with the sponsor. The companies willing to sponsor a visa holder outright often are companies started and run by immigrants themselves, or even based in India.
I have worked with knowledgeable, talented visa holders, but I’ve also worked with others who are limited by their culture or language skills, e.g. too timid to speak with users for needs gathering or not able to ask the questions to solve for the users needs because they don’t understand what they’re hearing from them. The nuances one needs to pick up from users who cannot articulate the issues in tech-speak go way over the visa holders head. I’ve also worked with scammers, visa holders trying to do more than 1 full time job, or having 1 person interview for the job but another actually taking the job (they all look alike to us? How insulting - for the visa holder.) Then, I’ve also been lucky and worked with some who are fantastic team mates, more so than their US born counter parts.
It’s a system that need reform, but not for ANY of the Musk, Looner, Bannon, or Rama… reasons.
Excellent comment. Yes, the middlemen exploiting these workers are often their own countrymen.
I hate scammers, but I fail to see how they would be “their own countrymen.” They would have to be a skilled, scamming American who came from the same country as the immigrant who wants to use the visa to secure employment, possibly future citizenship.
Here is an article and a quote. Infosys and Tata are Indian companies.
“The IT outsourcing firms Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services contracted with Southern California Edison (SCE), an energy provider, to replace hundreds of SCE employees with H-1B workers who were paid less to do the same jobs, with the U.S. workers being required to first train their H-1B replacements.”
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage-theft-in-the-h-1b-program/
Thank you for the link. Given the xenophobia amongst them, I do not feel X users are clamoring for jobs at Indian multinationals. They seem to be upset at h1b visas for Apple, Google, Tesla, etc.
Additionally, I do not understand how EPI can claim “DOL is in effect subsidizing the offshoring of high-paying U.S. jobs,” when the report explicitly states their business model depends on underpaying H1B visa recipients.
However, none of this has to do with what I replied to you about. I replied specifically about the interview process of H1B visa receipts. Moreover, the discussion now switching to Indian founded multinationals with offices within our borders further complicates that point.
How could “we all look like,” be happening when these multinationals led by Indian-American businessmen, 1st thru 3rd+ gen, are the ones negatively harming H1B visa holders by assuming “they all look alike.”
I do agree with the notion that white collar crime is widespread and not enforced enough. It’s shameful.
I must add that the DOJ just brought charges against the Adani Group and eight executives, including a prominent multibillionaire, so they are certainly watching. White collar prosecutions are about to fall to the floor under 47.
Yup. Tata undercut all the small consulting companies.
Greed and self-protection are worldwide phenomena. I’m not sure what the point is, whether middlemen are of the same nationality or not.
>After working with many H1B visa holders over the past 8-9 years I disagree that these people can easily switch jobs<
As I mention on this very thread, such workers require a bonafide, H1B-eligible job offer to leave their current employers, and they must invariably pay immigration lawyers to process the paperwork. So, switching jobs does indeed require effort and money on the part of H1B workers. No argument from me! But nonetheless this is very far indeed from impossible. It's actually relatively common. "Easy" (your descriptive) isn't a technical term. But nonetheless publicly available information suggests about 20% of H1B holders switch jobs annually:
https://www.newsweek.com/can-h-1b-visa-holders-change-jobs-critics-call-workers-indentured-servants-2006950#
I prefer statistical information to anecdotes. YMMV.
My experience from 30 years ago was that some of the original beneficiaries learned the system, got their green cards, and became the recruiter/sponsor/skim a lot off the top from those that followed.
Thank you much. Most “peaches and cream” Americans have never been exposed to this ugly underbelly.
Likely true. But how many of these workers are worse off for coming here than if they stayed in their home countries? After all, they are free to return.
The workers do great. Americans who lose their jobs in the process or are simply denied entry, not so good.
I beg to differ a little. Flexibility to change jobs is not technically impossible for some H1B visa holders, but arrangements to do it are overly complex. Many visa employees are limited by their original subcontracting arrangements back home, and also their lack of knowledge about US labor laws.
Changing jobs isn't remotely "impossible." No need to use the modifier "technically."
I'm not claiming that changing jobs is a piece of cake for H1B workers. The H1B holder is required to receive a qualifying job offer and submit paperwork to the government. This will almost certainly be handled by lawyers. And lawyers in America don't work for free. So yeah, there are some hoops to jump through and costs to bear. As I said at the outset, I favor changes to the H1B program (why not allow H1B holder completely unfettered access to the labor market—no need to seek government approval to change jobs—after six months?).
Still, the "myth" that H1B workers are practically slaves—or that the program itself is nothing but a sop to tech overlords—is just that, a myth.
The H1B program allows more skilled workers to immigrate to the United States than would otherwise be the case, and as such it's a win for America. Full stop.
Agreed to essentially everything you said. But… the ugly flip side is that I’ve personally seen HB1 visa holders arranged ONLY because American citizens expect to be paid more for the same work. HB1 visas effectively lower the average salaries of ALL the similar employees within any given industry. Let’s not fool ourselves about why Tech Bros are enamored with its use.
A sign of the times how explicit language dumbs the dialogue. To equate H1B or H2B to indentured servants basically ignores the ideal of America; post-Civil War, post two World Wars, post civil rights era, and post-Obama America in motion that more and more lives up to the ideal of being the land of the free.
Your thoughts are very well taken and true. However, the playing field must be fair in every way for actual citizens to compete for the same jobs. The point is that it is not fair right now.
I agree with you on your sentiment about actual citizens needing to be the priority. And yet, in a nation with a third of a billion people, the annual h1b visas is not a productive focus. There are less h1b visa recipients yearly than net jobs **created** monthly.
Additionally, American citizens are partially protected (as well as the corporations) through the inflexibility of h1b holders. So i am unsure why their inflexibility is used as a justification for their supposed double sided corruptness.
Paul took a positioned stance because work done by him, Joseph Stigiliz, and most importantly David Card confirmed the value of low to high and everything in between type of immigration.
Although what I am about to outline would hurt more than help, cutting off the legs of h1b visas is not enough to “Americanize” the workforce. It would require the disembodiment of international students at all of our universities, which would amount to weakening alliances with all our allies around the world. Thus, leading to poorer economic welfare.
Sorry—you made me laugh out loud.
“More and more lives up to the ideal of being the land of the free.”
Wow! Do you pretend to believe that or did you copy it from some cult newsletter?
The GQP has spent the last 40 years working to deny votes, gerrymander so that a minority can control government, gut civil rights, and give power to the ultra rich. It’s the land of the “free” for oligarchs and screw everyone else… but we will keep yiu fired up and pliable with”culture war” stories and the best propaganda the Russians can manage.
Hey lady. I am a first generation “Minority” American who grew up in *gasps* Florida and graduated from an Ivy League school along with my sister. Myself, my sister, and my parents have never once voted for a GOP presidential candidate.
Just because there are still substantial problems in this country, doesn’t mean that SALARIED WORKERS are comparable to SLAVES — seeing as I descend from SLAVES I do loathe language that weakens the brutality of SLAVERY.
Since I’ve read American history, I’ve read otherwise smart 1800s white men offer up ludicrous explanations of why slavery needs to remain in place because black people are a substandard type of human being.
I’ve read the optimism of Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, during tougher times than mine, who would be shocked at the trivialization of the first black President all while claiming this nation hasn’t progressed.
I know dam well about the insatiable rich, and Im damn proud of Lina Khan and Tim Wu’s work to improve the American economy. Obviously Trump & his trustees are going to screw everyone over & turn the Oval Office into eBay.
That doesn’t mean I have to be blind to the progress of a country that posed integrated schools, families, and sports were a threat to civil society just over 75 years ago.
The companies pay far below market rates for the roles. Yes, our immigration system is so broken that an H-1B visa looks good. My objections is that there's no portability, and it's hard to convert to a green card, it's for training future offshore workers. It's all bad for American workers, I'm fine with letting them become American workers.
>The companies pay far below market rates for the roles. <
Lack of cite duly noted.
>My objections is that there's no portability<
This, quite simply, is false. *Millions* of H1B workers have voluntarily shifted to better opportunities.
>and it's hard to convert to a green card<
Well, on this we agree: H1B visas should easily convert to permanent residence. I'd suggest three/four years of law-abiding, gainful employment with full payment of taxes means your H1B converts into a Green Card.
Yeah, sorry, I don't work there and didn't take notes at a previous job where I had easy access to that data. But we were advertising roles that I'd expect to make far more than my salary at the time, for far less money. It was clearly a fake posting, to justify an H-1B hire. They are a cheap way to get mid level and junior people, and cripple the development of senior people. But, they save money for the super rich. This probably explains why tech hasn't had a good idea in 15 years.
My immigration attorney spouse says that is inaccurate. H1B positions must pay a market rate salary. Or prevailing wage.
That's the theory, it's sure not the practice.
Documentation? If this is the case then an American worker(s) would likely have a cause of action to sue.
I think when people speak to H-1B numbers, it should be taken in context of the labor markets in which they are concentrated. Not simply over a single year but over a span of time.
A large concentration of current and former H-1B workers can be found in metros like SJ, SF, and NY. With new tech hubs in Texas following suit.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/03/29/h-1b-visa-approvals-by-us-metro-area/
I think it's not terribly surprising that H1B numbers tend to concentrate in tech hubs.
I agree, not surprising at all. But my point is that concentrated in these tech hubs, the number of H-1B workers is not trivial nor a drop in the bucket.
Because the labor supply for high skilled and high paid labor is so large in these tech hubs, cost of living has been impacted tremendously. Much of that is due to excessive regulations around housing and zoning, but the impact is nonetheless a general increase in demand, fueled by high incomes, for limited housing which is pushing locals out. I personally pay market rate for bay area housing built in the 1980s!
California has been steadily losing population under these conditions as cost of living has increased. We only recovered population in the last couple years because of
1) A decrease in Covid fatalities.
2) Increases in legal immigration.
California is set to lose electoral votes in 2030 if these trends continue!
2023
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/05/population-decline-california-grows-again/
2024
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2024/national-state-population-estimates.html
I confess I don't follow the thrust of your argument. You're claiming that high housing costs in California are due to immigrants (and not the fact that California allows municipalities to deny building permits)?
The fact that the recent rate of population growth in California is literally the lowest in its entire history suggests the blame for lack of affordability lies squarely on NIMBYism.
I’m saying it’s many things, but both issues contribute to varying degrees. My point is that where H-1B numbers, and tech workers in general, are concentrated matters. Again, these numbers are not trivial.
I agree that NIMBYism has created artificial scarcity, but nonetheless the real impact of increased demand is still high housing costs that not everyone can afford. Both of these things can be true at the same time.
North Jersey has had a very non-trivial number of H1B workers over the past 30 years.
I think that would count as "NY" for these purposes.
It will be interesting to see how Texans feel about this, both immigrant increase and housing price increase.
One difference is that the land is already built up in California. When you run into the ocean you are kind of forced to stop building. So demand increases and housing costs rise. Austin Texas isn't bound up by an ocean. There's prairie for miles and miles.
Austin has still had issues related to housing price increases.
The rest of the state somewhat though still affordable. Notably, the rest of the state isn't really a tech hub -- there's some stuff in the north Dallas suburbs but not really the Silicon Valley kind of "tech."
They aren't working in all industries but concentrated in tech
What people also miss in the annual cap is that there are renewals. So for example in in FY 2023, the Office of Homeland Security Statistics reports that 755,020 people were admitted to the United States in H-1B status. . https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program-fact-sheet#:~:text=However%2C%20admissions%20in%20H%2D1B,States%20in%20H%2D1B%20status.
In San Jose over 70% in tech are foreign born and in Seattle over 41%.
As far back as 2018 "The share of foreign-born IT workers has increased from 11 percent in 1990 to 40 percent today in the Seattle area. And for software developers — the No. 1 IT job here — nearly half were born outside the country." https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/more-than-half-of-seattles-software-developers-were-born-outside-u-s/
In fact now in Seattle it is so skewed that over 25% of the entire population is foreign born. Hardly a rounding error. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/new-king-county-milestone-one-quarter-of-residents-born-outside-u-s/
As a H-1B visa holder you are limited to the employer that hired you for the job you were hired to do. That means that you cannot change employers or even job title with a lot of red tape. There were people who previously worked for Twitter had to leave the country, some with their families.
If they truly cared about the supply of STEM employees, they should make the H-1B visa a time limited work visa that allows you to work in the USA but doesn’t limit who you can work for.
Yes! And perhaps an H-1B visa should automatically convert to a green card if it is renewed.
Amen Henrik!
>As a H-1B visa holder you are limited to the employer that hired you for the job you were hired to do.<
False.
You’re actually NOT limited to the original employer but nice try.
That's what Musk wants high skill workers who will work for half the pay.
Work 6 14-hr days & sleep on a cot or futon in said office. And, work that 7th day of the week often.
Yes, the problem with H1Bs is that it creates a caste of second-class workers, who face deportation if they don't accomodate abusive practices by the employer, and that undermines the bargaining power of the whole workforce. If somebody is good enough to work here on an H1B, they're good enough to work here, period, end of story, and they should be able to quit and seek other employment without the threat of being deported in a few months.
That explains why Musk supports these. Cheap, cheap.
Seems like the wealthy can only make money take advantage of slave labor or indentured workers to make a go of capitalism.
Well they don’t really care about being exact or correct about anything so I am not surprised
It’s not indentured servitude. It’s serfdom, indentured servants could eventually buy freedom once the debt was paid.
Dear Prof,
1) being a politician (not to say a Statist) is so different from being a (supposedly) clever businessman (even if we assume DJT and Musk come close to this definition);
2) Xi and Vlad are surely watching very closely. I am afraid they were the actual winners of the last US elections, and it is really a pity as the Biden administration in my view made almost a miracle keeping the western alliance together (with enormous sacrifices for allied countries) as compared with the great difficulties in China and Russia (financial, political);
3) NATO allies are also watching, frightened.
Yes.
No question Putin and Xi benefited. They also “helped.” Putin (and the Saudis) helped musk buy Twitter. Remember all the talk about how ridiculous the final cost was? Petty cash to win the prize they did—an unparalleled propaganda tool. And the cult followers praise musk for being a “freedom of speech” champion. Orwellian, even if they don’t have a clue what he wrote.
Finally, someone mentions education in this ridiculous dichotomy between greedy corporate tech bros and racist nativists/nationalists. The American education system is failing children, especially those from low-income backgrounds, robbing some of the opportunity to pursue STEM careers as engineers and scientists. I grew up poor and became a successful engineer in the robotics industry, in some ways in spite of the education system rather than because of it.
1) K-12 outcomes are inconsistent across the country, even in wealthy states like California. Underpreparing students for the rigor of undergraduate STEM education.
2) Higher education is expensive. The tech labor shortages are most acute in areas requiring advanced degrees. The median costs for an undergraduate degree (about $40,000) and an advanced degree (about $60,000) saddle students with nearly $100,000 in unforgivable debt!
Higher education skyrocketed in cost after 1980, which was also the year Reagan was elected president of the country. Led by John Silber at Boston University, colleges started being run “like a business”, which turned out to mean not sensible management but profiteering at the expense of students and staff. Students became customers to exploit, faculty workers to dominate and exploit. Academic departments became cost centers, housing a profit center. Tuition doubled over and over. Student loans, already having burdensome interest, became heavier.
Then came attacks on public schools at all levels. Funding went down. Teachers got blamed instead of supported. State wide testing, poorly implemented, created a “teach to the test” system that made it much harder to teach the students, to address individual needs, to teach kids how to think for themselves.
Here we are.
Thanks Joan. This speaks to controversial tuition increases I saw as a student in community college and public university in California.
Theres also something to be said about the growing reliance on full-tuition paying students from other states and from abroad. I personally valued that multi-cultural experience, with friends from Texas, the Carolinas and more exotic places like Italy and Hong Kong. But I became increasingly aware that the public schools I went to relied on their large tuition expenses to subsidize my education. I wish more funding went to schools.
Thank you, Joan. Truer words were never spoken, I say, as I labor in a cost center filled with anxiety unless we ( sound the trumpets) Get More Majors!
Add the increasing number of administrative employees to university bureacracies...
Thanks Joan simple but astute. Clear as the. Ode on our face. Without education america is a 5th rate country. What’s the very 1st thing Mr fatass dictator attacked?? Dept Education
What you’re saying resonates with me. Higher ed seems to be oriented around money and not students or research. I also think structural factors have contributed to rising tuition costs.
Demand for college education sky rocketed with Millenials, which were both the largest generation and the most educated. The supply of higher education is inelastic since professors take many years to train. A huge price increase in tuition feels somewhat inevitable under the circumstances.
Now that the crop of new students is shrinking, I expect a lot of financial strain in higher education.
Reagan sold US ALL OUT, to corps. For Money. Reagan ruined America 🇺🇸 for WE the PEOPLE, to enrich himself - Further. Greed begets Greed, look at the oligarchs, $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$ who still want IT ALL!
I went to UCSB and a few years after graduating in 89 the once palatable and cheap food outlets there were all privatized and bought out by fast food companies.
I picked up a salad from one campus center outlet and found a fly in it about half way through.
That was the last time I ate there. The community near the campus, Isla Vista (aka Oily Vista), had restaurants but they were even worse.
One deli on campus used to serve a pickle wedge along with cracked green olives. I always request more olives instead of the pickle and was rewarded with some of the best olives I've ever eaten.
Strange how even in the 90s things were better. Looks like the US's golden age was during the 60s and 70s.
The whole ecosystem for STEM education in the USA is struggling. My wife couldn’t find enough postdocs for her medical research lab without having access to H1Bs. Our son got a science degree and has started his science career, in large part thanks to a local public school system that values STEM and has one of the nations top STEM magnet programs.
Yes.... the key word your are not undersanding the implications of is POST..... what is the career path for those doctorte holding tech workers? err... they are trained... they have a doctorate... BUT they require more trainting... ergo post doc.... Pray tell WHAT are they TRAINING for? She is simply hiring lab techs at a discount....and they are disposobale if her funding declines. Most US trained STEM workers.... start in the career.... see this pathway and say.... NOPE.... out of here!.... Check in with your son after 3 years post training... (BS, Masters, PhD. )
💯 Mark. My daughter was getting her PhD in a STEM field but 'mastered out' instead because she was teaching a lab PLUS doing R&D for the professor in order to earn her stipend. In the meantime, the work she needed to do to complete her PhD suffered. The stipend barely covered food and rent so The Bank of Mom and Dad covered car insurance and health insurance after she turned 26. The foreign students are strapped even more because if they quit school, they have to leave. They are disposable.
This quote perfectly encapsulates much of America: "I grew up poor and became a successful engineer in the robotics industry, in some ways in spite of the education system rather than because of it."
I do want to say that I am grateful for my public education, for the teachers and professors I had. The lab spaces I had available to learn important ideas in physics, electrical engineering and robotics.
The ways I feel I succeeded in spite of the higher education system have to do with ridiculous tuition costs (especially graduate school), difficulty in securing loans in community college to cover housing/living expenses as an independent adult and full time student with an unpaid STEM internship, a distinct lack of STEM opportunities for community college students, ignorance and discouragement from career counselors early on (leading me to figure out my career path and curriculum for robotics on my own).
How K-12 made my education difficult involves issues like indifference from counselors/administration, undeterred bullying, prejudice, and gatekeeping of academic opportunities.
There is also a lot of culture involved. I did a STEM program for an elementary school a few years ago. The school was very mixed. Lots of white kids, some Asian kids, some Indian kids, some Mexican kids, some black kids. The school had relegated STEM to an after school program and used volunteers from industry, like me. Every kid in the after school STEM program was Indian or Asian. The other kids just didn't find that stuff important enough to pursue.
No they had to run home to watch reality tv
I don't want to jump to conclusions here, but your story does remind me of something I noticed growing up.
Culturally, middle class and upper middle class American families, from my experience, tend to groom their children for professional careers like law, medicine, business. Until recently, STEM was not as prestigous among traditional middle and upper class professionals. I say this because the richer peers I was raised amongst went into traditional professional careers and I am among a handful that became engineers/scientists. I am probably the only one that can claim to have worked at NASA and FAANG, nevermind turned down an offer at a DOE lab.
In the last 5-10 years, I've seen a push from young middle and upper class families to groom their children for STEM careers. I get questions from them all the time, can you review my childs resume, can you talk to my kid, how did you do it, what did your family do? The irony is I was raised by a single mom working as a fry cook in the downtrodden parts of a suburb in LA. Anyhow my point is that things have changed I suspect since your anecdote, the middle and upper class (at least in CA) aspire to STEM professions and pass that on to their kids. Culture doesn't matter as much as you think it does, it didn't for me. I think that gives me hope for the American culture I grew up in, no matter how dumb others might think it is at times.
I think there is a missing point highlighted by your anecdote; STEM folks are probably drawn to the field from interest and self-motivation. The more we try to groom people into high level positions, the more we may be fighting against nature. I have always been more in favor of a vision of society where failure is expected, inevitable even, but there is always a cushion to pick yourself back up and try again.
Humans live long lives, now. We still pace our society like we are expecting most people to crap out in their 50's and 60's due to heart attacks, accidents, etc. Most people live into their 80's, now, and our entire economy is now built so people hit their stride in their late-30's and 40's, rather than their late-20's and 30's as it was in prior gens.
I am an Infection Preventionist, now. I grew up in a single parent household in my earliest years, and then had a step father for my formative years. I flaked a lot in school, and even was homeless for a few years in my early 20's. It is brick stupid to demand that everyone have their shit together by the end of their teens when we live so long, and the circumstances which demanded us to rush kids through their childhood to potentially reach some rat race, upper middle class job may harm the kids more than anyone else. Maybe the toxic part of our culture that desperately needs to change is that we need to accept that our ideas about progression, where we should be at what point of our lives, are outdated.
Personally, I think that so much of our current education system is meant as a tool for the ruling class to turn out useful products rather than a public good meant to make good citizens of the republic. That is the first thing which should change, and all other changes will come from there. Policy and government is downstream from culture, right?
I think culture doesn’t matter until it does. For example, medical schools are FULL of second generation future physicians. It’s like we’re creating family dynasties in medicine. If and when the upper class turns away from professions like law and medicine and towards STEM, then STEM will also be colonized by the wealthy.
I have kids in a school, near Silicon Valley, and their friends are all pushed/encouraged into STEM studies during the week and weekends regardless of interest. Kids interested in humanities or the like? Not allowed to pursue it or even consider studying it in college.
It will be interesting to see how these first generation kids, who are heading off to college and careers, end up changing the field. Will we need as many visa holders in 20 years to fill the tech gaps?
In China and India STEM education must be like a political movement. They want to outdo “dumb” Americans and literally take our jobs and come up with technology better than in USA. It's like the arms race, but instead in STEM education over there. America should not ignore this fact. We have to compete with them too.
Absolutely
Der Prof Krugman, I liked your off-hand reference to the "Polish Plumbers," which caused such an anti-immigrant uproar in the UK 20 years ago. Thank you for your well-thought-out writings. I'm glad you left the Times.
20 years ago? It was a key image thrown out during Brexit as well, one of the most anti-immigrant campaigns in recent memory.
This reminds me that I should brush up on my Polish before my visit to London next month. Last time I was there I kept running into Poles. Or maybe now it'll be Romanians and Moldovans. (I've studied both languages, but to tell the truth I'm long past being able to recover any of that vocabulary, although they might get a kick out of a "thank you". In the meantime, they're all getting along fine in English.)
The drive, ambition and resilience of those who left/leave for a better life in the West continue to astound me. This is one reason I'm happy to have recent immigrants mixing into my society.
We are so glad you've liberated yourself from the NYT Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What a gift that you suddenly appear unadorned in my mailbox whenever you please. Thank you!
“But the main point is that after Elon Musk told Trump loyalists to fuck themselves in the face, Trump sided with . . . Musk.”
The good professor has been unleashed.
Never be ashamed about posting a Weird Al song. A master of his craft.
Who knew Weird Al possessed such amazing dance skills?
🎵🎵
I am hardly anti immigrant or against H1B visas in general but as a former employee of the corporate high tech industry, I believe it must be emphasized that people like Musk are after cheap labor, as others have noted here.
Although H1B visas can certainly bring in motivated and innovative people into the high tech labor force, there is not a shortage of capable labor in this country. In fact, I would say there is more of a shortage of interesting jobs which can challenge the well trained domestic labor we already have.
Krugman has ably described the pluses and minuses of immigration but the fiction of America somehow having an undereducated high tech labor force is something that needs to be dispelled to the general public.
"Interesting jobs" is the key. I was a Fellow in Lockheed Martin's organization. Most engineering organizations have a Fellows program. It's the top of the tech ladder and generally intended to parallel endowed chairs in academia. I received excellent performance reviews each year, and every year I would tell my supervisor (who was the site manager), "I don't need a raise. What I would prefer is more interesting work." Each year he would respond, "but more money we got...".
Hard to believe those billionaire geniuses could be that stupid and arrogant. Reminds me of Steve Jobs, a genius who thought he was smarter than his lying doctors and believed the quacks who peddled him "alternative" medicine until it was too late for the medicine that works to save him. Maybe we need to import a better class of billionaire - oh wait . . .
I’ve found in my career as a CPA that generally, folks who make an extremely successful business, or climb to the peak of their profession, suddenly feel they know everything. Steve Jobs and others have discovered the truth too late.
Is there a difference between "I'm smart and successful so I know everything" and "I'm smart and successful so, if I don't know something yet, I'll be able to learn enough about it on my own to make good decisions"?
Often enough, if you have a rare disease (of which there are lots), the doctors you're seeing won't be experts in treating your particular problem - and you'll usually have a lot more time to do things like search Google Scholar for promising new treatments than your typical doctor will. So it's entirely possible for you to end up knowing something important that your doctor wouldn't have learned on their own.
1. The lower wage tech worker or plumber being passed on as savings to average worker in general economy using those services and hence higher net income for them falsely (or at least incompletely) assumes that the employer/business owner employing engineer/plumber passes those savings. That may work in "economics" but in reality the owner keeps it for themselves; becomes billionaire, buys yacht and leases politicians. Similar to how greedflation since 2020 was real.
2. How about we invest in affordable univiversal quality comprehensive reality based education for all persons living in America, and reduce "need" for brain-draining other countries.
You are talking about idealistic & fair concepts - something you might have noticed does not tally with what Republicans desire !!! They have ZERO interest in helping any 'lower class' kid get a helping hand to step up into what they see as 'their world'. Of course all the idiots who vote Republican have no real idea what those already well-to-do 'upper level' people actually believe about them ! I'm a Brit where the class structure is very obvious, but here in the US it's actually much the same except that everybody claims it is not !
One of the issues I have with all of this is that US companies that require mid-tech workers hire Indian workers under the assumption that they are better educated. But cheating is a huge issue in Indian education. I don't think I'm saying this in a bigoted way. My business partner is Indian, and he is very well educated. But in India, cheating has become institutionalized. I'll leave a link at the end to a story in Business Insider, but there are many other stories on this. Parents, teachers, and whole school systems participate in the cheat. In many cases, some family members serve as runners to run questions out of the classroom to other family members who use laptops to search the Internet for answers so that the runners can run the answers back. And it's not just one family doing this here or there. There may be hundreds of people with laptops on the lawn next to the schoolhouse all searching for exam answers to feed the runners, all at the same time. No one stops this because the schools accept and often encourage cheating because it elevates them in the national rankings, and the level of cheating makes it impossible to judge the quality of the student based on grades and exam scores.
Unfortunately, the cheating habit comes to America along with the students who cheat. I can speak to that. I am a computer scientist. I take university classes to stay current. Several years ago I was in an advanced (senior undergrad/first year grad) class in computer science. There were about 25 people in the class. I was the lone white guy. The rest were Indian. So, to be sure, the Indian students were unafraid to take a very difficult class. They valued the material the class taught and were generally capable students, but couldn't afford low grades, which might have their scholarships withdrawn and force their return to India. In a class with such difficult material, the only meaningful way to conduct exams was take home, and those exams were hard!!! The questions were unique, written entirely by the professor himself. After the first exam was given, the professor searched the Internet sites where people pay the lowest bidder for solutions to exam questions. He found all of his exam questions, word for word, spread across the sites. He even bid on some of them himself. Many/most/perhaps all of the questions were repeated multiple times and on the same sites. He was able to conclude through frequency of repetition that at least half of his class and probably much more were engaged in open cheating. He addressed this with some disgust when he returned the exams, but he concluded that there was little he could do about it. It was really a shocking moment. As for myself, I spent about 40 hours answering the exam questions. And until the professor took us on a tour of those Internet cheating sites, I was unaware that they existed. I thought I did very well on the exam, but several students earned even higher scores. The problem is that I don't know if they are superior students and earned those scores on their own merits, or if they purchased answers to the exam questions and submitted the work of others. There is no way to evaluate my classmates, and if I was hiring, their performance at school would not help me in making hiring decisions. American companies hiring mid-tech workers on H1 visas are in the same predicament whether they know it or not.
https://www.businessinsider.com/india-families-paying-thousands-help-students-cheat-entrance-exams-2024-9
To be fair, this kind of cheating isn’t limited to Indians and STEM classes. We had a similar experience back in 1989 at the university where I was a graduate teaching fellow. When 75% of students turned in papers that were fundamentally identical, it was clear they had purchased a paper from an answer bank kept by a fraternity. Unfortunately, the paper most students chose to turn in did not even remotely address the assignment.
As for the Loomer/Miller/Bannon/Fuentes MAGAt faction’s underlying motivation (racism), it’s worth noting none of the Black students cheated in 1989. They did their own work.
If I could like this comment three times I would.
It’s well known that code can be generated in ChatGPT these days. My friend just went through a year of getting 3 coding certs state side in a program & she verified code with ChatGPT. I didn’t think that was right, but I’m old. I taught myself SQL in my late 40s on my job. I grabbed every opportunity I had to learn any software only to have it taken away from me & given to a younger male colleague once I’d worked out the bugs. No lie. Then I’d have to write up the process manuals. Cuz old women can’t code. We all got outsourced to HCL anyway. It’s funny, & probably because I’m old, or wouldn’t occur to me to cheat or use ChatGPT for anything.
Oh God if all ChatGPT does is eliminate tech jobs when they tried to tell the humanities majors that ChatGPT would render them irrelevant, that will be glorious.
All you have to do is tell humanities kids that they prolly wanna be unique & different & not auto-generated & they’ll write their own pablum. But code is also fun to write.
The point of a lot of modern STEM education is to get students to the point where they can tell if the computer is giving them the wrong answer.
The obvious way a computer can give someone the wrong answer is a typo, but another cause is when computer models make assumptions that don't hold in the real world. For example, if you ask a simulation program what will happen if you put a million volts across a one-Ohm resistor, it will use Ohm's Law to calculate that you'll get a million amperes of current flowing through that resistor, but if you try anything like that in real life, you'll get *zero* current because the resistor will get hot enough to burn itself out.
I looked at code like music. I could always hear if someone was “off” in a chord or harmony, or if my fingers weren’t striking the right notes on the piano. Or if I was writing a song if it was “off” as well. If you go back to medieval times you’ll see that math & music are studied together. I also thought music theory & calculus & trig were same. Those weird scales. Mathematical. Physics is music. So when I learned coding it wasn’t diametrically opposed to musical theatre, which was my BA. Also dance is movement through time & space. If that not physics, I don’t know what is! I stayed away from coding until I needed it for a job then I ran with it. If I can do it, anyone can.
Indeed. If you can learn college algebra or high school trigonometry/precalculus, you can probably learn to write code.
I left a Big 4 consulting firm because its managers treated H-1bs like indentured servants. Not willing to work 18 hours a say 7 days a week? Ship ‘em back to India. The sad part is the most inhumane were Muskaswamy types—first generation immigrants who became citizens.
Muskawamy might be my new favorite word. (Vivek went to the local Jesuit high school. He missed the classes on being "men for others" which emphasizes service to others. To see him become so grotesquely Muskian is depressing).
I was bummed when I read PK was leaving his op-ed post, but it turns out to have been a great thing.
A pleasure to see wit and riffing in this piece that would not have fit in the Gray Lady's straight jacket. Bravo and glad to subscribe.
Really appreciate Krugman’s perspective on MAGA dynamics. hope you keep it up, Paul. Let’s have training for Americans AND the visas for foreign engineers.
I think that there is one subtlety going on with native-born tech workers. People with tech skills don't get paid much compared to bosses. So those with both tech and boss skills move to bossing. And a lot of people have both sets of skills. Indeed, I would hazard that most of the boss people could be tech people, and may have been if tech paid better.
But there is one pool of tech talent that cannot easily exercise their latent boss skills--immigrants, due to social constraints. Some of them can, and maybe eventually become bosses. But the rest are relegated to tech, regardless of their innate boss skills. It's just too damn hart to surpass various cultural and language barriers--coding is easier for most. The same would be true for an American tech worker dumped in, say, Japan.
This isn't unprecedented. Think of women before the 1980's--all kinds of amazing skills channeled into nursing and teaching--at low pay!--because of gender bias. What's different here is that the pay is the independent variable and the channelling the dependent variable.