Comments Elsewhere

Echidne: “In some ways Gates is advocating more choices for American firms at the expense of American workers. Under his scenario firms could outsource jobs or import workers, whichever turns out to be more profitable, and the U.S. workers would have to compete both at home and abroad with foreign workers.”

But I wonder why I should care about the condition of American workers specifically rather than the condition of workers as a whole. I mean, yes, relaxing immigration restrictions does cut into the benefits that American IT workers enjoy by bringing more non-American qualified professionals into the labor market. But so what? That represents a net gain for Indian workers (for example), and I don’t think the fact that they’re Indian makes their well-being less important to me.

I’m also not sure what the traditional worries about globalization and authoritarian regimes (e.g., the effects of “competition” with literal slave labor or labor in countries with widespread government repression of workers) have to do with Gates’s proposals in particular. I mean, yeah, there may be reasons to worry about that when we talk about offshoring of textile production, but (1) it’s not at all clear this is much of a problem in the IT sector, and (2) H-1B visas don’t have anything to do with offshoring anyway; the workers they bring to the United States enjoy all of the labor standards prevalent in the United States (they do get treated poorly by the immigration bureaucracy, but that’s La Migra’s fault, not the boss’s, and the answer there is surely liberalization rather than restriction).

ken melvin: “What right thinking person would spend $100k and up for an education that leads to a $40k/yr job (about what Gates wants to pay)? Offshoring, illegal immigration, H1-B, they all have the same effect on american workers.”

I try hard to resist the urge to simply paint IT protectionists as a bunch of pampered crybabies, but it’s hard not to when you see things like this. There are a lot of people in the United States, let alone in the developing world, who would kill for a $40,000 / year salary, particularly if that salary came with a white-collar work environment. Even if the cost of making that were $100,000 spread out over 4-5 years. You’d have made your money back within 3 years. That’s assuming that you were the one actually paying the $100,000, which kids going to $25k – $35k / year schools almost never are (most of the money generally comes from a combination of scholarships and funds provided by mommy and daddy).

I don’t think that immigration restriction is ever the appropriate response to labor problems, no matter what industry we’re talking about, but the attempt to lump IT professionals in with industrial workers and minimum-wage service workers (for whom unemployment and wage cuts may make the difference between having or not having a roof over their heads or healthcare for their kids) and say that their situations are all of a piece is frankly ridiculous.

Elena: “There are Chinese chain restaurants that pile Mexican workers into vans and shuttle them around the country, paying them a flat rate of $300/week. They rent cheap apartments for their workers as an added incentive.”

Well, good for them. $300 / week is decent pay if your employer is also covering your rent as a benefit. It’s very good pay compared to what the workers would be making if they stayed back in Mexico. I mean, look, there are lots of reasons to think that employers hiring undocumented immigrants are often sleazebags. They often are. But the fact that they pay them and provide housing for them is not among them.

Elena, again: “The noble intentions of immigrant rights groups that want amnesty for workers who do work Americans “won’t do” play right into the greedy hands of business leaders who want to circumvent fair labor practice for their workers. The fact that Bush wants immigration reform should be a red flag. It’s not because he loves Mexicans.”

I could say just as easily that the noble intentions of those who want protectionism and immigration restriction for the sake of labor are playing right into the hands of the nativist hard Right and the abusive immigration bureaucracy. But the interesting question isn’t who does or does not happen to share your policy conclusions; it’s which conclusions are true and what policies we have good reasons to adopt. So what reason is there to think that escalating the immigration cops’ assault on immigrant workers, or even leaving it in its present state, is going to do any good for immigrant workers? Or, if you think that it won’t do good for them but it will do good for American workers, what reason is there to think that American workers’ lives and livelihoods are more important than (say) Mexican and Central American workers’?