I don’t think these workers are competing directly with 100% of the population. How many unemployed Americans could be employed right now if there was less temporary workers?
I personally believe we hit some kind of inflection point recently with whatever secondary effects all the importation of cheap labor has caused. The chickens finally came home to roost right around 2023. It's now a full blown crisis.
It's very difficult to tell. Employment isn't a finite thing, especially in white collar jobs. High quality workers will generate economic activity which generates new jobs. For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
How much of that is reality or how much is is suppresses wages will always be hard to pin down.
A basic starting point would be cracking down on H1B mills that explicitly do wage suppression + more scrutiny on big companies like Amazon using it. There's some big H1B consultancies designed to undercut gov contract tending who are much more blatant despite hard rules in H1B meant to stop it. Biden admin passed some new policies to help combat it but enforcement has always been problem #1, not a lack of rules meant to protect American workers.
Asians are 7% of the US population and above 30% of the engineering workforce at most tech companies. So either Asians are just extremely genetically/culturally superior somehow (which seems unlikely given the state of the software industry in most of their countries) or something is going on.
Oddly, over a 25 year period, I worked with far fewer Asians than I did Indians. India has to be the #1 supplier of H1Bs to the US, hands down. I'm not sure I can assess how the average Asian software developer did compared to Indian ones since the sample size was so skewed for me. Maybe on the coasts it was different? I look at Japan as a nation that has its crap together, but they also have terrible work/life balance that has now led to massive depopulation. It's like every race has its own particular blind spots.
Many things could be going on. You should propose a concrete explanation instead of some vague "something is going on" placeholder which could uncharitably be described as dog-whistling.
For example, consider that leaving one's country is difficult and, so, the distribution is skewed towards individuals with higher skill and talent.
I'm not saying that is the only effect at play here. My point is there are many effects and a lazy "something is going on" statement does nothing to understand that complexity.
You pretty clearly don't want to hear my concrete explanation. I'm not sure yours fully accounts for what's happening there. It's pretty extreme especially when there's a large pool of unemployed talent in the US.
> For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
Whose to say an American, given the same opportunities, couldn't do this as well? If you look at where the top AI companies are, only 1 is in China.
I don't think h1b mills impact tech workers as much. Most of those cases seem to be in the healthcare space or in low end tech jobs that Americans probably don't want anyways...
That's ~6% of the 9M. Not nothing but not a glaring amount. I'm seeing that there are 1.7M total SWEs in the US, which would bring the H1B % to 30%, assuming all are SWEs. This would make it a significant amount, not sure if it's enough to suppress wages / pass on US persons if they attempted it.
One look at the top H1B employers should stop this narrative however, because those companies do not pay near peanuts.
