Software engineers in the US get "government favors and protection" from US immigration policy. If anyone in the world could move to the US and work here, without jumping through the hoops of visa regulations, then American programmers would face a lot more competition from non-citizens than we do now; the pointy-haired bosses could get most of the cost benefits of cheap foreign labor without the headaches associated with managing workers ten time zones away.
(Many other professions would also benefit from cheap labor and therefore we, as customers of the labor, would benefit from lower prices, but I think geeks are at risk of losing more than we gain.)
I hear a lot of libertarian geeks complain about the unfairness of the progressive income tax or the welfare state, but not so many complaining about the unfairness of our immigration policy.
I hear a lot of libertarian geeks complain about the unfairness of the progressive income tax or the welfare state, but not so many complaining about the unfairness of our immigration policy.
Then you must run with a different tribe of libertarian geeks than I do.
I'm a libertarian geek. And I complain about the unfairness of our immigration policy constantly. A few of the best hackers I know are from other countries.
I completely disagree that I'm "at risk more than I gain" from increased immigration. If they can do as good a job as me for less money, then that's the market, and I'll have to accept that. But really good programmers -- the top 5% that are 5-26 times more productive than the rest -- are always going to be rare, and it's worth a pay cut to be able to work with them.
Incidentally, with our current system, tech workers are often given a visa that is only good for the duration of their employment with a single company. That means, if my coworker wants to go to another company, he has to get a whole new visa, which is incredibly non-trivial. As a result, my employer can skimp on his pay, because of the added cost of changing jobs.
If they pay immigrants less, then that brings down the whole market, including my salary. If our doors were open, we'd have more immigrants, but they'd be more able to negotiate, and we'd all be on equal footing. More people means higher housing costs, the weight of which tends to spread out the population distribution and make workers more demanding.
Interesting comment. I agree with you somewhat in the absolute, but completely disagree with you when you consider the degree of protection relative to other fields.
Consider the difference between an American consumer who wants to 1) have a simple spreadsheet extension written, or 2) have a simple legal will drafted.
In case 1, the consumer can 1) hire someone with a PhD, MS, BS, or no degree at all in any field, 2) send the work overseas with minimal oversight and regulation, 3) bring a foreign worker into the US on an H1B or L1 visa (to a limited extent).
In case 2, the consumer can 1) hire a member of the state bar who attended an ABA accredited school. That's it. No other options.
Law is an extreme example, and lawyers are, as members of the judiciary, quasi-government officials themselves, so maybe this isn't representative. But even in relatively unregulated labor markets here in the US, there's still no specific visa program to bring people on. In fact, the late nobel prize winner in economics Milton Friedman, champion of free markets, actually called the H1B program a subsidy for the tech industry!
Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."
So while US immigration policy, by not allowing everyone and anyone in, does indeed mess with free global labor markets, if anything it skews immigration in favor of foreign engineers who would like to come here, and against US Citizens in these fields. But I don't know anyone other than extremists who think that the US can have a truly open door immigration policy. The numbers would simply be too great. Instead, the US "only" accepts well over a million legal immigrants a year, not counting hundreds of thousands of work-related visas.
Keep in mind, in a true free labor market, I, as a programmer would face more competition, but I'd also benefit as a consumer from an increase in competition in the services I consume. By targeting high tech specifically with work visas, but leaving the other fields untouched, the market is probably more skewed than it would have been enforcing a skills-blind approach.
Lastly, plenty of high tech workers most definitely do complain about the unfairness of the policy. Most of the programmers I know are much angrier about the corporate control over the H1B's life than the presence of foreign workers. I know that the economic world is a positive-sum game, especially in wealth creating industries like high tech.
But the current approach of skewing immigration toward high tech workers while allowing employers to control the residency rights and green card application? I'm looking for the free market with a microscope dude, and I ain't seeing it.
Yes, doctors and lawyers are protected by non-immigration-related government policies that geeks don't benefit from. But most of the money you spend every day doesn't go to doctors and lawyers.
Consider your laptop. What proportion of the cost of a laptop can be attributed to the cost of wages for workers in the US? (Remember what Adam Smith said: the cost of everything in a free-market economy can be divided among "rent of land", "wages of labor", and "profit of stock".)
There's the cost of the longshoremen who unloaded it from the docks, the cost of the truck drivers who drove it across the country, the cost of the warehouse workers who put it on the shelf and then took it off again when you ordered it...on a per-laptop basis, I don't think those costs add very much to the price. So if the US opens its borders and people all over the world compete for truck-driving jobs, I don't think the cost of laptops is going to go down very much.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. It doesn't have to be a government sponsored union like the AMA or ABA to count as market manipulation.
My point was that software is among the most free labor markets in the US. This was in response to the point that engineers are hypocritical for not applying their libertarian leanings to foreign engineers who would like to move here without restrictions. My point was that 1) I plead guilty to this charge - I do not support unlimited immigration, though that would be the purest form of free markets, and 2) relative to other fields, software engineering is more open to foreign nationals than almost any other field in the US (rivaled only by crop picking - the other great employer-sponsered work visa program - and maybe that tells you something about software...)
(Many other professions would also benefit from cheap labor and therefore we, as customers of the labor, would benefit from lower prices, but I think geeks are at risk of losing more than we gain.)
I hear a lot of libertarian geeks complain about the unfairness of the progressive income tax or the welfare state, but not so many complaining about the unfairness of our immigration policy.