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dmixlast Friday at 5:12 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


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itakelast Friday at 6:11 PM

> 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...

msgodellast Friday at 5:59 PM

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.

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