by Brett Stevens on May 17, 2017

Despite the tech industry insisting that we need H-1B visas in order to “compete,” the data reveals that in fact, the program is designed to lower wages:

If you work at Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino as a computer programmer on an H-1B visa, you can can be paid as little as $52,229. That’s peanuts in Silicon Valley. Average wages for a programmer in Santa Clara County are more than $93,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the U.S. government will approve visa applications for Silicon Valley programmers at $52,229 — and, in fact, did so for hundreds of potential visa holders at Apple alone.

Control has two sides: a pretext and a result, which is the concentration of power in the hands of those who use it for the sake of more power alone. In this way, it represents a monopoly, meaning that method has been disconnected from any goal, and has become a goal in itself, sort of like drug addiction, overeating or gambling.

In this case, Silicon Valley knows that as time goes on, its products will become more commonplace and less valuable, and therefore that it needs to bump up its margins another way. Its method is to produce an army of programmers in which most people end up losing, and a few become superstars, transferring profit to Silicon Valley while externalizing costs to society at large.

When we look at immigration, from nurses in the UK NHS to manual laborers in construction in North America, this pattern repeats every time. Foreign labor is not needed except to act as a market force driving down wages and making jobs less secure, which benefits those in power by concentrating wealth at the expense of those who contribute.

Tags: control, H-1B, immigration, wages

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