Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?

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mbac32768 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.

The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.

I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?

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mlrtime 4 days ago | parent [-]

"Computer science ranked seventh amongst undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment at 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-ma...

Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.

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jiscariot 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

	▲	jameshart 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, historically a significant portion of the graduating cohort in top CS programs in the US has been overseas students.

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jameshart 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This reflects that there are just less openings overall. In a shrinking job market layoffs have already disproportionately gone to H1B holders; future layoffs, if this policy is implemented, will further erode H1B numbers, but it won’t magic up more domestic engineering job openings.

You know what would provide job growth in high tech? Economic growth and expanding prosperity in the economy overall.