A common problem in latam and other geos is brain drain. Most of their best minds simply leave the country looking for better opportunities. That is impactful for the countries economies, the country invest a lot in people,but others see the benefits.

During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.

Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

/me

I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.

Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.

>There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US.

As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-

Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.

Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US

US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries

Hi!

I know I'm just a datum, but I gotta represent myself.

Not yet.

The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.

Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.

Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.

Because of our historical strength. If we drive people away, that just makes room for other contenders. How is that smart?

Exactly, and especially SV and the US has seemingly been almost entirely locked down by Indians.

For FAANG engineers this will likely mean moving to Vancouver, Zurich or Singapore with their job, salary, rsus and taxes.

How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

Mmmh...How about four countries?US,UK,Canada &South Africa.

As a student,though

I had to choose between California and Germany. It is a thing.

Only two?

I am an American-born worker at a giant tech corporation. My coworkers are all immigrants, my job was created by immigrants, if they left I'd be unemployed because there's no way I can build this whole thing by myself. The work would simply disappear without them.

and so who owns the shares of "corporate america"? Newflash: Teachers' and firefighters' and cops' pensions are all invested in "corporate america". As well as pensions of union workers. As well as 401ks of all the other middle class people. Come on.

"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.

That classification already exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer

... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)

    Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000

    Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.

Good. I’m sure you and the 10 other individuals who choose to boycott all of FAANG will ensure that this all balances out in the end.

very real risk ? it's a certainty not a risk.

Right now. What happened in the future? When the job market recovers will it happen in the US or elsewhere?

It has nothing to do with “skin color,” but economics, culture, and worldview.

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton

Don’t play the race card, you sound emotional saying that.

You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.

It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.

The US has the nicest biggest pie in the world. Why would somebody move to a place with less opportunity?

The opportunity created in the US is due to the concentration of talent, high productivity, and extensive networks of people creating innovation that inflated the pie even larger.

Go ahead and move to any of those countries from the US, it's prettt easy, because everybody wants to be like the US! The only possibly better passport was a Canadian one!

Something deeply sick has infected the US when we no longer recognize the source of the wealth of our nation. Nobody could touch us. At least until we started to intentionally make ourselves poorer.

Probably you can go most countries

Yep. There is a huge amount of American talent wallowing in low-level, dead end jobs because corporations have been actively incentivized to hire cheap, captive foreign labor rather than foster American talent. I am absolutely thrilled to witness this return to sanity.

you know what's really stupid? when we give someone a student visa and then don't have a easy to keep them in the country on a work visa

There are studies regarding that: almost half of S&P 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children https://www.brookings.edu/articles/almost-half-of-fortune-50...

These other visas are incredibly complicated to get. And funneling everyone through student visas is just inflating demand for uni degrees.

What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.

On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.

Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.

Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.

Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.

Let's turn this around - would the US win if young, skilled people were net-leaving it?

Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.

Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.

---

Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?

Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.

(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)

Have you never met an H-1B worker?

Yeah exactly. And they embrace that fraud and turn it into a cornerstone of their economy. I too have worked with extremely talented people from the subcontinent and not one was on an H1B. The H1Bs I worked with were less competent than an undergraduate intern. Thankfully I only had to do that once during an on-prem install in Tyson’s Corner.

Yep.

Why are you using quotes around steal as though I used that word somewhere? Read what I wrote, repeat it to yourself when you fall asleep, come back tomorrow.

reform is a type of action that tries to identify a concrete set of issues and fix those issues, implies a positive change.

this is a change in the direction of significantly reducing hiring of foreign workers by American companies, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for American companies, because it will reduce their growth. It's bad for American workers because when our companies don't grow, neither does our economy and that hurts Americans. So it's a change, but it's a dumb change.

In other democratic countries, reform is mostly proposed in parliament. Experts and other government institutions are publicly consulted. Reform is seldomly passed under emergency grounds, and H1B rules are an unlikely area for emergency executive action that has a transition period of not more than 2 days.

Reform is done legally. The statute this falls under requires the fee be based on the administrative cost to process the application.

Changing the statute requires Congress to act.

So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.

Yes I would prefer just faster road to skilled immigration. It also doesn’t help string people along with this distant hope of permanent residency

Economy isn't a zero-sum game. Foreign talents were the enabler of the growth in this field.

I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.

Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.

Doubtful. Not sure I'd be hired. I was hired at like $160k/yr. Would my employer have paid over half my wages to import me? I'm not so sure. Am I not bright enough? Do ya'all not want me here? It's possible. I'm no genius but I think I'm pretty good at my job and I dare say above average, and I don't think my employer could fill all the positions they have with equal or greater talent with only American citizens.

$15K extra per year? Absolutely. $100k pre-payment? No. That's impractical since the visa holder may get hit by a truck or return home due to an emergency, etc.

Sure - to those that can afford it. But this basically wipes out the ability for smaller companies to use H1Bs as an incentive to draw talent when they’re already behind the gun compared to the FAANG’s of the world from a hiring perspective.

The rich get richer.

why not just hire them in Canada or literally in any offshore office and not pay the 100k tax?

$100,000 per year.

I could not read the full article so I don't have all the details about the report, but the scope pretty limited. There are equally numerous reports about e.g. BigTech H1B salaries being much higher than typical. So that raises the question, which is the greater effect?

Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.

The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.

How is that possible ? Doesn't h1b have to pay within a set range of wages?

Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments

Having learned more about the details, it's honestly not as heavy-handed as I originally thought. The Reuters article linked said it was "$100,000 fee per year" - but it has now been clarified to be a one-time fee per new H1-B petition. I also thought initially that it would apply to existing H1-B holders, but it does not. And I've learned is that it's structured as a temporary change lasting for 12 months (of course it could be extended in the future).

So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.

I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.

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