I mean I don't think it's easy to conclude much here, because economics research is the act of trying to figure out how to look at two different points in time in some way and try as hard as possible to ignore every other of the billions of inputs when looking at a single input.

Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.

Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!

The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:

- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting

- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.

This is just my own view of the world though