I was once brought in to a Fortune500 company to teach basic ENTRY LEVEL web development to a room full of supposedly "highly educated" H-1B Software Engineers.

Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.

Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.

We issue 85,000 H1-B visas every year. Last year, there were 442,000 applications.

Its supply and demand. If you think any of these changes will cause fewer than 85,000 H1-B applications, then that is a good reason to believe that these changes might negatively impact the United States as a migration destination. However, with that added context and framing, I hope you'll agree that it won't; there's still going to be a smaller, but growing, number of people applying for the H1-B every year.

Increasing the number of H1-B visas has very little support from both sides of the isle. The 65,000+20,000 number was set, if you can believe it, 35 years ago. There were one or two temporary increases, but since 2005 its stayed at that 85,000 number.

There is a website called jobs.now which has collated all of the H1B jobs that get (quietly) advertised to so that companies can demonstrate that no suitable US person can do the job.

Some are legitimately highly skilled, but you also see jobs like:

https://www.jobs.now/jobs/164577823-lead-software-engineer

>>Develop and implement next generation Human Capital Management (HCM) software.

>>Requirements:

>>Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Informatics, Computer Engineering or related field

>>2 years experience in software development

>>Develop and implement HCM software solutions for global enterprise

>>Create applications on cloud platforms

>>Work with Golang and NodeJS

>>Participate in full product cycle from wireframes and database models to UI/UX development

>>Home telecommute available

>>Application Instructions: Send CV to: LS, EPI-USE America, Inc. 303 Perimeter Ctr N., Ste 300 Atlanta, GA 30346

When was the last time you had to post a CV to apply for a job? This blatantly designed to ensure no US person applies (and if anyone in the US is qualified and wants to apply to stop the visa abuse, please do).

Very tautological - it's worth immigrating to due to immigration.

I guess the question then is, does H1-B actually make people want to live in the US? Or is it just a good way to earn some money and experience while they are young and then move back home and start their own business with their capital that goes much farther there? Because that is what it seems like it is best setup for since you can be given the boot and deported on short notice by the whim of a corporate manager.

So you are basically selling chips off the old American block every time you do this "one-weird trick".

>We want methods for highly educated people to make the US their home.

Who is we?

We shouldn't be arguing yes or no, but instead "how much".

Charging a yearly fee to offset how H1-B is abused for cheap labor instead of high performers makes sense. Making that fee $100,000 with arbitrary waivers for friends of the administration is absurd.

> One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too

Not really, no. That’s mostly propaganda that got pushed hard in the 60s - right around the time the wealth gap really started growing and hasn’t stopped ever since.

The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens. Given the ever increasing wealth gap this is obviously not the case.

The alternative is: no immigration, focus on increasing native births by ensuring it’s easy to have a large family. Ensure our elites have a sense of “noblesse oblige” and are self sacrificing instead of chasing profit. Some minor level of immigration is fine (for the Werner von Braun types), but staffing companies that build iPhones and gambling websites is not a good use of our resources.

All of my immigrant friends mention they’ll return to their home country if things get bad here. This is my home country, and I want my country filled with people who are here because they see it as their home, not a business transaction. I have nowhere else to go.

"One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too"

Rich people started playing this on repeat while they crushed the standard of living via immigration and low interest rates

It’s a one time fee for the whole of the H-1B visa, so only the first employer who sponsors the visa would pay it. So they have to ensure the candidate stays with them for a whole 6 years for that amortization. I do think well see more attempts to make H-1Bs stick with their sponsor, but depending on state laws that might be difficult to enforce.

Well it does put a bit more power into the employee's hand so im not sure it is all a bad tradeoff. Usually the company is holding all the cards, but if they just ate $100,000 that they will never get back then their threat of firing someone 3 months in if they don't lick enough boot polish is going to hurt the company too.

Isn't it over 3 years?

Students have access to OPT (1y) and STEM OPT (2y) on the same visa to work after their degree. If they go for a higher degree then they can get OPT again. Grad students from US universities also get a separate quota in the H1B cap.

All of this should to a little extent alleviate some of the concerns.

The weighted system should still work since the candidate pool (from within the US) is likely mostly students on OPT. They should have comparable salaries, unless they are hired by rotten companies.

Why should they be favored?

But for students there is the O-1 visa?

Way too many crap colleges out there.

Only if visas can only be paid through earned income or returns on investments made with such. Otherwise you're mixing people who bring value by contributing labor with people who contribute capital. Both can be nice, but should we treat them the same or independently?

I'm not an H1-B, but I am on a skilled migrant visa in a different country. While I'm not constantly thinking about it, I'm keenly aware that my immigration status is directly tied to my job. No job, no residence permit. So at a minimum I would say I have an incentive to not get fired, and the best way to not get fired is to be someone worth retaining.

In my experience H1-Bs know that the consequence of losing their job could mean being forced to leave the country. Management knows that too. Obviously this affects the incentives and behavior of both the manager and the employee.

So where will you start it?

> but maybe international outsourcing is the way to go in some areas

Seems like a lot of people forget there was a fairly massive push for this back in the early to mid aughts (for example, google "tech outsourcing 2004", as iirc 2004 was around the peak of the mania) and it generally didn't work out so great, with most companies who tried it pulling back away from it a year or two later.

Maybe it'll work better now, but I haven't seen evidence that much has changed that would modify the outcomes.

It’s great in theory but it leads to maddening conversations where you get one half-useful sentence response every 24 hours.

Right, but is that labor 100k worse a product?

For half that you could staff a new hub office in one of many countries where thats desirable and tax incentives are stacked in its favor. Phillipines. Serbia.

Maybe you send an engineer to go train them there for half the year. Still cheaper.

Now the ancillary benefits, the rental income, the food, the taxation, are flowing in the other direction towards the new host country.

Maybe instead of the H1-B marrying the training engineer and deciding to stay in the US, its the reverse, and now that guy starts a serbian family instead. The flow of knowledge starts to drip away from the US rather than towards it.

Which is why I support this law so thoroughly. Its so obviously terrible for the USA, and great for the rest of the world.

It falls short of the total US blockade that I want, but its another brick in that wall. One at a time Mr President. Step by step. Ban us from sending you goods. Black van people (including beloved childrens authors) at the airports. Prevent trained engineers from working in your country.

There are multi-multi-multi billion dollar companies that no longer have SWEs in the US outside of gigs requiring clearance. you should chatgpt-that-shit and check how many off-shore employees are actually current employed by US companies and then see whether it “leads to lower quality”

Well different people on this very site want very different things. So you can't really ask us to decide what we want. Probably most folks commenting here want to be paid a good wage, but their view on H1B visas is then going to depend on their own situation. I personally live outside the US and contract for a US company, I hope that whatever happens doesn't interfere with my work or my relationship with that company.

Probably not the same people.

// removing bad analogy

What part of this being a bad execution of the idea is confusing or contradictory? What "we want" is for the governance of our country, including but not limited to H1B reform, to not be a shambolic disaster.

I was prepared to accept this as one of the handful of semi-useful things Trump did, and I might still personally benefit, but the details quickly disabused me of the idea that it was actually good.