> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.

That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.

You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over.

If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.

I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.

and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.

GDP matters very little when I’m homeless.

I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.

Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?

> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?

That's my opinion.

However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.

And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.

Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).

Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.

We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.

H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.

> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.

And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.

Sure, they've already done it, Amazon, in India.

It would be far smarter to have invested in the workforce continually. A microcosm of this is how we mismanaged college education and is a symptom of a larger problem: As far as US policy goes, got complacent and extractive over innovative and additive. The narrative shifted from 'abundance for all' to 'the pie is only so big' (that is, unless you're a favored incumbent, like defense contractors). It doesn't stop here. Job training programs, continual education, robust workforce displacement services, proper social welfare programs. We lack all of this (and more).

Another would be to remove burdens off companies that are better handled by the collective of society, via the government. Take universal healthcare. An often unnoticed benefit is how it would shift liabilities off the books of a huge number of companies, from the auto manufacturers to smaller businesses. A tax is a much easier and simplified expense to deal with over legacy healthcare costs that can weigh down a business. It also has a secondary knock off effect: employers can't use it as a pair of handcuffs. In all likelihood, an unintended side effect of universal healthcare would be an increase in entrepreneurship from the middle class. People who would otherwise be handcuffed to their job because of health insurance.

Somehow, the lesson everyone took away from the G.I. Bill was not that the government providing robust funding of social services (IE college, home ownership) works. That part is seemingly ignored by the vast majority of the conversation around the 'good times past' that many Americans romanticize.

Too many of my fellow citizens are prioritizing their own short term gains over the long term health of the community and society in which they were empowered by to get ahead in the first place. This will inevitably crater quite spectacularly bad.

Or they just move their "headquarters" and the US part of the business will be a subsidiary.

This is an old, and well tested strategy.

E.g. Commodore International formally had its head office in The Bahamas, but the entire leadership team worked out of the US.

You can try putting more constraints on what will get a company considerd a US company to catch those kinds of structures, but as you indirectly point out, there are really only downsides to playing that game.

It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however.

The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare.

The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo.

Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that collapse is when the meat suits will toss aside socialized truths of history and go crazy primate.

Conveniently India and the EU just signed a major trade deal.

No, I think companies that want to stay competitive will leave the US.

That's what the third shoe is for - aircraft carriers.

Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.

Canada’s industrial economy was also undamaged. And so, by definition, the US was not the only one.

> They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete

They already do.

> You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.

This is the value prop of the US military

https://youtu.be/B1zKWNB2rho?t=230

Amazon's MGM subsidiary spent 75 million dollars thus far on the Melania Trump documentary that by all accounts, is looking like its going to be a box office bomb. Reportedly, 30 million of that 75 went directly to Melania[0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/28/melania-trump-d...

Iowa hasn't been purple for a while. Montana maybe a bit more recently.

> I suppose that is "in the tech field" too, as non-tech people would be happy with an $80K job where a lot are under $50K

Indeed. The median salary in America for full time employment is a little over $63K.

Edit: if the message from H1B folk earning $300k+ to voters who earn $63k on average[1] is "You need our superior intellects, you uneducated rubes", then its unlikely to be well-received, especially at a time when blaming foreigners is in vogue.

1. Or a laid-off American tech worker

Why? They are obviously being weaponized to suppress wages for native Americans in an environment where tech leaders were saying "learn to code". I think the H1B needs to be cancelled and companies should incur financial penalties for using foreign labor to undercut American workers.

I've had three different H1Bs. Yes, transfers are easy, but they're sure a hell more risky than staying at your current job and enduring whatever you have to.

You're not beholden to your employer, but you have borderline coercive reasons to stay.

You have 60 days to find a new job or get deported. It's a pretty strong lever.

It is unbelievable the kind of misinformation that is spread about immigrants. Thanks for pointing that out

You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.

Others like Google increased by 60+%.

You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).

But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).

H1B workers cost more on average than permanent residents. That’s just based on salary. Once you account for the fees and legal costs and risks of the immigration process, H1B workers are way more expensive. Also, these visas can be transferred between companies.

There’s no such thing as an indentured servitude class here - this is just part of the giant racist misinformation machine of the right, to make it seem like shutting it down would somehow be doing those employees a favor. In reality it’ll hurt the entire country.

tell us more about your racial-based hiring

> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

> Indian recruiting firms

There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.

As an American this does not match my experience at all.

What profession were those women looking for?

Tech industry has no problems working with state police forces to imprison woman that get abortions or just generally profit off of making teenage girls depressed.

We should applaud those women for not willing to date people that inflict misery and death upon them.

Maybe the kids are alright after all?

I mean, I'm a woman and a software dev.. I suppose I'm not most women though.

Anecdotally men in tech jobs tend to either be the best I've ever met or the worst I've ever met (loosely related to why they're in the field to begin with)

Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"

> But I had thought the social status of nerds and geeks had leveled up a few times since then.

Only in places like Palo Alto, Boston, Seattle, etc.

Not in most of the cornfield country.

Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.

Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.

"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.

All the conspiracies theories can be put to bed by walking into any engineering department (maybe outside of biomedical engineering…which makes me think this may be related to how Americans demonize math) and observing that the majority of students are foreign or maybe second generation immigrants.

This ratio gets worse because American students are disproportionately more likely to follow up their engineering undergrad with law or business school, so even if they may be engineers they’ll get into business and/or something like patent attorney going forward.

Businesses, the consumers who buy their products, and the global workforce.

> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates

I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.

He absolutely would harm some people in the US to benefit other people in the US. The same is true for many many other businesspeople and politiciansl