> Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

Yes, at the lowest wages they can get. Increase supply -> lower prices (wages) -> more corporate profits!

However, there are those who believe that corporate profits are not the highest good. Some of us also care about the earnings of American workers.

Also, "best candidates" alone does not "best company" make. You need people who can work well together—which requires some degree of culture fit. Immigration restrictions help preserve the cultural homogeneity that makes collaboration and social trust possible.

The “lack of local talent” is a fallacy. It’s “lack of talent at the prices I want”. Some people don’t take kindly to having their “product” replaced by a 1/2 price aliexpress clone

> I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

Respectfully, this sounds terribly naive.

> Companies want the best candidates they can get

Every global company I've worked at has had extensive ethnic networks and sometimes teams of only one ethnicity.

It's painfully obvious that they're not just taking the most qualified candidates.

If the h1bs are given access to the jobs (training and experience), then is it the American's fault that they are no longer considered "best"?

Google (and friends) famously have teams composed of a single national origin (or caste...). What does that say about their hiring bar?

Google (and friends) are already expanding the Shanghai and Zurich offices.

I find this hard to believe. Recruiters would not allow an applicant not eligible to work in the US pass to the next stage of the hiring process. Your role must not have the visibility that recruiters have.

> As an interviewer, I don't even know if the person I interview is a US citizen

I don't either, but my guess is almost none are

> I just rate their performance. And everybody is paid the same.

For some visa classes, the law says you should hire an American citizen if they can do the job - not if they rank first at whiteboards or fizz-buzz.

> If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar

Does it really matter? To a point, obviously, but a lot of people are good enough for the role without being the world's best. The bar for getting into Google has dropped since its early days, and Google keeps breaking profit records quarter after quarter.

This entire "hire the best or nothing" mindset has led to a dysfunctional hiring process that's a pain to both employers and employees, and is prima facie unachievable.

> Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

Did you write this with a straight face? Companies want candidates that are good enough for the lowest possible price.

Yes, US citizens are more entitled to be employed for US based jobs than importing someone from a different country to do the job. If Google wants an office in Zurich then Swiss candidates there should be more entitled instead of asking Switzerland to import foreign workers to fill the positions.

bingo. capital, talent has no borders.

I've never heard of a company giving a standard wage for a team. All the companies i've worked for (Tesla, Apple, Applied materials) give me a specific offer... Not a single person on any of my team's got paid the same. Some negotiate the base offer, some come with a higher base offer based on experience.. etc. So, based on the fact that no single US worker gets paid the same, it's very hard to imagine what you are saying is true.

Being paid the same as the other guy doesn't necessarily mean the wages themselves stayed the same. Adding H1B candidates to the talent pool exerts downward pressure on salary due to the law of supply and demand. I can't say for sure whether the allure of a green card or threat of deportation play a material factor in lowering the average salary that H1B immigrants are willing to accept. But in an environment where talent is treated as fungible (even if it isn't always so), any such downward pressure affects everyone.

When they're on visa managers know you can work them harder, especially during the PERM process

The idea is that the "same wage" you are talking about is too low to hire enough employees in the time needed that the company needed so they had to look abroad for people willing to work for that amount.

I was an H1B and this is a fucking lie.

Employment based and immigrant are not opposite categories of visa - these are orthogonal axes.

There are employment-based nonimmigrant visas like H1B and L1. Being a nonimmigrant visa means it doesn’t grant you a right to immigrate but some (including H1B and L1) are ‘dual intent’ visas meaning you can apply for an immigrant visa while in the US as a nonimmigrant.

There are employment-based immigrant visas, which have categories like EB1, EB2. Like all immigrant visas these are also known as ‘legal permanent residency’, LPR, or ‘green cards’.

There are also non-employment-based visas that are both nonimmigrant (eg visitor visas, student visas) and immigrant (eg family based green cards)

H-1B / L-1 are non-immigrant visas, immigrant visas are green cards yes. Pausing green card processing in consulates after (on sketchy legal grounds) forcing folks to not do adjustment of status for getting an immigrant visa inside the country is, indeed, how the admin is trying to get around doing their job the way the INA intends them to.

That is not actually what that article says.

It’s a common pattern to say ‘company X laid off thousands of employees but then applied for thousands of H1B visas’ which very much gives the impression that the company has just fired a few thousand Americans and hired a few thousand foreigners.

What actually happens is: a company has a global workforce of 100000 or so. 50000 of them are in the US. 5000 of them are in the US on H1Bs, 45000 of them are Americans.

Company does a 10% layoff: 4500 Americans, 500 people who are in the us on visas, and 5000 people around the world.

Headline: “Company X lays off 10000”

Then the H1B renewal numbers come out and what do you know company X is applying for 4500 H1Bs, to retain their existing H1B staff who weren’t affected by the layoff.

Headline: “After laying off 10,000 staff company x applies for 4500 H1B visas”

Unstated in such a headline: 5500 of those layoffs were foreigners; the company still employs 40500 Americans.

To bring it back to your point: you cited this article as evidence for the claim that Microsoft laid off ‘thousands of domestic employees’; the article does not say where the thousands of layoffs were and explicitly contains a quote from an MS spokesperson that says “H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S.”

As an interviewee I've read "we're not sponsoring visas at this time" a million times.

Not all opposing opinions are reasonable, nor "symmetrically unreasonable".

When a reasonable human being and a xenophobe or racist argue, the truth is not somewhere in the middle.

They are doing that now too, however the problem is that h1b is used for roles outside of tech, believe it or not, and if you measure everything by Bay Area tech salaries a bunch of necessary but lower paying jobs will go unfilled

The US public, who voted a conman to be their top dog not once but twice? And before that, some oil barons?

> How can you with a straight face equate “fine for 1921-1965” with “best for 2026”

It’s strong evidence that immigration restriction isn’t economically destructive. If you think economic circumstances have changed and the result would be different this time, then I think you have the burden to prove it.

The U.S. was at the apex of its power during those years. Those years are also why we remember earlier immigration waves as “working.” The foreign born population dropped from 15% to under 5% during that period. The Italian and Irish enclaves disappeared and so did the separate ethnic identity of those groups (to a large degree).

So you put the blame for WWII on the US government, then?

There is a whole site with various trends that diverged or changed since 1971.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

It's not exactly an unbiased selection but it is interesting.

>And the U.S. has been doing even better since 1965.

Better for whom? People are struggling to afford groceries largely because the dollar is worth 1/165th of its 1913 value and the minimum wage hasn't been raised in 17 years.

I found a job that pays in BTC and I'm super hopeful about that one because my effective salary won't go down by 3-8% every year but instead will appreciate relative to what things are priced in.

Before Hart-Cellar we had national origin quotas, it wasn't a free-for-all.

How is Scott Bessent like a racist grandpa?

They aren’t legal any more if their visa expires?

I’m an immigrant to the US. I knew the risk that at any time the rules could change and I’ll be headed to my home country.

Weakened so it can be controlled as a golem of sorts to carry out agendas like paving over the Middle East for them, not necessarily destroyed.

Israel is trying to stoke anti-immigrant policies, specifically they want to exacerbate Islamophobia. They're also well aware that the US is about to become staunchly anti-Israel once the baby boomers are gone.

There are many possibilities. The conspiracy theorists like to talk about how the people pushing the "pro Israel" actions in the U.S. are more loyal to Israel than they are to the US and so their end goal is to make Israel a regional superpower in the Middle East and to them in the end, it doesn't matter what happens to the US. I mean if you are loyal to Israel and not the US I could see this. Each country acts in their own interests and these people have been able to exploit the weakness of money in politics for their benefit. I personally don't fully buy that, but that's one theory.

Another theory is that the leadership in Israel is not really thinking long term. They are suffering from the same issues that other poor leaders like Trump are suffering from. They're just looking at themselves and what benefits them in the short term, so the moves that they're making are beneficial in the short term but very detrimental in the long term.

It's possible that they think that the US decline is inevitable due to uncontrolled spending, the decline in development in its people and other issues etc. and so they are grabbing as much as they can before it collapses and then afterwards they align with the next superpower there have been some moves in that direction to open up to China although small. Its a risky move because China may not treat them anywhere near as well so Israel has to work harder to earn its seat at the table but if the US decline is out of their full control then the next best move is to grab as much as you can before it comes crashing down and then move on.

You'd have to ask them:

“Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away.”

—Benjamin "Netanyahu" Mileikowsky

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It's not popular to mention but the US is the most immigrated to country on the planet, almost 4x the next country.

But really, immigrating to any country is quite complex. It's far from "just fill out a form" for pretty much every western country.