Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?

Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.

The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.

Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.

Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?

This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).

> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose

That's a (citation needed) right there.

The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...

Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."

What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.

Foreign labor helped build the very successful companies that have paid me extremely well.

Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.

You hear that a lot in third world countries where people nonlonger wanna go work.

The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.

In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers

Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.

Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).

CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.

Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.

Well if you have a liberal arts degree you might have learned something applicable to a world beyond computer programming

There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.

There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.

Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.

Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.

> There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.

Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.