The US will do anything but have a sane worker visa program, with clear path to citizenship. The lottery system is built to be gamed and so is the performative local "hiring" attempts.

On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.

> with clear path to citizenship.

Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.

The real rationale for the change isn't fraud at all. Does it make sense that the administration is specifically concerned about fraud regarding hiring in tech sector while at the same time pardoning convicted fraudsters where the victims lose out on billions of dollars?

Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?

> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers

HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.

> Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back

So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.

> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots

So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs

There’s not much point in coming to these threads and expecting anything. They’re only useful as low quality commenter honeypots. My auto filters have taken out 3/4th of the comments as habitual whiner parrots. I suggest you apply similar input data hygiene.

I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down. There was very definitely a shortage of qualified SWEs pre-AI, during the boom times from 2010-2022 or so. Sure some American SWEs exist but big companies were desperate for talent and there definitely weren't enough SWEs that were

(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar (b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.

You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.

Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.

Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.

But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.

As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.

> I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it...

The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.

Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.

I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.

1. Or farmer/roofer/construction

Why would there need to be a clear path to citizenship? If I go work in Amazon UAE for 2 year contract, why would I expect citizenship? The whole reason I'm there is for money. When the job is done, I go home.

I agree that the cruelty is disgusting and unnecessary, but you're going to have a very, very hard time convincing people that removing foreigners will not free up jobs for Americans.