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 think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down

Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.