If they reduce H-1B visas, can't large companies just hire more people overseas? How would you make companies hire more Americans?
Obviously reducing the number of H-1Bs will change the math, so that a few jobs may move overseas, but there are many advantages to having employees in the US.
The interesting thing will be whether SV will be willing to absorb the (presumably) higher labor rates for these citizens. Their other options will be to outsource the jobs or to develop more infrastructure in less costly areas of the US.
This is the most plausible explanation of the theory, unless of course you believe the version where the motivation for H-1B hires isn't purely economic, but rather that there just aren't enough Americans available who can do the work.
Another option is that companies simply don't hire at all i.e. they wind back projects and reduce potential growth opportunities. I've actually seen this first hand so always a bit mindful of seemingly simple or obvious decisions.
Especially since permanent staff who are OPEX and increase headcount are very different to contract staff who are CAPEX and don't. And many H1B visas are quite willing and happy to be contractors since the US may not be their life long home. That's very different for a US citizen.
Apple was co-founded by the son of a Syrian from Homs, and Intel wouldn't be the company it is today without Hungarian-born refugee Andy Grove.
Companies founded or co-founded by the children of immigrants include Walt Disney (from Canada), Oracle (Russia and Iran), IBM (Germany), Boeing (Germany), 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).
More than 40% of the Fortune 500 in 2010 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
If the US blocks immigration, it will be much worse off. If the best people go to other countries, those countries will probably end up much better off.
Fucking 500 years. Most beers i like exist for longer.
That argument gets us no where.
If you go back far enough, everyone is an immigrant everywhere in the world except for a small group of sub-saharan africans. And even in that case, they probably migrated.
It's adds nothing to the conversation.
I'm not arguing against immigration. Heck, I don't even think that the current administration is against immigration. (Yes, I know this is not the popular view of the current administration here on HN.)
My point was that the H-1B program is basically built on the hypocrisy that these are jobs that cannot be filled without bringing in immigrants because no one here has the skills.
It seems pretty obvious that the reality is that the H-1B program is built to enable employers to bring in high-skilled workers at a steeply discounted rate, and to keep them steeply discounted by preventing the immigrants from looking for better jobs once they get here. If this were untrue, I wouldn't read so many comments and even articles about how people here on H-1B visas ought to have the right to find another job.
In other words, make the program declare its real intentions. But that would never fly, because politically it would be unpalatable to people in any part of the political spectrum, with the possible exception of the <1% of those who profit from H-1B employees.
In passing, tech companies only use a small proportion of H-1B visas -- less than 100,000 out of 647,852 from Oct 1 2015 to Sept 30 2016 -- and most of those are Indian outsourcing firms: Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, IBM India (75,606).
https://www.axios.com/tech-firms-arent-biggest-filers-of-vis...
I looked at a couple of the tech people noted, and many of them came with their parents while they were young, a few came for college, and could possibly have stayed on an H-1B or without legal status. Often citizenship dates were reported, but other status wasn't well reported.
His top advisor, Steve Bannon, is definitely against immigration.
"Isn’t the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, is not illegal immigration? As horrific as that is, and it’s horrific, don’t we have a problem, we’ve looked the other way on this legal immigration that’s kinda overwhelmed the country? When you look and there’s got 61 million, 20 percent of the country, is immigrants — is that not a massive problem?"
If employee cost is the issue, then a company is abusing the H-1B. It's for filling skill gaps, not lower costs.