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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

The H1B program was being abused for corporate greed.

There are several better ways of dealing with that instead of just making up arbitrary and capricious rules enforced in a random and unequal manner. When even companies like Apple protest it, there's something more than preventing abuse by body shops going on.

E.g They almost turned a routine matter into a catch-22 where it turns people requesting for work visa extensions while following all rules into criminals and putting them into the criminal court system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...

They only backed down on that aspect after backlash from several big companies in the form of a letter addressed to DHS, but the other things in that letter still continue.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/business-rou...

"When even companies like Apple protest it, there's something more than preventing abuse by body shops going on."

Err.. Wasn't Apple involved in wage-fixing along with Google (and Intel and Adobe)?[0] Apple isn't particularly credible in this regard, not when the result of a badly run H1B program would happen to be exactly what Apple was illegally trying to do.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_cl...

Why should anyone put their trust in what corporation say? They're an entity whose sole existence is to generate profit from employee labor. Not to mention Apple has a 99% approval rate for h1b apps.

Because said corporations can move the same high paying jobs to Canada or India. Especially easier in these days where big companies are becoming more comfortable with people working from home and fully remote work. So instead of taxes and consumption happening in the USA, all that money will go offshore. Citizens' jobs will be affected too when new teams are set up offshore with people already up to speed on internal knowledge of IT systems.

When they are already set up offshore and they look for new hires, do you think they will hire first in SV/NYC or in their Canada/India offices? Same with layoff preferences, they would prefer to lay off people in the more expensive location. And maybe hire someone new in the cheaper location.

This will affect a lot of non-tech local jobs both at the company like HR and cafeteria, and jobs in the local economy.

>Not to mention Apple has a 99% approval rate for h1b apps

Then why do you think Tim Cook personally signed this letter?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/archive/letters/Immigration...

It isn't just about approval rates, it's about being able attract the best foreign talent, people being stuck in green card queue for a decade+ with no end in sight, not getting visas in consulates etc.

Don't you think if those FAANG companies could offshore those jobs they would have already? You think they keep them in SV because they love paying some Javascript guy more than a dentist just so he can afford rent? Please.

What do you think will happen if they need to pay 900k/yr to get good engineers in SV?

As the pay rises, the tendency and pressure to offshore increases. It will start slowly, but as more competitors do it, will accelerate.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/trumps-immig...

Maybe that's why IBM has been so incredibly successful after off shoring everything possible to India.

Look at all the projection in this thread. I made a simple and true statement.

Hacker News indeed

Then let’s just give green cards to everyone who’s been on one for more than day, two years. The consulting shops will die quickly if you do this.

Great, so the company instead of bringing workers over to America where they can funnel their earnings back into the American economy are instead hired remotely in their country of origin, don't pay US taxes and can be hired at a fraction of the price.

Is there any reason why we shouldn't encourage companies to bring valuable employees to America, instead of encouraging them to outsource development to other countries? Obviously we have to solve the problem of H-1B farms depressing wages and harming employees by hanging the Sword of Damocles that is deportation over their head but proper H-1B usage is a benefit to local economies.

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