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Comment by klaudius | Hacker News Reader

Could this speed up the shift to remote work? Why even bring people to the US when you can employ them where they live?

Well, it already happened more than a decade ago when out sourcing was the trendy thing. It's a bit different than remote work as it was driven mainly by lowering labor costs.

The big companies that dominate the H1-B applications already have offices all over the world and thousands of "remote" employees. They still have offices in the US where they need people locally.

Another aspect of immigration law that is shaken up by the growth of remote jobs is that it makes work restrictions unenforceable. Pretty much all expat digital nomads who travel around to work are doing so on tourist visas. It'll be interesting to see how governments react as this becomes more and more common

Most governments don’t care about restricting work unless you are there to take a local’s job.

If that were true then foreigners on F1 and H-1B visas would be allowed to start their own companies. That not only doesn't take away jobs for locals, it creates new ones. But that's illegal.

Can’t they start the company and then sponsor themselves?

Also H1-Bs are specific to The US so does not negate my comment about most countries and their attitudes to remote workers. Even if technically not allowed somewhere, no one’s going to start a campaign trying to deport remote tourist workers.

Remote workers pay local consumption tax while not draining value from the local economy.

This is absolutely the future of work. There's increasingly high friction for acquiring a Visa and increasingly low friction for working remotely (with tools like zoom & asynchronous workplace cultures).

Maybe, but a lot of the denials from services/consulting companies are of on-site semi-technical project managers who really wouldn't be that useful offshore. The technical people are already offshore.

Doesn't even have to be remote work. Companies big enough to bring tech workers in on H1B are big enough to open an office overseas.

H1Bs allow larger companies to out compete smaller companies with access to cheaper labor, simple as that.

Nope. That would force them to pay taxes there, and that's the very last thing they would do.

I think foreign remote employees are much more risky in terms of IT security and law protection. Companies need to take this risk into their business model or develop countermeasures beforehand.

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