To be blunt, a nation's citizens and permanent residents' rights to economic prosperity outweigh any temporary worker's right to continued employment. Yes it may be viewed as cruel in the individual case, but the point of these visas are not to provide a vehicle for those workers to come live in the USA. They're meant to fill a need for companies that cannot find qualified workers.
In a country facing a staggering unemployment rate, continued job losses, and possible long term recession, it'd be malfeasance on the part of any public official to magnify the problem by allowing more workers to enter and compete against its own permanent residents.
It's not pretty. It's reality.
In actuality additional workers demand lots of things themselves that create net jobs. If more people within the carrying capacity of the environment/structures decreased economic prosperity every country in the world would be looking to shrink their birthrate as much as possible so that the decreasing population could have an increasingly large share of the fixed prosperity. We know of course that the reverse is true.
We've had a massive energy boom in the C20th, and grown fat from it, and now realise that's not sustainable for the planet. We can't continue that growth.
Robotisation will continue the current trend of increasing the wealth gap. And we don't have the energy or resources to just buy our way out of it by making more and more junk to sell (as per C20th).
Yes more immigration, or more pay for immigrants, increases demand from them for "middle class" luxuries (and reduces the ability of the native population in general to pay; but doesn't reduce the desire, and debt fills that gap), but we need to take the limitations of the planet in to account and realise resources aren't as infinite as they seemed - that means it has to be treated as zero sum, and indeed with restrictions on energy/resources that debt won't be there to cover things.
On top of this the ability for the Western nations to control others, and live better off their labour, seems to be finally ending.
IMO if we in the West want to maintain our current standards of living we'll need to entirely curtail population growth. Redistribution is going to hit hard, except for the robot owners who will get richer.
Regular Westerners (the 99%), to my view, will have a taste of living in a World where others have the wealth, and we don't have resources (skilled labour in particular) to bargain with - the elite won't need most of us. Heavy immigration can be a foretaste of that. Skilled immigrants allow the elite to bypass negotiation with their own populations (that might lead to democratisation of roboticisation benefits) whilst simultaneously leaving home countries devoid of skills and ripe for exploitation, not by nations but by the Capitalists.
/rant
Whereas we don't need ANY of them and can vote away their wealth and their power. If needed we could lop off their heads but we won't need to as its far easier and more defensible to lop off their wealth.
From a pure economics view: it does because it constrains the supply of labor. Sure, many (most?) people would probably stay and not not go back, but there's always going to be a few who do go back. That constrains the labor supply, which in theory will raise the price of labor for everyone still here, mostly natives.
Well technically it was announced in advance, so they could conceivably fly back and avoid the restrictions.
>causes problem for both the individual and the employer, especially if that person is in a critical role and now unable to do their job.
I imagine that's what the exemptions are for. Also, if your goal is to reduce the amount of foreign workers, I'd imagine that "shock" of someone leaving is going to be present regardless of how it's implemented.
So exclusion of immigrants can reverse this, lowering fulfillment and reducing financial wealth.
Any ideas how those finances look in USA?
Whether or not it's cruel is orthogonal to whether it helps native workers. Summarily executing all visa holders is also cruel, but would probably also help native workers by constraining supply.
The fact that you're defending their cruelty because of the economy (that they fucked up!) is immensely disappointing.
We live in a capitalist economy which follows pretty simple supply and demand curves. Where there is a demand (cheap labor) there will always be a supply (even if it's the black market). Arresting sex workers doesn't stop people from hiring them, and arresting drug users doesn't stop the dealers.
Immigrants don't come to the US because it's fun or easy, there come here because there are companies willing to hire them, legally or not. So if there are too many H-1B holders competing with Americans, why not make it harder for companies to hire them over an equally qualified American, or punish the company for abusing the visa system just to get cheaper labor? Same with illegal immigration, why not fine or shut down businesses that hire illegal immigrants?
You say it's not pretty it's just reality and I accept that reality... but it's also needlessly cruel to punish job seekers and not the companies who are enticing them to come here.
This is literally what the H-1B visa program does, it makes companies jump through hoops to hire someone from overseas. The path of least resistance is definitely hiring a citizen where they don’t need to worry about getting a visa.
I see this type of measure as something that has a xenophobic base. The economic problem can be approached by applying sanctions to companies that use visas for cheap labor, not to the immigrants. But that type of action will be seen from a part of the US society as anti-capitalist because it attacks companies and businesses. So a big chunk of the society prefers the xenophobic idea of blaming the immigrants because they "steal" the job positions, but very little is said about the companies that abuse from cheap labor to be competitive.
This. All my adult life(15 years) I have worked and lived here and my parents are old and you never know what can happen with current pandemic. Being from India the green card wait is over 11 years and increasing so I keep waiting. There needs to be a distinction between legit employers and ones who abuse the system.
But, for the long term, this country really needs to start preventing "new" immigrants from coming because the US can't house enough people. Enough housing is not allowed to be built, so it doesn't make sense to keep having an expanding population in that type of situation.
Maybe not all, but I think many of them are. The "cruelty is the point" to quote Adam Serwer.