Why would offshoring the department hurt everyone though? Does "everyone" only count US residents?
If you were to make such a comparison you'd have to take all of the non-technical parameters in to account:
- communication
- culture
- values
- productivity
- intrinsic motivation
- team fit
Those would pretty much remove most of the 'canned workers' people seem to point to from the conversation, as well as most of the enterprise 'consultants' and the like (i.e. Deloitte)
If you want to include them, you would have to set the bar much lower, but then you also should make sure that the provisioning that government program for visas explicitly mentions that. At the same time, the 'interview process' is just bad as far as I've heard and experienced. 90% of the people you interact with and the activities you attend have nothing to do with the actual work or work context. At the same time, those kids that did some school work and now think they instantly get a job that happens to use the same words in their postings as the words they used to label their classes simply have a disconnect between theory and reality. But that's more of a general American thing than purely college-to-job flows being bad.
In the defense industry they can't hire internationals. Not coincidentally, this how interviews at those companies mostly go. And they plan for a lot of training of new hires to boot. Needing a hire to be productive their first day is a necessity for startups, not massive companies like Apple/Amazon/Intel/etc. They're just being cheap.