> New restrictions intended to protect U.S. workers curb access to pool of highly skilled foreign labor
There are thousands of software engineers out of work or fresh out of school looking for their first job. Why not hire them? Lower your requirements if necessary, and train your new employees on the job. Groom them, mentor them, teach them the technologies they need to know.
Still a bonus.
So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. If you're a company and you invest heavily in junior talent, they'll probably leave for greener pastures ASAP. And if you're an employee who stands by an employer who gave you an initial leg up, you'll probably get fired after an aquisition/re-org/etc, and you'll find yourself with very narrow work experience.
FAANG companies manage this with "golden handcuff" stock vesting schedules, where you'll leave 6-7 figures on the table if you ever walk, but that's kind of the problem. It's hard for small orgs to compete for decades on pure cash compensation, and they can't be trusted to provide stability for decades.
Tinder makes it too easy to switch partners when the sexual marketplace values change, and it's the same for job hunting: it's just too easy to do for both parties.
I think it's great if a company's willing to do that, but if they have the financial ability to pay employees to grow into the employees they need, they also have the financial ability to just pay higher salaries in the first place.
That is, this rule doesn't hurt big employers, who can both pay big salaries to qualified candidates (of any citizenship - and often can pay big salaries to qualified candidates by setting up an office in their country if it's hard enough to hire in this one) and invest in training up workers, but it does hurt smaller ones. Smaller companies, by their nature, have less funding to invest in long-term gains - they need to ship quickly if they don't want to go out of business.
Now, there may well be good reasons to conclude that that big entrenched employers are good for society and startups should face an uphill battle competing on talent, but let's not pretend this doesn't hurt small companies.