I want smart, hard working, talented people coming to the US, myself.
Canada and Australia have extremely generous immigration systems, but are backwaters for software development compared to the USA, and IT salaries are worse.
Additionally, there is no diversity or equality in the US H1B intake: Indians make up 75% of the intake, and 78% of them are male:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b...
The H1B visa could be hugely improved if the intake was limited to 10% max from any one country and max 49% male from any one country. The US Diversity Lottery has per-country intake limits already.
And it also perpetuates the "magic number" of visas, which is not based on anything rational or reasoned. It's just a number someone invented.
Personally I think we should be trying to get most of the worlds brightest to want to become citizens here. The issue is when companies have low skilled jobs that they want H1Bs using because they can pay them less and know they’ll stay around as they need to for their visa. That’s an abuse of the system.
Hard work is a skill in and of itself, that many of our ancestors who migrated here possessed - and not much else.
1. The population was low then, and the entire economic dynamic and need for immigrants was completely different than now. Laws change over time to reflect the current situation and should never remain static.
2. We already have existing ways for people to immigrate here legally outside of H1B that includes the low-skilled.
3. H1B was specifically designed for people who have skills that are difficult to grab from existing citizens, and is a requirement of the program.
4. This program has notoriously been abused as a way to pay less than the existing market of citizens would take for the job.
5. There are plenty of great people who should be here on an H1B (especially fresh grads), but are subject to a lottery that includes those who consultants have put in specifically to pay less. The abuse has displaced some who deserve it.
6. The premise of pre-reserving slots for H1B violates the entire spirit of the visa.
You don't know much about immigration in the US.
I've worked at and interviewed people at FAANGs for the past 5 years and the bar for hiring is the same.
In my particular office, upwards of 60% of the people working there were either H1B or contractors managed by Wipro. There were plenty of job listings that looked appropriate for new graduates / people with less than 5 years of experience but these were rarely filled by non-temp/non-contractor/non-H1B folks. HR never went out of their way to recruit local talent and did the bare minimum to "post" the job. I sensed they made the jobs hard to find, but also wrote the postings in such a way that being unable to find an American willing to do the work was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more Machiavellian managers realized they could overwork the H1B's because of how dependent they were on sponsorship.
How about we propose the following deal: I'll let your company do business in my country unfettered by extra rules and tariffs, if you let my company do business in yours on the same terms.
Now you're doing business in two whole countries instead of one. Is that a better or a worse deal than the one you were proposing before?
We have more people in the US than in 1960, and far more programming jobs.
I should also note this isn't the 1960s when women were stay at home moms keeping the participation rate down. No, now it's just the nasty kind of unemployment where people are barely scraping by because single income with kids isn't middle class anymore.
Unemployment benefits are not paid for by you the taxpayer. They are paid by the employee during employment and by his former employer both during and after the employment period.
At least that's how it was in the three states where I've opened companies.
Arguing for protectionism for yourself while complaining about the cost of protectionism for the unemployed!!
Who would be the "welfare queen" in this case. Is it those people who would have been unemployed with/without immigrants? OR Is it those who would have been employed only because of the presence of immigrants?
As brexiteers have shown, be careful what you wish for.
Its a complex situation filled with lies of omission.
Nor is it a corporatocracy in the legal sense.