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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

The unhappy hot take on this, is that this is a good thing.

I want every Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella here working for American companies. I want every smart asian and eastern European in the Bay Area to rub shoulders with. I would prefer that to it just being outsourced, or company XX having an Indian office.

Bring them here, put them in my time zone, make them my team mates. Beats the hell out of offshoring and that's the other option out there.

Edit: Clearly folks dont get h1b... There is still an annual cap, one we hit in the first few months of every year. That number is not changing.

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That's an idealistic view of it, and I think a lot of people would agree in principle.

The problem of course are the untold number of companies who abuse the system to suppress wages, limit career growth and company movement, or all of the above.

Fix the abuse first. Make the minimum salary for these so called exceptional folks 1.5x or 2x prevailing wage. Then loosen the rules.

Your under the illusion that this will change the number of people coming into the country.

This isnt getting rid of the cap on h1b's. It's getting rid of the stupid dance where you pretend to find an american before you bring the talent here.

Edit: ignore comment conflating visa workers with offshoring.

>> USCIS uses random selection when company H-1B registrations exceed the annual limit of 85,000. That includes the 65,000 annual limit and a 20,000 exemption for advanced degree holders from U.S. universities. The 85,000 limit for new H-1B visa holders equals 0.05% of the U.S. labor force.

from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/03/04/emplo...

This will not change the number of h1b's that come into the US every year. Full stop. Same labor pool as before.

I was hoping for a weighted lottery

I'm not against the number, I'm against the methods and abusers.

If each of those 85k had a wage floor of $300k, I'd feel better about the entire program, and less like it was a price fixing method. And at that point I'd advocate for removing the cap altogether.

In short, allow companies to import as much talent as they desire, as long as we're sure it's not for nefarious reasons.

This except make it easier for the best of the world to become American Citizens, and then allow them to fully participate in the labor market without being near indentured with H1B.

Why bother? If large numbers of US software developers are unemployed, you expect wages to fall without any policy change. That makes both outsourcing and immigrating to the US less attractive.

Not so easy: For whom is this a good thing, and for whom not?

> For whom is this a good thing, and for whom not?

Potentially literally everyone is better off. That happens sometimes in economics. Everyone not in STEM is better off and if the STEM people think they are getting a bad deal they can go do something else that is getting a good deal.

Understood, as everyone is better off with late stage neoliberal predator capitalism I guess :D

I get the impression you might be trying for sarcasm, but unironically yes. People living in "late stage neoliberal predator capitalism" are, despite it all, still usually much better off than people outside it. I'd still rather be poor in the US than China, for example.

I wrote the above so I'll elaborate.

It's good for everyone.

Right now if you want to build a top tier AI lab in the states VISAS are gonna be an issue. One that a good HR team will dance around and you might get 60 percent of the foreign nationals you wanted. Just drop the pretense and hand them a visa to work here. Now you have chinese, Indians, euros, africans all top of class working in the same lab in the STATES... 5 years later they green card and then the bulk of them stay. Their kids become Americans.

Or keep it the way it is... and dont build those teams.

Do you think this changes hiring at google? They have Indian offices, they could just hire teams there and pay them NO markup rather than us salaries.... Same thing with every other major tech firm out there.

The majority of the teams I have worked on had H1Bs and green card holders in them. I call many of those people my friends and am happy that most of them became Americans.

If you're actually looking the bring genuine AI exerts in, the government is extremely likely to say yes, as Biden issued an executive order to do so:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action... (Sec. 5. Promoting Innovation and Competition.)

https://ai.gov/immigrate/

But then this just contributes to brain drain in their home countries.

America maybe secures a chance to remain highly competitive, highly wealthy, but at the expense often of developing nations’ development

This is the whole point of the program.

I fail to see how it's a good thing for the Empire to suck up all the skilled people.

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