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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

OTOH many H1Bs come with the intent of moving to the US and permanent residence eventually. Which makes our workforce stronger.

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> OTOH many H1Bs come with the intent of moving to the US and permanent residence eventually. Which makes our workforce stronger.

Sure. But we are arguing about two separate things here. I am pro-immigration. But I am also against using immigrant primarily to depress wages.

Yes I would prefer just faster road to skilled immigration. It also doesn’t help string people along with this distant hope of permanent residency

So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.

We can still use policy to disadvantage the economics of offshoring, we just haven’t gotten there yet. This took time, that will take time.

Does it suck that billions of people were born into lesser global economic circumstances? Absolutely. Does that mean we should allow corporations to exploit labor (both imported and citizens who have to compete against that imported labor) at the disadvantage of domestic citizens? No. This is workers vs capital, not immigrants vs citizens.

There's a logically fallacy in there. Throwing up border walls does not stop capital. Capital can still exist outside the borders and work with the supply chains of the other countries minus 1. And pick an inflow metric that capital cares, and the US does not control more than 50% of it. number of consumers, GDP, income growth, all of it. The capital will continue to service the bigger number that remains offshore through cutting the US out of that pie reciprocally.

The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.

There is nowhere else to invest. China, Russia, and Africa? No trust. Europe and Japan? Too old. That leaves India, which may or may not attract material capital inflows.

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

https://www.columbiathreadneedleus.com/institutional/insight...

Who, funnily enough, will probably be the largest impacted by such things as locking down H1Bs.

Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.

All countries will end up like Japan, it’s just time (explained in the links I cited). Some countries are likely willing to eat some economic gains out of other preferences. That’s a choice. It’s not all “line goes up.”

India’s total fertility rate is already 1.9, below 2.1 replacement rate. Its demographic dividend (and any potential capital investment opportunities) is already on borrowed time. So capital would rotate and reallocate there, while there is still time, regardless.

https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/dont-panic-over-falli...

Per slide 8 of your second link: Except Africa and half of Asia who will still be above replacement rate for the remainder of our natural lives.

Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.

And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.

> Per slide 8 of your second link: Except Africa and half of Asia who will still be above replacement rate for the remainder of our natural lives.

https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a...

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-worlds-birthrate-may-already-...

Most of the world will be below fertility replacement rate by 2030. This is important, because the faster fertility rates decline, the faster the light cone of capital returns into the future shrinks (people = profits = returns).

So, to tie this all together: for the reasons I’ve laid out in this subthread (with citations), I’m not too concerned about the need to cater to the demands of capital. It needs returns more than humans need it considering population growth is almost over, and it will continue to slowly exhaust investment opportunities as the global demographics transition continues.

Unless you are an American tech worker looking for a job

Economy isn't a zero-sum game. Foreign talents were the enabler of the growth in this field.

Over a long enough time-span it isn't zero-sum. Under any sort of limited time span, which is what people with limited amount of life live deal with, it is zero-sum. It doesn't matter how much money you spend, the economy has material and man power limits than cannot be exceeded no matter what someone manages to pull out of their butt. On top of that, the value of money IS affected by the total amount of currency in circulation as history has shown many times over, and only in a theoretical economic vacuum where customers are infinite does one guy holding a trillion dollars not devalue someone else's $1.

Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.

Because US companies like Bell Labs invented it.

Ha! And who worked at Bell Labs, the US company? Immigrants.

Mohamed "John" Atalla, raised in Egypt, and Dawon Kahng from Korea, who together invented the MOSFET transistor, which underpins modern electronics and computing. Both immigrated to the United States for graduate engineering education and made their breakthrough at Bell Labs in 1959.

Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research and contributed significantly to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, was a founder and major figure in the creation of the Bell Telephone Company; AT&T, created by American Bell in 1885, later established Bell Labs.

Immigration has always bolstered the American tech industry, but the bulk of the industry has always been American. Just look at the distinguished members of Bell Labs. Many are immigrants, but most are American. The reason why immigrants come here is that American industry is already very strong. It’s not mutually exclusive to claim that Americans build a strong tech industry and that skilled immigrants have invented many new technologies here in America.

You are right about Bell Labs, the majority were US-born.

But let's consider one of the biggest innovations of recent times: Artificial Intelligence (transformers/LLMs specifically). Where was it invented? In America. Who invented it? Let's take a look. The seminal research paper that kicked off this revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. So only 25% US-born.

Have you watched OpenAI's demos and how many of their researchers are Asian? Would you prefer for them to remain in Asia and contribute to DeepSeek instead?

I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.

there's a lot of new policy that seems to be intentionally inflicting severe brain drain

the US is no longer the clear destination for the best and brightest

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