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Comment by ffsm8 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not American, but with how many software engineers having gotten laid off over the last 4 years, reducing foreign workers competing for the same positions should be a given from the perspective of governing a nation.

I'm surprised how divisive such a decision seems to be considering our current reality of a contracting industry (employment wise)

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Why do you think they would not close the position in USA if immigrants are not an option anymore?

If Indian developer cannot obtain a visa in Microsoft they will simply recruit the same person to the office in India.

This is anecdote, but majority of the folks that Microsoft has on H1B from India are people who were hired in India in the first place and were allowed to move over because it was “worth it”. Microsoft specifically will be fine with Indian H1Bs even if they don’t want to pay $100k.

If it's so easy to recruit for the Indian office, why go through the trouble of getting an H1-B in the first place?

The timezone difference between the west coast and India is pretty brutal for close collaboration. Argentina for example is much easier.

Same reason why they go through all troubles to force RTO: to keep people around in the office to justify position of the manager.

> but with how many software engineers having gotten laid off over the last 4 years

And how many times have we heard that you can’t time the market

Can you call the bottom ?

Let's be real here, the metric the foreign workers are mainly competing on is price.

The average tech immigrant is not particularly more bright then the average native dev, and the truly outstanding ones can still be given entrance just my paying 100k - which should be entirely neglectable for world class talent.

> and the truly outstanding ones can still be given entrance just my paying 100k

The same song, a tariff on talent

The H1 system requires the sponsoring company to prove there are no available US citizen candidates. Perhaps the appropriate move would be to look at eliminating fraud in that area. If there are large numbers of available qualified candidates then under the existing system H1-B applications should drop to zero.

Indians would rather import more Indians than hire anybody else (including Indian Americans) domestically. This is well understood by looking at lawsuits against WITCH companies, and by speaking with anyone who has seen what happens when an Indian attains a leadership role in a tech company. That’s why you get downvoted and suspect it’s controversial. It’s not controversial to anyone but Indians.

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