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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make sense, at all. Why are you allowed to pay a foreign person/company to write software, or marketing copy, or legal documents, or... whatever?

They are doing the work elsewhere, and it would be suicidal for any economy to mandate only using domestic contractors to do all work. (Also, just a side note, even though logically irrelevant: it's not at all the case that these foreigner+robot combos are taking local jobs; I live in Tokyo and have seen that the convenience stores are desperately seeking staff, even 1 day a week, and paying more for it... they just can't find enough (yes, partly because immigration is pretty difficult here).)

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What's the point of a work visa if you can just bypass it with a robot?

IIUC, typically you don't hire foreign individuals for "your company". "your company" sets up a subsidiary in that foreign country and they work "locally" for the foreign subsidiary. And so the difference is that your local company would _import_ the work products from that foreign company and pay any relevant tariffs (see Nintendo of America paying tariffs from Nintendo Switch 2s produced by Nintendo of Japan). Now, IIUC the tariffs for digital goods are typically 0% so it's pretty simple to import them but you're still following a law allowing for the importation of a digital good.

The robot control instructions are a digital good.

The main reason work visas are required is not to prevent foreigners from doing work, it's to restrict and control their ability to live in the country, send their kids to school, receive medical care or whatever other social services might be available to residents, or do whatever kind of activity that the government doesn't want people to do and believes foreigners might do (discussing Tiananmen Square, disparaging Charlie Cook, advocating for gay rights, petty crime — whatever it is).

Hiring a foreign company, or foreign contractor, to perform work in their own country is almost always allowed. This is fundamentally not any different than a company having people answer customer phone calls in a call center in Bangalore.

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