In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.
All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.
My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.
There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.
The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.
They generate revenue all over the world. Seems only right that their costs should be distributed around the world too.
Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.
Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?
At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
https://share.google/aimode/k9blzn3HX1PvqOTFO
Maybe Apple wouldn't be founded anywhere else but it wouldnt be what it is without immigrants.
Even Steve Jobs was an immigrant.
In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.
H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.
Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.
These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...