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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

I have worked in offices where half my coworkers were not American.

The average American doesn't get to peek inside these offices and so they don't realize how bad the problem is.

They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positions.

It's a disgrace we're letting this happen to our own country.

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I'm American, and I've been working alongside a professional staff that is ~90% brilliant foreign researchers and software developers for 15+ years of my career. I would not characterize this as "a problem." It's only a problem to Americans who feel they are somehow owed these jobs due to where they were born.

Privileged take. I’ve been unemployed for years now and am “brilliant” (hah) compared to most people in tech. You might feel differently if you experienced that and have also have seen entire floors of foreign nationals working at a tech company twenty years ago. Not all of them can be geniuses.

I don’t begrudge individuals but the system is broken. Refusal to train (times explosion of stacks) is another facet.

Thank you for saying this - foreign people who come to the US generally speaking seem much more willing to work hard than Americans who were born there.

I’d hope that average American doesn’t care about jobs they aren’t qualified for being filled by people paying taxes into their communities.

> The average American doesn't get to peek inside these offices and so they don't realize how bad the problem is

Right. They don't care how bad the problem is in an office they will never be offered a job in.

> They see non-Americans working in taxi cabs, in landscaping, in food trucks, but they haven't seen how many white collar positions are being taken over by non-Americans. High salary positions. Management positions

Uh, the right has been railing about Indian and Chinese born tech CEOs for at least twenty years now. It didn't land until the message was broadened. (And even then, it was cheap to discard.)

If anything, the average American is feeling a lot of schadenfreude after being lectures to “learn to code” for the last two decades.

Its really quite impressive how massively ingrained fixed-pie thinking has become in the American public discourse and your comments show this very well. The idea that these jobs would still exist if companies were only allowed to hire Americans is delusional frankly.

The pie is open during times of plenty, not during the down times.

Times of plenty like the 6 years of unmatched growth the US had since covid? Where are these down times you’re talking about?

Hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off since 2023—have you skipped the news for three years? As a wakeup call, I recommend trying to get a job outside your network, just for kicks.

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