Rep. Crane Introduces Legislation to Pause and Reform the Broken H-1B Visa | Hacker News Reader

Rep. Crane Introduces Legislation to Pause and Reform the Broken H-1B Visa

crane.house.gov

26 pointsrawgabbit6 comments

At the ASU graduation ceremony this weekend, the dean asked all the international students to stand. Almost all stood up. Appeared to be 95%. Almost all Indian. I suspect the reason they're at US universities is to get access to OPT. This legislation would destroy American graduate programs. But with the impending AI apocalypse, it's probably the right thing to do.

I suspect the biggest effect will be that American companies will offshore more of their work (instead of bringing in the workers on H-1B visas) or open more non-US IT offices. Universities will open more programs in foreign countries to manage the loss in revenue and to help with the credentialing peoblem.

I would like to imagine this motivates them to invest in training native-born workers, but I really can't see that happening, given how they've operated the last 30-40 years.

Sorry to reply to myself but this was just so timely. This - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100005 - is the kind of thing that I think will accelerate. Companies currently usually have a mix of salaried (citizen) workers with an H-1B force acting as support. If companies can't bring that support staff in any more, because of these restrictions, then local staff become more expensive to support - they can't get as much done without this "glue" staff around. If all of the support is now in the offshore location, GM might find it better to beef up managerial/architect presence in offshore locations.

If the H1B program had been dominated by say nurses, there is a substitution effect of needing to find and train local (citizen) staff because of the onsite nature of the job. But that's not what IT work is like.

How would this impact medical professionals? Especially for outside of major metro areas?

Pay would have to go up to attract health workers in small cities, towns and rural areas

Some of this seems reasonable.

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