I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.
If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar, or would they expand their Shanghai or Zurich offices? Are US citizens entitled to work at Google more than others for the sole reason they have a particular citizenship?
Yes, at the lowest wages they can get. Increase supply -> lower prices (wages) -> more corporate profits!
However, there are those who believe that corporate profits are not the highest good. Some of us also care about the earnings of American workers.
Also, "best candidates" alone does not "best company" make. You need people who can work well together—which requires some degree of culture fit. Immigration restrictions help preserve the cultural homogeneity that makes collaboration and social trust possible.
I don't understand this.
At least in tech megacorps, immigrants get paid the same as americans. They're also very good, and if they were to hire only americans, their talent pool would be worse. They're not 'cashing in' on cheaper labor.
… which is less than the Americans would otherwise get paid if there were fewer immigrants. A larger labor pool depresses wages for everybody.
A megacorp isn't property of the US government. It's a property of this shareholders who very often aren't even US citizens.
It's pretty ironic that Americans who forced globalization to the rest of the world, and largely benefited from it, are now bitten by it.
If Americans want the lucrative jobs, they should better improve their education system and work hard to compete.
No one is saying corporations cannot offshore and move the jobs overseas and hire workers from that country. What we are saying is that it is disingenuous to bring those workers into the country and claim there is a skills shortage; that is a bald faced lie.
It's not disingenuous to say that America's talent pricing has created a genuine shortage in the country. It's simple supply and demand.
Why do you think so?
Where are all the people good enough to work in Big Tech but they have better options than a job that pays $300k to a new grad? What work are they doing right now which pays them more than Big Tech would?
> > At least in tech megacorps, immigrants get paid the same as americans
So at least in this thread we're talking about those employees.
A market price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Do you understand this concept? If not, I can use examples or link to better explanation.
Adding highly skilled immigrant workers to the labor pool will marginally effect labor prices (most likely hold them from rising, not decreasing them). So the talent pool would be smaller, maybe worse / maybe better, but definitely higher priced.
Your comment is veering uncomfortably close to bigotry.
No it doesn't. It's not black and white. Of course, some amount of cross-cultural collaboration is not only possible, but desirable. But there are also challenges that need to be managed, and some degree of shared assumptions that need to be instilled. If you don't carefully control and limit immigration to a sustainable level, you get stuff like this: https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...
(BTW: I'm an immigrant, I'm talking about myself here) Yes people from a certain place do tend to be a certain way. They are not all 100% exactly the same, of course, but culture is a real thing that exists*. Assimilating into a different culture is slow and difficult, and not everyone is equally good at it. If you non-selectively import people from cultures A-Y into culture Z faster than culture Z can assimilate them, the result will be conflict between all the different cultures.
* I've always found it strange how many people will insist that they love "diversity" and "different cultures", and then in the same breath deny those things exist at all. Actual cultural diversity requires boundaries, otherwise you just get an ugly broken mish-mash.
Respectfully, this sounds terribly naive.
The moral of the story is that two things can be true at the same time: A lot of H1Bs are rightfully thrilled at the opportunity to work for decent US companies and make decent money to provide for their family. While a lot of American engineers are rightfully wary of the knock-on effects of hiring workers who can be cheaper and more 'malleable' (in a manner of speaking).
1/ Employment provides training and experience. If the h1bs are given access to the jobs (training and experience), then is it the American's fault that they are no longer considered "best"?
2/ h1b increases labor supply, not the demand. More supply, means lower wages for everyone.
2/ Demand for software is not static. Good software drives demand for more engineers in many cases, intra or extra-company. There is probably a non zero rate of wage suppression per marginal h1b currently. But an American economy with no h1b employees could feasibly have a much lower average sde salary. It is not an Econ 101 problem.
Again... the skill issue falls apart when you consider teams at tech companies having 1 non-American national origin or caste. I'm very skeptical that, between two foreign candidates with the same U.S. education and experience but different national origins, the fact that the candidate whose nationality matches the current team composition is selected can be explained purely as a matter of skill.
2/ Great, lets train up more American engineers to push the demand higher.
Consider growth of CS graduates in the past 5 years or the number of people that transitioned into tech (like myself).
In 2026, this signal is not as clear: with the uncertainty of tech, increased output with less labor due to AI, and growing competition amongst workers (citizen or otherwise). We may see a shift in studies to other fields.
Google (and friends) famously have teams composed of a single national origin (or caste...). What does that say about their hiring bar?
Google (and friends) are already expanding the Shanghai and Zurich offices.
That racism isn't only something white people are capable of.
Every global company I've worked at has had extensive ethnic networks and sometimes teams of only one ethnicity.
It's painfully obvious that they're not just taking the most qualified candidates.
I don't either, but my guess is almost none are
For some visa classes, the law says you should hire an American citizen if they can do the job - not if they rank first at whiteboards or fizz-buzz.
> If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar
Does it really matter? To a point, obviously, but a lot of people are good enough for the role without being the world's best. The bar for getting into Google has dropped since its early days, and Google keeps breaking profit records quarter after quarter.
This entire "hire the best or nothing" mindset has led to a dysfunctional hiring process that's a pain to both employers and employees, and is prima facie unachievable.
I went for a job in the US back in the late 80's (Specialist on hardware).
California it was exceptionally strict. While I was more than qualified it took months of the company advertising in the US, and at the end of it all an American was hired.
The second job for another company in California, same deal except they only advertised in the local newspaper (which felt off), and when I finally got an interview they said they couldn't hire me but recommended places in Mexico to jump the border if I ever wanted a job. Noped out of that fast.
Did eventually get to a spend a couple of years in the US in the 90's. It was the same hoops to jump through as the first company. Wasn't easy or fast.
No idea what it is like now. But I had seen the racism of "They are an immigrant, so they were only hired because we can pay them cheap", not as bad as my Indian co-workers though.
As an interviewer, I don't rank candidates. I have my set of questions, some candidates solve them, others don't. You can argue that it's the bar to do your job properly. Should politicians tell big tech companies what's the bar for being a successful SWE?
> When it comes to national interest, the argument for "meritocracy" falls apart quickly.
A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers. I'm not sure what would be the tech industry without them.
Someone in your org does - an individual or committee: that's the entire purpose of the hiring pipeline. I've interviewed candidates at multiple companies small and (extremely) big, and interviews always have to give recommendations for ranking purposes (out of 10/100, or (strong-/)yes / maybe / (strong-/)no)
I am not attacking you personally, but the fact remains: in some circumstances hiring "the best" - when they happen to be a non-citizen - can be in contravention with the law depending on the visa class and whether you failed to find an American capable of doing the job.
Don't just take my word for it, big tech companies have lost or settled multiple AG suits because they tried to hide job postings from Americans, e.g. by posting SWE/PM jobs in some podunk, print-only Farmers-Weekly-type magazines.
> A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers.
I fully agree. Unfortunately being skilled doesn't grant them the right to vote, and as young people keep finding out, those who write (and sign) laws care a lot about what actual voters think and feel. You have to get into office first before you can do the hard labor-policy stuff.
Relevant historical footnotes: The Manhattan Project [0], where an international team of scientists and engineers built the world's first atomic bomb.
Operation Paperclip [1] where Nazi scientists and engineers were hired by the US government to work on the space program, amongst other things.
and of course, there's this Andrew Grove guy, [2] who convinced the tech industry to obsessively focus on KPIs, for better or worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Did you write this with a straight face? Companies want candidates that are good enough for the lowest possible price.
Yes, US citizens are more entitled to be employed for US based jobs than importing someone from a different country to do the job. If Google wants an office in Zurich then Swiss candidates there should be more entitled instead of asking Switzerland to import foreign workers to fill the positions.
A company can decide to open an office in India where there is cheap talent as long as they pay the taxes put in place by US/EU governments to prevent offshoring. That's the game.
Maybe try to express yourself a bit more clearly, because once again, I have no clue what your point is now.
Now local talent over immigrants, each country has different policy, and it certainly affects where companies decide to open foreign offices. For instance, would OpenAI open an office in London if all they can hire are British citizens?
It's common for the prevailing wage to be double what that person could earn in their country of origin.
You don't need the carrot of a green card or the stick of deportation to make a software engineer on an H1B accept a depressed wage, because it's not depressed relative to their alternatives.
* The expected marginal increase in supply, from immigrants looking for jobs in F
* The expected marginal increase in demand, from immigrants (or non-immigrants identifying an opportunity) starting companies that need experts in F
And how strongly does that delta correlate with average salary in F?
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...
It’s a common pattern to say ‘company X laid off thousands of employees but then applied for thousands of H1B visas’ which very much gives the impression that the company has just fired a few thousand Americans and hired a few thousand foreigners.
What actually happens is: a company has a global workforce of 100000 or so. 50000 of them are in the US. 5000 of them are in the US on H1Bs, 45000 of them are Americans.
Company does a 10% layoff: 4500 Americans, 500 people who are in the us on visas, and 5000 people around the world.
Headline: “Company X lays off 10000”
Then the H1B renewal numbers come out and what do you know company X is applying for 4500 H1Bs, to retain their existing H1B staff who weren’t affected by the layoff.
Headline: “After laying off 10,000 staff company x applies for 4500 H1B visas”
Unstated in such a headline: 5500 of those layoffs were foreigners; the company still employs 40500 Americans.
To bring it back to your point: you cited this article as evidence for the claim that Microsoft laid off ‘thousands of domestic employees’; the article does not say where the thousands of layoffs were and explicitly contains a quote from an MS spokesperson that says “H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S.”
There are employment-based nonimmigrant visas like H1B and L1. Being a nonimmigrant visa means it doesn’t grant you a right to immigrate but some (including H1B and L1) are ‘dual intent’ visas meaning you can apply for an immigrant visa while in the US as a nonimmigrant.
There are employment-based immigrant visas, which have categories like EB1, EB2. Like all immigrant visas these are also known as ‘legal permanent residency’, LPR, or ‘green cards’.
There are also non-employment-based visas that are both nonimmigrant (eg visitor visas, student visas) and immigrant (eg family based green cards)
They explicitly said that for h1b and l1 aos wouldn’t be affected as they are dual intent visas.
When a reasonable human being and a xenophobe or racist argue, the truth is not somewhere in the middle.
You can't hire scab helicopter blade design engineers. Not even from abroad. You have a small pool of those who qualify looking for work (or actively keeping their ears alert for new work), muddied by many people tangentially quasi-qualified who want a job.
After you filter (imprecisely, but as well as you can), the pool is small, and you don't have enough qualified applicants to routinely work one group against another.
That would be a market based solution that allows everyone to get the talent they need without driving down American wages.
But the point isn't about helping Americans, it's about being peedormatively against letting in brown people.
And if the employer isn't willing to pay the cost of labor to fill the position, it directly raises the question of whether its "necessary".
What a brilliant plan. Lets make sure that we restrict the supply of doctors and medical personell, that's sure to improve care!