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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

In the best case we could hope this will lead to increased wages to American citizens, but realistically I think the most likely impact is it pisses a lot of people off, causes a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and has no real impact for most.

Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.

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I hope it causes some people to return to Europe and do some good work over here.

I'm never sure how to feel about this kind of thing. On one hand, it's kind of interesting to see the self-destruction, and having qualified people return to Europe can only be a good thing for Europe. OTOH, it's scary to see, and I'm unsure whether I prefer a world where China gains much more power.

Is this the same Europe that's cutting work visas, tightening restrictions, and increasing naturalization requirements across the board?

What's really interesting to see is your blindness to that self destruction.

A European returning to Europe from abroad doesn't need any visa, and doesn't face any restrictions.

this made me chuckle, considering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(2026_film)

While true, the question should be: is each European nation/the EU collectively doing those restrictions sensibly, or poorly?

If done in a similar fashion as the US has chosen, i.e. due to incoherent populism, it would limit the number of competent e.g. Americas, Canadians, South Africans etc. from joining the European workforce.

If done in a sensible fashion, it would only exclude the would-be migrants from those (or other) countries who have shown a wanton disregard for democracy and other constitutionally required values.

Well they do depending on which country they are citizen of and where they are working.

The UK is considered non-EU so there would need to be a visa for a Brit working in the EU.

Since the word used was "returning", that would mean that they go back to where they came from, where they are citizens.

A nitpick here, but "visa" gets tossed around a lot. A visa is a document which allows you to request permission to enter a country for some purpose. To work in a country you need a work and/or residency permit. Even in the US, there are situations where you can work with a an expired visa, provided your other immigration documents are current. But if you leave, you need a new one. Similarly UK citizens can still work in some European countries without a visa, because there is no requirement for them to enter with one (but the officer at the border might still refuse entry).

You can be grandfathered in, but since this was about somebody returning to Europe, it likely doesn't apply to them

Again, depends on the country. Switzerland (which I appreciate is not in the EU) does not require visas for many "friendly" 3rd countries even if the person is coming to work.

https://www.sem.admin.ch/sem/en/home/publiservice/weisungen-...

"I like burgers."

"Why do you hate pizza, jackass?"

"I hate burgers covered in shit, I'd rather eat pizza"

"That pizza is covered in shit too, so do you actually hate shit?"

"Who said anything about shit!!1!"

Please re-read my original comment.

I think there are plenty of qualified and hard-working people in China, I'm not sure this change would increase the number of people there the same way it might in places like Europe or India.

For about 5-6 decades all the qualified and hard-working people in China came to the U.S, because they could enjoy more freedom, fewer arbitrary government dictates, and better economic opportunities. This brain drain was a huge factor in U.S. global dominance.

That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.

So the US underinvested in the native workforce and now the chinese have gone back there's a big gap that a native workforce would have filled if they hadn't been temporarily replaced by chinese? Seems terrible short sighted.

Yes. The mechanism is that American kids stopped learning useful things like STEM skills. I remember when I went to college in the early 00s, every single person in my physics class was either an immigrant, child of an immigrant, or Jewish. Now we have a shortage in engineering skills that has to be filled by H1Bs, and a population that all gets service jobs and consumes disproportionately because of an overvalued reserve currency. If that currency ever stops being overvalued, we're fucked.

Americans stopped learning or they were rejected?

Come on.

Stopped learning. Physics classes at my college were about 12 students. CS and math would be about 20-30ish, History and English and Psychology classes were about 40-60, PoliSci could be upwards of 100. I don't think any science or math course there ever filled up. There was zero barrier to anyone wanting to take a physics course or be a physics major, other than the work being really hard.

The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.

The U.S. is 4% of the world population. Back when the world population was 2B people and the developed world population was about 400M and the U.S. was 130M of that and the only market whose capital stock hadn't been totally destroyed by WW2, we were crucial to the world economy. But now the world population is 8B, the developed world population is 6B, and the U.S. is 330M of that. In terms of raw size of consumer markets, the world can ignore the U.S. The tricky part is the dependence on U.S. software and financial companies for significant parts of the global information infrastructure, but there's already a strong movement to that.

This ruling is not targeted towards Europeans. I doubt this will significantly affect European workers in the US. The reality is there aren't that many European immigrants in the US and not many at all on H1-Bs. The vast majority of immigrants are from the Americas (with over 22% from Mexico), India and China. European migrants as of ~2023 total around 10% and have been slowly decreasing over the past few years. Bear in mind a lot of people are still here from the post-WW2 period when immigration was much more liberal.

Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.

>I hope it causes some people to return to Europe and do some good work over here.

No need for them to return. They've been replaced with the tens of millions of doctors, lawyers, and engineers the left imported from MENA countries over the past two decades.

That won't happen. There is no reason for it to happen anyway given that AI agents are more efficient anyway.

Microsoft and others are more focused on building data centers (homes for AI agents) than hiring humans at this point.

Fewer people means less qualified applicants for the same jobs, which means wages go up. Maybe companies like Microsoft have enough dead weight that they will just absorb the losses in growth but most companies don't have that luxury and this is hitting staff aug body shops so it will hit mid market and small employers as well unless it gets overturned.

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