The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
I never said they're bad at their job, I said they're just doing the same jobs the locals can do, nothing exceptional.
Maybe those companies pay shit or offer shit work conditions?
> If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them.
What about "muh free market supply/demand capitalism"?
Because when a company can't find a worker to accept their jobs, then the government gives them a foreign worker visa to fill it, but when I can't find a job, the government doesn't give me a job or deport a foreign worker to free up a place for me, it's considered my fault or skill issue. So where's the free market capitalism there?
But no, people only take the parts of insert preferred political flavor here that they seem beneficial to them and they discard the parts that are not.
And yes, of course people take political stances that are beneficial to them, to their families, to their communities, to their country, in their (maybe wrong) opinion. Again, totally reasonable. You're suggesting that people should pick one of a few political flavors and blindly support every single thing that leans toward that flavor, or else they're a hypocrite? That's ridiculous. In fact, it's what's killing my country.
The part that irks me the most is the hypocrisy I feel around these issues. Essentially, people pick points that are convenient for them and dress them in moral justifications. People take opportunities that helped them or their families, and then demand others not be given these opportunities. People take a stance only when it advantages them personally and quickly discard it when it's not advantageous anymore. Not because they realized it's wrong or they were mistaken, but because now it's not personally useful. People get up a ladder and then quickly pull it up.
I am obviously an idiot since I believe in moral consistency and I believe the the pie is not fixed and that we can increase the welfare of everybody. Such a fool I am.
Every one of them should have at least double the salary if there's any truth in claims of their superiority to domestic workers and any truth to the claims of a shortage of talent.
The world's top athletes and artists all have salaries in 10x - 100x of the average worker in their field. And what more: Their own countries are usually world leading in those fields also. But when it comes to migrant workers, somehow they are exceptionally talented beyond what any domestic worker could even compare to, yet their own countries aren't leading in their field. Hmmmmm....
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
I didn't say "outsourcing", outsourcing is where you have a different company do the thing (who may or may not be in the same country).
What I am describing is "offshoring" (specifically where it's the same company, though this is not strictly necessary for the word "offshoring").
> yet they haven't done it to date
As of June 30, 2026, we employed approximately 223,000 people on a full-time basis, 121,000 in the U.S. and 102,000 internationally. Of the total employees, 89,000 were in operations, including product support and consulting services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and distribution; 77,000 were in product research and development; 43,000 were in sales and marketing; and 14,000 were in general and administration. Certain employees are subject to collective bargaining agreements.
i.e. 45.7% of their staff never even needed a US visa, green card, or HB-1.
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
Not true anymore. They spend more on bean counters, marketers, managers, consultants, lawyers, etc than on engineers.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
If you want to keep higher local wage levels, you rely on other comparative advantages (easier access to capital, better education, better political stability), and all those tend to erode over time. As they do, you either lose your wage advantage or the whole industry, there is no alternative.
> Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
They are! Just compare vehicle production for an easy proxy: Mexico had >100% growth over the last 2 decades, while US numbers are basically flat. Russia is a bad example now because of war, but they did a lot of catching up before.
If your theory is that all western manufacturing struggles just because every single company is stupid and spends too much on lawyers and accountants then I don't know what to tell you.
America is the #3 exporter of cotton in the world, and the world leader in manufacturing and exporting the harvesters (John Deere, Case International) which have replaced those slaves as pickers of cotton.
The facts of the matter support your point much better than your counterfactual did (I do realize you probably did not intend to be taken literally here).
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
We can all just download programmers now. :|
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
We can count how many people are truly lamenting its loss, and follow the money.
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
And no, I don't live in a major city where rent is $4k.
We should all bear in mind, every government program is a market price distortion, and the workers are going to keep working.
Who they work for is all that has changed.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
Also all Fortuna 500 companies have offices abroad, where they use local talents already. Just like everywhere in USA there has been increase for roles that require higher security - those are for USA nationals and naturally they exclude any H1B visa holders.
Given that USA tech companies are laying off steadily thousands of software developers over last three years because of optimization efforts that they started around covid times as a push back against demands to raise salaries and freezing those salaries, the only use for H1B would be to put larger pressure on IT job pool in USA to clamp these salaries down.
Clearly this is something that USA administration has caught on as mass recruitment where a lot of those talents are not used is a security issue as it is unregulated. So, despite what other commenters are mentioning, stricter H1B is better for USA software developers, as slaves from H1B are driving salaries down.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
That population requires a very pointed set of constraints that are super hard to find, because no one in their right mind would want to live under the systems we're building if they live somewhere without worse off already.
Globalism is just a shortcut around gaining the consent of the labor class which materializes in the form of "you can't pay me enough to implement that".
Besides, moving a business is a whole lot easier than uprooting people and their families and putting pressure on the local population.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
It’s really that simple. If you’re not getting enough qualified applicants then you need to make your offer more attractive. That could involve culture, work environment, or perks, but the biggest thing is pay.
Of course a company’s ability (or willingness) to pay is not unlimited so that may not be a possibility. But then you have to accept that you’re not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet your hiring desires. That’s ok. I am not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet my luxury-sports-car desires either.
There is an apparent contradiction: you’re offering good pay and not getting many applicants, but there are a ton of jobless programmers. How to square that? The former is something you’re directly experiencing, the latter is something you’re hearing through the grapevine, maybe getting some broad numbers for. The obvious conclusion would be that the jobless programmer situation is not nearly as bad as people say.
The mismatch may just be that you have no idea how to set up your hiring tools or operate your hiring process.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
I see this with startups all the time. Cofounders get 30-50% equity with preferences and then want to hire a lead engineer as a first hire... with 0.5% equity and a $100,000 salary.
Big companies already do a lot to pay as little as they possibly can. AI is just the latest foil to suppress wages.
What I disagree with is "it's not a labor problem, it's a compensation problem" framing.
I think it IS a labor problem, and also a compensation problem. Compensation itself only solves for the local maxima.
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
you: where's your evidence?
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
You can't train people for years and pay to do so. No company can afford to do that esp at these salaries.
If you ever interview for a tech company you learn quickly how many people applying for these jobs aren't qualified. It's sad but it's true
I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."
I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?
> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.
You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.
Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works.
If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.
Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."
Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D
My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
Try saying something like that.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.
There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
H1B is for cheap java devs.
There's been plenty of incentive for people to learn to code or study other skills to get a job in tech. Why do they need extra handholding on top of that? If they could do it, they would.
That's not to say more can't be done to strengthen early childhood education or reduce the cost of college. But it's unrelated to whether big tech companies hire foreigners or not.
Why? That means any education not directly useful to employers won't be funded at all. Not how you build a society. Education should be funded by taxpayers and society because it benefits society. "Taxpayers" includes companies too, not only individuals.
> and work training expenses
They already do. Every company trains employees on their own processes and systems. New employees aren't productive for several months.
> should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason
Then the work goes abroad. Or these companies don't grow. (Referring solely to tech companies, not outsourcing body shops).
> Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up.
I understand if you say outsourcing body shops are a problem here. Tech megacorps pay a king's ransom in wages. They've already driven wages up. Any citizen not already working there either doesn't want to for any amount of money or is not good enough.
These people don't exist. Not for Big Tech roles.
You already hit the nail on the head - companies don't want to spend money. You think they like paying new grads (citizens and foreigners) $300k? Why would they do it unless they had no choice?
American policy should be to increase the total number of jobs not restrict where we hire from. We can and should increase our population to 1billion people. If China can employ that many so can we.
American policy should help average Americans, not corporations. There's a larger wealth disparity now than ever. Importing millions of white collar jobs to suppress wages only exacerbates that.
Where I agree is that most Americans could be paid more and would be id employment law, antitrust, were enforced and union busting was reversed
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
Maybe you disagree and I never considered getting a PhD but from what I understand, the workload has gone from hard to insane. If you are saying PhD only work with 18 hour days, 7 days a week, alright I guess.
>There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
BTW, I've seen the legislation, it gets derailed a ton because many voters, myself included, believe it would just backdoor into Universities happily taking money for people to get PhD in low demand subjects to get the green card.
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
You're proving my point. Paying more, beyond a certain point, doesn't increase the supply of "good" people. It just moves them around. After that the work starts going to overseas offices.
> I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back
Usually with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Financially they're at least 10 years ahead of their peers who stayed home. And that's after paying the higher rents and health insurance in the US.
You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week, for ~10 months per year, sure the net number is higher in US, but calculating what's left over per hour of work is not that much in favour of US, especially considering what you can buy with that. One of the friends who worked there (google in sf) spent over 80hours per week in office, something like that is not just unheard over here, but also illegal. He was basically working two jobs there while being paid for one.
And yes, of course at some point (when you earn enough to live comfortably) your priorities become free time and other things, but again, that means that the company needs to pay more, to get another person to split the work. That's why everyone who did that says that the experience was great but that it's not worth it, neither financially nor health-wise.
In which country? I'm also in Europe, but never seen such low working hours. Maybe some nordic country?
I'm interviewing for a major french company now and their work week is still 40h and money isn't amazing at all.
So can you share this utopia where I can make great money for 37,5h/week?
You think Microsoft doesn't pay for "proper health insurance" for their workers?
It's 100x better than the failing public system I have in my rich EU country.
>and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails
In which country is that so? 40h is more or less standard for full-time everywhere I've been so far in white collar careers.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/