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Pay better.

It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.

There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that

We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).

Is there something preventing this right now?

Political will and priorities. It seems like there's always money and enthusiasm for another war, but not to pay for uniformly decent schools with reasonable class sizes and happy, fairly-compensated teachers. Sounds too much like the S-word, probably.

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!

We already do this.

Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.

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.

O-1 is a strictly regulated visa. Limited to Nobel Prize winners, Influencers, and Underwear models.

H1B is for cheap java devs.

But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.

Tech megacorps already hire interns and pay them very generously. Like annualized 6-figure pay.

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.

They train a fraction of the actual labor force. Why should the social cost of job training be put onto taxpayers and individuals, and why should employers be allowed to import labor? Employers should foot the bill for any and all education and work training expenses, and should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason. Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up. It's not rocket science.

> Employers should foot the bill for any and all education

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.

Companies are going to spend as little money on everything as possible, labor included. If importing labor wasn't cheaper, they wouldn't do it. It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.

> It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.

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?

Sorry but I’ve hired hundreds of people. Not everyone is motivated by pay. I’ve successfully recruited people that turned down hiring pay for better title, project type, flexibility for family reasons, and been unable to recruit people with higher pay.

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.

What you mean is the pay wasn't high enough to convince people to do a particular job, not that you couldn't find qualified people. Alternatively, you could have made 1 role into multiple, so things like 'work life' balance weren't impacted. This would cost the employer more money, so obviously can't be considered.

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.

Your presentation is a false choice. It is both the case that corporations have to much market share, employment bargaining powers, anticompetitive collusion and immigration isn’t the main cause of harm to American workers. It can also be simultaneously true that specific roles and industries have unique characteristics. It can also be the case that some jobs have a maximum market pay rate based on the economic activity connected to the job (a job as farm worker picking strawberries can’t pay $100m because no market for strawberries would exist at the price needed to pay that salary). It is also the case that many people aren’t motivated by money.

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

To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.

We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.

Exactly this. And these talents are both sufficiently scarce, valuable and not included in o1 visas that it makes sense to expand h1b by 10x

I mean, we also break a lot of PhD programs because due to glut of foreign workers, the work environment is hell. I've known several citizens who dropped out because it was 996 type environment and since they didn't need to visa to remain in the US, they could just move on.

Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.

What does it mean to "break a lot of PhD programs"? Research is competitive, and hard work. Yeah, there are easier options, but in the long run, the countries with the people willing to work their butts off academically are going to outperform ours if we can't get their best to come here and work their butts off here.

>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.

"break a lot of PhD programs" meaning PhD look less attractive day by day for citizens while relying on foreign money to stay afloat because funding is no longer available.

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.

I think those proposals are usually scoped to science/tech PhDs, I guess to avoid that scenario, but I only have a headline-level knowledge of the bills. I don't know if it's that insane at most labs? But my first/second hand knowledge is a decade out of date at this point.

Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?

I dunno, parent claimed he can't find good people. He could hire them away from his competitors by doubling their salary if he needs them that badly.

Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )

So the competitors also pay more. Existing workers, domestic and foreign, get paid more (hurray). But it doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs.

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.

I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.

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