Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday.

I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people.

Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens.

(Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).

There are companies like Cognizant/InfoSys/Tata/... whose business model is based on abusing the H1B system, and that's obviously wrong and I'm quite surprised they get away with it. I'm not defending that.

To those who broadly argue against skilled visas, consider this: Most H1B immigrants are between 20-30 age range. The prime age to join the workforce. Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce. It would at least cost you 1$M and probably much more. Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy. Why would you not want that? People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale. If they have more workforce they can do more. Things get done faster and they just make more profit. Stopping immigration obviously would dent the economical growth. Never mind that many top tech companies in the US were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.

To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce? As if allowing immigration would reduce the amount of money for investment, while in reality immigrants pay taxes. I personally have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so far. I'd be happy if this money was used to educate the American workforce. However I know that it doesn't. I would like to see that change.

To be blunt, a nation's citizens and permanent residents' rights to economic prosperity outweigh any temporary worker's right to continued employment. Yes it may be viewed as cruel in the individual case, but the point of these visas are not to provide a vehicle for those workers to come live in the USA. They're meant to fill a need for companies that cannot find qualified workers.

In a country facing a staggering unemployment rate, continued job losses, and possible long term recession, it'd be malfeasance on the part of any public official to magnify the problem by allowing more workers to enter and compete against its own permanent residents.

It's not pretty. It's reality.