H1B rejected – builds unicorn back home

I feel that a reason for this is the cheap human labor available in India, which naturally allows manual-powered processes to scale much more easily in India compared to tech solutions. Also, given the sheer size of the market, even building CRUD apps backed by manual labor for more and more niche use-cases can still garner a lot of users (but revenue per user is still quite low). And note that there is nearly no upside to actually replace the manual component or build state of the art tech solutions because labor costs are relatively small and non-prohibitive

Related recent thread on Twitter which discussed some of these ideas: https://twitter.com/championswimmer/status/15339066147383910...

> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country.

Our immigration service hands out N visas a year. You reject one, someone else will pick up that slot. On an average it should not make a difference either for US or the other country unless they are so small their number of visas doubled or something because of this one reject.

> In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world?

Yes it does make a difference, but fixing that has other impacts. In the 90s when the H1 visa regime started (or got big), if someone in Ceylon wanted to write software for an American company, they probably could not do it, at least in the early 90s. They did not have too many other options so US not acquiring an available talent did not impact them. Nowadays such un-acquired talent can do anything - set up a company, work for Russia (or choose any other name who you would rather not have acquire talent, maybe an oil company). However, the fix is not so simple. To acquire all the talent pool would require upping our immigration intake many fold, and that is not going to happen for various reasons (politics, cost, limits to how much immigration can you absorb).

I wouldnt want this unprofessional person working for me. Look at how he lazily half-censored the names of his co-workers at Microsoft that sent/cc the email, in such a way that you can easily read it.

> While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations.

I suffered the consequences of the ongoing visa mayhem myself, losing my job in early 2022. Luckily, I received my green card soon afterwards.

The US immigration policies, especially for work and talent related visas, are incredibly disconnected from reality. There is still no mechanism in place to curb the abuse by IT consultancy companies, aka "visa mills". Instead, we have brilliant people rejected because of their nationality, not their achievements. Even worse, people with 5, 10, 15 years in the country, high earners and taxpayers, may see themselves kicked out because bureaucracy is just slow.

> Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it?

It is. At some point, money won't justify the looming feeling of insecurity, and people will be less willing to leave their home countries and come to the US.

Even now, immigrating to the US is prohibitively expensive. The talent pool is being reduced to those who can either afford it, or are sponsored by their companies, and this doesn't guarantee that the best and brightest are the ones arriving anyway.

> ...since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space

The fact that the tech scene in the West (which is the place where most things happen) is white-male dominated and likely outranks Indians by a factor of 10x (?), which means, as a group, they're likely to accomplish 10x in a lot of metrics.

Also, India is roughly 5x / 10x behind the US in tech salaries too (amidst high inflation and weakening currency), resulting in the infamous brain drain to the West (where they then make things happen, if they catch a break).