> If US workers are so much more highly paid than foreign workers, then we can reasonably expect the best workers to migrate to the US whenever possible
Not really.
No one wants to leave their families, and the upper tier of salaries in alternative geos are high enough to capture the higher talent tier because their salary expectations are based on their domestic condition.
On top of that, the US immigration system is severely backlogged. It can take decades for Chinese and Indian nationals to become green card holders, and we as employees increasingly expect foreign nationals to pay the filing costs - not us.
> other is simply that these companies exist in the US, which means collaboration needs to be done in US time zones, which makes overseas workers far less efficient and having major negative impacts on worker morale
Not anymore. WFH proved async work models can ensure business continuity.
On top of that, the bulk of layoffs during COVID were workers on work visas who were given the option to return to their home countries and open an office there.
This is what Google did in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Warsaw, Databricks in Bangalore, Amazon in Canada and India, and Nvidia in Bangalore.
Furthermore, we as employers don't really sponsor VPs, Engineering Managers/Directors, Product Managers, and Staff/Principal Engineers on O-1 visas. Most are stuck on some form of EB1/2 or L1/2, and those who apply to O1s who aren't founders or extremely critical to the business are being sponsored but filing out-of-pocket.
It just isn't attractive to immigrate to America long term anymore as a white collar employee in most cases now aside from unicorn roles which employees then use to boomerang back to executive roles or demand US salaries in their home country.
Ideally we need to build a domestic talent pipeline, but universities failed severely by watering down curricula in an attempt to compete with bootcamps, which burnt a lot of employers disincentivizing them from hiring early career, and state and local jurisdictions in the US just don't give us the support or pipeline needed to build a competitive early career hiring pipeline.
For example, in cybersecurity, I can hire someone in Israel who has done offensive security work for a couple years in a military, police, internal security capacity or someone in India who participated in one of the dozens of Police Force, Army, or Home Affairs cybersecurity internship programs. Similar programs like Cyberpatriots and the Cyber Incentive Program (approx $100M) were mismanaged as was found in a 2023-25 investigation by the DHS OIG [0][1] and an entire generation of students of cybersecurity scholarships quit in 2016 when the Trump 1 admin cut funding for cybersecurity scholarship programs.
[0] - https://fedscoop.com/cisa-cyber-incentive-program-dhs-inspec...
[1] - https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-09/O...