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Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

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Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#71

Post by seanmcdirmid »

themaninthedark wrote: post #65
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a special group of conservatives largely in Utah have the ambition and brains to do much tech work. The rest aren’t very promising, and with the current birth rate, future tech jobs will mostly not get done and the work will move abroad. Indians and even Chinese, not to mention most of the non-European immigrants, are relatively conservative (socially reserved, self reliant, lots of self responsibility) and are…

I thought that the rural conservatives just needed to learn new skills in order to transition into a new job market. At least, that was the messaging around 2019 when we were telling coal miners to 'learn to code. https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/changing-america/en... Now we are saying it takes a specific mindset... It's also looking like those coal miners who pushed back had more foresight as the market is…

They should learn to code, but as long as they believe math is some sort of conspiracy, they can’t. And it’s worse as they push their kids into the trades and into mining jobs that should go away, there simply won’t be an improvement quality if life.

Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#72

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

I understand headlines can't be infinitely long, but it seems critically important to note that this bill is being introduced by a disgraced Congresswoman hated by both parties now on literally her last day in office. Nothing wrong with taking a good excuse to argue about immigration, but this is not a bill that will ever be taken up.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#73

Post by cmxch »

willvarfar wrote: post #47

This is going to be an interesting take but I think it is plausible that we'll see a quiet growth in American tech companies having even bigger offshore campuses instead. Google Zurich or Google London could grow, Google does hardware in Taiwan and Apple and Intel do hardware in Israel, and pretty much all the big tech companies have the biggest chunk in Hyperbad. The withdrawal of the H1B means companies can't compe…

And with these new structures, new penalties for their existence will follow.

Properly executed, those offshore structures will have to incur losses to exist, or will no longer exist.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#74

Post by decimalenough »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #52
RealityVoid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the salaries. They are much higher in the US. Also, the SV bay area has an absurd concentration of talent that you probably can't find anywhere else. Having a head start from anyone else helps. But don't worry, I'm sure that in the current climate Europe will be able to gather and retain talent. I personally would be much more happy to work for lower pay than contributing to the prosperity of such a predat…

Chinese salaries aren’t bad in tech, especially compared to Europe/Japan/Taiwan but even when compared to Canada. It’s pretty clear where talent could go in the future at least if Europe doesn’t up its game.

China is not welcoming to talent unless it's Chinese, and since COVID there has actually been an exodus of both locals and expats out of the country.

They belatedly recognized this and introduced a "K visa" specifically to draw in talent, but the mere possibility of this bringing Indians has created a furious backlash.

https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2025/10/05/china-k-visa-indian-...

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#75

Post by cmxch »

bjourne wrote: post #59

Every state has the right to regulate its labor supply. In fact, that is how society got better. Unions setup oligopolies to ensure workers were fairly compensated. Unlike other commodities, labor cannot be traded on a free market because if you can't sell your time you'll starve and become homeless. And if supply and demand is a thing, it seems that restricting supply favors the sellers. The US has no shortage of la…

You make the erroneous assumption that these people are defective and are default not qualified.

Retraining has been tried and has failed every time when taken at scale.

Just have the tech firms and the like cut huge, straight, salary replacement checks to the citizens who they harm.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#77

Post by myk9001 »

RealityVoid wrote: post #38
m00dy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I think is more interesting is why can't Europe retain talent?

Because of the salaries. They are much higher in the US. Also, the SV bay area has an absurd concentration of talent that you probably can't find anywhere else. Having a head start from anyone else helps. But don't worry, I'm sure that in the current climate Europe will be able to gather and retain talent. I personally would be much more happy to work for lower pay than contributing to the prosperity of such a predat…

> I personally would be much more happy to work for lower pay than contributing to the prosperity of such a predatory country.

Even if that pay was so much lower that you'd have to split your rent with flatmates? (yes, European comp is typically that bad, not oveblowing this)

Then I admire your principled position, but you're one in a million.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#78

Post by HelloNurse »

ben_w wrote: post #62
QGQBGdeZREunxLe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I think is more interesting is why can't Canada retain talent?

Several reasons. Top talent has the world as their oyster: for the best the answer is obvious even when it is a 96% fit vs. a 96.5% fit. I don't know the actual %, likely gap used to be much bigger, but point is you can get very sudden state changes in outcome from very small policy change when at that point: think idiom "it was the final straw that broke the camel's back". Self sorting: the best see that people like…

> This one also depends on political stability.

Canada is going to be seen as similar to USA, but open to immigrants and not fascist. Will it develop enough opportunities?

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#79

Post by JuniperMesos »

pcurve wrote: post #12

Many large fortune 500 companies have already opened up large offices in India to perform core business operations, so this won't have the intended impact. That ship has sailed. All this is going to do is accelerate the trend. That will continue to play out until it doesn't make financial or competitive sense to do so.

Indians who work for multinational companies in India don't vote in American elections.

Re: Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress

#80

Post by piva00 »

mattnewton wrote: post #11

Not only are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I feel like the current rhetoric in the US doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the metaphorical baby anymore. The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. I don’t think that is a popular view anymore, and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to t…

> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.

In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish.

It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides.

I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done.

It's quite a cultural quagmire.

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