Free H-1B for laid off tech-workers

Except this company is trying to make it easier to keep these people here to depress wages during a downturn.

To make a name for themselves and to drum up further business.

It's to help companies and H1B workers at the same time. It doesn't support the nativist theme that legal immigrants should be tossed out of the country for no other reason than their company had layoffs it a tight market.

Ideally, we'd spend more on education/training and less on sourcing workers from other countries - but being nice to the workers already here and making it work for small companies seems a legit altruistic move (and good PR).

It baffles my mind why anyone would immigrate here legally, considering how laughably easy it is to overstay (or cross one of our multi-thousand mile borders or coasts).

I've interacted with DHS (the department under which immigration is housed) and they are nothing but authoritarian jack-boots who systematically destroy your civil rights, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually ask them "may I pretty please papa" on a regular basis while you wait for the next arbitrary reason for denial.

If you came here legally there's millions of illegal immigrants laughing their ass off at all your effort. ~400k removals a year with ~11M undocumented/illegal immigrants; the chances of someone undocumented being removed without committing a crime is well below 5% a year (and probably well below that, since a pretty small minority get into crime and thus disproportionately expose themselves to the system).

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re: it is not easy to retain a good middle class lifestyle long term

Something like half of illegal immigrants don't have a high school education. Yet they earn roughly the same amount as US non-high-school graduates at roughly ~25k / yr. So portraying them as earning much less than Americans without high school education would be wrong. They are earning close to same as citizen without having to go through immigration process. The higher earning illegal immigrants may be using B2B payments (possibly to offshore company they setup) or someone else's document to satisfy I-9, if they aren't working off the books.

IMO this is a gross generalization and exaggeration. Sure some abuse occurs in H1b, but it has also been the path of entry for many immigrants. While I am not certain, I believe Nadella, Pichai, Musk, and many others came in via the h1b. Over 50% of companies founded in SV have a founder who is foreign born.

To just blithely dismiss the positives because of your own naked self-interest. ("suppress tech worker wages"). FYI US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation, and there is full tech worker employment, your claims have no basis I am afraid.