[throwaway122112]

Ok, lets walk through a scenario, how that might work in practice.

- A law is enacted that says that H1b workers must leave US after training their replacement.

- One of the big five companies puts out a requirement for a Software engineer with 10 years of experience who is also a US US citizen.

Currently, there are about a thousand job openings for software engineers with 10 years of experience in all big 5 companies combined that they are not able to fill, so a change is law is not required for this and won't do any good here.

- So say they relax the rules and say anyone can apply and will get trained.

- A laid off steel plant worker applies for the position of a software engineer.

- Once hired a H1b worker starts training him for the job that he was doing. Which might take a lot of years. Nothing against steel plant workers, they are just as honest and hardworking as any engineer. It would have taken me the same number of years to be good at steel manufacturing, just the transition takes time.

Now if I am any of the top 5 companies I am thinking, it will take a decade for us to hire these replacements and make the transition, and they are right. So what do they do, they come up with their own plan. They send that H1b worker home (india/china) and say 'you know what work from home' or they send him to a third country like Ireland or Canada and get him to work from there. Effectively its a sum negative for US economy because a tax paying job has now left US.

[serge2k]

> - So say they relax the rules and say anyone can apply and will get trained. - A laid off steel plant worker applies for the position of a software engineer

This is a fantasy world. Companies aren't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars training people who have no experience.