[brainwad]

When you buy services, is your bar good enough, or do you look for best value for money? And are those who try to optimise bigots merely for not buying from their local provider?

But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other office and not pay that cost? It's a self-own by the US.

[elcritch]

That’s just another way of admitting that H1-B was always about lowering costs rather than lack of talent.

[brainwad]

No, it's about being able to hire more people at the same hiring bar and comp for companies hiring at scale, like (pre-2022) big tech. If you limit yourself to only hiring Americans in your US office, then you are at a talent disadvantage unless/until you open another office in a more friendly jurisdiction. And if you open such a satellite office and hire there, then that's worse for the US than if you had hired them in the US, because the US misses out on the income tax.

Many other countries have the exact same sorts of visas, because it is good to attract talented, high-paid workers to your country.

[alephnerd]

It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well.

Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off.

If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k jobs in GOP-leaning upstate NY, the CEO of that company (who also invented the entire field of flash memory) may as well hedge and shift abroad [1] helping other countries move up the HBM value chain [2]. And even the Trump admin is giving a helping hand [3][4].

If you can't respect our community, why shouldn't we geopolitically hedge as well?

[0] - https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2026/01/trump-cabinet-member...

[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260123VL207/micron-commerc...

[2] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZAICbxB0kT0

[3] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8

[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...