[billsunshine]

No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

[jollyllama]

> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.

In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.

Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...

[peyton]

It’s a non-immigrant visa. I believe E* are the immigrant employment visas.

[jpgvm]

> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.

I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.

There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.

[Dig1t]

“Top tier programmer”

Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.

These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.

[selridge]

I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.

[weirdmantis69]

Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.

[throwaway2056]

You should try to communicate to managers (that are US citizens or greencard holders) that decide on H1B/outsourcing.

[wildrhythms]

They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.

[gymbeaux]

As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.

[thatfrenchguy]

> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.

[georgeburdell]

H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.