[thatfrenchguy]

> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…

Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.

> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?

I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.

> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program

H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.

[stego-tech]

You're deliberately conflating different arguments to suit your preconceived opinions rather than read them as the individual arguments they are. Even so, I'll respond in earnest to each counter-point you're attempting to make:

> Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.

I do, actually. I've navigated the immigration system as a sponsor, and it's hell. It's deliberately engineered to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to navigate successfully, and it's needed an overhaul for half a century. Using that as a wedge issue to deny reform, however, also hasn't worked for half a century, and has only resulted in a fatigued populace embracing fringe populism and naked fascism in an effort to see any movement at all on the issue.

Seriously, this was a big topic leading up to the 2008 election. Congress has dropped the ball dozens of times.

As for self-sponsoring, I'm not ready to open that can of worms given the immense exploitation it allows (essentially indentured servitude - which, to be fair, so is H1B, so let's not shift that exploitation further down the ladder either).

> I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.

Yes, I do. If an employee decides not to Naturalize, then they're free to seek other employment on the job market with employers not phased by such penalties. Employers will naturally shift to only hiring Citizens or permanent residents pending Naturalization, not Green Card workers. This shifts the exploitation further down the chain rather than up front via temporary visas with no direct pathways to Citizenship, but to be clear, it does not eliminate exploitation of immigrant labor.

Immigration to another country is a serious decision to make. It comes with tradeoffs. We should want people willing to integrate - not assimilate, necessarily - into the country's fabric, put down roots, raise kids, contribute back to communities, and be good citizens. We don't want or need more rich tourists stopping by for a decade or two as permanent residents before fucking off back to their home country where the cost of living is cheaper, not when so many of our problems require long-term thinking and strategizing to solve - something citizens are best equipped to see through.

> H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.

I'm aware. You're conflating every single proposal after the H1B point in bullet 1 with all of them targeting H1B specifically. In this case I'm referring to the fast food industry, the retail industry, the service sector, the multitude of American enterprises who refuse to pay livable wages by design, so that taxpayers have to spend more on SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, and other welfare programs for the working poor just so Walmart, or Amazon, or McDonalds can pay their shareholders and leadership panels even more money. This isn't even an "open secret" anymore, it's literally the business playbook for some of America's largest employers.

You're making decent enough arguments, but you're not doing the barest minimum research before making them. C'mon, you can be better than this, I know it.