- Not only are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I feel like the current rhetoric in the US doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the metaphorical baby anymore.
The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. I don’t think that is a popular view anymore, and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.
- "Killing the golden goose" is the phrase that has come to mind repeatedly in the past few years. As someone living in a country that has been brain-draining into the US for decades, I'm quite perplexed at all this. It looks like the next Andrej Karpathy (born in Czechoslovakia, educated in Canada) will be taking their talents somewhere besides the US in the future.
Maybe they think they can just cherry-pick the geniuses and leave "the rest" but that's not how it works; skilled experts don't just suddenly appear out of the vacuum, you need a pipeline with a wide mouth. It wasn't perfect but the US had the world's best genius pipeline, and it has already been largely torn down.
- Many large fortune 500 companies have already opened up large offices in India to perform core business operations, so this won't have the intended impact. That ship has sailed. All this is going to do is accelerate the trend.
That will continue to play out until it doesn't make financial or competitive sense to do so.
- This is going to be an interesting take but I think it is plausible that we'll see a quiet growth in American tech companies having even bigger offshore campuses instead. Google Zurich or Google London could grow, Google does hardware in Taiwan and Apple and Intel do hardware in Israel, and pretty much all the big tech companies have the biggest chunk in Hyperbad.
The withdrawal of the H1B means companies can't compete on offering them to attract talent, but that talent still wants to work somewhere and companies can instead complete on the perks they offer at those offshore places.
Things will get interesting if Europe can become the place that US tech companies offer visa support for people to move to though.
- I would be incredibly curious if the mods could look into the stats of these political threads. I personally feel they are being manipulated at least through the voting system if not through active bot influence campaigns.
It might be me being emotional about this and about seeing a country I looked up to becoming what it's becoming, but I just can't comprehend how some of the people in this otherwise great community can look at this and think it's the direction they want for their country.
- If skilled workers can't come here, then the businesses who need them will just open up satellite shops there. Not an opinion on H-1B, just an observation.
- There needs to be a moratorium on it, at least for a while.
- Unfortunately there are consequences for its abuse. Is eliminating it the right consequence? Who really knows but it should have never been abused especially in favour of one particular country that is taking over tech. People talk about brain drain but people do go back home and they are opening more offices back at home.
- This is only increase offshoring even further, unless the new administration now finds a way to tax VPN connections between company sites.
- A representative thrown out of her own party lays out some meme bills. Why so serious batman?
- I understand headlines can't be infinitely long, but it seems critically important to note that this bill is being introduced by a disgraced Congresswoman hated by both parties now on literally her last day in office. Nothing wrong with taking a good excuse to argue about immigration, but this is not a bill that will ever be taken up.
- Seems very unlikely as MTG is crazy
- This has no hope at all of passing. Marjorie Taylor Greene is on Trump's shit list after daring to demand the Epstein files too loudly, and she's introducing these bills on her last day in Congress as a symbolic gesture to her base.
- Half of the Fortune 500 is founded by immigrants or their kids:
https://fortune.com/2025/07/30/latinos-immigration-economy-j...
And H1B workers are paid slightly more on average, not less, than citizen workers. Not to mention that if you account for the cost companies pay to deal with the immigration process (lawyers, fees, etc) they end up being a lot pricier.
The new hatred towards H1B is part of a broader shifting of the Overton window. First hate illegal immigrants. Then ones on visas. Then naturalized citizens. And soon they come to a place where they can deport 100 million, their actual racist goal that the DHS tweeted recently:
https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2006472108222853298
Meanwhile China just launched their new K visa to soak up all the amazing talent the new far right America is pushing away.
- Every state has the right to regulate its labor supply. In fact, that is how society got better. Unions setup oligopolies to ensure workers were fairly compensated. Unlike other commodities, labor cannot be traded on a free market because if you can't sell your time you'll starve and become homeless. And if supply and demand is a thing, it seems that restricting supply favors the sellers.
The US has no shortage of labor. However, it is terribly allocated. Like "baggers" for groceries, old people (that should have retired long ago) working as "greeters", and thousands of Uber drivers working 12+ hours/day cause cities are so badly designed that you need taxis to get around. People whose only job is to put out cones on the street to force cars to slow down when the light is green... So much wasted labor. Why not try and "upgrade" these people through education (which tech companies should pay for in taxes) so that they can work more qualified jobs? Then the US wouldn't need to import qualified labor.
- All power to the Americans of course, but this sounds incredibly dumb. Cutting legal and skilled immigration and doing nothing about illegal immigration? That will surely help the people. /s
- More than 50% of our unicorns have first generation immigrant founders. All the standard anti immigrant rhetoric ends up falling flat so it’s just straight up racism now.
- Literally who cares? Most bills that are introduced go nowhere, and this one was introduced by a congresswoman who recently resigned (Marjorie Taylor Greene).
But what Congress really needs to do is introduce an onerous tax on offshore labor, that's a much worse problem.