Reading about the H1B debate, it will be a disaster for the country to scrap it. We are extracting ready, top talent from other countries, without spending any money on their education. It is like the US sending all its MIT and Princeton graduates to China to develop tech and military equipment. H1B brings only 85k graduate while familybased immigration brings 1.5 million and let's not discuss illegal immigration.
If the program has loopholes, then work on fixing those, not scraping the program.

The average American-born CS grad and even the average American-born coding boot camp grad runs circles around the average H1B, in my experience.

If you look at job titles and salaries, it's very hard to make the case that this is about importing top talent to do jobs Americans can't:
https://h1bdata.info/index.php

You can’t claim there is a labor force shortage while you layoff thousands of people per year. 100% companies are abusing H1B as a cost saving strategy at this point. C-Suite loves it, it boosts stock price, more incentive. If I’m Trump I’d start pulling H1B workers from any company that does a layoff. They’ll lose their cheaper labor first. Offshore is getting out of hand too, it’s bypassing minimum wage laws. Those workers are getting $4-$10hr. A 3rd party is charging clients $30-$40hr. It’s slave labor working 70hrs a week at 40hrs charged.

H1B is good for tech companies and such that can exploit a pool of highly skilled foreign workers. No surprise Elon and Vivek are for it.

It’s bad for America and Americans

Problems with H1B:

1. Companies like it because the H1B holders are essentially indentured to the company because the visa holders can be forced to leave the US if they lose their employment and sponsorship. If they hire Americans they’re not forced to stay so they can leave a toxic or underpaid environment

2. As a result it takes good paying jobs away from Americans. There are plenty of qualified Americans who could do those jobs who don’t get the opportunity

3. By extension it also takes good college opportunities away from Americans. There’d be a lot less international students competing with Americans for a limited number of spots in the top programs if the H1B option wasn’t available after graduation for those international students

I don't think anyone wants to scrap it, they just don't want to expand it and have an unlimited cap. You obviously haven't talked to many young CS grads who can't find a job.

And now that the wave of imported labor in tech has moved up in management, there is a very strong bias in hiring. Just talk to any female post MBA who interviewed with a non US born male.

H1B’s are modern day serfs. I worked as the sole gringo/diversity hire on a team of 50+ H1Bs (current and former)…

It was a nightmare. In at 7 am, out at 7 pm, and I was considered the lazy butt for working so few hours!

They know their bosses can end their dreams of working in the USA with a snap of their fingers and thus delay their entire lives just to get at a chance for a better life.

I met many lovely folks. Some of them ran circles around me technically. Most had no people-sense whatsoever.

It’s a fascinating dilemma for sure. Don’t think it’s black and white. But def wish we didn’t destroy our own tech sector with idiotic legal moves in the 90’s.

Connecting top talent and H1B is a stretch based on my career experience.

Actually, it is more like sending our tier 3 college graduates who are willing to work for less-than-Chinese wages to China. The Chinese companies would make higher profits and the Chinese workers would need to work for less. We could use this as a strategy to weaken China. All we need to do is lower our wages below China’s to encourage people to leave the US.

H1B is a scam to import cheap labor from India. Read the jury verdict against Cognizant and the lawsuit against Accenture. These are low skilled workers being used to outsource IT departments such as what they did at Disney. If these were people filling a gap in highly skilled work, they would be getting paid more than domestic labor not less. If there is a shortage of highly skilled workers then let people who graduate from a US university remain in the country after they graduate. H1B program is indentured service.

We wouldn’t lose much by scrapping it. Companies abuse this to hire indentured servants cheaply.
The people they’re hiring are not more skilled than their American counterparts, they’re cheaper.
In many instances, they’re actually worse, but leadership thinks that hiring more people for cheaper will be able to overcome the quality issue.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with HB Visa workers that are actually highly skilled and bringing something new and novel into the workplace, but replacing American workers with cheaper, less-skilled labor is an abomination.

If this is what it’s gonna be, I said they should burn it all the way to the ground, and make an effigy from whatever scraps remain, and then burn those to ashes.

It’s ridiculous to scrap it. There’s a lot of talent from China, Africa etc that would contribute to America’s success. However, the requirements should be tougher to ensure we recruit the best of the best!
That being said, we cannot overlook our men and women graduating from top schools. We encourage them to go into STEM and struggle to land a role.

“Cheap labor” is a canard and a euphemism for brown skin. H1B wouldn’t be an issue if it was bringing Aussies.

Majority of the H1bs got their education in India and do not have tuition loans. They will always undercut Americans who went to college here and burdened by student debt.

As petty as it is, tell Trump to keep the visas even if he has to make it 90% female.
Oh so petty.

I agree offshoring is a much bigger problem, I don't see anyone ( that matters) advocating to end H1B. But the idea of making it unlimited is BS. Oh and advertising that IT job in a small local rag does not insure qualified candidates willing to relocate ever see it. That is the game. Maybe if they required a posting on Linkedin or some national or at least regional source, I might buy the no American qualified willing to take the job. You think they gave the same effort to recruit H1Bs?

H1B and outsourcing are two different things. “Low skilled” is in your head. The rest is logically deficient. As ‘temporary foreign workers’ in the US, logically, if they are being paid more than the prevailing wages in their home country, why would they be paid more than local workers here?

While India supplies many H1B recipients, it’s not the only country that does so. So do China, Ukraine, and many other countries. It’s telling when people single out India. I guess people need to release whatever pent up feelings they have, and grab onto whatever the most obvious face of it is to them 🤷🏻‍♂️

So your plan is to decrease labor supply, artificially forcing companies to hire at a premium, by screaming ‘fraud and incompetence’ at temporary foreign workers, on jobs that are about to disappear entirely, because of anecdotal rants? And yet, you haven’t offered a single thought about how to hold American companies or American shareholders accountable, all of whom benefited from a margins-driven stock mkt system created by Americans to benefit Americans, including your 401ks?

I worked in advertising. No H1Bs in advertising to speak of. And job loss has been massive due to AI. That system is obliterating jobs and yet, all you can scream is brown face!

The conditioning is fascinating