Comment by blints
8 hours ago
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
8 hours ago
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
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The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
I own a home health care agency in 15 states, software company, roofing company and real estate. I see the broad range of employment. My father was an immigrant. My mother is a descendant of the mayflower.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
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> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Foreign labor helped build the very successful companies that have paid me extremely well.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
They can help their own country with their talent, we don't "need" it to live.
You hear that a lot in third world countries where people nonlonger wanna go work.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
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I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
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Well if you have a liberal arts degree you might have learned something applicable to a world beyond computer programming
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
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> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
> There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
Then let Americans create unions. If this is abuse of asymmetric power then balance it. It’s not about that though it’s about nativism, racism, and punishment of liberal elites.
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I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
That's not supported by economic data or wage trends. Blocking unionization is a far bigger driver than immigration. That's why Steve jobs was trying to form a nonhiring cartel before he died.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
Many do. Look at the ranks of founders, context level execs, all made up of a disproportionate share of immigrants. That's also not necessary to justify the proposition that immigration doesn't reduce market wages if it increases demand. It is possible that the demand for software far exceeds software developers and we could 10x or 100x employment and demand would still keep wages the same. You need to show why the fact of salary levels and directional trends are causally linked.
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Well, the program may be poorly executed, but don't ignore the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures. It does have that aspect to it.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
We can all just download programmers now. :|
> the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
I have no doubt everyone who has abused the program, has done so to the best of their abilities.
We can count how many people are truly lamenting its loss, and follow the money.
> fully abused to suppress wages
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
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As someone who interviews 10+ candidates per week for high-paying software engineering jobs, the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people. It feels like H1B shouldn't be needed. But empirically, we do need to invite talented people from other countries.
Saying the pool is too small or calling something a labor shortage is trimming away a bunch of relevant detail. There cannot be a shortage, only a shortage of people 1) qualified to do the work for 2) the compensation and 3) conditions you are offering. That's 3 levers to pull: Train more, pay more, offer better conditions (remote work). Particularly compensation, I have been told that's how supply and demand work.
The current crop of AI startups offer exceptionally high salaries, to the point that San Francisco rents have almost doubled over the past 2 years. Note that the most prominent AI researchers are of Chinese national origin. We can't only pay and train our way into getting talented people. We have to expand the pool internationally.
You can’t just train people and have them be good software engineers… It takes years of training to be a good software engineer (with plenty of people flunking out during the training).
Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
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Yeah, that's been my experience as well.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.
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> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
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The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
Why does "qualified" always mean someone who commands an inflated salary and can do the job from day one?
Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?
I hire new grads and experienced engineers, roughly half of who require visa sponsorship.
What exactly are you paying, do you offer remote work, do you offer training? You can find plently of excellent devs in the USA.
Pay is comparable to top companies in San Francisco. This would probably be comparable to the distribution at the company I'm at now: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic
>But empirically
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
me: observes something
you: where's your evidence?
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
Are you hiring for in office or remote?
Then pay more or modify your requirements. Stop chasing unicorns.
We're paying top of market and compete with frontier labs. Your recommendation is to exclude candidates who require visa sponsorship?
This is a load of shit. There are millions of people out of work in the US and it's likely that tens of thousands of those are perfectly qualified developers. Assuming your expectations haven't been completely warped, your real problem is that modern hiring as a process is completely broken as a result of multiple factors.
Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.
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I used to be optimistic that we could train displaced coal miners to code. This was tried in the 2010s and did not work. There is a distribution of aptitude in different subjects.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
> the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
Just to understand your recommendation, I should create a software engineering training for candidates who do not require work visa sponsorship, but who couldn't pass the original interview, for my small software team?
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
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You’re simply outcompeted by other employers. Get good.
NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are outcompeted because they hire from H1B visa pools? This is your assertion?
You’d get more qualified Americans applying if you offered more money.
We pay on par with the most in-demand employers in the San Francisco Bay Area, all who also hire people who require visa sponsorship. Anthropic hires many H1Bs and O-1s.
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Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.
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The solution is staring you right in the face: Move your business to a country where these "qualified people" live, hire there and serve that market instead.
I should tell my leadership team to move a company whose business relationships are in San Francisco, to other countries? All to avoid sponsoring people on work visas? And offshoring a business is superior to hiring people from other countries?
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I don't buy your claim of "high-paying". If you don't pay as per US resident and urban standards, good domestic candidates obviously won't bother applying.
That sounds like a serious systemic issue. What are US candidates lacking that you find in candidates elsewhere?
for interviewing 10+ candidates a week, that is just a BS claim - USA is nowhere that small
There's never a labor shortage, only a compensation shortage.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
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> only a compensation shortage.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
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When I see a comment like this, all I can say is that I don't believe you. You are a liar.
Do you interview people?
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look harder.
doubt.
"qualified" : adj , willing to work for 60% of market rate.
Most developers are still overpaid from the pre-AI boom, so this sounds about right.
Which has an easy solution: you want to be part of the program, the state announces your opening nationally and internationally. That way the state knows exactly how many are applying and why
More state control? Isn't that haram around here?
I prefer state over corporate all day of the week. I have legal pathways to force the state to do things... I do not have for corporate for the same thing.
In the UK, we simply removed that requirement, so company doesn't have to give evidence of shortage and also we set the wage limit to a quarter of median earning for given profession (Labour government increased it to just half now). This means corporations have no incentive to hire local workers as it is vastly cheaper to hire (and exploit) immigrants, as they don't have means to pick and choose once they are in the country. Meanwhile local people can't find work and have to battle increased rents and pressure for access to public services. All by corporations who are very shy when it comes to paying taxes.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
Corporations have been pulling this scam for forever. Governments too.
Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."
Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D
That's true, but what's new about it is the scale. It's called Boriswave and since Labour have not scrapped it, should be called Keirwave or Andywave.
The PERM process is a bit ridiculous. If followed in the spirit it was written, then PERM would be restricted to top-tier professions.
My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the current immigration system but saying "this sucks" adds nothing and is of zero value. Here, let me help:
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
Try saying something like that.
They were also often doing basic stuff, like database programming. Even in AI, most of what they produce didn't have marketable value. So, I don't buy that they couldn't find or train anyone here to do the job.
"golly, we can't find a human being for the job, we'll have to use AI"
all that is left is to hire that human that will use AI and do job of whole department of people we did not hire...
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
As long as you don't mind people remote working then no need to limit the pool nor pay visa fees.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/
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Pay better.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
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Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
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I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
This might sound controversial but an office job at Microsoft is a teensy-bit more desirable to a citizen than a job cleaning motels.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
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