Comment by safog

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.

I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.

> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?

Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.

In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.

And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.

So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,

So the following are almost certainly all true:

  - Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
  - Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
  - Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off

Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?

> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down

Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.