What'll probably happen is a spiral like in the US South and rural/republican areas. The economy keeps getting worse and people keep getting more hateful and anti-intellectual and self-destructive.
It kills two birds with one stone -
* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.
* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
Outsourcing: another company. Hard and a bad idea for your core competency.
Off-shoring: another country. Much easier if you keep it as part of the same company.
The problem with outsourcing is similar to the problem with contracting. You have limited ability to direct the work, the terms need to be specified up front, the contractors can substitute in the B team once they've got the project under way, etc.
With an office and local hiring, you have full control. You can second employees on-site for some time to get the culture and work practices in shape. The bigger issue becomes stuff like timezones. So you try and carve off whole responsibilities, so the team is mostly working locally.
Similarly the employers will just cut the bleeding edge programs that require specialty skills and will focus on others that the local labor market can cover.
There are tons of agencies who provide access to good to excellent talent from abroad (India, Eastern Europe even Latin America if you prefer same time zone) for a fraction of what the US market offers (even after accounting for overhead).
You can literally find someone vetted to work on your project within hours. No mess with payrolls, insurance and whatnot, you just pay a consulting fee.
So if the H1Bs were not really better than the expensive local and cheap remote talent, why would the companies get into this mess?
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h1b0...
That's a rough estimate for how many engineers etc. that have or had a H-1B at some point.
If you think of value creation as requiring fuel, humans are an input to that. The size of the industry and the liquidity of the labor market all contribute to enabling Americans in the Bay Area to acquire plenty of wealth.
I think you mean cheap fuel, and the H1-B program creates artificially cheap fuel to the detriment of American citizens whose parents paid years of taxes, fought in foreign wars, etc. Our children are owed a fair deal. The H1-B program is a moral wrong.
Don’t forget that immigrants are participants in the economy. If they are removed there are fewer customers.
Without immigrants, the US is losing population. That is fact.
Or do you mean the culture of Indigenous Americans?
Or do you mean the culture of Africans who were brought to the USA against their will as a part of the slave trade?
98.9% of Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
Canada has given the US so many great people: Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, Rob Pike, Ken Iverson, James Gosling, Rasmus Lerdorf, Matei Zaharia, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, John Chambers, Robert Gentleman...
The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
It's way worse in industries where there's external licensing. If you're a terrible therapist, professional engineer, lawyer, etc, etc, some company will keep you around for your license.
The only downside is for the countries these people come from - these countries don't have an immigration problem. Their issue is a much bigger brain drain problem.
Maybe I'm too insular, but is there much of a startup seen here, @aussieguy1234? If there is I'd love to hear about it
Why there, why not Vancouver which keeps the same timezone as SV?
Racism is crazy. Everyone can look at the US south and plainly see the results of failed policies .. everyone except the Southerners.
Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.
Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!
The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:
- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting
- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.
This is just my own view of the world though
Control group mismatch: Treats non-profits as a clean counterfactual for for-profits, but the sectors have very different occupational mixes and shocks—so the triple-diff can pick up sectoral composition, not policy.
Short pre-trend: Only a tiny non-binding window to test parallel trends → weak pre-trend evidence.
Approvals ≠ demand: Uses approved H-1Bs (not applications), so results reflect rationed outcomes and USCIS processing quirks, not employer demand.
Strong wage-equalization assumption: Identification leans on wages equalizing across very different employers; if sector premia move (e.g., recession), estimates drift.
Relative, not absolute, effect: The estimate is “for-profit vs. non-profit”; if non-profits expand (cap-exempt), the “effect” can be reallocation, not a true for-profit decline.
Recession confound: Lottery years coincide with 2008–09; macro shocks can differentially hit new vs. established hires across sectors.
Noisy worker/firm measures: Experience is imputed (age minus stylized schooling ages); employer names are inconsistently harmonized → concentration trends may be artifacts; “large firm” cutoff is arbitrary.
Wage results are shaky: Based on offer wages (not realized), trimmed, and imprecise—tail stories are fragile.
Placebo underpowered/misaligned: Native “no effect” test is noisy and not analogous to “new vs. established” H-1Bs, so it’s weak evidence on substitutability.
Ignores geography: Cells are national; regional wage floors and local cycles could drive composition shifts.
Net: clever design but brittle; treat findings as suggestive reallocation under approvals data, not clean causal effects on demand, wages, or “top talent.”
