alt Hacker NewsFor some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
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> She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans)
Is this not by itself a problem?
For every job like that, there's 100 jobs that are "Write basic Java CRUD app against RDBMS backend"
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
So, I think your point is moot.