alt Hacker NewsI know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
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Microsoft employs more than Software engineers.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
If they're physically here on US soil on a visa, they're paying the same taxes as any other US citizen. Sales tax, property tax, Social Security, Medicaid, etc..
Lower expenses for the company means the shareholders profit more.
A follow up question for you: why isn’t India lobbying heavily to end the H1B program? Wouldn’t it be a massive economic benefit to them?
> Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains
Sorry, what now?
Well, you can only offshore jobs complex up to a certain degree, not frontier talent or higher management. The O1 visa will likely still be in effect for them; what's getting rejected are worker-level visas.
For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
There are many negative externalities of mass migration that are borne by the locals while benefits mostly accrue to a handful of... shysters.