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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

> You can work in the US for over a decade and start a family, and still be on a visa which requires you to leave the country if you spend just a bit of time unemployed. And it makes it very hard to switch jobs.

Unfortunately that's the point. These visas aren't designed to make it easy to permanently settle, they're designed to provide lower-cost labour and remove employee bargaining power.

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Even so, it doesn't make sense to concentrate the pain on the basis of nationality.

Country of birth not nationality.

Nationality, not country of birth - you could be born in India but be a US citizen.

PS: yep, seems I got that wrong

The relevant law in question is explicitly country of birth. Nationality doesn’t apply.

It is supply and demand that eventually dominates the bargaining power of employees, right? Less supply yet increasing demand of tech talent actually drove up the package. Just look at the the crazy packages doted out by companies in the last few years. I'd venture to guess that many of them, if not most, were given to H1B holders.

Just imagine what comp would look like without all the foreign H1B holders...

I shudder to think how low, I imagine all the H1Bs starting companies in their home countries making the US look like an also-ran in the tech scene.

> H1Bs starting companies in their home countries making the US look like an also-ran in the tech scene

Everyone says this but no one does it. Startups abroad can't compete with US startups and it's not a talent problem...

The US has the right combination of capital, willing investors, regulation (just the right amount; more than developing countries, less than most western countries), etc... There's no practical reason India couldn't compete yet their culture seems unable to produce startups on par with Google, Facebook, etc...

Tinfoil hat theory: The recent diversity push is a cover to hire more H1b

The overwhelming majority of H1B holders are Indians. Which diversity initiative is pushing for more Indians?

To most people "diversity" just means not White regardless if the "diverse" people are over represented by 6x while everyone else is underrepresented.

All major US tech company diversity initiatives I'm familiar with measure diversity as percent of the workforce that is black, Hispanic, or female. Asian men don't count toward these goals because they aren't under-represented relative to the US population.

They are like (e.g.) Man City in the Premier League (football). That is, suck up talent because you can so no one else can. The USA loves to pat itself on the back about immigration, but the side effect is that it weakens the source countries.

Thank you for your best and brightest. They make us stronger. But we don't want to talk about the "unintended consequences" on the source country.

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