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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

> “treat hiring remote similarly to bringing in a visa worker or add a form of tariff like you would for manufactured products”

How would this work in practice? Visas and tariffs are enforced at the borders.

Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees? Would Congress require Slack and GitHub to scan for evidence of work being performed by remote employees?

If you just make a law but have no enforcement mechanism, people will find workarounds because they only have to be justified internally.

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>Where is the checkpoint for taxing foreign remote employees?

company payroll/tax reporting I'd assume. If payments are going to a worker in a foreign country, throw an additional tax on it to make it so there's no cost savings compared to hiring locally. That way the only reason to do it would be because you couldn't find the talent locally

That would be quite the tax. Developers in Europe and Asia make a LOT less than the US.

that's kind of the point, you want to eliminate companies just doing labor cost arbitrage rather than hiring globally because they actually need a unique talent they can't find in the US. If that's the case, they will happily pay the premium because that person still provides ROI even at US pay rates. That's supposed to be how H1B visas work as well

What's to stop Apple, for example, from setting up companies all over the world that employ their people and own their IP local to the employees? Then Apple US buys / licenses products for US distribution from those companies.

Massive companies have far more incentive to "engineer" their way around such laws than lawmakers have to find something without loopholes. Especially given how lobbying works in the US.

To "own" those companies Apple has to participate in trade agreements between both countries respective legal systems, and also know those agreements mean something.

If your foreign subsidiary is owned by citizens of the country it's in, then how exactly do "you" own it if your claim to ownership doesn't in fact depend on agreements between the respective governments?

The foreign employees are often employees of a foreign company, because it's more convenient that way. It's difficult to do business in a country if nobody around you understands the legal status of your company. That foreign company could be owned by the same holding company as the American company, or it could be technically independent. And if you impose tariffs on buying services from foreign companies, other countries will reciprocate, which will hit US tech companies hard.

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