Ask HN: Should foreign remote workers have to get sponsored for H1B visas?

IMO yes. Someone from abroad working in an office domestically would need sponsorship via the visa process as to not take away labor from domestic labor by residing here. Working remotely is still working on the projects that would otherwise be going to domestic laborers.

Since the current administration has rightfully ended non-competes, I think the next move should be to require that all non-citizen employees, contractors or contracted or full-time, to go through the h1b visa process if they are producing American technology outside of the US.

Any American enterprise that wants to continue to access American market profits will need to ensure that the vast majority of their workforce is American, with remote options going to Americans first. This need should be especially obvious for products that have sensitive user data in storage or access to sensitive IP. Otherwise it is a race to the bottom and currency manipulation will just siphon off American IP and the underlying foundation and fabric of STEM jobs in the USA.

This is also tit-for-tat. As an American citizen, it's not exactly as straightforward or possible to get access to remote opportunities from those other countries. This all seems like cleverly structured IP/data theft by using currency manipulation to siphon off access and visibility to the IP/data.

I've worked at a place where all of the critical database deployments and production monitoring of incidents goes through contracted teams from other countries first. They have visibility into the data and a lot of the systems. It's not kosher at all, and those countries in particular don't care about protecting American laws or American IP. Yet they are being given more access by people who do not understand the implications of this IP and data risk, because they only focus on spreadsheets and dollar signs. Enforcing h1b visas for such contractors, be they directly contracted by your company or by a third party that your company contracts, would limit how easy it is to outsource tech labor.

Make it much more expensive to hire cheap laborers abroad. Protect American labor in STEM roles, and in critical ones especially, and American IP and technology and data.