That just means you worked with brilliant people paid in excess of $400K. It probably has more to do with where you worked than with the talent or compensation of H1Bs across the spectrum.

You're right, there is no need physically. Luckily governments exists to exert power over human behavior (ideally to the benefit of its citizens), and not over the behavior of physics.

>Employers have only one job: to maximize profits, thats it.

This is wrong. In practice, we bias toward this rule because it happens to align with benefit to society moreso than other rules (most of the time), but it is not the end, it is the means. The responsibility of employers (and all people participating in society) is to jointly maintain, and ideally improve, society. That's part of why government exists - to control harm-doers.

Also, "the loudest people are the least educated" is probably true on most topics, but it's not a great way to make an argument. You should address the smartest people who disagree with you, not the dumbest (and that way, you also avoid being perceived as believing you are better than other people, which damns so much socially-bisected discourse at scale).

there is no smart argument to ban H1B. Its all pure jingoism and racism. There is really nothing else here.

The fact that America is global tech leader is thanks to foreigners, all these FAANGs and MAG7s and OpenAI and Anthropic, the paper "Transformers is all your need", everything was created by highly skilled foreigners.

Without foreigners there is no tech sector, no sweet MAG7 and FAANG stock returns, America would be steamrolled in tech the same way Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, and Dodge were steamrolled by Toyota and BMW.

> highly skilled foreigners.

All of whom would have no problem securing an O-1.

The H-1B is a mess, in no small part because you can have world-class contributors and low-skill, entry-level positions applying for the same visa.

You dont know jack shit about how arbitrary the USCIS asjudication process is, thats first. Please dont ever comment on visa and paperwork matters, unless you went through that hell yourself.

Second, this admin (steven miller et al) and loud wignats supporting it, want to shutdown all immigration completely, starting with high skilled one.

So please lets stop pretending that wignats will accept any immigration. Just say you sont want brown people, and that will be honest at least.

A lot of H1Bs are more qualified than the O-1 just because its easier to get coming from top tier Ivy League school and phd

This is a genuinely depressing position to see on HN - the one place left on the internet I will willingly engage with. Not everybody who disagrees with you on policy is simply a racist. You are being uncharitable, and leaning on the drug of "all my enemies are stupid". Everybody is stupid. I'm stupid, you are stupid. Expertise is a fallacious bar for normal discourse. Honesty and curiosity are what actually constitute "smartness" - not knowledge.

Smart people are not arguing that we should have zero immigration forever. They are arguing that H1B should be reformed or replaced (e.g. with O-1, or something else), which, yes, is synonymous with destroying it in its current form. And they are arguing that offshoring should be punished unless actually necessary. This does not conflict with the historical case studies you are using as dramatic rhetorical example.

Maybe the people you are disagreeing with are wrong - you could simply argue that. But you are making a different argument. It's going to be very hard to convince Americans that Americans should not be protected by America, and that everybody suffering is just a stupid racist idiot who should accept what is happening to their homes and livelihoods instead of trying to comprehend solutions.

re "historical case studies you are using as dramatic rhetorical example":

It is very easy to undermine American big tech. If tomorrow China comes up with cheaper version of American tech products it will be over. Same way TikTok took over social media, same way DeepSeek can undermine openai/anthropic, and any other random SAAS can undermine existing american SAAS, because American salaries are 2x-4x compared to other countries. The moment America experiences reverse brain drain and alternative tech hubs are established, they can undercut prices with the same quality. So do not take it for granted that America will be tech leader forever, the global immigration is the only thing that keeps the leadership and drains other countries of top talent.

Immigration must be legislated by Congress, it is their job. GOP controlled the congress during trump1 and trump2 and decided not do anything. Superior Court mostly decided to maintain the status quo.

I am for reasonable and thoughtful reform of immigration, that should be done by Congress. Current admin has zero capability and no interest to pursue bona-fide reform.

All they want is throw defenseless foreigners under the bus and draw blood of innocent people for a big show, all while stealing money for themselves. and GOP voting base has no interest in keeping the people in power in check and demand accountability.

This is why I am firmly against the current admin using administrative procedures to halt immigration via backdoors like "$100k admin fee". Let's be honest here - nobody is interested in recouping admin costs of adjudicating immigration paperwork. They are simply using $100k to stop it.

The authority for stopping/reforming immigration lies firmly with Congress.

It's an oversimplification to portray the "other argument" as asserting that everything in society is strictly a zero-sum game. In some important ways, it is; and in some important ways, it isn't. People may be wrong about those details, but that's not the same thing as the common quip "it's not a zero-sum game", which essentially portrays the other side of the argument as dunderheads (a trap that well-meaning people who believe they are on the "right" or "moral" side of an argument very easily fall into).

I.e. no, it's not a zero sum game, but it is a complex system with inputs, outputs, some finite resources, and lots of human subjectivity and desires. Concrete harm easily comes from bad immigration policy (regardless of the "direction" of the policy's badness).

>Economics is generally not a zero sum game

This is true in the literal sense in which you are using the phrase, but the context is not realistic. This sentiment is used a lot in defense of bad policy.

Economics is a zero sum game, just not a static one. People are variables in the equation, which makes it non-trivial (after all, people are the entities splitting the sum, which is normally not part of the system of a "zero sum game").

The point is that the implication that "more people === better" is an oversimplification, to be point of being meaningless. In some contexts, more people makes everything better for everybody. In some contexts, more people makes everything worse for everybody. In most contexts, it's somewhere in between. Where the sparks really fly is when more people makes things better for the new people and worse for the existing people.

The subcategory of NIMBY hate regarding overdevelopment of existing communities (as opposed to things like datacenters, multi-home owners concerned about investment, etc etc) is mostly hatred of the average citizen, which is not a great category of people to decide to hate. 90% of people would react the same ways in the same situations.

The obvious problem is that you can only develop a "desirable" area so much before you have fundamentally altered it. When there is a perception that the demand is driven in large part by people moving into the country, rather than by being born, that naturally engenders bitterness. When there is a perception that there are plenty of other areas available for development, which would then become desirable over time, but the developers want money and the government is focused on short-term goals, that further engenders bitterness. This is all very natural, and doesn't necessitate people to be unreasonably NIMBY to oppose it. Again, most people would.

People state this constantly. It's a very effective distraction (a distraction based on reality, to be clear - there are plenty of plain old racists out there, of course).

What do you mean it is a distraction? I don’t think the fact that people at the highest level of power go on TV and give racist lectures about how Haiti had problems because Haitians themselves are defective should be ignored when we look at the policy the same people are making and tell us it’s motivated by something else.

This is the fallacy of inventing a hypocrite by combining individual opinions from multiple people.

Not one single tech person I know in person has ever been "pro immigration" or "anti immigration". They all want reasonable immigration, and part of that has always meant not harming the livelihoods of existing citizens. That's the subjective part.

Edit: This is also a good example of the problem where we assume a person's opinion when they are not loud/explicit about a topic. E.g. a tech person might not have loud opinions on H1Bs, or they might loudly denounce e.g. Trump's immigrant detention centers, and you might falsely then slot that person into a blunt binary like "pro immigration". Then, when their lives are negatively affected by H1B policy, they speak against it, and you then think of them as a hypocrite even though they did nothing hypocritical.

I've seen the whole "nobody is illegal" be quite a popular sentiment in recent years and that (when talking about the US) that as long as they're ok people, they should be let in, seemingly oblivious to the incredibly strict US visa requirements for people from Europe etc.

I'm sure this is at least partly a case of the loud minority, but it's hard to tell sometimes

> oblivious to the incredibly strict US visa requirements for people from Europe etc.

Their strange notions of what democracy looks like might feel dangerous to the current government.

The whole "it's like the printing press, cars, computers, etc etc" is a weak, blunt comparison. Not only are all those things, AI included, very different from each other, but even accepting the premise, critics of technology often had/have reasonable arguments.

It's a disappointingly un-thoughtful quip to see on HN so commonly. It's the kind of thing I would mostly expect to hear from non-technical people out in public spaces.