People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough.
While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, especially for information workers like programmers.
Take this real example.
Google has offices in both Mountain View (USA) and Bengaluru (India). The hiring bar is the same and Google employees can easily transfer between offices.
A SWE in the BLR office makes ~40K USD (due to the local cost of labor), while the same SWE would make ~150K in MTV if they decided to change teams. USA gets $0 out of the 40K that the BLR SWE makes, while it would make ~55K in federal and state income taxes and even more in payroll taxes if the same person moved to MTV. And I am not even counting the sales taxes, and general velocity of the money that person would spend if they lived in MTV.
Either way for Google a SWE is a SWE and if the US made it impossible to hire them in the US, they would just increase hiring in India.
How is this a better outcome for the US or its citizens? Unless you ban all outsourcing, you are only increasing the chances of shifting the labor entirely outside the country by having strict immigration control, as opposed to labor that lives in the country and pays taxes. It's ironic that most of the H1B rage is targeted against programmers, one of the MOST remote-friendly professions as COVID lockdowns have re-affirmed. It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding.
Historically the US has had the benefit of being a desirable place to live in, due to being a developed country that largely had its shit together. That encouraged the best minds from around the world come and live here, whether researchers or working professionals, even if they had to jump several hoops to do so.
It feels like the US is extremely insistent on killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Due to the constant volatility in immigration policies, university toppers and budding researchers across the world are already wary of choosing the US as a place to work or live in. It will be a few decades before the chickens come home to roost for the US, but it will be too late by then.
> It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding.
I'm curious if you've ever actually worked at a US company that was almost entirely Indian. I think a lot of this has to do with people's personal experiences at work.
I worked in a subgroup of Fortune 10 company that was 98% Indian (3 white people out of about 200). The amount of cronyism was really eye opening. Personal friends of the bosses were the only people hired by the parent company (others were "consultants" for an all-H1B sponsoring firms). There were fairly reliable rumors of company leaders having their own "staffing" companies that took cuts from many of the H1Bs as well. We had a number of wives (and in one case a husband) of developers who couldn't program, but would get programming jobs as personal favors - a few on each team. Our head boss was chosen because she and an executive lived in the same apartment complex and their kids played together. This is the kind of stuff that went on. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked. There was almost no accountability for people being bad at their job. Almost all had Masters degrees and a few years experience, but were no better (and usually worse) than recent college grads from the local state university.
I'm pretty sure this isn't isolated because you hear about entire departments becoming all Indian at some companies (Cisco, UHG, ect). Basically, everyone who can't stand the cronyism leaves and the Indians bosses only hire their friends or friends of friends or other Indians.
I'm sure many people have good experiences working with Indian H1Bs (and I've had good experiences when they are part of a much larger and diverse team like what you'd have at a FAANG company), but one bad experience like I had can really sour you towards what's going on.
I think it's more like ~100k USD in Bangalore vs ~250k USD in the US if you include stocks. (Checking typical L4 Google salary in Mountain View vs India in levels.fyi)
Companies do prefer to have most of the development done in the US as far as possible, because there are intangible benefits from being in one time zone/in the same office etc., and for that office to be in the country which brings in most of the revenue.
It's a better option because the strengthening of India and the transformation of India into a developed country is a more important long term national security and prosperity interest than american hegemony in any particular industry
That's hope, but hope is not a concrete plan/strategy.
So as far as India is concerned, the overall quality of talent has only reduced. Thanks to all the regular office politics and general cultural problems we have, the quality of management is lower than ever. There is more job hopping than ever, there is lesser quantity of serious work done compared to previous times. People don't exactly train for skills the same way they do for interviews and the whole thing reduces to acing gatekeeping. The kind of leadership talent you need to build talent and skilled people on the longer run is just not there. So we just get the outsourced work done, and send it back(services). Even the Google offshore center described by the OP is that way. Most offshore centers in Bangalore don't have autonomy beyond that.
When you have this you just can't take on technically challenging projects or the kind of engineering projects which actually count for something.
This is one of the perennial problems in the Indian system. We are unable to move beyond services, and low level IT jobs. Even the product ecosystem like Flipkart etc is not comparable to innovation coming out places like Amazon. Its not really a money problem, because Flipkart actually got tons of funding. All this leads to the ultimate result. We are really a country of resellers, and service economy people. We make money by reselling or servicing things, not by making things. So even to make our metros transit systems, we need to hire German/Japanese firms. Or that our national monuments and statues are engineered and assembled in China. We don't make 747's or F1 cars here. Let alone that Maruthi Suzuki- Suzuki makes cars and we(Maruthi) do servicing.
Basically unless we have a larger culture of merit, fairness and justice- Topped by engineering and industrialized economy the bigger gains won't come.
Lots of this has got to do with culture and priorities. The only way this can be changed is politics and the current political priorities of India aren't anywhere close to this.
i think google would save themselves the 90k/engineer if they could so this doesnt hold up. Also, to a worker it might be about not having to code for minimum wage because expats might, but Trump doesnt care about workers. he never worked a day in his life. It's about something else, namely your nations future.
In Google and similar big cos, certainly. If anything it's harder because college grads in India and China are some of the most zealous and effective when it comes to Leetcoding and similar preparation techniques.
The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of less-paid and supposedly 'bad' H1B talent comes from 'IT consulting firms' like Infosys, Cognizant etc. who files 10s of thousands of H1B applications, compared to say Google which filed 5000.
While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, especially for information workers like programmers.
Take this real example.
Google has offices in both Mountain View (USA) and Bengaluru (India). The hiring bar is the same and Google employees can easily transfer between offices.
A SWE in the BLR office makes ~40K USD (due to the local cost of labor), while the same SWE would make ~150K in MTV if they decided to change teams. USA gets $0 out of the 40K that the BLR SWE makes, while it would make ~55K in federal and state income taxes and even more in payroll taxes if the same person moved to MTV. And I am not even counting the sales taxes, and general velocity of the money that person would spend if they lived in MTV.
Either way for Google a SWE is a SWE and if the US made it impossible to hire them in the US, they would just increase hiring in India.
How is this a better outcome for the US or its citizens? Unless you ban all outsourcing, you are only increasing the chances of shifting the labor entirely outside the country by having strict immigration control, as opposed to labor that lives in the country and pays taxes. It's ironic that most of the H1B rage is targeted against programmers, one of the MOST remote-friendly professions as COVID lockdowns have re-affirmed. It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding.
Historically the US has had the benefit of being a desirable place to live in, due to being a developed country that largely had its shit together. That encouraged the best minds from around the world come and live here, whether researchers or working professionals, even if they had to jump several hoops to do so.
It feels like the US is extremely insistent on killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Due to the constant volatility in immigration policies, university toppers and budding researchers across the world are already wary of choosing the US as a place to work or live in. It will be a few decades before the chickens come home to roost for the US, but it will be too late by then.