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Who said employment? It hurts the companies, and by extension the CEOs.

Plenty, and that’s actually part of the problem. The tech industry has used “there are no local workers so we need H1B’s” as an excuse to keep wages artificially lowered and working conditions in the fucking toilet. There are plenty of skilled tech workers in America… They just don’t want to put up with the bad pay and 80 hour crunch weeks that the industry is demanding.

The H1B system has been a conduit for worker abuse for a long time, because it ties the worker’s legal status to their job. So they’ll be willing to put up with awful working conditions, because quitting means they’ll be facing deportation. The same way that the agriculture industry relies on illegal immigrants to cheaply harvest crops, the tech industry relies on H1B workers to keep wage expectations suppressed.

Honestly, this feels a little like a “broken clock is right twice a day” moment. Trump is doing this for all the wrong reasons, (he’s probably trying to recoup a portion of the massive tax cuts he gave to the rich, and have some leverage to use against the tech industry to get them to fall into line with the regime), but I do think it’ll be a net benefit for American tech workers. I foresee it hurting the smaller startup companies the most… But that’s because Trump is likely going to go “if you agree to fall in line, I’ll waive the fees.” But that will only apply to the big companies that Trump actually cares about.

The bigger concern is actually academia. There are a lot of H1B visas in universities, and those visas are largely earned. These are well respected researchers and professors who are the best at what they do, and deserve those visas because the university can make a genuine “this talent isn’t available in our country” argument. And Trump almost certainly won’t offer any kinds of waivers to the universities, because conservatives hate higher education. These tech industry will shift towards outsourcing, (which is already extremely common), but academia won’t be able to do that.

All the ones that will still be more expensive than Chinese ones I guess.

I suspect that these are fully separate things. They won't find people in the US with the required knowledge of skills and hire them in other countries instead.

Not really, that's just how Trump does things, like the tariffs.

They can't make up the difference, they pay them less than $100k. This could work out if it makes hiring H1Bs more expensive than hiring citizens. After all, the reasoning behind H1Bs is that the skills are so specialized that companies can't find citizens to fill the positions, so it's only logical that such skill would cost a premium (it doesn't because it's being abused to exploit immigrants and suppress wages for everyone).

H1Bs are temporary, the workers are going back at some point. And with the job market as competitive as it is, do we really need to bring in more workers?

I'm sure this will be astonishingly poorly implemented, if it ever gets past the "say random shit to distract from other issues" phase. But the core of the idea is solid.

At the same time, recent headlines about "CS degree holders aren't guaranteed a job anymore" wouldn't be happening without the program.

H1Bs were badly abused, companies would post jobs with ridiculous requirements, throw away the resumes they got, and then claim there were no Americans willing and ready, so they neeed that immigrant. It's driven down wages and jobs.

But the solution wasn't to axe the program, rather figure out a better solution that doesn't fuck over Americans.

This is my belief. Companies will hire people in their existing foreign offices and that talent will never come into the US.

They already can. How is hiring an H1B any different than outsourcing? For a higher cost, you get a local workforce in the same time zone with a higher quality of work. That's the same proposition as hiring citizens. Sure, if H1Bs didn't exist, or were made more equitable such that H1B workers are fairly compensated, some percentage of the current H1B jobs would be outsourced. But I bet it'd be a low percentage since that option already exists yet companies have decided that a local workforce is worth an extra cost.

Doesn't that contradict their requirement to be in the office??

Quite the opposite, thyell recoup it from the workers.

I think you're on to something. This could accelerate the movement of tech jobs to India & other countries vs just importing cheap labor.

In the past, when tech jobs were outsourced, it was just the coders. Lately, ilve noticed entire teams being outsourced, manager, project/product managers, coders, agilists, designers and others. Big companies are letting all technology be performed offshore and only the business units remain. This administration policy move could accelerate this trend, which could have far reaching implications.