You change the environment. Be clear - this rhetoric, which is so naively being echoed here on HN, of all places, is based on assumptions of a world which does not exist.

In this specific case, and depth in the comment tree, there have been 2 incorrect assertions made, the clarification of which leads to the truth.

The first is - maybe now america will invest in its own talent

the second is - many times people are being told to train their own replacement

The issue is that job distribution is bi-modal in tech.

Theres a cluster at the very high end (jobs as a google scientist), and theres a cluster at the lower end (guys maintaining web pages).

The talent people compete for around the world is for the top end of the curve - and america has been sucking these people away from their home country for ages.

Furthermore - I have seen American talent in American colleges, you do a very good job of converting people into smart people.

This process has only recently been corrupted because of the poor job scenario for the lower and middle ends of the job curve. But its still damn good.

Closing those doors, after the rank xenophobia being displayed by the Administration means you lose out on the part of the curve you want to be competitive on.

Rhetoric doesn't do much good. I appreciate the reply but you may just have well said, "Magic!" ;-)

To be clear, I'm not sure my question even really has an answer. I understand the need to attract top talent. If we don't, they are just going to go to work somewhere else.

At the same time, do we really want to replace local talent with not as talented, but less expensive, people? There are some big implications there and I have seen reasoned arguments to support doing so. It hits very strongly on the concept of what duties the government has to its citizens and to the rest of humanity who are not citizens.

I really don't know. I don't have a solution. I can do your math homework, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to realistically determine the answers to these questions.

I suspect that nobody would listen, even if I did have the answers. Ah well...

>do we really want to replace local talent with not as talented, but less expensive, people?

This is a false dichotomy. These people could be just as skilled, if not more. So then your only argument is localism.

Also, if we _let immigrants compete in the labor market properly_ by not handcuffing people like H-1Bs to their company.... they won't be cheaper. They could just get poached by another company or take a job at market rates.

If they were just as skilled, they'd not be being trained by the people they are replacing.

That's very wrong POV - you can train someone else to work with tooling/software/processes specific to your company, while still being less skilled or otherwise beneficial than him/her overall.