> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India. This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India itself.

There's a big assumption in "Since remote work has become acceptable". Some companies are talking about making things permanent, others are already trying to get people back in the office.

And if the remote work swing is both big and permanent, then I think this is less likely a "backfire" situation and more of an "irrelevant" one. Companies looking to save money would hire in the foreign country regardless of the new rules.

>There's a big assumption in "Since remote work has become acceptable". Some companies are talking about making things permanent, others are already trying to get people back in the office.

It costs companies a lot both monetarily and in time/effort to advertise job postings, get applications, schedule interviews ,hire someone new to do the same job, train them and get them set up and acclimatized until they become productive. If they can still have them working that'd be a big boon for them. Of course this won't happen for all jobs, but is likely to apply to a large fraction.

Someone making a conscious decision to hire in another country takes a lot of effort, but an existing productive employee who is already working 100% remotely for the past 6+ months asking if they could work in Canada or India till the uncertainty around the election is resolved will definitely have a good chance.

> Companies looking to save money would hire in the foreign country regardless of the new rules.

You're going to get people who are already productive for the company moving willingly to lower expense parts of the world, while continuing to be identical in disruption to someone moving to Wisconsin.

Companies (more importantly managers) do care about hiring locally, since they have a lot of opportunities to on-board, evaluate and guide - however, once they're all baked in, the shift is less of a concern for the companies.

"Hiring in a foreign country" is different from "We save 18k/employee if they move to Canada and they want to!".

Doing it all through Canada gives them he same time zones and a just one additional legal system to deal with.

You are grossly overestimating how trivial it is to support remote workers in different nations.

There is at best a 9.5 hour difference between the US and India, which leaves practically no opportunity for real-time cooperative work during normal office hours. Not to mention differences in holidays... and equipment cost... and the cost of doing business in another nation. That all adds up very quickly.

> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.

You will not be granted a work permit to work remotely for an American company in Canada.

Canadian Immigration is actually quite strict.

My understanding is that Canadian residency isn't particularly strict, but Canadian citizenship is very strict. Besides, most of the companies in question (e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) already have subsidiaries operating in Canada so employment via the Canadian subsidiary is not an issue.

The program that allows anybody to apply for residence is called Express Entry.

They offer something like 4200 positions every 2 weeks, or about 100k per year.

My understanding is that unless you're at the very top of the list (it's score based) you're likely to be waiting a long time.

Edit: For example the last drawing required you have a score of 471 or above. A 28 year old Indian person with a CS degree and 6 years of job experience who has perfect English scores would only have 441 points.

You also have provincial programs which have different/maybe more lax requirements than express entry. Once you get PR, citizenship is just 3 years away.

4 years effectively. It takes almost 12 months to process the citizenship application.

There's no prohibition for remote work per se. The American company just needs to set up its legal presence in Canada since only Canadian companies can sponsor immigrants. That would still be a barrier to small companies so I expect the PEO (Professional Employment Organization) industry to come up with a way to make this possible at any scale. And that's before Canada changes IRCC regs to help this use case, which they could very well do.

Which is why I mentioned that there are Canadian companies that handle hiring the employee and sponsoring the Canadian work visa, invoicing the company in the US, taking the cut and paying the employee the rest.

https://syndesus.com/why-u-s-companies-need-a-peo-to-recruit...

The US economy isn't the same as the state economy. For local revenue states and cities could simply tax the employer a percent of the outsourced employee's paycheck and if the problem did become federal then the federal government could do the same. Since these employees are coming from places with a lower CoL there's no reason they couldn't make up the difference in savings anyway.

Moves like that would be dangerous, because what's stopping the company from moving their office or HQ out of that state or city or even the country to escape taxing of someone that isn't even in the country. And then, forget about the tax on the non existent employees, real local employees could be out of a job.

> Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.

If remote work becomes more acceptable, companies in Canada and EU can also move their jobs outside those countries. Less taxes and laws to worry about.

I think working remotely for a US-based company as a resident of another country is more nuanced than you seem to imply. It may require significant changes to their relationship, which in turn may be more expensive than just raising their salary.

In your theory wasn't this already the "optimal move"?

Sounds like bullshit knife hanging over American tech workers heads. Cut the rope, let's see what happens.

That wouldn't be considered backfiring if this was being done to move the US closer to an ethnostate.