The motivation for FAANG committing so much fraud using the H1B isn't really debatable. They do it to to steal money for their shareholders. The same motivation for all their tax cheating. The difference being that the H1B fraud is clearly illegal, even if it has remain unprosecuted by virtue of political bribery, etc.
And even if it was true (it's not), FAANG have enough money to train every person they want to hire from scratch. It would just cost more. Which is the entire point: they're greedy in the extreme.
It's very easy to disprove in any specific instance that there aren't U.S. programmers available to fill a role. Take a look at the H1B openings and see if you can't find some people in your LinkedIn connections that could fill those roles and don't yet work for FAANG. I certainly could for almost any role because they're almost all very generic tech jobs.
It also seems likely to be false just based on the number of U.S. programmers and the number of programmers employed by FAANG. They are very big employers but not nearly big enough to employ even a majority of U.S. programmers.
I don't think anyone in FAANG leadership believes this claim to be true at all. They all know why they're committing fraud, which is to compete against the others that are doing it too. The same reason restaurants and farms hire people that are in the country illegally.
You probably fell for the same propaganda about Americans not wanting to work in restaurants or in farms. When in reality, they don't want to compete with people being exploited.
Some companies exploit "unskilled" illegal immigration.
Some companies exploit "skilled" fraudulent immigration.
In both cases, it's the unethical theft of wealth from the population.
As to the H1-B thing, I suspect most of the people here haven't interviewed at the crummier software jobs (like at a commercial bank) but it's amazing how an entire department can be nothing but foreigners of no apparent excellence, and yet they can't "find" any citizens to hire even after interviewing them. There's heavy fraud top-to-bottom and it's going to get much worse.
Without that influx, this concentration would be impossible. If the US heavily restricts immigration by software engineers, the industry will ultimately relocate elsewhere. Europe would love to get all its software engineers back.
Yes, it does, you used a figure to suit your argument, now people are rightfully asking for a more relevant figure to see if your argument still stands. So what % of developers live in USA? The rest is just purely your opinion.
More like you don't want to know, or it would turn your argument into an absurdity.
> At what thresholds would it make a difference one way or the other?
Since we can't know how many people are employed as developers, we must guess. But we can reasonably guess that if only 4.25% of the world's population lives in the US, it can't possibly have all the best developers, or even the majority of them.