Then once you get that office established you can bring people over on L1 visas I believe.
Simply not true for Facebook. The London office has a wide variety of different teams working on different projects, often directly on the same projects as teams in the US offices.
You may be “pretty sure”, but you are wrong. I worked at Facebook for four years including with many people from the London office. I don’t know how else I can convince you.
Facebook already has offices over there. Everywhere. They could hire tomorrow. They want slaves and slavery is what this shit is about.
This is how it works. Foreign manager bribes a US based VP and gets a inter-company transfer. Automatic L1 visa no questions ask. Then they start selling 200-500k jobs to people they know back in their home country. Those people pay a cut, maybe $50k maybe $150k to their trafficker in order to come to the US as a SDE away from their "shithole" country and make $50k.
They don't know what they are doing. Doesn't matter, SDE, manager, director, VP are all from the same country and are a fucking GANG
When visa policies are tightened, FAANG companies don't decide "well, instead of hiring this Indian who passed our interview process, we'll hire an American who failed it instead". Rather, they expand their offices in places with less restrictive visa policies, like London or Vancouver.