The idea is moreso that Meta abuses the visa system to hire SWEs on the cheap.

Because America has a moderately[0]-restrictive immigration system, people who come here on a visa are committed workers. If you decide you don't want to work for one company after moving here, your options are to leave the country in 30 days or find another firm knowledgeable enough about the immigration system to adopt your existing visa application.

The reason why this happens is because the system is designed to be deliberately difficult to use. The idea being that if it's hard to hire an H1B visa worker, you'll hire an American instead. But because this works as intended, companies that know how to work the system get access to hordes of cheap, pliant labor. So instead of protecting American workers, we protect well-connected businesses that can screw over American workers.

[0] Compared to EU nations, at least

Stop fetishizing Europe, the situation is the same there in regards to the visa process(moneyed companies looking for cheap labor).

Sincerely, someone who dealt with the nonsense of multiple European visas.

I meant to say that Europe is harder to get into than the US. Their visa processes are probably more exploitative than US H1B, but I know less about it so I left it in a footnote.

So your suggestion is make immigration easier or tougher?

But Meta’s employees aren’t uniformly distributed across the Earth so comparisons to the global population are irrelevant.

But Meta is free to hire the best no matter where they live.

‘The best’

Wow, what a comment. Totally packed with insight and truth.

Is it not useful to highlight that we have no idea how to measure “the best,” so defending hiring practices because they’re filtering for “the best” is silly?

Edited for clarity

Access to education and infrastructure could be the reason for disparity. But real challenge to solve is to have 60% of giant corps coming from Asia, run with proper corporate controls.