Tax breaks for hiring citizens.

Tariffs for hiring non citizens.

Force companies to follow all the same employment laws for employees and contractors in other countries.

Yeah, and really enforce anti-dumping laws.

The cost of living of an Indian developer is way less than that of a US one, especially if the US one is in a high cost of living area such as SF or NYC. How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?

Offshoring like this is allowing dumping of below-cost labor into US markets. Great for US C-suite folk and their profit-based bonuses, and for lobbyists getting paid big bucks to let this happen, but no so great for US citizens trying to make a living as software developers, which one might have thought would be a thing the US would strategically want to encourage, rather than strengthening a foreign country.

> How can the US worker complete when they have US housing and college costs, not Indian ones, that need to be paid for?

In my experience, US workers, even with much higher wages, are simply better than Indian workers being paid much lower wages. Note that Indians being paid US wages, in the US, are fine - you just can't expect much if you're paying peanuts.

I have had experiences where entire offshore teams have contributed significant negative value. This false economy is as false as they come.

I think a bigger danger to US wages is European offshoring.

The problem is that companies will simply change the countries they incorporate in. Will SAP be tariffed for hiring Germans (where the company is based) rather than Americans? If not, you are giving SAP an unfair advantage over its American competitor.

I mean, yeah, you could also just target foreign businesses at the same time.

The USA has trouble targeting foreign businesses who do most of their business outside of the USA. Its like, they can't tell SAP they should be using Americans to address an account in Taiwan, WTF? Google has plenty of offices around the world, but it is pretty proportional to the amount of business it does around the world also! So telling Google they need to serve everyone around the planet with American workers while SAP gets to use whatever because it isn't American, Google would quickly become a German company instead of an American company. You can't have American companies playing by overly restrictive rules if you can't force the rest of the world to play by those same rules, and America's influence to do that...unless it conquers even its allies, is limited.

You start a business.

Laws and regulation.

Is this a genuine question? You can go for a strict, legalistic approach, like requiring cause to dismiss workers, or you can tweak incentives, like tax breaks or tax penalties encouraging desired behaviors and discouraging undesired ones. You can make arguments for why it shouldn’t be done but it is not hard to imagine things an interested government could do.

It's not that simple, long-term. Companies will just be founded elsewhere, because a hard-to-fire worker is worse than no worker. However, you could add additional layers like "if you do business in the US you must have x% of your employees here". But it's getting messy.

Or will they, I mean, are you really going to found your business in... where, Singapore?... if you live in the US and your whole network is there? Maybe not. And tariffs are certainly an approach that could work to advantage native companies or those that employ a large number of US developers.

Either way, I think this gets away from the premise and starts getting into reasons not to do it (theoretically, you're losing some new jobs that would otherwise be created) more than reasons it's impossible

Look up "protectionism", the USA has historically frowned upon other less-developed countries when they implement protectionist policies, they go as far as censoring them from the international market. So it would be very incongruent if they suddenly did that for their own workforce.

Not that incongruent; look at Chinese EVs. Or TikTok.

Historically protectionism was a major part of how the US developed its economy but typically countries become less protectionist once they have highly developed economies (because free trade tends to benefit them more).