https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
You're believing and repeating the propaganda. The H1B was sold to Americans as for this purpose and then very deliberately turned into a loophole for importing massive amounts of foreign labor.
How silly is it to accept the idea that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla are not be able to hire Americans for any role they want. They're the richest companies on the planet!
These companies use the H1B to increase their labor supply, suppress wages, and gain indentured workers.
If they couldn't cheat by importing cheaper foreign labor they would have to compete against each other much more than they do for American workers.
This is all about big companies rigging the system. They do not care if it's good or bad for America, the foreign workers, or anyone else. It's simple greed.
and entirely different propaganda is that without being able to hire so many people constantly, the work just doesnt happen, and companies downsize to save money rather than grow to make more money.
a greedier facebook doesnt dump a ton of money into VR or ai glasses.
It was never, ever that they "can't find someone".
There are extraordinarily few roles handed out to H1Bs where there aren't enormous numbers of domestic options. Indeed, by far the biggest users of H1Bs in tech are shitty consulting firms like Cognizant, Infosys and Tata doing absolute garbage, low skill development.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are truly unique talents in the AI space, for instance. Not someone to build Yet Another agent, but someone who actually understands the math. They are extraordinarily rare in that program. And for those exceptional talents, a $100K fee would be completely worth it. But they aren't going to pay it for an army of garbage copy-paste consultant heads.
In actual reality it's just a way to push down wages by forcing Americans to compete with the developing world in their own country. In Canada we have "TFWs" filling the same role. It is a laughably unjustified, massively abusive program.
I'd much rather push everything into the salary of the person being hired. Both because it ends up raising the median salary for local workers and because it stimulates the local economy where that person is brought in. It's also a yearly fee. I think there's value in getting a very capable person working in your company and having a high salary is one way to make such roles highly competitive. A highly capable person will ultimately make everyone they work with more capable.
What I care about is the current system isn't being used to find hard to find labor, it's used to bring in cheap labor in an abusive situation.
We as a nation are really better off if we bring in the best in the world to work here with a cushy salary.