Unemployment for tech workers is not currently low, and it is taking months, or even years to find a new role, therefore this argument doesn’t hold water. Wages > consumer excess and profits. The world will go on if you don’t build the app, and perhaps someone else will. The evidence is clear this visa is abused at scale, and this action has been overdue.

https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...

https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...

The unemployment rate in the information-technology job market is 4.5%?

Over 650k tech layoffs have occurred in the last 4 years. Companies have tried as hard as they can to offshore and use visa labor to avoid hiring US citizen workers. This doesn’t account for new job creation needed for workers entering the workforce. Corporations are also hiding jobs from US citizens (citations which you can find in my other recent comments).

https://layoffs.fyi/

Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306539 - September 2025

Ask HN: Recent unemployed CS grad what do I do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211153 - March 2025

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/job-market-report-c...

https://www.axios.com/2025/07/06/unemployment-job-market-edu...

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1kcc40j/what_happ...

https://apnews.com/article/college-graduates-job-market-unem...

Given all of that, the unemployment rate is still only 4.5%.

Sounds like the metric is unreliable and cannot be trusted as input for policy, based on the evidence and ground truth.

U-6 (the most inclusive unemployment rate) is 8.1 as of this comment: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

So, start cutting labor visas until the unemployment rate improves. The domestic labor clearly exists.

Additional citation:

Millions of Workers Are Left Out of the 'Low-Hire, Low-Fire' US Job Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414795 - September 2025

To make this concrete, suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US. SpaceX and Tesla are never founded, or are founded in some other country.

The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.

Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.

To make this concrete, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla. Musk invested and, arguably, made it vastly more successful than the two founders were on track to do, but Tesla Motors was already founded without requiring Musk's immigration to the US.

That's a very fair point. :)

> suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US

That’s certainly one version of how events may have been different - a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life” scenario. (Though comparing Elon Musk to the kind and ethical George Bailey would be quite a stretch!) But it’s not inconceivable that other possibilities would have emerged.

Those 150,000 spend a dollar on a different app. You are taking 150,000 away from another business.