Seem like sensible changes, though more is still needed. Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism. The per-country caps also seem like a throwback to the early 1900's era immigration exclusion policies.
Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.
>It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
I want to pick on this point, because it's the general refrain about this topic. If there is some thing that American workers can't do in an in-demand field, and the government sets up a system to allow non-citizens to do those jobs, most people will say that this "helps" America. But does it? If the education pipeline is inadequately preparing Americans for being competitive in this in-demand field then perhaps that is the problem that should be addressed. Right now it feels like we have a (highly suspect) "labor shortage" that is addressed via immigration, which doesn't send a signal back to the educational/training infrastructure that they're doing something wrong.
The US is only 4% of the world's population, so there's an enormous number of extremely smart people who live outside its present borders. I don't think anyone believes that even the world's greatest educational system can bring all of its students up to an extremely high level of general intelligence. We should be letting very smart people born outside the US emigrate here, which is a win-win for everyone involved
Sure. But the government of the United States is, allegedly, there for the benefit of its citizens. I'm not really following where this "should" comes from. "Should" in what volume? "Should" over what time frame?
If you don't think that having Linus Torvalds as a US citizen tremendously benefits the US public as a whole, enough to offset any imagined downsides of a great many merely average immigrating tech workers, there's nothing more to be said. And that's just him alone but he is merely one example of many other famous examples.
I missed this comment, but what does Linus' citizenship status have to do with this? Surely you don't think that conferring a US Passport on Linus made him who he is.
Not understanding what point you are making. Is it that any displacement of US citizens' employment via immigration of foreign tech workers is somehow neutered because Linus is really good at writing code and has a US Passport? Anyway, I thought he became a US citizen somewhat recently, well after the bulk of development of Linux. Wikipedia says 2010.
The benefit to the US if he is a citizen is that then his taxes flow to the US and if he's resident his local spending flows to the US economy and that of any geo immediate coworkers there for the face time.
Letting in a lot of smart people benefits the citizens of the United States, that's why I said it's a win-win. Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Just going back in time, do you think the US would be better off if we'd excluded Irish immigrants? Italians? Germans? If blocking immigration somehow benefits native-born citizens, you'd logically have to think our population should have stayed the same as it was when we broke away from Britain. We'd be about the size of say Colombia, maybe with a bit higher GPD
The current immigration regime is still relatively new, it is not as if it has existed for the entirety of the existence of the United States. It's an artifact of the late 20th century, and only just now accelerated in the early 21st. That's barely a single generation. So, no, I don't take it as a given that essentially limitless immigration - even if loosely constrained on "high skill" - is somehow axiomatically good for the United States.
I'm a little confused. It's possible to be very pedantic and say that the current immigration law only dates back to the 60s, but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent. There was a wave of British, Spanish, and French immigration in the 17th & 18th centuries, followed by Germans, Italians, and Irish in the 19th & 20th. In the 19th century the legal regime about immigration was literally 'open borders', there were hardly any legal controls at all. The vast vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants (my apologies if you personally are 100% Native American, didn't mean to lump you in)
I think you're the one being overly pedantic if you only qualify 100% Native American as "American". This country isn't just some economic zone that people come to and from for the purposes of commercial or business activity. If that's all it was, then a much more lax or liberal immigration regime would make perfect sense.
>but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent.
This would be a surprise to the 85% of us who were actually born here. In its most simplified form, what those of us who are skeptical of the current immigration regime are wondering out loud is if these processes do actually make "people born in America" better off. "Immigration is always good" has been the mantra since, as you speculate, the 1960s. Probably worth evaluating that idea from first principles from time to time.
But we're all descended from immigrants. Do you think it was wrong when the British & Italian & Irish & German all moved here en masse? Assuming no, what would be different about the latest wave of immigrants?
I honestly view this point - that there were prior waves of immigration from various European nations, and before that concurrent waves of forced migration from Africa and elsewhere (though this is left unsaid) - as a bit of a non-sequitur, bordering on bait, largely because it happened over a very long timescale into an essentially empty nation. Suppose I answered in the negative (that I don't think there was anything wrong with it). That wouldn't change anything at all about the current debate. It isn't some kind of gotcha, that if I don't have a problem with British/Italian/Irish/German/French/whoever coming during various migration waves it somehow neuters any particular point about how any immigration regime should, in my view, be structured such that there are clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country. Enumerated elsewhere in the thread, but the H-1B system in particular is for the benefit of industry (POSIWID etc etc). Not people already here.
It is worth noting, though, that after the peak of immigration in the late 19th century and ending in the 1910s, the United States very intentionally shut off immigration to allow time for assimilation to do its work.
I think the main point that I want to make is that attracting all of the world's smartest people to our country, and staying the world's superpower in technology & science, does have extremely 'clear and defined benefits to the people already living in the country'
The United States achieved its super power status during the most restrictive phase of its immigration history, but now we're getting somewhere. Things like Operation Paperclip are clearly good ideas, and should be replicated for e.g. Russian or Chinese scientists, as but one example.
Yes, one of my ideas that I've had for a couple of years is that the US should impose the following sanction on Russia for invading Ukraine- all Russian scientists & engineers in a narrow range of critical industries (nuclear weapons, armaments, missiles, etc.) and their immediate families are now entitled to a Green Card. It'd only be a few thousand people, so not enough for immigration restrictionists to get upset about- but it'd be absolutely devastating for Russia's technological edge. In some ways it'd be worse than any financial sanction, because your economy can always bounce back later, but once you've lost cutting edge scientists the knowledge loss is probably permanent. I think we should do the same thing for Iranian nuclear scientists too (albeit I understand there might be a bit more political pushback on them)
What is currently happening is the exact opposite.
There is a so-called "Technology Alert List" — a list of critical areas (nuclear, missiles, AI, etc.). If a person has a background in one of these areas, they get an automatic U.S. visa refusal during the interview.
Their visa application gets placed on indefinite hold (the so-called "administrative processing"), which can last for years even if it is eventually resolved.
Why? The U.S. government fears espionage. They worry that someone with expertise in a critical field might immigrate to the U.S., secure a job at a company with access to sensitive, export-controlled technology, and then leak that technology to Russia.
Even without espionage, such individuals could gain valuable experience in critical areas and later emigrate back to Russia — a reverse "brain drain."
Yeah I think there's probably two types of an Operation Paperclip 2.0: the first for adversarial countries (Russia, Iran, perhaps China if you squint hard enough though that one isn't as easy), and the second for something like "geopolitical benefactors" if that phrase makes sense. Basically, using immigration as a tool to leach top scientists and human capital from places like Russia, and as an out for folks in places under direct threat (Ukraine). Immigration policy as a geopolitical tool is probably a much more fraught policy discussion but at least it would be an honest one.
> Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?
Given where he ended up, probably.
Cheap rockets are nice, but speed-running a complete destruction of public trust, culture, and of any illusion that the country is one with rule of law for the benefit of a few insecure billionaire narcissists is a juice that wasn't worth the squeeze.
Telling me that Musk is incredibly popular in Texas or Alabama is like me telling you that Putin is incredibly popular in Moscow. 'Strongmen' authoritarians peddling revanchist fantasies that'll make their country great again are often popular.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's a net good.
The man himself is an insecure narcissist who can't let any slight, real or imagined go unanswered. It would be sad and funny if he didn't own a speech platform, or hitch himself to an absolutely insane political movement.
Allegedly...by and large the US Government operates, however, for the benefit of corporations and rich folk (with some exceptions). If they want to hire foreign labor, the US Government is going to make it happen.
I mean the US thinks of its place in the world as much more than the domestic insular affairs of its citizens. If you look at it from that angle it’s obvious that vacuuming up smart people and becoming “more powerful” intellectually is what the US clearly wants.
The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering, just like they're not smart enough to be a doctor or college professor. All cognitively demanding jobs compete for the same (probably single-digit) percent of the workforce. Better education could certainly prepare more people to do these jobs, but it's not a given that there are enough smart people in the domestic workforce to do all the cognitively-demanding jobs.
If thousands of the smartest people from the rest of the world want to move to the US and fill these gaps, doesn't that make America better off overall?
This is just brain-draining the rest of the world for the short-term boosting of some myopic statistics. This isn't going to improve the employability of median-intelligence people, and in the long run, it's going to exacerbate the same problem, but now globally.
>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering,
This point, assuming for a moment that it's actually true, would matter if "complex software engineering" was all that this was being used for. Complex for whom?
I think a lot of these comments don’t properly capture the benefit. The more skilled workers, the more startups/companies, not to mention smarter people.
But the effect is bigger than that, by allowing skilled immigration, it makes US universities and tech companies the best in the world, at the very least seen as such, which has tremendous larger effects.
It’s not a coincidence that we have the largest tech industry, and it’s not because we magically have smarter people.
I don't have statistics, but given the student visa -> H-1B pipeline changes, it would seem there are a number of H-1B holders who are educated in US colleges (either at the undergrad or graduate level). This indicates that the problem is not entirely a training gap.
Honestly, the US needs to (and used to) do both. We should have a world-class public education system, and we should aggressively get the best and the brightest people to move here.
It seems unlikely we’ll do either of those things moving forward. At least China’s investing in green tech, I guess.
Is this bad due to the hypothetical loss of diversity? ie, it'd be better if there were a mix of Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Mexican, etc immigrants, vs only immigrants from a single state in India?
What happens in a lot of cases like this is nepotism and lack of need, or even desire, to assimilate to the host country. Things like this are always dismissed the first 20 years, but it always leads to racial and ethnic tensions as time passes. Saying "ummm, like, don't be racist" has never worked.
But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
And notice that I specified no race. I specified no country. I specified no religion or ethnic background. It's simply a universal thing that happens in every country. It always leads to far right swings when not quickly addressed. If what I've said in any way comes across as "racist", that's due to the reader inserting their own racial biases and thus their own racism into this statement, because I'm not in any way implying this is confined to one group. It's something that's been a problem for millennia and governments keep making the same mistakes.
> But when immigrants all come from one small region, they tend to only hire people they know or are vetted by someone they know, they only rent properties to people they know or are vetted by people they know, they start to see the locals of the country they're living in as below them, and it just keeps spiraling out of control.
This happens with some races more than others. When you import Indians you are importing caste thinking.
It’d be interesting to understand why immigrants to Canada are disproportionately coming from a small number of locations. Unless there’s a good reason behind it I think it’s reasonable to find a better balance.
The reason why there's so many Indians is because THERE'S SO MANY INDIANS! You don't need to be a rocket surgeon to figure that one out =)
The "problem" with having that many Indians isn't that they're not adapting to Canadian culture it's that they're bringing along some of the bad things from India like the caste system. It's not as bad as many other cultural problems because it's strictly Indians causing problems for other Indians but it's still a problem.
Literally can’t think of a single conspiracy theory about why Canada specifically brought people from that region. Seriously unhinged to bring up anti-semitism.
What region ? What are you talking about ? Nobody is bringing anyone from any region. Human beings migrate for better opportunities, and over time groups find their niches and areas of expertise. That manifests as a concentration geographically or professionally as it's a reinforcing loop. That's why group X is dominant in trade Y in city Z.
Brampton is a suburb of Toronto with a large Indian immigrant population. This is leading to tensions within Brampton as different Indian political factions attempt to influence Indian politics from Canada[1][2][3].
How would have the same policy had any effect in Canada? Country caps in the US don't change anything about who can enter the country, they only affect who gets permanent residency.
> Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
Makes me wonder how many people gladly support this while at the same time clamoring against the EU's DMA and other regulations and fines it imposes on SV companies.
What you're saying is of course absolutely true! I like how plainly you've stated it, because the directness makes clear to people just how awful of a deal it is for the EU and other countries where US tech companies make enormous profits without hiring any significant number of locals.
I've lived in both the EU which suffers from the above, as well as a place where protectionism and barriers helped strongly restrain US tech and "artificially" give opportunity to local players. The latter has worked out so much better for every party involved except US tech.
> It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US
I used the same argument in Brazil to support a strong free software preference in all government functions. Support from voters in Redmond wouldn’t get anyone re-elected in Brazil.
They had a huge office in São Paulo back then. For all I know, it's bigger now. A good friend of mine spent so much time in airplanes between São Paulo and Brasilia that his skin was dry as a turtle's.
It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently. You may also be asked to leave at any time. It's reasonable for the host nation to want to ensure that outcome is still available and that someone hasn't actually fully emigrated here with no options for return.
Ultimately it's known to anyone who applies for a visa that this will be the requirement, and so, if they don't want the economic opportunity of working in the US, they're free to avoid the stress and just stay in their home nation.
> It's a visa. The whole point is that it's not permanent and you are ultimately expected to return home permanently
probably do not have to tell you this but not all visas are created equal... this one is particular is a dual-intent visa so what you are saying applies to SOME visas, just not this one :)
No, this was post 9/11. It has nothing to do with immigration policy. The collective jerking after 9/11 led to many bad policies, including this one. Biden half assedly tried to go back to the pre 9/11 state of "stateside renewal" but it went nowhere.
If you hire US-based engineers working on R&D (most software engineers) then you amortize their pay over 5 years. Foreign-based engineers working on R&D get amortized over 15 years.
You get to expense 3x as much for domestic engineers compared to foreign engineers. This means you need to pay more taxes upfront for having a foreign R&D team, which is bad for cashflow. Your company could be losing money (unprofitable) but still owe corp income taxes because of Section 174.
If the gov charged "tariffs" on foreign labor or services provided, especially for certain countries that labor is typically outsourced to, or certain types of labor/services (e.g. support, engineering, etc), that'd probably be an effective way to discourage offshoring.
It's a policy based on unsound reasoning. Why is India treated as a monolith when it is more diverse than the EU in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity? If tomorrow India magically broke off into 30 separate states, all the same people who have been waiting for decades would be immediately eligible for green cards. How does it make any sense?
That is exactly what diversity is when it comes to immigration, the freaking yearly green card lottery has diversity in the name of the program https://www.usa.gov/green-card-lottery
And yet the tech industry is far from diverse. It is predominantly male, white, and Indian. Did the US H1B program have an effect on this? Were some groups squeezed out even more from the tech industry due to H1B? For example, would there be more Black people in the tech industry without the H1B? More women?
> Requiring H1B holders to leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism
FWIW every country requires you leave and come back to change or renew visa status. The computers and processes are all setup at points of entry and just aren’t designed for people that don’t physically leave/enter.
It’s so common the guys at the us/Canada land border call it “flagpoleing” because you literally drive a u turn around the flagpole and go back. I’ve done it a dozen times, even driving 4 hours each way in a gnarley winter storm into Alaska and back to Canada at -45.
Not the UK at least, as someone who has done a completely in-country switch from student to skilled worker. In fact you are not allowed to leave the country when your application is in progress (leaving would cancel it).
Per-country caps remains an absolutely good idea. The goal of immigrants should be to integrate into the society they are joining. Without per country caps you can start creating strange enclaves and you get some of the issues Canada is having.
Having people who have been living in the country for decades, but have the threat of leaving anytime they get fired from job or due to visa issues doesn't encourage them to "integrate into the society they are joining".
If anything, the way the country caps work in the US right now make integration harder, because no matter how much they try to integrate and be part of the local community, they could be kicked out at any time. That just encourages people to have one foot out the door at all times.
To be clear, I'm saying too many from one place shouldn't be allowed in in the first place. If they're let in the path to citizenship should be straight forward.
India has roughly twice the population of Europe and is just as diverse. Treating India as a single, homogeneous entity because it's one country overlooks its vast cultural, linguistic, and demographic diversity—comparable to that of Europe. If diversity justifies country caps, it doesn't apply to India. Clinging to such policies seems outdated.
If India were divided into smaller countries like Europe, the same South Asian population, culture, and diversity would persist, but the artificial constraints tied to the name "India" would disappear.
I believe this is part of the problem/perception -- Indian immigration via policies like H-1B and whatever Canada does disproportionately offers people from a handful of Indian states (and the highest castes) the chance to be North American tech workers. Even if you say "well, the Indian tech industry is centered on a few states" it in essence is the same problem or perceived problem.
Specific to North America, most people actually like the idea of someone coming from halfway around the world to try to be a citizen of their nation. They do not exactly like the idea of being "carpetbagged" or being "flooded with people who do not integrate" and those perceptions exist not wholly out of imagination.
>They do not exactly like the idea of being "carpetbagged" or being "flooded with people who do not integrate" and those perceptions exist not wholly out of imagination.
They do exist wholly out of imagination in this case. You are professing your opinion and stating it as fact. As far as actual immigration statistics go, Indians are a tiny minority, disproportionately successful on wage, crime, and education metrics, and most importantly, legal.
>offers people from a handful of Indian states (and the highest castes).
I really do not get what caste has to do with anything. Which states ? What is the mechanism that favors people from these states or castes ? The legal immigration pathways to the US/Canada are either education or work, and neither of them has any preference for state, caste, etc.
You don't have to leave the country to renew your H-1B status. As long as you stay in the US and have a legitimate reason, you can keep renewing the status. Some have done that for 20+ years while waiting for their green card priority date.
But if you leave the country for any reason and your entry visa has expired, you have to apply for a new visa to be allowed to return. And you often have to return to your home country to do that. Which can be inconvenient, as it can turn a short vacation or conference trip to a month-long stay in another country. And for citizens of some countries, there is a high risk of denial. Visiting your family can then leave you stranded in a country that's no longer your home, while being locked out of your actual home and life in the US.
This is a peculiar feature of the US system. In most countries, when you renew your temporary work permit (whatever it's called), you also renew you entry permit.
Another complication - H1Bs are valid for 6 years. However, the physical paper stamp given on passports is only valid for 3 years at a time. So if I chose to stay in the US (and not travel internationally) I'd be fine to continue working without renewing my physical visa paper stamp. But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
> But to get a new physical stamp, I have to re-enter the country every 3 years. How does that make sense?
Why do you need a new physical stamp at all if you are not re-entering? I think your argument is backwards here. What I think you’re asking is “why can I stay in the country without taking this step, but I have to take this step to re-enter.”
Well, because when you leave the country you are subject to certain laws. Even a permanent resident cannot just leave and expect to come back whenever without consequence. Even a person eligible to apply for citizenship must meet a minimum threshold of presence.
Now, your question becomes “why are the laws the way they are” and/or “why doesn’t the law make sense”. I conjecture that these situations are particularly fringe for our legislators so they don’t get a ton of attention, and they make just enough sense to remain as is.
Visa is valid for 6y, entry visa for 3. You decide to visit Europe in year 4, you have to travel to southeast Asia or South America to renew your entry visa before you can get back to work? Sounds stupid.
Another incredibly stupid thing of the American system is the fact that your spouse cannot work while you're subject to it.
When I was in the US with visas for my four-person family, we FedExed our passports to Finland where my parents put them in a different envelope and mailed them to the US embassy. Ten days later the embassy mailed back the passports with the new visas attached, and my parents FedExed them back to us in New York.
Yeah, seems like this re-approval concept makes a ton of sense. FedEx at least got some business.
This doesn’t sound remotely legal, but I’m not a lawyer. How were you expecting to comply with reasonable requests for your family’s passports and visas by the US while they were in transit? What if they were lost in transit or stolen? If your intent was to circumvent the process, that could constitute mail fraud and other violations that could result in loss of residency or in extreme cases loss of citizenship. Why would you or anyone ever do this?
What reasonable requests? There isn’t (yet) a task force that goes door to door in Manhattan knocking on doors and checking immigrants’ papers.
We are Finnish citizens and if the passports really had been lost, we could always get new ones at the Finnish consulate in New York to return home.
I’ve held several types of visas, L-1 and O-1, and I also applied for a PERM whatever that I eventually abandoned because I didn’t want to stay in the country and with that employer. The American immigration system is incredibly poorly designed and frustrating for all parties. It drives honest legal immigrants like us to an “I don’t give a shit” mindset where we just did the minimum to get the paperwork while waiting to leave the country.
Now I still get paid by an American company at the same rates as before, but I pay taxes to Finland instead. The immigrant-hostile system isn’t the success you imagine.
I’m crying about that in my beer tonight, getting paid a Silicon Valley salary by an American company while living in my home country.
You have made it so complicated and unattractive to stay in the country that you don’t care about losing people who wanted to stay and pay taxes, and instead are enabling these jobs to be exported.
The static “papers please” mindset killed the Soviet Union and many other empires before it. Americans somehow managed to avoid it for over two centuries. I know you don’t want my opinion, but you probably shouldn’t give up on that achievement so easily. It’s not just about immigrants — the mindset infects the entire society. This was the fundamental edge you had over Europe and you’re throwing it away.
Please don’t interpret my disagreement with you about the immigration process as a desire to not know you and interact with you as a person. I appreciate your insights into the process as you experienced it and your contributions to HN community.
Thank you for the gracious reply, it’s very much appreciated.
The reason I have strong feelings about this topic is that I want America to continue succeeding, and I wanted to be part of it but it didn’t make practical sense for me.
When I was a child in the 1980s living next door to the Soviet Union, the USA was a beacon of hope to us. It sounds corny but it’s true. (Reagan and Clinton were politicians who seemed to intuitively understand this global mood and were able to leverage it. I disagree with them on many specifics, but they excelled at this.)
I know Americans always feel like there’s too much going on at home to care about the rest of the world. But often in history the solutions at home have appeared by opening up, not closing in.
Your earnest desire to be part of America is admirable, and the pitfalls of the system are that much more tragic in light of this. The system failed you, and your attempts to lessen the burden imposed on you and your family are not my own to second-guess, though I would have preferred a better solution for you all that would have allowed you to remain in the country legally without requiring leaving only to return. It would be supremely unfair if you would be denied residency or citizenship due to your actions, as I don’t believe you had any intent to deceive or violate the law, and you very well may not have done either, and I will not besmirch your honor by implying you did. I understand that your first responsibility is to yourself and your family, and I hope you are able to enjoy the holidays with you and yours.
> The reason you have to leave the country is because it is not a “renewal” it is a “re-approval” and if you are denied they don’t have to deport you if you’re already out.
No. You only have to leave the country to have the visa stamp on your passport. That has no bearing on you being authorized to stay or work in the country.
That’s the simple truth. They do that for all types of visas. My mother had to do it, until she finally (reluctantly) became a US citizen, and she lived here, most of her life.
I think she had long-term visas, though. I only remember her doing it a couple of times. I think I went with her, on one of the trips.
This is more complicated than that. H1B is a visa and a status.
As long as you have a valid H1b status, you can stay in the US indefinitely. Having a physical visa in your passport is optional, you only need it when you want to cross back into the US.
Follow the sun is great for on-call rotations, but I'm my experience, for regular project work, the need for a handoff each day ends up being too much overhead. The teams in vastly different time zones wind up working mostly independently on completely different projects.
> leave the country to renew paperwork is an insane anachronism
Not really. This is really Customs and Border Patrol/Immigration way of saying, you can always do the default/what everyone else does. You can leave and return six months of the year. The key is leave (which they do), they are already declared non-immigrant, and are self-sufficient.
Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).
It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.
If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.