I'm from Germany, and from an outsiders perspective I can only say that your argument wouldn't convince me.

I looked into the h1b for myself before, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to start my own successful business while on it.

You're aware that there will continue to be immigration without the h1b visa, right? That's just a common way big corporations use to import cheap labor, at least that's what I looked like to me - because id be fully at the mercy of the company I'd be unable to really negotiate my contracts etc

It's definitely possible to make an argument in favor of the program, but it's a lot more nuanced at the societal level - and I suspect overall net negative, because often the h1b visa recipients will transfer their money back to their home country, which makes this into a net-negative again.

>and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through

The birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0. From the perspective of the conservative movement in power, it makes sense to halt immigration so the population becomes more and more conservative over time (as immigrants are left-leaning on average, especially Indians).

I agree with your points about how the USA used to be viewed globally, and that the predominant feeling is disappointment (or in my case, sadness).

However, your characterisation of European countries as “shitty” is unfair IMO. I’m reminded of the saying “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other ones). Europe is FAR from perfect, but the long arc of history factors large in their politics and humanistic predilections (relative to other countries that is). They have living memory to just how devastating divisions on the continent can be. So yes, the EU may be the shittiest form of government... except for all those other ones (acknowledging that this paraphrase only makes sense if your values are similar).

> shitty European country

I wish the crumbling of the empire will bring some humility to one of the most entitled and ignorant-about-the-world culture that ever had the chance to rule the world. Jesus, some of your comments are insufferable and it’s hard to feel pity for whatever is going on over there.

Also, the USA has stopped being the land of the free in the mid 70s for the rest of the world, but it’s clear that within your borders your post-war propaganda is still very effective to this day.

"We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me isn't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did."

- Steve Eisman, 2008

This is what I am getting at; the system is bringing skilled immigrants with some unskilled and some abuse, the baby and the bathwater. We should be focused on keeping that skilled immigration flowing, instead all these attempts are presupposing that all immigration is inherently harmful.

Your take only applies to recent developments. For the entirety of the H visa program, it has brought in very valuable talent, which stayed here to generate incredible wealth for the country. "onlyfans" is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing. Sure immigration is broken, but that's what happens when the government is intent on breaking the country.

Who are you to claim the talent isn’t skilled at all? Maybe you’re the unskilled, unemployed one who is now asking the rest of us for a protectionist tariff to save your employability. The business owners who are hiring these people are making the choices that are the best for their business, and they’re judging the quality. It’s their money, and they’re betting with it - and confidently too.

But let’s assume you’re right. Even if 90% of them were unskilled, the other 10% is still incredibly valuable for the American economy and taxpayers. And it’s not even a difficult decision. That “loss” is tiny compared to the extreme benefit we receive, that literally NO other country on the planet can replicate. Unless we give it away, like you’re proposing to do.

This is by design by replubicans so that they can claim government doesn't work, or so that they ca kneecap programs before becoming successful and permanent.

Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.

As a country US can't even agree on securing rights for its own people. Raising minimum wage or universal healthcare or housing leads to lots of bad faith discourse on socialism. The wealth is instead spent on fighting wars and strong arming others. Heck even the guy who promised no wars and America First cannot get enough and attacks another country in name of "liberation" and oil. But somehow immigration has dealt damage to three generations?

> the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry

The has to be the funniest part of the whole statement. The whole point of creating an "outsider" is that you have an enemy to fight contend with and can justify your dislike by accusing them of fraud and other crimes. People who dislike "outsiders" never had sympathy or empathy for those "outsiders" so lets not pretend something has changed.

Exactly, I'm reminded of this that I read recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.

Several reasons.

Top talent has the world as their oyster: for the best the answer is obvious even when it is a 96% fit vs. a 96.5% fit.

I don't know the actual %, likely gap used to be much bigger, but point is you can get very sudden state changes in outcome from very small policy change when at that point: think idiom "it was the final straw that broke the camel's back".

Self sorting: the best see that people like them went to the USA already, because those forerunners saw their talent, advise them to join them in the USA.

This one depends both on political stability and everyone not leaving/being kicked out.

Money: especially for startups, especially for tech. US trade deficit and reserve currency enables this as all the dollars have to make it back to the USA somehow, and investment is a somehow.

This one also depends on political stability.

The question I think is more interesting is why can't Europe retain talent?

There's so many Americans who have this intuition you're expressing, that there must be some good immigration system for responsible people who obviously ought to be allowed to stay in the country. The reason there isn't is that immigration reform deals have been sabotaged for decades by the people who are feeding you this disinformation. To emphasize, the person who told you this information knew it was false, lied to you about it in order to serve their political goals, and you must not trust anything they tell you going forwards.

The actual law, dictated by the F-1 visa program allowing foreign studies, is that a foreign Stanford PhD must permanently depart the United States within 60 days after graduation. There's a one-time extension available under the OPT program, where they can stay up to one additional year so long as they maintain employment complementary to their education for at least 20 hours a week. But after that year they must either obtain an H-1B or leave.

History indicates regulation always trails corporate accountants.

It's not "normal competition" to be displaced by immigrants in your own country. Allowing that is simply allowing the capitalist class to assault and weaken the labor class.

The message "guys, it's really not that smart to let in a huge number of people from a completely different culture, this is going to be a problem" was completely ignored and labeled racist.

Perhaps it has something to do with this topic being extremely relevant in tech.

Rampant abuse, fraud, nepotistic hiring combined with record high tech unemployment to start.

I am looking at the problem from a population and industry level, and so my apologies if I am not looking at it from the individual’s perspective.

The first issue which stands out to me is that the world at-large doesn’t create enough jobs in industries where highly-skilled Western educated workers can work. In fact, low-skilled Western educated workers don’t have many prospects at a global stage either. So Western-educated workers (either immigrants or citizens) are stuck in Western nations due to several factors, including pay ranges, work conditions, and quality of life reasons, like access to a clean and safe environment, or a working justice system.

The quality of life reasons and pay ranges are the main attractors for immigrants as well, which is why some nation-state economies have remittances as a key component of their GDP. On top of that, some nations have sacrificed building an education and employment infrastructure in favor of building what are essentially factories for producing workers for Western nations. This also has the side effect of keeping the quality of life of these countries suppressed because people who would voice the most discontent simply leave. So, I’d say the second reason immigration visas need a more nuanced approach is because they hurt the development of other countries, unless those countries set up remittances or job contract pipelines. But even so, there’s no guarantee that the baseline quality of life will improve even as GDP sky rockets.

If you look at where people work, and how they’re the happiest working, it’s when they can find something modest which affords them a reasonable quality of life in their local environment. Great examples of this include many East Asian and Northern European countries. The key difference here is that these countries prioritize building benefits for their populations via education and workforce training and development. Unlucky people in any country will hope to immigrate to change that aspect of their life, which is a failure on the part of their home nation, not the individual.

Some nations have prioritized infiltration of large cap Western companies primarily for strategic geopolitical reasons, and that’s the third reason why I think immigration visas need a more nuanced approach.

Lastly (because I am secretly an idealist), I’d like large cap companies to be responsible with the great power they wield. Large cap companies have a global reach, and so can upset the local economies of any country by interfering with the work of small to medium sized businesses. Imagine if Google decides that it will set up shop in South Africa because the U.S. curtails all H1B hiring. Some people in South Africa will benefit, but the overall effect will be that the majority of the population will desire to shift its behavior so the individual can work at the best possible economic opportunity. While that sounds like an ideal scenario to a Western-educated liberal, consider that many businesses in local communities will lose out on potential high-skilled workers. The ecosystem of workforce development and employment needs to balanced against community development. Large cap companies subvert the function of local communities by shifting the calculus to economic optimization, whereas healthy and thriving communities have other goals as well.

Populations as a whole have lost sense of purpose because the main reason most people work is so that they can stop working. But globalization perverted that mindset by prioritizing the needs of large corporations over the needs of local communities. People still want to stop working, but they don’t know how to reach that goal. This problem exists because more than half the countries in the world have sacrificed their own development in favor of developing workers for large cap companies in Western countries.

Bit of a hastily typed ramble, but I hope the gist of it is clear enough.

no OP, but I can answer one way:

the US has very many visa programs, including half a dozen to a dozen work visa programs

this one particular visa program is politically radioactive, as if it is the only work visa program, and it doesn't accomplish its stated goals in hardly any way

until that can be settled I think and the program ironed out, it should be hampered to closed off, a moratorium

I would like to see the H1B program used to its original (and still codified) standards - highly in demand professionals that couldn't be sourced in the US so easily and are exceptional. The minimum wage for what such a professional would be paid was set in the 1980s, to $60,000 for someone with a master's degree, when it was exception. This minimum would be around $156,000/yr today. Okay, let's do that, that makes sense

if its politically radioactive to even just suggest that, all the more reason for a moratorium on that program, to me

Because the excesses are well documented and the proponents of it are constantly disingenuous about the issues that make it widely hated everywhere except in SV and in C-suites. It's at risk of being eliminated completely because those who abuse the system are spoiled brats that melt down over any hint of reform. When reform isn't possible, elimination becomes the only choice to make the excesses stop. Pretending not to understand this only makes it that much more likely that it will be eliminated entirely. The time for getting away with playing dumb is long gone. All it accomplishes is making the program even more hated.

The temporary program from three decades ago to bring in some extra help until the industry could ramp up training programs to develop domestic talent isn't temporary after three decades and the industry has made clear as long as it exists, there will be no honest attempts at developing talent instead of going for the lowest cost global source. All of the above will of course fall on deaf ears, with all the usual intellectually dishonest deflections and outright lies being brandied about. This once again guarantees that reform will be impossible and elimination the only solution.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon B. Johnson.

Eliminating H-1B isn't going to make Americans' lives any better than imposing tariffs on foreign countries or deporting immigrants. But the propaganda must continue for the sake of fascism.

This is a (very effective) distraction. The fact that culture and race have so much correlation is perhaps the most intimidating hurdle to civilized problem-solving we've ever been presented with as a species.

I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general.

I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.

" “Foreign persons” is broadly defined in the bill as any person who is not a United States person. However, the bill does not include “any corporation or partnership organized under the laws of a possession of the United States” in that definition of foreign person. "

Most offshoring companies don't pay directly to individuals - either they are employees of their own subsidiaries or those of offshoring entities. So, this is not going to change anything.

> This is called a tariff and is the same as raising taxes on every American.

Come on, what are you going to do next? Mic drop "I, Pencil"? Libertarian rhetoric is tired and old, and doesn't adequately address present-day concerns. It's not the 90s anymore, get with the times.

FYI, free market economics has taught me to love the idea of tariffs, other similar taxes, and trade barriers. I'm glad those ideas are back on the table, and I hope they can be more competently executed after the current administration ends.