It's worse: we're actively ejecting the global brain drain that has been to our benefit since the post-WW2 era.

I know several people on various visas that are making plans to leave after having gotten PHDs here. Still more have naturalized and are making contingencies for exiting.

Immigrants found close to half of the fortune 500 businesses, and start something like 20% of our new businesses each year. For those motivated immigrants to choose elsewhere is going to reduce our growth both from what they don't do, and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through.

US looked like the next stage of humanity, if you are ambitious you go to USA. Anyone can become American and didn't feel like betrayal to the country or the people who raised you. Whatever you achieve in USA it will be available to all the humanity.

Fast forward to mid 2020s, now USA feels like old style European country that is rich as f and about to go through stages of great suffering to eventually become a nation. It's not even like Dubai or something, its straight out time travel. You don't go to USA to be treated fairly and climb to the top in a meritocratic system anymore, its all about race, identity and paperwork now. It looks like a shitty European country, why would you go to a shitty European country? You can have that experience at home in most places in the world and you don't have to suffer the part of being far away from your friends and family. I'm sure a lot of people will still go to USA but their profiles will be different.

IMHO the predominant feeling towards USA is disappointment, not even anger. It wasn't supposed to end up like that.

I think anyone working with the global talent can tell you there are absolutely no controls around measuring their quality. The skilled talent simply isn't skilled at all. They are willing to engage in kickback schemes. Even the O1 "genius" visa is being given to onlyfans models. Immigration is completely broken and it's by design.

> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.

In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish.

It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides.

I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done.

It's quite a cultural quagmire.

> The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent.

Among the many inexplicable things the current US administration is doing, abandoning soft power in favor of returning to militaristic brute force makes the least sense to me. Soft power costs less, is easier to maintain, and creates a vast moat. Giving that up is nuts.

Without passing judgement on whether eliminating the Visa is a good idea or not:

Global talent can still come in on a different visa.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

H1-B has lower standards.

That’s because the damage has gone on too long.

When three generations (late Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials) have seen it and the various alphabet soup of programs from the perspective of having to train their replacements from these programs, or hear their parents having to do same, the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry. The only valid thing to do is to have the various involved entities from the law firms that architect the citizens out under dubious if not outright fraudulent terms, the companies that implement it (from the body shops to their clients, large and small), and the various lobbying groups that have pushed the sorry excuse of a program series (along with their smears about the citizens’ dare to protect their own first), to simply start cutting painfully huge, salary replacement checks to the entire generations that dealt with that mess.

And then you might understand why this is even on the table, and hope that the 1965 Immigration Act (and its follow on provisions) doesn’t get repealed in full to get rid of the fraud and abuse that even Grigsby & Cohen advocated for in the early 2000s.

Either you can stop this now and make amends with two and a half generations (and more) while you have a voice in the matter, or that it will be resolved in far uglier terms where your words will not be heard.

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Meh. Every time the H1B visa comes up on HN, you always see the exact same THEY TOOK ER JERRRBBS comments about the program as a whole, even irrespective of any supposed abuse. Why should we be surprised that some Congress critters are now taking that exact attitude at face value?

> It looks like the next Andrej Karpathy (born in Czechoslovakia, educated in Canada) will be taking their talents somewhere besides the US in the future.

Karpathy, with a Stanford PhD, would not have received or needed an H-1B.

This, like the new $100K fee, is about shutting down the Indian body shops that consume the vast majority of "tech" H-1Bs.

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

The question is whether we're a nation or an economic zone.

Indians who work for multinational companies in India don't vote in American elections.

It's already happening. Every major tech company is investing in engineering presence outside of the US.

My employer sent out a company-wide email late last year outlining an aggressive growth strategy in two new tech hubs in Ireland and India, and encouraging employees to apply for open roles in those locations.

And with these new structures, new penalties for their existence will follow.

Properly executed, those offshore structures will have to incur losses to exist, or will no longer exist.

> If skilled workers can't come here, then the businesses who need them will just open up satellite shops there. Not an opinion on H-1B, just an observation.

They're already doing that, because if the workers stay there, the businesses can pay them much, much less than if they bring them here on an H1-B. And it seems like that's much more common now, since the pandemic further normalized remote work.