[thecardcheat]

> The industry lobbyists’ ace-in-the-hole argument is that if they can’t hire more H-1Bs, they’ll ship the work overseas. But for projects on which H-1Bs are hired in the U.S., face-to-face interaction (between themselves and their American coworkers) is crucial. That is why employers bring H-1Bs to the U.S. in the first place rather than sending the work abroad, where the wages are even cheaper.

Considering the growth of tools that facilitate working remotely, and the flexibile schedule pursued by many software engineers, the willingness to ship jobs overseas is hard to merely cast aside.

Visa workers should absolutely be paid a fair wage, and it seems a realistic side-effect that there may be a shift in the type of roles offered to visa employees vs. overseas when the cost of in-house now represents a premium on the foreign employee.

[mdorazio]

Keep in mind, though, that a lot of H1Bs are being used as replacements for a typical IT department, not as the type of staff you could easily offshore, even with remote working technology. For example, at a Fortune 100 company I did quite a bit of consulting for, fully 60% of their IT staff was Infosys and Congnizant H1Bs. You could make the argument that some portion of those positions could be offshored, but realistically no large company would do that - they want people on-site too much. I don't think the rise of tools is really changing this mentality fast enough to make remote/offshore work a real possibility here in the near term.

[drabiega]

I suspect that instead of shipping work overseas, you'd simply see a relaxation of attitudes on remote work. The US already has a large base of engineering talent that is willing to work for less but either won't or can't relocate to a tech hub. (Often because if they relocate to you they're going to want more money because of cost of living differences.)

[valuearb]

There is a significant advantage in doing the work here, but they'll still do some work overseas. And they'll start their own companies overseas and compete with us.