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I came to the USA on an H1B visa 2 years ago.

On a high salary and with the promise of being sponsored for a green card.

I got my green card just before covid impacted the USA and still have a pretty high salary (in the same range of my US born colleagues).

I already had a great job in my home country, I was not going to come to the USA to be paid a pittance.

Yeah, there is abuse of the green card system but it is in place because there aren't enough skilled workers in the USA.

[vbtemp]

Couple important points:

1. SV/FAANGs, like elite colleges, only hire some very small percentage of people who apply. Many people who are perfectly well qualified and have successful careers otherwise get denied employment.

2. The market cap of these FAANGs is in the trillions. Between talent and capital, there's literally no problem they can't solve (they can solve problems about cyber bullying, trolling, etc but their business relies on it.. so it's not really a "problem" per se).

3. There are SO MANY underprivileged and/or poor kids in SV, LA, Pittsburgh, all the places where tech companies reside. Saying there aren't enough skilled workers in the US is kind of dishonestly true, as they have tons of applications from many qualified people.. many of whom with some training and support may very well become highly qualified....

4. ...They could literally invest some of those trillions to build a pipeline from these areas, develop talent locally - or at least domestically.

So much of tech is about solving problems with the resources you have. Opening up broadly to a global labor supply removes the constraint on that resource, and therefore don't need to innovate or find clever ways to make it work. Now, they are companies that have only one duty - deliver profit to shareholders - and that's fine and how companies should be run. But public policy needs to exist to serve the interest of the people, and for the most part - not entirely - H1B has been to serve the interest of executives in Big Tech.

Also, finally, Trump is absolutely awful, horrid, all that. A broken clock is right twice a day though, and this is one of the few possibly accidental things he's done that isn't a complete self-shot to the head.

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1 - I am the first one to complain about our broken hiring practices, but just because you get a first interview does not mean you are qualified for the job.

2/3/4 -> FAANG have a ton of money but no incentive at all to spend it on philanthropy. I wish it was not the case, but their only job is to make their investors happy.

3 - is it dishonest ? For sure there are some kids in SV, LA,etc that could work in tech if they got the education but the thing is, they didn't. Also, local talent is never going to compare to the global one.

I would love to see laws pushing FAANG and co to invest in philanthropic causes. Heck, I would not even mind if this was based on taxation. But cutting H1B is not going to solve any of these problems.

[vbtemp]

This is not a correct reading of what I wrote. Investing in local (or at least domestic) employment pipelines at all is not philanthropy. Seeing it as philanthropy is patronizing.

Let's just have a thought experiment (maybe we'll see what happens if the ban continues) - what will Big Tech do if H1B is not a thing anymore?

Second thought experiment - who benefits most from H1B? First of all, the H1B holders themselves. Second, the tech industry itself. Further out from that benefits are less clear and more mixed. We are a nation of immigrants seeking opportunity, immigration is important to this country. Immigrants brings a lot of economic and cultural benefits, and we must always fight bigotry and discrimination towards our immigrants. But there is also much more complexity surrounding immigration policies, and they have their cost, too.

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How is it not philanthropy when there are already skilled workers they could hire right now ?

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If you feel that philanthropy has a negative connotation, in this context another word for it would be social justice (which it totally is).

[pnako]

There is an issue with 'diversity in tech' and, among other things, under-representation of African-Americans in STEM.

So why are the big tech corporations that are constantly virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter and social justice not simply training American engineers (not specifically black, but people coming from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, which would definitely include many African-Americans). Why do they bring Indian or Chinese engineers?

America does not lack people, it has good universities. It could certainly train a local workforce. Providing good jobs to those communities would do wonders to reduce criminality, drug abuse and various issues.

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>America does not lack people, it has good universities

I am not american so not 100% certain, but from what I can see, the public education system in the USA is not that great and universities are way too costly compared with the rest of the world.

I 100% agree that there is a huge diversity in tech problem.

Not all of that problem is about hiring POCs either, a female friend of mine had to flee a job because none of her colleagues would accept to have a woman as their manager (that's in 2020 in the SV..)

>So why are the big tech corporations that are constantly virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter

You are answering yourself, virtue signaling is cheap. I can talk for my own company. They were happy enough to talk about the importance of BLM, but less interested in taking concrete steps.

I fully believe that companies should encourage their engineers to participate in mentorship programs. I highly doubt that it would magically solve systemic racism but it would be a relatively cheap way to find and hire junior engineers and good PR.