[president]

Honest question. Why does nobody consider the fate of US university graduates that are up to their neck in debt and unable to find a job because companies would rather hire an H1B worker with 10 years working experience for cheap? There are large swathes of American workers that have been plunged into homelessness, drugs, or cannot feed their families because they lost their jobs to labor arbitrage. I understand that due to inherent bias, non US citizens couldn't care less about the fate US citizens but I believe it is abhorrent that an American citizen would balk at suspending H1Bs, especially in an economically tough time like this. If you have children or plan on having children, you're essentially selling out their future.

[guyzero]

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cps_charts.pdf

The unemployment rate for university graduates in the US is 7.4%, which is not great, but is considerably lower than the civilian unemployment rate of 13.3% in that same report. In past reports the unemployment rate in IT fields is even lower than that of university graduates. US university graduates have been hit the least in the covid economic downturn.

Please explain how suspending L1 visas is going to help this same set of debt-burdened American graduates. Or perhaps these people are all expected to become au pairs now that those visas have been suspended as well?

[pandaman]

There are two requirements for L1: working for a related (subsidiary, parent, etc) company abroad for 1 year and having "specialized" skills. Apart from the 1 year requirement it's weaker than H1-B as it does not put any requirements on education or salary. Furthermore, a big enough company can get a "blanket L1", which does not require DOL certification like H1-B. Did I mention there is no cap on this and you can have as many L1 workers as you wish?

1 year requirement is not a big deal: everyone using these has already offices all over the world so they hire somebody in a foreign office, wait one year and transfer to the US, considering that H1-B is a lottery it's faster than getting an H1-B from abroad on average. And, bonus, unlike H1-B, the L1 workers cannot easily jump to another employer: for a new job with a different employer they need to get some other visa, likely H1B, and, unlike a worker who already has an H1B, go through lottery. And if you fire them they will have much more trouble staying in the country: a new H1B application will take at least 6 months (file on April 1st, get the status on October 1st, if you won the lottery and did not get any RFEs) so they likely will run over 180 days out of status and get banned from the US for 3 years unless they find some other status like F (student), which won't let them work anyways so they will have to live off the savings they've made from their lavish L1 compensation.

Essentially it has all problems of H1 plus its own: less scrutiny, no salary requirements, stronger bond with the employer.

Hope this explanation helps.

[president]

I'm not familiar with L1 but I was referring to H1B. Many intern/entry-level positions in tech are assumed by H1B workers. In every company I have worked at (large corporations + startups) in SV, the overwhelming majority of these entry-level type positions were assumed by H1B workers. Many US grads from CS programs are forced to take on low paid jobs irrelevant to their training.