[coliveira]

There is a reason companies pay for this process: they are allowed to maintain the worker for as long as the process goes. And for many people this can take up to 10 years, depending on nationality. If they have a good employee, it is a no-brainer to pay so they cannot leave the company, under the penalty of having the green card process cancelled or restarted.

[jogjayr]

The applicant keeps their position in the green card line even if they restart the process with a different company. If it will take 10 years at the current company, it will also take 10 years at the next one if they leave right now.

So it does not help retention in the way you believe.

It is beneficial for retention because companies who don't apply for green cards for employees will lose them to firms that apply.

[liquidpele]

> If they have a good employee

I think you mean cheaper employee.

[jrockway]

I really don't think Big Tech is using H1-B and greencards to buy fake loyalty or cheaper labor. If your current employer applied for a visa for you, your future employer will too. (To some extent, startups get screwed here, since nobody on an H1-B is going to ditch Apple to work at your startup.) H1-B salaries are public information; and they are exactly the same as what everyone else puts on levels.fyi. I worked at Google; I saw the mandatory H1-B job postings and there was no difference in comp or requirements between my role and the ones being advertised. Filling out paperwork so that every qualified candidate in the world can work there is the cost of doing business; if there were more qualified applicants, they'd hire more people. To the visaholders, this is just another perk for working at a big tech company.

When I clicked the link, I thought this article was going to be something like "non-US citizens get an extra $10k in perks because these companies do all their visa work for them, and US citizens don't need a visa". But it's something much more obscure that doesn't matter.

[injb]

Right but the argument (the good one) isn't that they're paid less - it's that you're paid less because they are available. If US employers couldn't import workers they'd have to pay you more.

[jrockway]

I don't really believe it. The companies would just offshore to a country with more preferential immigration treatment. Remember that plan for a boat in international waters where programmers who can't get visas would work for companies in San Francisco with the same time zone? That's what limiting immigration would accomplish. Immigration has maybe one effect, increasing the tax base.

[cool_dude85]

If it's so easy to offshore these jobs, why hasn't Apple done it yet and quit fooling around with this whole onerous visa process? Out of the good of their heart?

[injb]

It's a good question. There's just something about being in the same country. It's hard to explain why though.

I work for a fully remote company. Most of us are based in the US but the company also hires people from some other countries through some kind of agency. Even though many, probably a majority of the US-based people are immigrants (myself included), and many don't speak English any better than the agency people, there's still somehow a clear divide. The agency people are great - talented, skilled, no issues. But somehow they understand the business less. Their contributions are purely technical. It's clear that the company could not just can us all and hire the same number of agency guys, but it's hard to explain why.

My previous employer once tried to outsource some stuff to India and sent a guy over there to oversee it. It didn't go well. But we had lots of Indian people before and since in the company, and they were great. They had the same background, same education. But they were local to the company.

I often think of the first iPhone as an extreme example of what I'm trying to say. It was built in China using parts sourced from China. But it was invented in California, and it had to be. From the inventors and the builders there's a sort of spectrum, a range of people, like the developers who conceived and wrote the first killer apps - and the closer you are to the inventing side of things, the closer you need to be to the heart of the company.

If I had to put sum it up in a word, I'd say it's "ambiguity". Knowing what to do when you don't have exact instructions requires you to be steeped in the same culture as the CEO and the main market. This isn't a fixed thing: I'm sure there's a market for luxury devices in China now that Americans find it hard to understand. But in general the countries that are the most developed have already experienced what other countries are going through, and thus they are uniquely positioned to dictate what the next big thing is.

So companies will always have to do some hiring locally, and the harder the job, the more important it is to be local.

[jrockway]

Because the prospective employees want to live in the US and the current legal climate allows that. Since you can't up and move to the US (from most countries) without a sponsor, the employment is the arrangement that allows this.

Because people are not automatons, there are often situations where a company has offices in, say, New York and Zurich, and some employees in the New York office moved from Zurich and some employees in the Zurich office moved from New York.

[theGnuMe]

Legally there cannot be comp differences. The issue is once you get the H1B you have them for 7+ years. Obviously they can change companies but it is not without risk.