If there's any truth in the "phd level AI", let alone AGI narrative going on since a few years this must be no problem at all, just use AI.
If that narrative isn't true then in not-so-distant future SV must run out of money to hire people for other stuff anyway as all the resources seem to be in the AI basket.
The AI thing aside, I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues, i.e. right to change employer. Sure, companies wouldn't want that but aren't the SV engineers highly paid individuals? Wouldn't they be able to collect considerable resources to lobby the politicians into it?
> I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues
It’s yet another case of what economists call “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs”.
The companies that use H1-Bs have strong lobbying power. The average US citizen doesn’t know much about H1-B or the common criticisms. Some grievance-based US voters want to cut most/all work visas, especially H1-B. Crucially, H1-B recipients don’t vote in US elections, so the people most affected have no influence in fixing it.
The underlying problem is that Congress is defective. It used to fix problems that helped America. Now it’s only useful for launching influencer careers.
They can pay people who are trying to make other people vote for their candidate though. Chip in a 10K per, and you a major power in US politics. Apparently there are 730K H1B holders, that's enormous demographic considering that all of them are employed people. Even at 1K per person would generate 730M budget.
Jamie Dimon is in DC right now lobbying the admin over this, but in all honestly, most companies built redundancy plans for this kind of a regulation years ago with GCCs in India along with the Canadian branches of American companies.
Reality is this rule only incentivizes offshoring (maybe India, maybe Canada, maybe LatAm, etc) instead of hiring domestically.
In trying to get a headline saying "we can hire 100% American" now companies are considering offshoring, which means 0 Americans are hired.
There are smart ways to crack down on H1B abuse, and the headline policy wasn't it.
There aren't enough of them to rate that level of attention from politicians. Especially when pitted against the lobbying might of Silicon Valley, which very much wants to keep its totally-not-indentured workers.
The AI thing aside, I wonder why people are not demanding actual fix on the issues, i.e. right to change employer. Sure, companies wouldn't want that but aren't the SV engineers highly paid individuals? Wouldn't they be able to collect considerable resources to lobby the politicians into it?