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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
In the end this had to happen. While illegal immigration and family / chain migration from places like Central America, Somalia and Haiti were and are far more critical (and still aren’t being stopped to the necessary degree) than a hundred thousand Indian programmers a year moving to America, the latter was still an issue.
The H-1B system was designed in 1990 when remote collaboration was nonexistent or in its infancy. Today there is no need to bring highly skilled foreigners to America permanently to collaborate. You can work together on Zoom, over email and instant message, can meet in person for social reasons a couple of times a year. Relocating a family from to America permanently, making all their descendants in perpetuity American citizens, that should be done for reasons more substantial than to add another database guy to the Tata team in Orlando.
I’ve long thought Trump should just make a better ‘America is closed’ speech. We had the era of mass immigration, we settled the country, now it’s ended, it’s not coming back.
Remote collaboration still sucks, especially with big time zone mismatches. There's a world of difference between me walking over to my coworker's desk for a quick chat and we can pull up a whiteboard or look at a screen together and me trying to find time with a coworker with an 8 hour time difference (convenient overlapping hours are usually booked solid with meetings already) and try to make myself understood over zoom.
And if they're gone home for the day (which happens before I have lunch) I can't talk to them at all that day.
I've seen both sides, as I have some collaborators who go back and forth with enough significance that we keep up when they're abroad. There are nice things about being able to stroll down to their office. There are also nice things about, "Here's what I've been thinking about today; it's still kind of a hazy idea, but I think I'm on to something," and then I head home, go to bed, they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it. Similarly for working a document toward a deadline. I can do what I can do, leave some notes, and magically, much progress has occurred while I was sleeping. It's a wonderful feeling when it happens.
Sure. I've worked with coworkers on a 24x7 rotation and there the time difference is a must for maintaining sanity. But when I'm working on a project (rather than keeping a system running) I find it way better to be nearby.
This works in the case that they have nothing going on, or are going to drop everything to pursue your project. More likely IME, they'll think about it for perhaps an hour and send you some feedback. That's the kind of thing that would have been way better as a meeting and that's most of my cross timezone experiences.
I'm sure it's quite field and role dependent, but mine is definitely a good one on that front. They're already pursuing "my project" as a large component of their role. So if I have the makings of a promising idea, it's not uncommon for them to spend hours trying to make the details work. I'm pretty impressed pretty often, but I also have managed to get myself a set of impressive collaborators.
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