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I don’t think we're at war with legal immigrants who came here to work. H1Bs tend to integrate pretty well, follow the rules, and just generally are productive members of society. You can reasonably make the case that 700,000 is not the right number of H1Bs to have in the US. I don't think you can reasonably make the case that we should consider ourselves at war with them.
It seems to me that we have a conflict between companies who want to import foreigners who work for cheap and lack many legally-mandated employee protections they would be compelled to respect for native employees, and a faction now with control of the federal government who want them to pay native workers standard market wages with full protections instead. Certainly there seem to be a number of other commenters here framing it this way, including several claiming that the H1B visa system was "abused". I use quotes there, because it's pretty clear to me that in situations like this one, we say things like "this system was abused" when what we want to say, but cannot, is "they clearly broke the law". I'm pretty sure if we prosecuted these companies for violating immigration law, their legal defenses would succeed. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of people don't want them to do what they're doing, and are willing to coordinate efforts to make them stop doing it. That's the conflict, and in that conflict, as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, giving those regulated a clear, consistent, stable set of rules to work under is not a good way to achieve the regulator's objectives.
And as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, the issue is that the regulatory goals should be achieved by laws but are not popular enough to achieve the necessary support among elected legislators.
In any case I don’t know how saying "any h1bs who were abroad must pay $100k to reenter effective basically immediately" serves any non-applause-light purpose.
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