Not sure I believe this. H1-B is normally people who already live here. Normally they are students. Or family of other workers or students. We aren’t normally importing H1-B workers. Many were F1 first then move to H1-B after their F1 expires. The F1 is a year of practical work after graduation from a US college. The H1-B allows a 3 year period of working and can be renewed for an additional 3 years. In that time you either get a green card or you don’t. They let in about 250,000 of these a year. The idea is that it keeps the population growing slightly. The US would be shrinking if not for immigration. We don’t have enough babies per families to keep up the population.
Now that is not to say that I support all immigration. But we do need to fill in the working ages a bit. Millennials are the largest group. But under them we have a fall off. Boomers are a big generation. Gen X is too small. Gen Y (millennials) are big enough. But Gen Z is not. Ideally, we would like to have enough working aged people to take care of and pay for the retirement of the larger boomer generation that is 56 to 74. The strategy is to grow no more than 1% a year. But not to shrink. If you shrink the economy starts to shrink as well. Homes, stocks, and other invests loose their value.
Evidence?
H-1B is no help there - they work for less than Americans and drive down salaries.
the native US population is so taxed, so burdened with college debt, and so spiritually malnourished that native population growth is all but impossible today
You sound like an engineer.
i’m an engineer, but a started out as a wanna be poet.
So I’ll draw you a metaphor, to show you how i think about this problem. if it makes no sense to you, no worries. just ignore it.
A well-meaning doctor decides to treat a fast spreading tumor with what would normally be deadly poison by inserting a catheter into the tumor. It’s deep in the body. He threads the catheter carefully through the patient’s body. There’s a pump to force the poison into the catheter. The poison is deadly in large dose, so the pump starts and stops to rate the flow of the poison.
But some hater of the patient has sabotaged the catheter. It has small leaks along the way. The poison puddles all along the path to the tumor. It leaks out when the pump is on and stops when the pump is off. The poison is mixed in small amounts at the site of each leak. Then the pump is turned back on.
The tumor gets fresh cells to feed it from the leaks in the catheter. It also sucks up some poison with them, but the poison is now contaminated with the patient’s healthy cells and blood, and so feeds the tumor instead of killing it. The poison spreads slowly throughout the healthy body, weakening it. With fresh nutrient, the tumor grows faster, continuing to spread throughout the body, finally killing it.
I would much rather raise the retirement age and provide other incentives for more Americans to work than to keep bringing in cheap foreign labor. To the extent that we allow foreign workers in, they need to be MORE EXPENSIVE for companies to employ than it would cost to employ Americans for the same jobs. That way they’ll only hire real superstars from abroad and it will not undercut the wages of Americans which it currently does.