Were they on H1Bs? Most I knew from similar countries in the Bay Area wouldn’t have been.

But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.

Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.

They all eventually became permanent residents and citizens. But they all start off as h1 or the one that lets you stay a while after finishing a PhD. Some switched to O-1 (or whatever the extraordinary talent one is).

I’ve worked with some amazing Austrians who had to go to 3rd country for a year waiting for the lottery.

I've worked with amazing people from all parts of the world. I'm a bit uncomfortable with bucketing my coworkers' abilities by ethnicity like this though.

But I am American: most of us couldn't even guess our own ethnic origins after a couple generations, especially if our ancestors weren't affluent. That fundamental difference in worldview makes all these discussions so difficult.