Most people are missing the fact that there’s a whole immigration economy on the other end, it’s not a passive storefront (that was banned in the 19th century). People want to immigrate, but the people who are best at immigrating aren’t necessarily best at their job.

How have you only worked with 50 or so H1B in your career? It's either not been long, or you didn't work at any large tech companies (the ones who use this visa the most)

I don't jump much, I've worked for 3 companies in 20 years.

They were smallish companies, 1000ish employees. Only one had H1B, and there were more than 50, but never worked with most enough to pass judgment one way or another.

The idea of 'best of the best' relies on the assumption that it is measurable which history has shown that it is not.

I mean, this is basic VC logic: because the returns are power law distributed, and it's very hard to know in advance which ones are going to hit, you should probably invest at least a little bit in anyone who seems basically plausible. Imagine having denied a visa to Sergey Brin!

My understanding is Sergey was just along for the ride and Larry was the one with the unique insights (pagerank) and led Google through the early years as CEO.

Money is measurable, engineer quality is not. Sure with a smaller startup you could average amongst the engineers but it's an imprecise value. The million threads on leetcode and interview are proof positive engineer valuation is hard.

It's all well and good to gamble when someone else, the public, is picking up the tab.

What tab? H1B engineers are definitionally employed, usually in the upper tax brackets.

Unpriced externalities. Housing is unaffordable in no small part due to immigration. Opportunity cost for Americans workers.

Generally the government manages the economy to make things 'easy' but not necessarily reflecting the true cost of any behavior.

Housing is unaffordable because tech brings high-paying jobs into regions that don't want housing growth. Whether the people coming to fill those jobs and throw those salaries around in the housing market are from India or from Wisconsin hardly matters, except that it's more comfortable for local governments to be overtly hostile to the Wisconsinites.

Housing requires land which inherently does not scale.

Accepting that premise for a moment, why would the land around Bay Area offices scale any better for Americans than for H1Bs? If the opportunities simply go to Americans, you have exactly the same geometry problem. If the Americans who refill those roles do so at higher wages, the supply-and-demand imbalance gets even worse.

Ultimately there exists more foreigners than Americans. American employees are more willing to create jobs outside the bay area.

So then the h1b hires will go to jobs outside the bay area, reducing pressure on housing prices in the bay area.

Tech companies have N openings in the bay area. They will fill these openings. Whether they fill the openings with people moving from India or Mississippi has zero effect on the pressure on the bay area housing market.