This H1-B fee is such nonsense.
"President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages", Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman told CNBC.
Amazon has 14,000 H1-B workers. They have 1.1 Million total workers in the US. Not many H1-B workers in the warehouses or driving delivery vans. Inability to fill engineering roles puts those 1.1 million at risk. Layoffs bs - all of these companies have open requisitions. One group overhires, another needs more people. Can't put a WebDev into a back-end role, or building out systems designs or designing ASICs. Even if they could be trained, they wouldn't want to be retrained or they would have studied EE instead of CS or vice versa.
Wages? Engineers at Mag-7 companies have total comp 250k plus, and it goes up fast if the RSUs are deep into the money. But if someone on H1-B is a key hire, that 100k is going to come out of everyone's comp.
If you wanted to hire just US citizens out of college, the way to do it is to fund Universities so tuition would be cheaper for US citizens, and invest in growing the schools so more kids can get in. Something like 2% of people applying to CS at Berkeley get in. So if some kid doesn't get into CS and studies Poli Sci, then our grad schools get filled with kids from IIT, who then filter into student visas and eventually H1-B. But you know, indoctrination centers.