The H1B has “speciality” categories. You can lay off in one “speciality” while hiring for others. It’s silly but that’s how it’s setup at the moment.

I agree with you. The category list in H1B needs to be trimmed. So that companies have less wiggle room for things like this.

The layoffs were also worldwide. Not sure what the impact to US workers was. India was hit hard.

They should also trigger holds on bunch of other operations, like stock buyouts or sales by people with active or recent relationship to the company

So hire 30k H1Bs first and then fire 30k? Outcome is pretty much the same.

I agree, if you are doing layoffs, you should be banned from the following year H1B visa lottery. If you really need some extraordinary guy, there other visas for that.

When you are puzzled about something, the first step is to find out why something works like it does. :)

With green cards, the government is concerned about permanent residents being dependent on the state if a company ceases to exist or fails to pay salaries or lays people off.

This worry is largely not present for limited term work visas.

The US only has two political parties and they are both, secretly, pro immigration.

The EU is actually clamping down on it because of populist/far right parties. I know someone who runs a Thai restaurant and he cannot fly in a cook from Asia. He has to find someone from Europe.