Everywhere I look the downturn is because of “outsourcing”, “India taking our jobs!!”, “cheap overseas labor” and never, never ever porky’s fault. It’s the dirty immigrant labor, not the guys who talk about having “properties”. I’ve always seen this shit floating around in white collar jobs as long as I’ve been working but it’s been really amped up the last few weeks. I am not surprised that people are just this racist on their own but at least some of it feels very manufactured.
It could be helpful for a company to hire H1bs if it employs a combination of domestic and foreign workers. Having worked for a tech company that hires some remote teams in India for some projects, the large timezone gap makes collaboration difficult. Any meeting involving both US and Indian employees required the Indian workers to need to be available really late and US workers to be available really early (like 3 or 4 AM early), making everyone unhappy. It’s a much harder timezone difference to manage than, say, the difference between US Eastern and Pacific times.