> Depends how you define cheaper. The visa sponsorship is a one time sunk cost, but if the candidate you sponsor aggress to work for several thousands or even t

> Depends how you define cheaper. The visa sponsorship is a one time sunk cost, but if the candidate you sponsor aggress to work for several thousands or even tens of thousands less per year than the local candidates, then the saving for the company are obvious. What i meant was for the same Embedded Linux/C++ jobs - they were willing to pay me 65k/year in Germany - while similar jobs in Netherlands or even other smaller towns in Germany were offering me 36-40k back then. So my old company could have easily scooped up the people from Netherlands as opposed to jumping through hoops to get me a Visa and still save up on a lot of money. But people were reluctant to move there/in general harder to find apparently. I do know what you mean about the "candidates from low wage places". I have seen that happen a lot too. In fact I am seeing it happen a lot more these days because more companies are getting used to remote work and the competition is driving down the wages quite drastically. > 44K/year seems pretty low for a so called "shortage job", and even more so if you consider the rampant inflation in the past couple of years. AFAIK 44K is pretty much around or sometimes even far less than a new grad makes in a skilled field at a good company. So, IMHO such low wages for supposedly "shortage jobs" are there for wage suppression and nothing else. If we had something like 70-80k/year as the bar for a shortage wage then we'd be talking sense. Yeah My German Colleagues coming from smaller cities were making around 45k/year even with 4-5 years of work experience back then. Later on they moved to the big cities and got those 75-85k/year Devops jobs (this was around 2020). The companies which paid the bare minimum to sponsor a work visa were usually the ones like yet to be funded startups in Berlin, hectic jobs in Games industry etc... And Yep. Too much of a good thing can be bad too. There needs to be infrastructure growth to keep up with the incoming population. Real Estate market - it is crazy. People had to be on waitlist for months to rent an apartment even in little cities. God knows how long they have to work there to be able to buy a house.