Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?
* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,
* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,
* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,
* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,
* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.
In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.
Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.
Language l, cultural, and time barriers still come into play regardless of how good they are, however.
General perception was the universities there produced qualified graduates who were not paper tigers (or didn't lie about creds).
Rates for them were pretty good, and we had better alignment with timezones and holidays.
Reasonably good alignment in terms of legal and HR issues -- easier to enforce than, like, Bangladesh
The NAFTA / USMCA / whatever its called now Visa made it easy for them to come across the border for a few years as well. Pay bump for a while plus a chance to work in HQ or the IT office directly, make fat stacks, and then rotate back to MX and buy a nice house. The Mexico City PMs were also instrumental for bridging the language gap when running projects in other LATAM countries.
Trump's ICE might be the end of that approach tho