That wouldn't do anything to address any supply shortages of workers for certain skills but would at least level the playing field for citizens looking to get into fields like tech, nursing, medicine, and more.
I'm not so cold hearted or extreme to say 'shut it all down tomorrow', but it feels like at the very very least, in this job climate, we could suspend new entries?
But it just keeps humming along like everything is rosy.
1. H-1Bs applications are ranked by total comp. 2 years of that comp is unconditional (no PIPs, no performance management, no excuses). I can see an argument to bucket this by industry.
2. Only job codes where the YoY median pay and total employment are currently at a 3 year high are eligible to receive H-1Bs.
The comp requirements would devastate the body farms. The unconditional comp will put major pressure on the system of working H1-Bs to the bone, and not thoroughly vetting those hires. Companies that layoff in the thousands, or layoff their highest paid (oldest) employees are simply poisoning the H-1B well for that industry. Deep cuts can't be made up with H1-Bs for 3 years or until all the layoffs have been recouped industry-wide.
If this still sounds crazy, I think your objection is more to there being a cap at all. If there is going to be a cap, it makes sense to order it by total comp even notwithstanding the COL.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit... [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-immigration-h1b-vis...
It is true that the LCA (and PERM!) processes are have grave flaws that leave them open to abuse.
There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.
After that you may want to rethink suspending new entries.
How impactful would a say, 1 year pause be to that? Is the number of jobs created by H1B each year > the number of H1B entries each year?
Generally speaking, the economy is not a zero sum game (by definition), or we would never have made it past the first 50 people in New Amsterdam. Every person here on a visa interacts with the economy (needs to buy groceries, etc). Presumably they create more wealth for the economy than they cost, or it would not be worth it for a company to hire them.
I think a more interesting question would be if, for the particular occupation (say software engineer), a person on an H1-B visa adds more than one jobs worth of demand for more software engineers. Even if they benefit the economy as a whole, it is still possible that a subset of the labor force sees extra competition. That opens up the question of is it better to suspend the program to protect a subgroup, or is it better to expand the economy as a whole.
At this point it doesn't look like allowing anything other than net emigration is practical. You just can't trust the people involved to do anything else.
Can you give an example where H1Bs changed voting patterns?
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
But if it's a replacement for supporting domestic education and a source of cheap skilled labor, no thanks.
If FAANG were screaming at Congress about their inability to hire and the solution was better primary and secondary education programs for people at home to create that skilled workforce, we probably wouldn't have such an aggressive urban/rural political divide in this country.
Did I give the impression that better education is sufficient to solve the problem?
Instead, you end up competing against the whole world on salary and servitude hours for a local job.
Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applicat...
Companies always want the lucrative American businesses and consumers as customers, all the while wanting to shed expensive American workers.
Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.
Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.
I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
The h1b candidate pool would be mostly undergrad and masters students.
It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.
I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B.
I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once.
1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically.
2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa
3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”.
Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
I didn't see where that was shown in the chart.
All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees.
I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.
> By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best...
> I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs
Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.
This is bound to happen as you run out of people in the US. I don't think it's useful to prove a problem unless top US graduates start losing jobs to immigrants that outcompete them for lower salaries that they can live on because of lower educational debt.
How much of that is reality or how much is is suppresses wages will always be hard to pin down.
A basic starting point would be cracking down on H1B mills that explicitly do wage suppression + more scrutiny on big companies like Amazon using it. There's some big H1B consultancies designed to undercut gov contract tending who are much more blatant despite hard rules in H1B meant to stop it. Biden admin passed some new policies to help combat it but enforcement has always been problem #1, not a lack of rules meant to protect American workers.
Whose to say an American, given the same opportunities, couldn't do this as well? If you look at where the top AI companies are, only 1 is in China.
I don't think h1b mills impact tech workers as much. Most of those cases seem to be in the healthcare space or in low end tech jobs that Americans probably don't want anyways...
So it's fairer to it's really ~490K vs 8M.
One look at the top H1B employers should stop this narrative however, because those companies do not pay near peanuts.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
the green card queue is severely backlogged for India (and to some extent China, Mexico). this causes people who would usually get a green card after 3-5 years be on a continuous H1-B renewal cycle every 3 years.
This would create a more honest system, ensuring these highly sought-after professionals are paid competitive market wages and the company has to pay a large premium to hire the foreign worker. Not engage in this fictional market studies to prove they can’t find people to find the role. Make them pay a premium and don’t lock them into the employer.
Further there should be a separate program for graduates of US universities and us university graduates shouldn’t be competing against Tata gaming the system. People invested in the USA that we’ve invested in should get a preference over random people from a consulting company.
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
This cap-exempt H1B bypasses lottery, can be obtained in about 3 months any time during the year.
The 9000 number is also a global number which includes layoffs in countries all over the world.
The argument “9000 US workers were fired and X visa applications were applied for” is also very reductive. The layoffs were in gaming, sales and other divisions, meanwhile the visa applications were for people who either already are on visas in other divisions like engineering and are continuing their status or for people in newer positions that have nothing to do with sales or gaming.
Speaking about original post US tech industry is 16M people. So 600K+ of H1Bs, suppose they all in tech, is 4%. Blip on a radar.
https://www.nafsa.org/professional-resources/browse-by-inter...
"AC21 [codified at INA § 214(g)(5)(A)-(B)] exempts the following petitioners from the H-1B cap:
Institutions of higher education
Nonprofit entities related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education
Nonprofit research organizations
Governmental research organizations
Only universities, university-affiliated nonprofits, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations can sponsor one. Furthermore, even after you obtain a cap-exempt H-1B, you would be required to go through the lottery like anyone else if you want to work at an employer subject to the H-1B cap.
Only non-profits are allowed to skip the lotteries. I've seen it apply to universities and hospitals, but never to a for-profit tech company,
If people from India/China were allowed to naturalize as fast as other countries, you’d not have the chart of number of H1Bs grow in the country.
Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.
This sentence doesn't really help your statement, it just makes you a gatekeeper.
I get that there are probably loopholes in the law. But then the solution is to fix the loopholes and tighten enforcement. Give DoL access to IRS data. Improve the definition of prevailing wages. A lot of things can be done to fix H1B so that it behaves like how it's intended.
Minor nitpick, but if you get an H-1 visa to work at a university, it's not part of that 85K limit.
But yes, your point is valid. And the headline is editorialized - they cherry picked the year 2011, because it's the lowest. It was the lowest because we were knee deep in the financial crisis, and many companies suspended/reduced their reliance on foreign labor precisely because they'd have a hard time convincing the government that they couldn't find a qualified local.
Because due to the GC backlog, the existing visas do not go down for 2 major contributing countries.
You could easily move from a lottery to a total comp auction process. IMO if your company does layoffs it should automatically void your ability to participate for 5 years. It's pretty gross to see tech CEOs whining about how they can't get the talent they need on a Monday and then mass laying off on a Tuesday.
mikece•3h ago
If the answer is in the affirmative then we need to study and address why that is.
If not, then I'm curious how many qualified Americans are being pushed out of (ore prevented from entering) the high tech job market by H-1B applicants.
toast0•2h ago
If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.
laretluval•2h ago
quag•2h ago
[1]: https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/intern...
throwmeaway222•2h ago
That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.
Ar-Curunir•1h ago
OkayPhysicist•1h ago
I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.
FuriouslyAdrift•35m ago
In state $30,154 Out of state $53,638 International $54,814
This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.
OkayPhysicist•8m ago
proc0•2h ago
superxpro12•2h ago
You really have to have solid, engaged recruiting and screening processes in place to filter the wheat from the chaff with H1B's.
I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate, and the domestic candidate would outperform every time.
This is obv anecdotal, but I would not be surprised if this pattern exists across the entire H1B pool.
We do hire some H1B's, and there are some incredibly talented candidates, but only after great expense and time invested in screening and interviewing.
ToxicMegacolon•1h ago
Do you ask people their visa status during interview?
If you do not ask them about visa status, then how do you know they weren't a domestic candidate? Is it a judgement based on race/skin-color/accent?
If you do ask them this question, How do you keep that information from influencing your decision in the interview?
Aspos•2h ago
renewiltord•2h ago
I’ve hired people for a decade in tech and through that period people have been bellyaching about this stuff throughout.
The absolute truth is that if you can’t hit $500k annual income in 5 years despite trying to do so, you’re not good enough.
The H-1B workers I know are making millions. If you’re getting pushed out by them it’s because American competitiveness is enabled by this. And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
selimthegrim•2h ago
adamrezich•2h ago
Uncharitably, it sounds like you think of your nation as a generic economic zone whose growth you want to continually increase at all costs, regardless of the fate of its citizens. But what is a nation, if not the people that comprise it?
renewiltord•1h ago
But one nation, alone, fights Humanity's cause. Trump et al have cast off the mantle, but it's only another 3.5 years and we have a shot at donning it again. The nation is not for the people - or we would simply rapaciously consume its resources to feed the present. The people of the nation are not for the nation or we would consume them to fuel the engine. The nation and the people are both there to advance the principles of the group into the future. And I believe America's principles deserve to exist into perpetuity so long as they adapt to meet shifting weather.
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
adamrezich•16m ago