This seems like a no-brainer. Why did Biden withdraw the rule?
I forget the contractors company name but they came up on HN at the time for being abusive towards their employees who risked deportation if they stood up for themselves. If I find specific examples I'll add them later, but you can probably just search hn for h1b.
If there is surplus to being physically in the US, then the US should gain some of that surplus.
Let the market decide.
The H1B isn't charity, it is a work visa for specialty occupations.
Trump's "golden ticket" for example
For example, if CheapoCorp is looking to replace reasonably well paid US workers with H1-B workers, they won't bid much for the visas. CheapoCorp isn't trying to get good talent from overseas. They're trying to save money, push down wages, have a workforce that they can mistreat (since they can't easily leave the company given their immigration status requires employment), etc.
By contrast, if a company is looking to hire great engineers or scientists from overseas because they're in a growing industry with a shortage of workers, they would be willing to pay a lot more to get the H1-B visas. They're not looking to save $20,000/year on someone's salary. They want top talent.
When companies are trying to replace their workforce with lower-paid foreign workers who can't complain (lest they lose their job and with it their immigration status), that's not what the H1-B system was designed for. It certainly is how some companies are using it. If you're on an H1-B and lose your job, you have 60 days to find a new job or you're gone. That's going to make you a much more compliant employee. You have little leverage to negotiate raises, you aren't likely to quit even if they're overworking you, they can pass you over for promotions and you'll quietly accept it.
But if the employer is competing in an auction for H1-B visas, they're more likely to be companies that are seeking out top talent rather than seeking out workers they can underpay and mistreat.
• Someone with a lot of money wants to get U.S. residency.
• They set up or work with a shell company that “hires” them under the H-1B program.
• That company uses part of their payment to win the visa auction.
• Once in the U.S., the “employee” does whatever they want — the job is just window dressing.
This is essentially what’s happened in other visa categories when money alone becomes the main filter.
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
More revenue for the treasury and efficient allocation of resources
It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor?
Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself.
The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them.
So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
- You don't allow the US to import skilled workers anymore, and rather than hire locally from a non-existent labor pool they simply move the jobs abroad. What's worse, hiring someone from India on an H1B to work in your AI lab, or moving your AI lab to India?
- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples. Or maybe...they'll just figure out how to automate those jobs or go out of business since no one wants to pay $5 for an apple.
That's the same argument used against abolishment of slavery. "Who will pick all the cotton?"
Except today it's not slavery, it's indentured servitude.
I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become. Because your ancestors were white they were permitted a chance to work from the bottom up, but because today's immigrants aren't white, you think its either slavery or exploitation, and they should just stay in poor countries accordingly (a situation that was not forced on your ancestors, for your benefit). Or if it isn’t racism, what is your reasoning for pulling up the ladder today?
You’re the one that’s bringing race into the argument. I don’t care what race they are, I don’t want any illegal immigrants in this country.
America’s obligation is to its own citizens first and foremost. This should not be a controversial opinion. Every country should put the interests of its own citizens first.
Expand H-2A: Temporary Agricultural Worker visa then.
We shouldn't be encouraging black market activity. If as the US we want to have cheap imported labor pick apples then write it into law. If we as the US want to experience the Baumol effect [1] then don't. I think most people want to experience the Baumol effect as opposed to losing out gains to trade.
Pro tip: in case of actual racism, use the flag button.
The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
Also HN hive mind…if we can’t import illegal immigrants working for subsistence wages, who will pick our crops?
My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.
There is no evidence that this is actually true. Decades of illegal immigrant labor has suppressed wages and supplanted American citizens, so you have no way of knowing that’s the case.
Zero percent unemployment means that no one without a job is looking for one. It means no new entrants into the job market (since by definition, you are unemployed the moment you start looking for your first job). And it means that no one is transitioning jobs or careers without a firm job offer in hand. It means that no business ever fails. It means that it is remarkably difficult to find employees. It means that there are no employees that quit instead of doing something immoral.
You should look into the different types of unemployment, as well as the definition of "unemployed", and specifically, frictional unemployment since you seem very unfamiliar with the base concepts.
Again, people study this and have a name for it: structural unemployment. This is the unemployment level caused by employers needing to hire for skills that the market cannot currently provide. Think of the town with high unemployment due to a car factory closure, but a local business that needs scuba diving instructors can't find one. Plenty of labor, but no scuba diving instructors.
I think this is what you are getting at: If you want to hire someone foreign because the skills don't exist in the local labor market, you should be obligated to prove that the skill is being developed in the local labor market.
The argument (not mine, just an argument) against that is that individual firms should not necessarily be forced to bear the cost of training workers in a portable skill when you can just bring in non-local labor (H1B). Back to the Scuba shop example: it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop. They would much rather pay lower prices and bring in a foreign instructor than run short handed for months while they plow money into training someone in a skill that the worker can take to their competition.
My feeling is that H1Bs are probably useful in much more limited circumstances than they are used in now (probably something more like O-1 visas that are given for people who are leaders in their fields, or demonstrably and uniquely talented). If the H1B job can be done interchangeably, then it should be done by domestic labor. If you want to hire the one guy who just won a nobel prize to work on your time machine, that is when we should allow foreign labor.
I believe the common situation is a company pays for your masters degree but the two of you end up with a contract where you'll stay at the company for X years afterwards.
I don't see why there can't be a non-"At will" situation for the scuba instructor.
The hive mind is greatly exaggerated. The existence of cognitively dissonant opinions on a website is more likely evidence that the site has posters that have differing viewpoints, rather than evidence of a group thought process that is illogical.
Like if you showed up on a homeschooling moms facebook group and half the moms are spewing religious mumbo jumbo and the other half are spewing trans rights stuff it immediately begs the question how the heck are these groups coexisting without fighting at every turn without massive cognitive dissonance or not actually believing what they're saying. Same thing here with immigration, among other things (wouldn't have been my first pick of an issue to highlight the dissonance but here we are).
If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.
It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper.
If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
If you really need the lower salary worker then sure, you can have them, but it will cost you.
I would also make the company sponsoring the H1-B visa responsible for all relocation costs when they fire someone on the visa.
The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.
and whats wrong about this? Humans funneled into area with higher added value.
The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
Edit: Saw somewhere else in this post it was around 9k, after layoffs, so I stand corrected
your logic erases nuance of the US labor market and infinity of specializations and niches, on top or large regional differences in labor market.
let's just say that nurses will never be paid on par with software engineers just because it is different specialty, and it is stupid to force nurses to compete with IT for visas
Probably something similar to nursing programs
https://tiffany.house.gov/media/press-releases/tiffany-intro...
https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-int...
And as others said, add a cost factor to train an citizen for every H-1B issued. Actually, slap a 350% tax on all the salaries paid to H-1Bs except for the first 15 people (or, I don't know, 3% of the overall staff, whichever is higher) and make sure it's hard to game with shell companies, body shops and subsidiaries.
Precisely 0% chance it'll happen in the current administration, and it's anyone guess if there will be administrations after this one, but a few hours of additional thinking around this solution (this is the first 3 minutes roughly) could make it work way better. Remove limits, make it really expensive, give some rights to the people who come on it, use the money to address real shortages, and watch companies stop abusing it.
P.S. European here, with 0 interest in coming to work in the US.
"O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)"
I think the issue is expecting a masters/phd to ensure access to th US labor market. This greatly distorts the fact that for most software engineering positions a bachelors is enough (if necessary at all), crowding the domestic market.
The US should not allow the pipeline of jr->sr engs to be culled for the sake of accessing cheap foreign labor. Given the necessity of software to run the modern economy, it really is a national security issue.
Although for China and India the priority date for EB1a is three years currently so if you’re from either of them O-1 will be a necessary stopgap, but for anyone else EB1a applications are open immediately.
Is it unfair that a big company could afford to pay more to hire a desirable employee than a small startup?
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
"We could pay you more and ensure you're able to get that visa, but then we'd need you to pay 20% of your salary back..."
Its already illegal, you just don't know how India behaves. The body shops in the US don't even behave legally in US, how are you going to get the behavior controlled in India?
Just ban organizations caught playing games (that is: "I'll know it when I see it" for labeling) and the ban should include not contracting consultancies that hire foreigners and maybe attached to anyone with feduciary duty as well. It would be very effective.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
You’re competing for this talent against every other company. If they’re good, you (and others) want to hire them.
Again: data set of one, at a high-paying company who generally has a strong ethical bent. There seem to be a lot of other experiences with the system.
Interesting. Citation?
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
Quote
The statute creating the H-1B visa—which allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated workers as well as fashion models from abroad—contains language establishing a “prevailing wage.”4 This prevailing wage requirement is intended to protect the wages of U.S. workers in occupations requiring a college degree from adverse impacts and to prevent college-educated migrant workers from being underpaid and exploited. Corporate lobbyists and other H-1B proponents often cite this prevailing wage requirement in the H-1B law as evidence that H-1B workers cannot be paid less than U.S. workers. However, the reality is that the H-1B statute, regulations, and administrative guidance allow employers wide latitude in setting wage levels....
Although salary information that corresponds to requested positions on LCAs has been made available by DOL for a number of years through the Office of Foreign Labor Certification’s LCA disclosure data, until recently the prevailing wage levels selected by employers were not readily available. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time reported what some had suspected and speculated about but to that point were not able to officially confirm: The vast majority of H-1B jobs were being certified by DOL at the two lowest wage levels.I mean if you follow the law sure.
It's easy to either just pay them below market or hire them at a lower title than the role actually requires.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
So, it's more like saying "people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we're going to improve enforcement". Reasonable statement to me.
How many of these consulting companies just have the most awful, toxic company culture imaginable? I don't think that's a coincidence - that's a purposefully engineered cost saving strategy.
That said, consulting companies out of India are horrible, I don't think they'd be more productive even if they worked twice as hard.
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
That said, whether software is high-skill or not is tangential to the point I'm making. Which is, H1-B is being used to depress wages and that reworking it shouldn't affect jobs that actually have few people that can do it because O-1 allows them to work that job.
Software development may seem simple for a lot of people here on HN, but trust me, I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job. The regulatory environment which requires the "apprenticeship" is a totally different topic and doesn't inform anything on the skill required to do the job. Also, the electrician apprentice gets paid while learning on the job, the software developer in training doesn't.
Watch out. Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job.
do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)
anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
1. I didn't claim that.
2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
With PERM (converting to a green card) they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved. Some of the tricks include putting ads in the newspaper, using esoteric websites and other media such as radio instead of job boards where tech people actually look for jobs. Some Americans who have trouble finding jobs in the current market took on a side project of scraping newspaper ads and these job boards and created https://www.jobs.now/ which lists these jobs. If enough Americans that meet the minimum qualifications apply for a listed job it stops the green card process for that position, usually for 6 months before the sponsor may try again.
Also, there are a lot of stories about people getting O-1 visas via fake credential mills and research papers. Both can and are being gamed to get O-1's.
Are they hiding jobs?
I haven't bothered to ever apply because to me it seemed obvious what is going on.
I still think that you mix up the "green card" and the "H1B visa".
The green card is a status of a permanent resident. A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it. It costs significant money so an employer usually helps with that.
The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US. That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
"The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US."
The H1B visa application has no requirement to try to recruit US workers which makes it easier to game the system to pay the lowest wage possible.
Practically true - but that it’s not permitted to count experience gained while working on an H-1B when applying for a green card.
If an application for a green card is made for a person who’s currently in the USA on a H-1B visa, the person needs to qualify for it based on their qualifications and experience prior to whatever they’ve done in their current H-1B job.
There is no "5 year" requirement to get a green card. A company can even sponsor an employee from abroad (e.g. a satellite office) to get a green card and if approved they will be a permanent resident the moment they arrive in the USA.
Perhaps you are thinking of the five years of a green card needed to apply for citizenship?
And this explains why I recently heard an ad on KNX radio for a tech job at a winery or brewery or something similar, which specified that applications would only be taken by mail.
It also had a massive list of responsibilities and a pay rate about half of what it should be.
Meta being sued by the DoL was supposed to stop ridiculous gaming of the process [0].
Still I think a points system would be better for America and the RAISE Act is looking better everyday [1].
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/facebook-settles-claims-it-d...
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025
You can technically be forced to hire only citizens by paying them really high salaries but you wouldn’t be able to have that many businesses.
If you don't account for the kickback schemes and terrible results.
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
The tech industry like tech stack is broad.
For example, it's nigh impossible to hire an American citizen with professional CUDA or eBPF experience because almost anyone with those skills already has a job. If you have those skills YOU WILL land a job (not remote first though - that era's over).
And it's not like you can retrain a fullstack engineer to understand systems programming overnight - it takes years of experience and knowledge of computer and OS architecture.
And it's not like companies aren't paying top dollar for these skills - they are, but people with those skills simply don't exist in significant numbers in the US.
There's a reason a large portion of the cybersecurity industry shifted to Israel and India - the kinds of table stakes skills in systems development aren't heavily taught in the US anymore compared to 15 years ago, and the only universities where you might have a shot hiring someone with those skills are T10 programs where students can field multiple job offers.
That said, the proposed changes in the H1B program are good - it's easier for a startup or a professional company to sponsor an H1B now instead of dealing with unethical consultancies gumming up the works.
The H1B market is bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups. You want to optimize for the right hand but don't want to make it so hard that you don't end up incentivizing talented people from leaving and returning to India or China or Europe.
That said, I don't envision this having much impact on easing hiring - AI/ML in the hands of experienced devs is fairly powerful AND the economic conditions currently are incentivizing us to limit hiring to only those who are truly critical.
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO of the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
The simplest solution is just to take salary into account. If someone is making $180k a year then they aren't "owned".
For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
I agree, but on the flip side: the point of applying for an H1-B visa is to come and work for a company in a specialised field. If you're trying to use it to get yourself permanently into a country, then that's the wrong visa type to apply for. I've worked overseas on a visa, and it was stressful for this reason, but I was under no illusions about that when I applied for it.
What other mechanisms are there to move to a country that has a quality of life you seek, and work for a company that you feel excited about? Because that's most of the motivation from the people (like me) that lived in an under-developed country, are qualified, and wanted to work on the top of the industry.
You work a bit out of college, some day you get an invite to an interview from a FAANG, you take the interview, and next thing you know you're moving to another country, working for a great salary, and in a huge company. You do life. You meet people, maybe a partner, maybe get married, maybe have a kid (after all, life doesn't stop). All this while on a temporary status with no easy way to progress out of it other than via time.
I have felt this pressure of not wanting to switch jobs and/or having to be extra careful in order to not put myself at risk of losing it. Specially with the current state of the industry. It has put me (and still does) at a disadvantage with my local peers. I am not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but it is a reality. The 'visa choice' is fictional, and not the most relevant part of the process.
I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.
About 20% of H1B visas go to indian outsourcing firms. You know the culprits here. Are you really going to argue that these firms are not abusing the system and underpaying employees?
That's abusing the system, but I dunno, better than abusing the employees that I hear about... Or the straight up fraud where immigrants were paying to get hired on h-1b for fake jobs, or the abuse where job shops would submit 3x the applications for the number of positions they actually had, etc.
Since H1B has a 6 year hard time limit.
Everyone has their own perspective. Your friend who referred to as “rented mules” probably will question you as a friend because you actually want them to be out of this country lol. Just be real, we don’t want H1B slaves who set the bar so high for work ethics. Just stop fake being nice as if you care about their well being. They chose to stay in the US after college knowing the expectation. You are shutting down the door for those who really could of developed into great tech talents.
H1B is not so bad. Many IT people I know came to the US by L1 visa. That is a true modern slavery! Don't like the work? Laid off? Go home, no other options.
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.
So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.
They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.
Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.
The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
And considering most US tech companies have huge growing offices in India (Microsoft has 20,000 employees in India) - no, Western society and India do share values of respect and trust. Thinking otherwise is disrespectful and downright insulting to people across continents who work together everyday.
It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.
At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]
I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...
While I understand from a purely capitalistic view that it makes sense, but Microsoft and others are multi-trillion/billion dollar companies, and they are skimming every last dime while also hurting Americans. The system needs heavy reform, this current change isn't close to enough. To me the rightward shift, especially among college aged men, is partially because of things like this. You can preach that the "replacement theory" is all nonsense, but if you're trying to convince people that have seen their friends or themselves literally replaced at the job with non-Americans...well, it's obvious they are going to start to lean into those ideas.
So much of the right-wing surge could be thwarted by simple policy reforms and it seems like no one wants to do it, or is too beholden to corporations, etc to do it. It's a bit baffling. I've always said politics is a pendulum and it should come as a shock to no one that a problem that is constantly ignored or written off will eventually swing back hard the other way. I think we're seeing that. I think that's why compromise is more important than purity a lot of the time. Unfortunately there will not be much compromise for a long while now.
I am not sure if you are talking about just USA or entire west but this can be said for most western countries.
Really concerning.
I do think it's good to curb abuse by the Indian bodyshop companies like Infosys. They spam the system with applicants to the point that they get more than their fair share of visas for what turn out to be relatively low-paid jobs with fairly horrible working conditions.
At the same time, that couldn't happen if we didn't have the artificial per-country limit on employment-based green cards.
This will hurt new grads and non-engineering STEM applicants though.
But part of all thyis should be that if you did layoffs in the last 12 months (maybe even 2 years), you don't get to apply for H1Bs.
Oh and any system that uses artificial performance metrics to force people out should also count as layoffs. By this I mean that some companies will require a quota of 5-15% of the workforce to get subpar ratings and, in the current environment, that means more likely being put on a PIP and fired within months. If the goal is 5-10% of the workforce every year to be ushered out on PIPs, that's a layoff.
>"There aren't any tech jobs in this city..."
The 14th amendment to the US constitution grants unconditional (and thus, irrevocable) citizenship jos soli.
Naturalization indeed is mandated by the nationality law and not the constitution, yet it ain’t a courtesy. There’s a list of requirements, which once fulfilled mandate the US to grant a person a citizenship.
As for revoking US citizenship, this just not a thing: a person can rescind their own citizenship, but this requires a deliberate action from the person rescinding it. And naturalization can be deemed void, which is not the same as revoked, as it requires a failure in the granting, not a decision after it.
Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
So no, it ain’t courtesy. It’s a universal right, that is ratified in the US constitution, US nationality law, and multiple court decisions.
As for Emma Lazarus, she died in 1887, thirty three years before the US constitution was amended to stop denying voting rights from women.
A child born in this country is entitled to citizenship.
I didn't mention revoking US citizenship. I literally said it's an irrevocable courtesy, which means it cannot be revoked once granted.
> Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
The UN Declaration of Human Rights is subject to the United States constitution when being interpreted by US courts.
Yet shoving and pushing you into the modern world isn’t something for randos on the internet to do, but on yourself. Good luck!
This was the first search result for me.
https://www.visaverge.com/greencard/uscis-issues-green-card-...
Especially in today’s extremely remote friendly environment (and H1B visas outside of maybe biomed research tend to be concentrated in remote friendly fields), if a company cannot hire a candidate on an H1B visa, and the candidate has to return to their home nation, why wouldn’t the company not be thrilled to hire the exact same person abroad for a fraction of the cost?
And with RTO failing miserably, and with nearly everyone on HN assuring us that WFH is as good, if not better, than RTO, it’s not like them working abroad is gonna be materially different from them working in a U.S. city.
Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.
Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.
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