https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224057
Your reply to my comment there:
(me) ... I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs ...
(you) They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
So, you seem to understand the problem. This is not about lack of domestic US talent. This is about disempowering US corporations from importing unnecessary labor to disadvantage US workers (who are currently facing an unfavorable domestic labor market).
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44880832 ("There is no requirement to demonstrate that you cannot find an American to do the job to get an H1b visa approved. If that person applies for a PERM position (needed to convert to a green card) there is. Hence the H1b is easy to game by employers to get cheap indentured servants. 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." -- u/lgleason)
Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)
Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)
How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
Research universities could probably use O-1, as the requirements for O-1A are lower than the bar for getting a tenure-track position. So they would effectively pay $10k to a lawyer rather than $100k to the government.
Unless they clarify that education is exempt from these rules, my wife will surely have to quit her new job. She is supposed to go on fieldwork later this year and she won’t be able to re-enter. Not to mention I can kiss my lecturer offer good bye. This is an incredibly retarded situation.
Want proof? Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella were all on H1B visa at some point.
For instance, there is still no action taken about the L-1B visa classification, which is a lot more open to abuse than H-1B is. It has no cap on how many visas can be issued every year. It also has no obligation to pay the employee a prevailing wage, no requirement for a bachelor's degree to qualify, and it cannot be transferred to a different employer (which means employees are stuck with their sponsor until they qualify for a green card).
Now Trump needs to go after all the "founders" scamming the US through their O-1 visa. That shit needs to end yesterday.
https://extraordinaryaliens.substack.com/p/o1-visa-hacks-for...
Also, you're right that it's often used in a way that wouldn't make sense grammatically if it were written out, but that's true for most acronyms I think; e.g. JPEG or GIF.
"Look at this funny Graphics Interchange Format I just sent you!"
TACOBELL
- Trump Always Chickens Out Before Eventually Losing Loudly
Now that you say, I can see some similarities with Al Pastor.
And FWIW, I think the H1B program, like the TFW program in Canada, is outrageously corrupt and has zero legitimacy, and the laughable foundations that people use to justify it -- namely a completely unsubstantiated labour shortage -- is such a ridiculous lie that it deserves to be obliterated. It is a way for the ultra-rich to stomp on worker rights and compensation.
That's demonstrably false, even just by my own experience with people, so not sure I can take what you're saying seriously.
Yes, there's corruption and abuse, but I've also worked with some fantastic, excellent, smart, ambitious, hard-working people on H-1B visas. They would not have been in the US without it.
I've also worked with some mediocre fools who were on H-1B visas. That's the problem we should be focusing on, and there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
From your minimal activity on here it seems that you're Indian. Do you think you have an objective, ground-truth position on the H1B program?
As to the "scapegoat", if there is a bad economic climate, it's simply obvious that the purported labour shortage is no longer the justification, doesn't it? You don't have to scapegoat to point out that a program contingent on an economic condition needs to change when the condition changes.
I'm neither in the US nor do I work for a US company, so granted, I personally don't have much skin in the game, and yes I don't have objective, ground-truth position, like you do, but you fail to notice the comment I was replying to, which was simply pointing out blanket statements, namely this:
> I think the H1B program [...] has zero legitimacy
I take it me being Indian doesn't sit right with you, considering you're Canadian yourself. Now as for my bias, I'm frustrated by the rampant racism piggybacking on the singular fact that the majority H1B visa holders are Indian, which comes back to my point: there is a lot of perfectly understandable frustration surrounding H1B, but does this make the racism alright?
Is H1B exploited? Yes. Are ALL H1B engineers good for nothing, wage slaves? Probably Not.
Now, FWIW, the company I work (not WITCH) for has sales engineers in US who are under H1B, so yes, I can claim that the legitimacy of H1B is in fact, non-zero.
As for the "scapegoat", I've seen discussions go from "DEI" and "woke" taking away jobs to "H1B Indians". I'm sure there will be someone else to blame once all the H1Bs are "evicted".
How is this remotely appropriate to my reply, beyond a rather transparent attempt to taint readers?
> I take it me being Indian doesn't sit right with you, considering you're Canadian yourself.
Another incredibly weird comment, again wholly inappropriate. Does this tactic actually work?
Indians have a significant bias on this and similar topics, and given that there are several hundred million English speaking Indians online, their presence is seen in every discussion. It is always some manner of "this is good for you and it's racism if you oppose it" (which is a rather ironic given the incredible racism that Indians are often observed plying when they do get to the West).
> the company I work (not WITCH) for has sales engineers in US who are under H1B, so yes, I can claim that the legitimacy of H1B is in fact, non-zero
Instead of hiring Americans to staff an American sales office, they parachute an army of Indians into the US to use US systems to undercut Americans? This is precisely the illegitimate use of H1Bs, so what an incredible claim.
Regardless, I have no idea why you've become so angry and racist about this. Is it because you hate Canadians? Weird. Hey look, I can do that ignorant tactic to divert from the discussion as well.
> As for the "scapegoat", I've seen discussions go from "DEI" and "woke" taking away jobs to "H1B Indians".
Almost as if it's a complex and multifaceted conversation? Some are diversions, some are legitimate grievances, and again that is just nonsensical distractions. If the economic climate is bad, which you specifically said, programs like the H1B should be winnowed down to the truly exceptional. Which obviously includes zero "sales engineers".
Okay, I apologize for the snarky remark, I just found it odd that you called my nationality into question.
> Another incredibly weird comment, again wholly inappropriate. Does this tactic actually work?
This was simply mirroring what you did, I don't know if you meant it in good faith, but it was inappropriate on my part.
> "this is good for you and it's racism if you oppose it"
I would genuinely not have engaged with you if not for this comment. For my part, I'm simply concerned about racism against Indians, which I've seen increasing more and more in recent years. I don't have a problem with criticism, I'm just concerned about the slippery slope.
> Instead of hiring Americans to staff an American sales office
As I mentioned, I don't work for WITCH (consulting) companies. This is an assumption you made out of thin air. I work on a product based company that sell it to American businesses. There is a relatively handful of sales engineers/support engineers in the US, and not just H1Bs, this includes US citizens too. There is no undercutting here, it's a relative niche that American firms haven't bothered with. FWIW, I know a few companies similar to mine, where our target market is NA, though I agree it's very few. We can also afford to pay $100K fee, because of the smaller number of staff.
> Is it because you hate Canadians?
> From your minimal activity on here it seems that you're Indian. Do you think you have an objective, ground-truth position on the H1B program?
Assuming you made the original comment in good faith, I apologize for the remark. I simply lurk here and read whatever is posted, not much of a commenter!
> Almost as if it's a complex and multifaceted conversation?
Yes, but how often do you find people willing to have complex and multifaceted conversation? Purely from personal experience, the moment people find they're talking with an Indian, they tend to have many assumptions. Also note, I'm predominantly talking about conversations online.
By all accounts those arguments were pretty correct, no? The tariff rollout was delayed multiple times, changed multiple times. What we have now doesn't very much look like what Trump announced back in March/April.
And the tariffs may disappear soon, depending on SCOTUS. Not that I depend on SCOTUS doing the right thing anymore, but I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised on this one.
So, details to follow.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-09-19/trump-...
The Hyundai factory exposed this. The VISA'd employees (or non-VISA'd? I don't remember the details offhand) were only there in the first place overseeing the project because they literally could not find anyone qualified to do the fucking job in Georgia.
Last I checked, Software Developers did not have a 0% unemployment statistic, so clearly there are American software developers that could be employed in those jobs, but FAANG still hires an H1B. Gee, I wonder why.
Maybe it's because H1Bs are cheaper than an American. Maybe it's because H1Bs cannot say no without risking being deported.
This claim that "No no no, every H1B was fine and totally could not even possibly be replaced by American labor" flies in the face of the actual reality of the tech industry. Microsoft can't find an American to write code? Bullshit, they just fired tons of them.
The fact that it is less abused in other industries should not be used to paper over the games the tech industry play. FAANG have been found multiple times to be collaborating to suppress tech industry wages. This is just another way they do that.
>could not find anyone qualified to do the fucking job in Georgia.
There was not a single American anywhere in the entire united states that could do things to build a car factory? Really? They couldn't fly someone out from Texas, or Michigan? Am I supposed to believe we don't have any human beings in the entire united states that know how to build part of a factory?
They also have the option of just not building the factory. Somehow you guys expect to increase manufacturing, while also increasing costs and acting like money grows on trees for businesses, and if you just got rid of the dirty brown and yellow people, you'd be getting paid $500k to work on an assembly line.
I do find it interesting that these trillion dollar companies can't find domestic workers, at their level of wealth they should simply be forced to pay for the education of Americans to create a funnel of workers rather than exporting this societal need to other nations.
It's $100K per employee per year.
"the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000"
It sounds like it applies every time you leave and enter, provided you are a nonimmigrant alien on H1B (which they all are).
Ultimately this isn't going to do anything to reform the H-1B program; this is just trump "doing something", which he'll claim as a success (and his base will eat up), even if it does nothing or makes things worse.
Moving jobs offshore is already cheaper and has been for decades. There's a reason it's seen as a dead end / ktlo.
This change is a big win for all American tech workers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2024/09/16/the-micros...
$100k is a big pizzo (protection fee)!
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-19/ted-cruz-...
> “That’s right outta ‘Goodfellas,’ that’s right out of a mafioso going into a bar saying, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” Cruz said, using the iconic New York accent associated with the Mafia.
Exhibit 1: Tariff revenues to bail out American farmers: https://www.ft.com/content/0267b431-2ec9-4ca4-9d5c-5abf61f2b...
In my understanding H-1B is supposed to be for generic workers, rather than O1 which is for people with extraordinary ability in their field. That's why there is limit, lottery and high application fees.
H-2B is for ordinary workers.
I am an immigrant (not to US though), so looking from this standpoint. If I wanted to move to the US, H1B would be a pretty straightforward way for me to do so - as it is for many professionals now. With this path cut off - what is left to people who are just good professionals in their field, but maybe not exactly Nobel laureates? There is Green card lottery, but being a lottery, it's not ideal for life planning, and it doesn't account for one's professional achievements.
Having a degree and expertise isn't sufficient. There needs to be a reason a US company should hire you over a domestic applicant.
The $100k fee basically makes it not about money. It's going to be more expensive to hire a foreign worker - meaning that if they're chosen over a domestic applicant, it's for a real reason, not just because they'll take a lower salary.
Unlikely. America has a massive services export surplus.
China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. If people stop immigrating to the US, then we will surely fall behind technologically, economically and militarily, and soon we will be making t-shirts for Chinese for $5 an hour.
[1]: https://www.cecc.gov/agencies-responsible-for-censorship-in-...
OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469124 - July 2025 (370 comments) [15 year amortization required for international R&D]
We'll see a rebalancing for sure.
But you'll really need that person. It will also kill OPT in general.
This was already addressed by changing the odds to be per unique candidate, not application, thereby reducing the incentive to game it. More context here: https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/uscis-announces...
And yes, it does work, because we have data from the year before this change, to the year after to compare against. The "Eligible Registrations for Beneficiaries with Multiple Eligible Registrations" dropped from 47,314 for FY 2025 to 7,828 for FY 2026. Source: https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-announces-strengthened-i...
I believe the parent commenter's argument is that they instead play the game with multiple people. The increased chance is not per person, but achieved by using more people, each with their own chance.
I don't know if they do this, I merely find the argument itself intriguing with the shift in perspective, and that you as the reader has to keep track of the change in context from the individual one level up.
When faced with an arbitrarily small, insignificant problem, in lieu of the status quo, the solution he/she advocates is to completely dismantle the status quo without any form and reason instead of actually focusing on the solution.
I.e punishment over progress.
oof, that's a big price increase.
What I care about is the current system isn't being used to find hard to find labor, it's used to bring in cheap labor in an abusive situation.
We as a nation are really better off if we bring in the best in the world to work here with a cushy salary.
I'd much rather push everything into the salary of the person being hired. Both because it ends up raising the median salary for local workers and because it stimulates the local economy where that person is brought in. It's also a yearly fee. I think there's value in getting a very capable person working in your company and having a high salary is one way to make such roles highly competitive. A highly capable person will ultimately make everyone they work with more capable.
It was never, ever that they "can't find someone".
There are extraordinarily few roles handed out to H1Bs where there aren't enormous numbers of domestic options. Indeed, by far the biggest users of H1Bs in tech are shitty consulting firms like Cognizant, Infosys and Tata doing absolute garbage, low skill development.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are truly unique talents in the AI space, for instance. Not someone to build Yet Another agent, but someone who actually understands the math. They are extraordinarily rare in that program. And for those exceptional talents, a $100K fee would be completely worth it. But they aren't going to pay it for an army of garbage copy-paste consultant heads.
In actual reality it's just a way to push down wages by forcing Americans to compete with the developing world in their own country. In Canada we have "TFWs" filling the same role. It is a laughably unjustified, massively abusive program.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
You're believing and repeating the propaganda. The H1B was sold to Americans as for this purpose and then very deliberately turned into a loophole for importing massive amounts of foreign labor.
How silly is it to accept the idea that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla are not be able to hire Americans for any role they want. They're the richest companies on the planet!
These companies use the H1B to increase their labor supply, suppress wages, and gain indentured workers.
If they couldn't cheat by importing cheaper foreign labor they would have to compete against each other much more than they do for American workers.
This is all about big companies rigging the system. They do not care if it's good or bad for America, the foreign workers, or anyone else. It's simple greed.
American companies shouldn't be able to bribe American politicians into letting them cheat the market at the expense of Americans.
If companies couldn't cheat by importing foreign workers they would have to hire and pay Americans more. They would also lobby for good things, like educating even more Americans to work for them.
The system is corrupt.
and entirely different propaganda is that without being able to hire so many people constantly, the work just doesnt happen, and companies downsize to save money rather than grow to make more money.
a greedier facebook doesnt dump a ton of money into VR or ai glasses.
The idea of requiring a high salary is reasonable, but I'd make it rather e.g. 120% of the median salary in a particular industry.
The percentage could be reasonable, but I think it's too easily gamed. You just know the company would try and say they are bringing in entry level people for whatever they want and use whatever lowest median they could find. There needs to be a fairly significant minimum salary to avoid such monkey business.
An H1B job should be cushy. Otherwise, the company should simply raise salaries to find local workers.
I don't think it's easy to game the median number, or the third quartile number if you prefer. Unless the salary distribution is severely bimodal, it should work reasonably.
If you can't find somebody skilled enough here to work for 200k or less, then you should probably be paying 200k or more since you're looking for a role that is niche and low supply.
This fee is a great way to ensure that there's very little medical services available to rural populations and to help kill science in the US among other things.
Don't post docs usually come over on J-1s (if they aren't using practical training)?
Part of the shortage is also because very few people can afford to become doctors.
In many cases, the rebalancing that is needed is from subspecialties to community based primary care in rural and other underserved areas. Some new medical schools appeared in the 1970’s to address the need for more family medicine docs. What happened was completely predictable… more subspecialists. Graduates follow the money trail when choosing residencies and fellowships.
Doctors, pilots and other genuinely essential professions are well covered by a number of other visa categories, such as EB-2.
I don't think the EB-2 process allows the applicant to stay within the US while waiting for the priority date to become current so staying in the US and working during that 3-12 year period won't work without another visa type.
Rural hospitals are lucky to have any doctor on staff let alone a cardiologist. They are mostly staffed by nurses for quick patch-up work and life flights to major medical centers.
H1B doesn't solve the problem of poor communities getting poor healthcare. Frankly, it costs too much to become a doctor which limits where doctors can be employed. Plenty would like to work rural, but not with $500,000 in student loans. And no, that's no joke. I have a nephew going to medical school in Idaho and that's what his loans are.
A serious problem should not be treated with a band-aid and if you think a band-aid is ok do not be surprised the problem gets worse.
"My rural patients are so much more insufferable than my urban ones"
https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1nkb8f9/my_rural_...
It seems that the reasons for missing doctors are... complex.
I retired from medicine, having spent my career at a well-known institution in the upper midwest of the U.S. Over the course of my tenure there, I took care of patients from all parts of the world, all walks of life. Some of my most cherished patients hailed from rural farm communities. Whatever that commenter’s issues might be, this doesn’t line up with my experience at all. The work of the physician is to tailor their work to meet the needs of the patient by understanding their needs in ways that may be difficult to discern through ways other than empathic understanding.
There was no prediction or conclusion made whatsoever, it was a number of for the Internet quite high quality personal observations. If you are unable or unwilling to accept the personal observations of those people, here doctors, then the issue is on your side.
We also know that there indeed is a significant difference in culture, we can see that in elections and elsewhere. That too is a "known bias", which you also ignore.
For example:
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-electoral-coll...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07430...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...
So differences in general are real, and you cannot simply dismiss any anecdotes as "bias", especially since there never was a claim for that thread to be anything more than that.
This divide is also not the same all over the globe, the US may be more extreme (example: https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/news/2024/03/t... -- "Compared to the US, UK and Canada, overall levels of urban-rural electoral divides are still substantially lower in most European countries, due to centrist parties attracting support from both urban and rural areas."). That too has some interesting comments showing this in that thread, with the bad anecdotes coming mostly from US doctors.
So, if we're using the reddit thread you yourself have presented as evidence of the general sentiment on this topic, I think the parent commenter is correct in arguing that there is no particular universal trend here. These experiences probably have more to do with the simple randomness of where you work and what kind of personality you have.
To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically. It would probably be wise to use that in the formula as well, so as not to disadvantage smaller areas, where cost-of-living and salaries are lower.
I like the goal of making sure visa works are paid well for where they live.
I would not want to restrict the visa worker geographically though. Or alternatively I am unsure about the overhead of tracking the location visa holders and enforcing salary changes.
Might also have unintended knock on effect of encouraging job growth in low cost of living areas.
The h1bs are often used to abuse that system by just importing someone willing to work for x, with the added bonus of it being very hard for them to ever leave your company.
https://thefactcoalition.org/tariffs-manufacturing-tax-break...
If you couldn't undercut H1B salaries there is little incentive to use them except for their desired purpose (you can't find any local workers).
And if foreign workers are a "better deal" because they take more abuse (due to terms of their immigration) this further disincentives fair competition and makes the long-term problem larger.
> There is a lot of under-employment for highly qualified US citizens.
No, there isn't. Even with the current AI mess, the unemployment for highly-qualified software engineers is 2.8%: https://www.ciodive.com/news/june-jobs-report-comptia-data-I...
The AI is now decimating the jobs for the recent CS graduates.
qualified nurses are having to get jobs at retail, etc to survive. For some sectors, it's importing cheap labor (aka wage suppression).
You also are missing another possibility, the nurse jobs can just disappear and patients will be left with worse care.
What now?
"The proposal would increase the wage floor for H-1B visa recipients from $60,000 to $150,000, eliminate the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, and replace the current lottery-based selection process with a highest-bidder system."
EDIT: This is a proposal by 1 senator - not Trump. https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-change-proposal-2132484
EDIT: This is a proposal by 1 senator - not Trump.
But that would be a free market that respected human rights, and Americans don't want that! Equality? Freedom? That's just marketing!
So just open USA borders to anyone that passes screening (security / health / etc)?
What about gov subsidized welfare / healthcare / education / ...? Would you end all that? If not end it how would you handle the situation with current citizens vs the influx of foreigners who will expect these things be provided for them? And if those who show up start to vote for communism or some other ism that you do not like what will you do?
It is ridiculous. Do you have a citation for the $50K number?
I'm deeply unhappy about H1B abuse. I've watched it happen, in front of me. It's definitely a real thing. But I also worry about the legit folks, that want to take advantage of it.
However, when used by people that we (theoretical, rational economic actors) actually want here… those truly exceptional people who may not look exceptional on paper… Well, getting those people here has been one of the magical things about the United States of America, so far.
Messing with that is dangerous. It needs to be done, but it needs to be done very surgically.
Does the extension also cost 100k?
I don't know the statutory authority under which this is being done, if this is true it will come out in the next few days.
I would have preferred a simple auction, seems like the most reasonable solution.
That will make the program non-viable for a large percentage of the people who use it today.
I suspect that the o1 visa would get far more use if this change were enacted.
It seems to high. Again: why not make it an auction?
Something's gotta give, and the endless dancing with partial offshoring and H1Bs is band-aiding over two options: a bloodbath for American workers where competing for their jobs is actually opened up to the globe, or a massive, nationalist set of labor protections to stop other countries from bidding on work asked for by the US markets. Making H1Bs more costly is a little stronger than a Band-Aids, but not by much.
It's not doing really well though, COL is sky high, and wages are low.
I'm sure Canada will gladly accept highly skilled engineers.
The sort of high educated immigrants of the sort that would work in software engineering will not face remarkable headwinds.
You're right because that totally didn't happen to varying degrees in various industries in the US...
This insanity seems collective.
How so?
Open up studios in British Columbia and hire the relatively cheaper labour. It's on the same time zone as Silicon Valley. It's a no brainer.
Until anything actually happens there's no reason to take this president at his word.
Why? Trump was known for "telling it as it is" so shouldn't the assumption be that it will happen?
AFAICT, the people that promoted him that way often had mutually incompatible interpretations of what he was saying that happened to fit their own biases coming in, which they felt like Trump was agreeing with.
And as the rubber of vague, contradictory, and incoherent statements hit the road of substantive action, that impression became a lot less common.
Not startups. 100k is like 75% of base comp in most bay area startups
Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.
I suspect that flying someone from Buenos Aires to SF or NYC for onboarding and then and back would cost significantly less than $100k.
Remote work from Europe is harder in this regard, and from India... would be night shifts only.
I do not mind working all day until I pass out, and I do not mind adjusting my life to a different timezone as long as I get paid enough, and considering that USD > HUF, it is probably a no-brainer.
So yeah, hire me for full remote! Unfortunately traveling is out of the question due to disability.
What if they are a contractor? Well usually the law treats these things like ducks and asks if they quack. If it quacks like employment it is subject to that law.
I work for an American startup, remotely from S. America. I'm hired according to the (extensive, and expensive) local labor laws, while my startup likely knows absolutely nothing about the intricacies of how my countries' labor laws work, the EoR just handles everything and sends the employer a bill every month.
I dont know of a single person here on a visa making less than 150k salary. They get the same stock, bonus and benefits that every one else gets.... it's well over 300k to have that staff member when all is said and done.
You're not adding on 100k a year, you're adding on 100k for a 3-6 year employee.
Even if that works out to 20k a year, it's pocket change in the grand scheme of things.
I'm glad to hear this has been the environment you've worked in, but I don't believe it reflects the majority of skilled workers in the US on H1-B.
H1b also only takes into account the actual salary, it completely ignores stock bonuses.
The USCIS uses the BLS data for the prevailing wage. You can also check it on the BLS website if you want.
Do you think that the median "Software" developer being brought over on a H1-B is Level 4? Even if you think a large number of them are L4, do you see the issue with trying to exceed a median salary at 150k if the L1 is 117k and the L4 (management or supervisory) is only 212k ... and we're using data from one of the most expensive corners of the US?
Anyway, I looked at studies of H1B wage gap and they either find none or at most 10-20%.
I'm relieved to hear this and appreciate you giving me a better understanding of the pay situation in Software.
$150,000 median yearly salary would mean H1-B positions are taking home 10k a month. I've worked with too many people in these positions to believe they're being paid reasonable wages - unless you have an extremely in-demand skillset, H1-B holders are often treated like indentured servants by huge companies/teams.
Don't have data on this but anecdotally the base salary range for most YC startup jobs advertised here is around 150k-200k based on what I see.
You are right that it does amortize if the employee stays long enough.
And I expect workers on H-1B change jobs much less frequently than citizens & green card holders (and holders of "safer" visas), since changing jobs on an H-1B involves more risk that can end up with you being required to leave the US.
All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people. I cant say the same for all my localy sourced colleges. The tragedy of the economics in most of these cases was that they were making the same amount of money as their peers and not more...
In a lot of cases companies are getting a Steff Curry or a Lionel Messi and paying them the average of the rest of the team...
Anecdotally myself, I've worked with great ones yes, but the majority aren't incredible.
In the tech arms of banks you can see a lot of what I would describe as at best regular software engineers, nothing special.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...
That's surprising; for me, H-1Bs have run the gamut, with a range of talent and ambition that's pretty similar to the range of talent and ambition I see with US-born workers. And I think this is perhaps the problem: your experience should be the norm, if the H-1 visa program is functioning properly, but I don't think that's the case.
Among my friends who have been on H-1Bs, they tend to be high performers, but that's just selection bias at work.
Mathematically if we collected all the brightest people from both these nations, say the top 5 percent of their population thats 100 million people in that pool to pick from.
The entire population of the US is 350million.
Comp sci went from something people did cause they enjoyed to something they did cause they thought it was a pay day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ocpf0g/oc_...
We ran out of talented, passionate people a long time ago.
There is also a cultural problem in America, one that buisness and staff are afflicted with.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA (pay attention to Noyce in Japan and the article he wrote... think about intel today, compare it to the above article).
I don't think Noyce's take as a business owner is far removed from the above take from the prospective of staff.
The top 5 percent of India and China is a pool of 200 millon people.
The top 5 percent of the US is a pool of 17 millon people.
If your looking for talent and not looking to other nations your going to come up short.
That exactly is Trump’s intention, no?
He has been pretty good at sticking to his campaign promises.
Whitehouse already clarified the new fees apply to new applicants, not current H1B. It's an opening gambit, designed to shock people and get them to the negotiating table. If not, they will continue to ratchet up the pressure.
I wouldn't be too surprised if you genuinely believe that Ukraine war has been over since Jan 20 and that grocery prices are at all time low.
Certainly the $100k fee is going to make the application much more expensive (though you can amortize it across 3 or 6 years, right?), but it was already not exactly cheap to deal with the legal costs around H-1B employees.
> Among BigTech, maybe like ~20 companies will be willing to pay this per employee.
I think that's a vast, vast underestimation. Most companies, even not-so-big ones, will continue to pay it. Maybe they'll think twice a bit more for future hires, and try harder to find someone local, which I don't think is a bad thing. Or, of course, this could just represent another factor in downward wage pressure across the board, which is bad.
More like you bend the knee and get destroyed. The better option is to not bend the knee, but weak people will do what gets them further today without thinking about the future.
I say this not because of cowardice, but because I know the cemeteries are full of brave dead people.
Sure, if you have no spine, morals, or will to do what is right.
> You need to read the room, if you don't like your odds, leave the fight for another day.
Spoken like someone who enjoys position of privilege.
> I say this not because of cowardice, but because I aknow the cemeteries are full of brave dead people.
Ah yes, I bet those dead people wish they'd just "followed orders" instead.
Keep making excuses for billionaires if you want; I'll resist if I'm given the chance. A cemetery full of people who actually tried is better than the world of non-cowardly room-readers you describe.
F1 -> OPT -> H1 bridge is way more expensive now.
Universities are bound to lose a ton of money due to this. Those outside of the top 50 will likely get hammered.
Yes, it brings in more income for the government at the expense of universities.
It’s a great way to remove h1b fraud and abuse but you do burn down a bit of your garage in the process of getting rid of the rat.
This is a significant chunk of revenue for many colleges to keep their budget in shape.
Even in conservative states, lots of colleges are reliant on this stream of income. A loss of this stream is going to put a strain on them to balance their budget, or seek more help from govt.
The proclamation gives me the impression that foreign students are exempt from the fee.
https://www.wsmimmigration.com/immigration-resources/faqs/fi...
F1 is the same. You can have an expired visa but maintain legal student status in the US because visa is for entry only.
If this doesn’t apply to foreign US university students then this policy actually helps those students because it will free up spots in the lottery for them or eliminate the lottery, and reduce the quota line for quota country student currently studying.
I think a very high application fee is actually part of a good solution, but is useless by itself.
A flawed proposal:
* Dispense with the 'need to search for a qualified American' which just complicates the process without achieving the stated goal, and includes a ton of legal and bureaucratic expense and time.
* A large application fee paid from the company to the federal government.
* The worker's relocation expenses must also be covered by the company.
* The worker gets a 10 year work authorization on the day of their arrival.
* The worker gets to leave their sponsoring employer on the day of their arrival, if they choose to. The employment contract may not include any clawbacks of anything.
The latter bullet is the key one. That's the one that uses market forces to truly enforces this person is being paid above market wages, and is being treated well, at their sponsoring employer. (which in turn means they don't undercut existing labor in the market).
It also means that employers don't really look abroad unless there really is a shortage of existing labor. But when there is a true shortage and you're willing to spend, the door is open to act quickly.
The obvious defect is that it creates an incentive for the employee to pay the federal fee themselves (hidden) plus more for the privilege of getting sponsored, and the company basically being a front for this process. Effectively buying a work authorization for themselves. I'm not sure how to overcome that. Then again, the current system could also suffer that defect (I don't know how common it is).
You almost had me there.
We can do better than bonding people by immigration status. This might be controversial, but I don't think should be bonding people at all.
I'm open to hearing why it's ok, but it's going to take a lot of evidence to convince me that a company's well-being is part of that calculus.
But those work permits mostly concern the individual and the government. The employer is not as much sponsoring them as providing evidence.
Yes, you have three months to find a new job if you're fired, but it's Europe, you most likely got at least a 3 month notice as well.
[1]: https://www.udi.no/en/answer-pages/answers-skilled-worker/#l...
Also, it is definitely not just a formality to change employers. For example, on a blue card the new employer must prove to the ministry that they couldn’t find anyone local or EU to fill this position aka “Labour Market Test”. The position needs to be registered in a special gov database to prove that, etc, etc.
how long is that reasonable time in europe? For H1b it's only 60 days
If they are just using the program to pay less than they otherwise would for labor that does exist in the us, well, then we have another issue.
I would modify the proposal to include a larger annual fee rather than an application fee, so that the initially sponsoring company isn’t solely bearing the cost. There should also be a floor pay rate for the visa holder, something the 75th or 80th percentile of both the company and of income in the MSA the visa holder is located in.
I dont know if thats a good idea. It does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Im also not sure its a bad idea either, it seems useful from an economic perspective. What i know its not is "pointless", it does do something.
A lot of those bullet points could and perhaps should be shuffled around and the terms changed, but not in a way where the employees are more or less tethered to the company.
As a counterpoint to my own argument, one could argue that those programs let people escape even worse living conditions, so I guess it could be exchanging a greater form of oppression for a lesser one, which is still better than nothing.
I don't want to be too hyperbolic, but this has the same vibes of "but freeing slaves will impact the economy!" IMO businesses that can't operate ethically shouldn't be encouraged.
A company that is confident it is offering worthy salary and career should have no extra reason to worry a foreign worker will quit during first week, than that a local worker would do the same thing.
The only difference a fee would make under such conditions is that locals become cheaper to hire, which is the point.
If you are sponsoring an employee for a visa and "it's a great thing they can't quit, it's the main thing that's keeping them here!", then you are abusing the system and should be excluded anyways.
I thought they needed these foreign workers because no American could do the job?
Right now, the H1B system is used to bring over cheap labor, willing to work for compensation and conditions worse than native labor. This is not the stated goal of the program, the idea was to bring over highly skilled labor doing jobs that no-one native is able to. The system detailed above is supposed to be a way to change it from how it currently is to what it was supposed to be.
The whole reason most people stay at jobs? (Theoretically)
That's the whole point. It distorts market forces when companies are allowed to just trap people.
Else, if company A pays a $100k fee, company B has an incentive to give the worker $90,000 more to jump ship. And this devolves to no one paying the $100k fee.
Your other points are a good start. The main thing I would add is a floor on salary. H1B for a >$200k job makes some sense, it shows it's essential, the employer really wants to fill it and is having a hard time finding a US citizen. H1B for average or below average salaries is where the real abuse is. It's basically a form of indentured servitude.
Make the incentives align with the priority, is what OP was getting at.
I'm with OP. Make it crazy expensive and let the employee quit if they want. Employers will immediately build the 'search for qualified citizens' into the process themselves.
You can argue you only care about the now and, sure, if that's all you care about, who am I to say your priorities are wrong?
I do think that you're wrong though, I think it doesn't make you better off neither now nor in the following years. But, again, who the heck am I to tell you how to run your country. I guess we'll see how this plays out.
It is reasonable that if you get a temporary visa to perform work in another country, and you decide you don't want to do that work anymore, you leave. They aren't enslaved or anything if the work is not worth it you can attempt to transfer your status to another employer or leave.
I'm not familiar with current H1B law, but what prevents this from happening today? I've hired away an H1B holder in the past; the process wasn't particularly difficult.
My understanding at the time was that the tricky thing for H1B holders is that they can only have a 60-day gap of unemployment before they need to leave the country (or find a different visa resolution, I guess).
Now, if this new fee applies to H1B transfers as well as the initial application, well, that'll actually make it harder for H1B holders to change jobs.
A lottery allows a natural influx of people, who are free to find their way into whatever jobs are needed. It's another form of market solution, but more of a push model than a pull model. But it also, logically, reduces wages across the board (to some degree).
A pull-based model, where companies compete to bid for visa slots, lowers wages in high-end roles, because visa holders are beholden to their sponsor company, and uprooting and moving back to your home country is not something to be taken lightly.
Most H1B go through perm process that does this already.
My ancestors came here ~140 years ago when the only "visa" process was a look in the mouth at Ellis Island. I don't see any fundamental reason why we need to have stricter regulations than that, and I reject dragging the Overton window further right on immigration.
Funny thing is those who opened the gate will be protected from consequences of their own policies in their gated communities.
That's what we see here in Canada after reckless immigration policies implemented by past government.
For what it's worth I know multiple people who have been turned away from Canada because their immigration laws are even stricter than ours. So I don't know how much you can attribute your lack of housing to immigration.
Saying Canadian immigration laws are stricter that US is just delusional.
Canada has the most straightforward and permissive immigration laws, if you don't take countries like Argentina or Dominican Republic. Fill up the forms, get your score, wait for a draft, obtain your PR, wait 4 years, you're a citizen, that's the whole immigration. Compare it to h1b now.
> Compare it to h1b now.
H-1b is a non-immgrant work visa, so it should be compared to the same category in Canada, not the immigration process (which in the US is nearly identical to the process you describe for Canada at the same level of detail, except “wait for a draft” is instead “wait for your priority date to come up in the Visa Bulletin.", and the four years is 10 years.)
Is there such a thing in US? Maybe I'm missing something, because the only realistic way to immigrate to US that I know is h1b lottery/caps bs.
This is revisionist history. 140 years ago the Chinese Exclusion Act had already been in place for 3 years, and the Foran Act had just been passed. The high clearance rate of immigrants at Ellis Island had far more to do with preliminary screenings being conducted by transport companies, who were liable for the cost of deportation plus a fine.
This is not true. Transferring your H1-B to another employer is entirely possible, the new employer will have to file the application as usual, but the application is not subject to the annual H1-B quotas.
At least this was the way it was several years ago. I doubt the process has changed since.
This is not true. Typically you want to stay until i140 which for me took 1 year or so back in 2020. If I want to switch there are multiple other reasons I'd end up delaying the switch anyway (wait for vest, bonus etc ...)
This would be workable if it also results in the person losing their visa. There must be some downside for the employee, otherwise it's an invitation for abuse.
If the worker gets to keep their visa then it's just a backdoor way to get a company to pay for their visa and relocation so they can immediately quit and then go do some other job they actually want (at no expense to the next employer).
You underestimate the ability of INFY/TCS etc.. to game these laws.
> I think a very high application fee is actually part of a good solution, but is useless by itself.
This is always going to be bad if you compare to what any functioning democracy should be doing in this situation which to revert the deterioration of wages and punish/reeducate abusers. I admit it's idealistic, but if you could suspend the need for political realism here a moment there is a chance you could see this is only logical.
A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.
It's kind of sad to see the accelerated downfall of your country.
But that is your story you believe, consider that the parent commenter has the exact same (mirrored) mindset.
A useful segue to avoid you or them "being resigned": given that you say you're "skeptical", what would be the minimal proof you'd consider valid for you to change your mind?
I might be wrong, fully willing to cede the point, but this whole thing going on is more than _just this point_.
Have you ever considered what causes income inequality? Maybe policy that favors globalist, ownership class over salaried workers? H1B in it's current form favors owners/managers over workers! We are saying the same thing. We have to analyze the causes of income inequality in order to solve it.
I will leave you with one last thought: the states with the lowest gini co-efficient are the ones that have been more conservative over time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
policy matters!
Mixing a wolf with a bunch of sheep isn't diversity, it's dinner time.
Have a barbie, find some middle ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGdj1TwBU1w
Of course - they're connected. Taking advantage of labor is a big part of income inequality, including the way H1B is used/abused.
I've worked with some extraordinary H1B sw engineers. I would say the ratio of great to mediocore is about the same as for non-H1B sw engineers.
I don't buy the argument that there's a big shortage of talent for these jobs in the US, especially in a job market like there is right now.
Having said that, I do know quite a few people who have been in the US on H-1B visas, and many of them are exceptionally skilled. I think those are the kinds of people we should be granting H-1B visas. I also know quite a few H-1B holders who I wouldn't ever want to work with again, and there are too many people in that group. Not saying there aren't plenty of US citizens I wouldn't want to work with ever again, but that's a separate issue.
I think my HN karma right now would be over 1,000,000 if it wasn't for all the downvotes each time I've said this same thing. I ballpark 95.87% of all SWEs are mediocre-to-less-than-that. I have 30 years of experience behind me to back this up :)
This "10x engineer" jazz is really just someone who is good-to-very-good compared to the rest of the crew
Do you suggest that they check the immigration status and offer to some people lower compensation because of their status?
This is precisely what HR and hiring managers at FAANG companies are instructed and trained to avoid.
1) Hiring manager to have incentive to hire quality talent at the most economical price
2) Foreign talent be more desperate than domestic talent
The effect is practically guaranteed even if there is exactly zero intent by the hiring manager or any conscious 'discrimination.' Incentives beget results and people may not ponder how they got there, and they often don't.
Unless you change (1) or (2) all the discrimination legislation, lawsuits, and 'training' in the world isn't worth the paper it is written on.
The incentives ensure that it will happen with zero intent, and probably without the people doing it even realize they're doing it. It's not illegal to see someone, think of them as a 'sucker' but not even realize why, then lowball them, which is far more likely than for a person to actually consciously confront themselves they may be a racist.
In any case, even if they know it's illegal, it's not so easy to enforce, the fact that people get successfully sued or jailed a small fraction of the time isn't going to be some solace.
The only way to actually solve it is to remove the incentive in place, namely either the market pressure to get the best developer at the cheapest price or the vulnerability of being an immigrant.
But yes, as far as I know companies would usually offer an H1B applicant lower salary. They know the candidate will need visa sponsorship because the candidate has to say up front (usually in the first conversation) if they are authorized to work in the US. If the companies know they will have to undertake costly sponsorship, and as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary: foreign nationals are not a protected class so salary discrimination on the basis of who will need visa sponsorship is just to be expected in the current system...
Though there's pretty hard limitations on what you can transfer with - it has to be the same sector, similar limitations on minimum salary, and requires work on the new employer's part to move the H1B to them (so you can't keep it quiet, and it's another barrier as it's non-zero cost for lawyers etc. to actually do that).
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-e-chapter-...
most of us here have been hiring managers in the bay area so we have been exposed to this. My exposure was you are fairly locked into one company. I had friends who had to go home abruptly when fired. We would have to buy their cars so we could sell them slower at non-fire sale prices for them. But this was late 90s through early 2000s. Maybe it's different.
Changing or Leaving Your H-1B Employer
Q. What is “porting”?
A. There are two kinds of job portability, or “porting,” available based on two different kinds of employer petitions:
H-1B petition portability: Eligible H-1B nonimmigrants may begin working for a new employer as soon as the employer properly files a new H-1B petition (Form I-129) requesting to amend or extend H-1B status with USCIS, without waiting for the petition to be approved. More information about H-1B portability can be found on our H-1B Specialty Occupations page.
...
Q. How do I leave my current employer to start working for a new employer while remaining in H-1B status?
A. Under H-1B portability provisions, you may begin working for a new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous H-1B petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on the petition, whichever is later. You are not required to wait for the new employer’s H-1B petition to be approved before beginning to work for the new employer, assuming certain conditions are met. For more details about H-1B portability, see our H-1B Specialty Occupations page, under “Changing Employers or Employment Terms with the Same Employer (Portability).”
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...
When can I begin working for a new H-1B employer if I change employers?
If you are changing H-1B employers, you may begin working for the new employer as soon as they properly file a non-frivolous Form I-129 petition on your behalf, or as of the requested start date on that petition, whichever is later.
To be eligible for portability, you must not have been employed without authorization from the time of your last admission into the United States, and your new employer must properly file a new, non-frivolous petition before your H-1B period of authorized stay expires.You're not locked into one employer on an H1B. Once you are here it is possible to switch jobs relatively easily since you do not need to go through the lottery again.
> as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary
"The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers."
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-require...
If they offer below-market (for American workers) salaries and get no sufficiently-qualified domestic candidates, as they're required to promise they do, it's no surprise to anyone that they're hiring a ton of H-1Bs. They want that because they want to pay less.
I don't blame them for doing what's fiscally advantageous for the shareholders up till now -- but I think I'll be glad to see this change implemented, if it is, because I know companies write on those forms "domestic talent not found" when they know the truth is "domestic talent not available at the wages we'd like to pay".
What?
I’m not saying the system is perfect, we definitely need to work on clearing out these fraudulent consultancies and such. But FAANG H1Bs are good engineers and we would definitely be worse off without them. I much preferred the proposal to only allow H1B after a certain salary threshold of ~200-250k which seems like it would solve the issue.
Get applying, every application sends a H1-B fraudster home (not, but we can wish).
You can argue that they can fight the inflation impact that way.
But I think you’re implying paying less than market rate which is simply not true.
If they’re bribing USCIS to get around this rule. That’s a different discussion.
Promoters of H1B keep talking about highly talented H1Bs while ignoring a mass hired at very low end of tech jobs.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...
The occupation requires:
Theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge; and
Attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in a directly related* specific specialty (or its equivalent) as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.
The position must also meet one of the following criteria to qualify as a specialty occupation:
A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally the minimum entry requirement for the particular occupation;
A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally required to perform job duties in parallel positions among similar organizations in the employer’s industry in the United States;
The employer, or third party if the beneficiary will be staffed to that third party, normally requires a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, to perform the job duties of the position; or
The specific duties of the offered position are so specialized, complex, or unique that the knowledge required to perform them is normally associated with the attainment of a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent.*
Chances are this was done as a seasonal H-2B non-agricultural worker (likely under a seasonal need)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
To qualify for H-2B nonimmigrant classification, the petitioner must establish that:
There are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work.
Employing H-2B workers will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
The problem (for them) is that pay scales (and cost of living) in that area are above average. A friend of my son got a job there about 8 years ago and it paid about 63k plus benefits, whereas the average home depot employee makes about 32k. No idea what it’s like post COVID.
So... if you see it, report it. https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...
And there are actions on it when it is caught.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-executives-plead...
Ignoring visa fraud is one of the ways that it becomes established and in turn makes it harder for the companies that are following the rules to be successful.
Perhaps that was so they could keep everyone “in the system” by not allowing them to be established, or something? I’m not really sure, but I think it worked kind of like a temp agency, but I believe the pay checks were issued directly by home depot, so I’m really not sure how everything was organized.
The house had an “agent”/handler that basically they had to obey, even though they worked for HD… it felt really Mob-like, with prohibition on dating, being out late, etc and strict organization of work schedules for room sharing.
But they paid 2x normal rent, all in advance, 6 months at a time and the apartments were always in great shape, so the property owner loved them.
Whatever it was it sure smelled like some kind of trafficking to me but I could never put my finger on the exact issue, and they all seemed genuinely grateful to be there. It did seem super shady though.
And tell your manager explicitly and put it on the record that you reported it. Get fired in retaliation? Lawyer up.
> You do not have to tell us your name or provide contact information. However, if we need additional information and have no way to contact you, it may limit our ability to review your tip and take further action.
It’s likely an H2 visa (assuming it’s not undocumented immigrants). Which is unaffected and unchanged, likely because Trump properties are heavy users and dependent on these visas.
Any suggestion that the program is dragging wages down instead of dragging wages up is not just misleading but factually wrong.
Second, Indians have to pay their bosses to get a job. Their real pay is at least $20k lower. And there's far worse as well.
But also, the H1b median salary for a software engineer is ~$120k, which is almost identical to that of the US median overall - so all of this hullabaloo seems pretty groundless.
H1B visa abuse by consultancies and mass recruiters is a real issue, but this now incentivized companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, Cheveron etc to expand their Indian offices.
Edit: can't reply
> Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.
Spending an additional $10-15k in visa filing fees isn't that big of a deal for an employer who's already paying around 25-35% in withholding and benefits, but at $100K that makes it enough that if you needed to sponsor 10 people on an H1B, you now hit the monetary amount to avail GCC tax rebates and subsidies in most of Eastern Europe and India, where they will give you an additional $10-20k in tax credits and subsidies per head.
Basically, opening a new office abroad just to save on $10-15k of filing fees per employees wasn't worth it, but now that it'll be $100k per employee, the math just shifted.
> Why is this parasitic organization allowed to incorporate?
VC now, not a director anymore. But help me find a new grad with 3-4 years of exploit development and OS internals experience in the US. I can't.
On the other hand, I can in Tel Aviv. There's a reason the entire cybersecurity industry has shifted outside the US.
Large sectors of the US tech scene just lack ANY domestic know-how.
Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.
The upperbound for middle class pay is over $100k in all states, approaching $200k in a couple.
First, I would like you to reconsider 'high income' and putting $120k in that category. It was a good chunk of change. In this year of our lord 2025, it is not. It is, for my region anyway, barely acceptable middle class income.
And your self-classification is questionable, but that is very common. Maybe a good trigger to experience gratefulness and satisfaction for the economical situation you are in?
But, and this is the most important part, just because I am in better situation than most, does not make the overall state of the population that much less shitty.
Am I getting through to you?
Has it ever been better?
Not saying it shouldn't, just that we might have unrealistic expectations.
Total national health expenditures have grown much faster than population growth: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
And yet, over the same time period, life expectancy hasn't gone up that much: https://datacommons.org/tools/visualization#visType%3Dtimeli...
I deleted longer response from yesterday. Long story short, I disagree. If anything, it is unrealistic for anyone to expect that current economic ecosystem is sustainable.
I don't expect a lot, but I do expect my standard to improve over that of my parents', not decrease.
Partially, that's because increased self determination is part of being middle class. Partionally, that's because the ability to participate in culture (art, music, education, multiculturalism, etc.) is part of being middle class; and those opportunities are highly concentrated in the cities.
A $120k job in any region of the country is 'high income'. You are feeling a different effect, which is that we have designed our country such that even high income people often do not feel economically secure.
The sheer balls on people to suggest that high absolute value automatically means it is high. And that is before we get to how those jobs are are not even in the same category...
I am going to stop here, because I don't want to get mean.
Also, those numbers are bumped up by bigtech who doesn't discriminate by visa, so pays in bodyshops are even lower and tech salaries are way higher than that in US.
Once you are breaking the $100k mark and want to only save costs, you are better off opening a GCC in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India, which is what most companies started doing once remote work became normalized in the early 2020s.
All this did is make a free "Thousand Talents" program for India, especially in chemical, petroleum, biopharma, and biochemical engineering - industries where the delta between US and India salaries aren't significant but the talent gap in the US is real.
There are much smarter ways to crack down on H1B abuse by consultancies - this ain't it.
Edit: can't reply, but here's why this is dumb
Assuming I am in Dallas (a fairly prominent domestic IT services hub) and hiring an H1B employee.
In Dallas, a wage around $95k base is fairly standard based on JPMC, DXC, and C1's salaries in the area.
That $95k an employee is has an additional 18% in employer required taxes and withholdings. Add to that an additional 5-10% for retirement account and insurance plans. That $95k employee became around $115k-125k.
Once salaries start breaking into the 6 figure mark, that 23-35% in overhead starts adding up very fast. On top of that visa processing before this rule costed around $15-20k in additional legal fees on the employer's side.
If I'm at the point where I'm paying a low six figure salary, I'm better off opening an office in Warsaw or Praha or Hyderabad where I can safely pay $50k-60k in base to get top 10% talent while getting a $10k-20k per head tax credit over a 3-5 year period depending on the amount I invest building a GCC because my after tax cost at that point becomes $50-60k per employee. These credits tend to require a $1M investment, and with the proposed H1B fee, this made that kind of FDI much easier to justify than it was before.
At least with the current status quo, if I was hiring an ML Engineer at MS or an SRE at Google (a large number of whom are H1Bs as well), I could justify hiring within the US, but adding an additional $100K filing fee just gives me no incentive at all to expand headcount domestically.
You don't use the stick if you also don't have the carrot.
> You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year
That's a rounding error now that it costs $100K to renew or apply for an H1B visa. And for larger organizations breaking the mid-8 figures in revenue mark, section 174 changes never had an impact one way or the other - it was mostly local dev shops and MSPs that faced the brunt of the section 174 onslaught.
> Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad
Germany needs to severely reduce employer contributions and taxes to become cost competitive against Warsaw, Praha, or Hyd for software and chip design jobs.
That said, this is a net positive for Germany's biotech, mechanical, biopharma, and other engineering industries that aren't software or chip design related.
If you don't fix the supply constraints, you'll depress growth.
You could fix the education system - good luck - and then wait 5 years before you cut H1B.
But yes, obviously it depressed wages, which at a certain point is probably a good thing.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but there is an english name for that city and it's Prague.
There is no point in using the local spelling because it adds no clarity, is less obvious to pronounce for any reader and the locals are not really gonna thank you for doing this either. Just seems like a form of light cultural white-knighting to me.
You are not even consistent because Warsaw is not how locals spell that.
The most prominent exonyms are of cities like Paris, London, Moscow or Beijing.
I.e., places culturally and historically significant enough that older historical pronunciations have become ossified in foreign languages.
English having a "Prague" spelling means the name of the city was important enough to have entered the English language back in the day when English was still borrowing heavily from French.
Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad, but Hyderabad has the volume and the offices.
Funny things is the agencies/consultancies/outsource companies all solds us on it would cut costs when the only thing changed was labor. But apparently they could cut costs without cutting labor costs? How does that work?
You can see this in BLS data.
Is there a good resource for data on wages in Poland? I mean, I am going to look, but I thought I'd ask.
I don't doubt there may be people who would be fine with that, but I guess no one who values their own skills would go for it if there are plenty of East/West Coast companies hiring remotely.
> Is there a good resource for data on wages in Poland? I mean, I am going to look, but I thought I'd ask.
I think you can start from looking at the local job offers, e.g. https://justjoin.it. Just remember there are a couple of nuances:
- most developers in Poland don't want to be FTEs, because the tax burden on that type of employment is at least 2 times higher than on B2B contracts; effectively, we ended up having a market where everyone is hired B2B, but with all the usual FT benefits (paid vacations and sick days, equipment, private insurance, gym memberships, free food and whatnot) - it's sort of a gray area, but the related law is not really enforced; thus as a foreign company you compete with the local B2B rates + benefits
- people are aware that US is a different market generating more revenue
- the work-life balance may be quite different, so they expect to be paid accordingly
- Warsaw is generally more expensive than other cities in Poland, so you don't need to limit yourself to one city in your search, the same way as you wouldn't hire remote developers from the Bay Area only
- there's a reason these offers are hanging in there :)
Edit: formatting.
Yep! Krakow, Lodz, and the other various cities have become cost effective and built hiring pipelines as well.
You see this all over the CEE and India as well, such as Czechia (Brno, Ostrava), Romania (Cluj thanks to the Transylvanian government, Timisoara) and India (BLR/Pune/Hyd/Gurgaon to Tier 2/3 cities)
We'd be paying that for Early career base (think L3). Mid-career you'd see people breaking the $80-110k base range.
I don't like giving "TC" simply because RSUs are very dependent on a number of outside variables.
And my example was for why a JPMC opens an offshore office abroad, or why a company hires an EPAM type.
For product companies who actually care about work quality, you won't too see much difference between salary abroad and a US salary from 10 years ago. I'd recommend using a fork of the old GitLab comp calculator - it's fairly accurate.
you're pointing out facts - yet people deny. most software jobs listings are either in eastern europe or india these days. that's the "A.I" eating software jobs.
yeah some companies might list U.S jobs - but they're only seriously hiring for Staff roles. the rest offshored.
The nativism and rejection makes sense with that regards - it's an almost religious hope that stuff will get better.
I just believe in being brutally honest - especially on HN, where I can vent or shine a light on decisions.
It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.
It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.
However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.
It's not just a supply and demand equation; it's a fundamentally different environment that changes the social payoff for mentoring, networking, and building a reputation.
Ultimately despite all the propaganda trying to convince us that diversity is inherently beneficial, we are trading economic benefits for social costs. So we need to carefully restrict migration to make sure the economic benefits are actually there.
This is if you believe that lower wages for high skill work is not an issue.
However high migration rates lower social trust, this is well studied.
If you take a smaller example, hiring internationally vs domestically. If you have to go domestic then you might have to settle for a less ideal qualification, requiring more training.
This is repeated everywhere, so companies that train better are more likely to succeed. Leading to conditions that encourage upskilling for locals overall.
Importing people short circuits that idea.
Except the Heritage Foundation, er, I mean, Trump Administration controls all 3 branches of government and has all the freedom in the world to power a resuscitation of public education in America, except they're not interested in that at all; quite the opposite, they want to further fragment education baselines and make secondary education less desirable.
What study does one "have to do" to support _this_ claim?
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but make up over 20% of entrepreneurs. 44% of fortune 500 company founders were either born outside US or to immigrant parents in the US.
They seem roughly correct
You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work.
I don't believe for even an instant that there is a significant amount of immigration happening to bring in people who are that specialized
Some, maybe. But not the vast majority of it
But it was so hard to get the visas (and so much uncertainty in whether or not they'd be able to secure a visa for any particular worker) that they opened up a European and Canadian offices.
The admin has been cutting billions in funding to universities which makes this argument easier.
Need an expert in arithmetic combinatorics? Well Terry Tao lost his grants so now you've got to look elsewhere.
An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.
Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.
> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.
If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.
Lower supply tends to drive the price up.
The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.
[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.
Base salary, not total comp, the first year
> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.
So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.
Companies already do a lot of offshoring - you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?
On top of this, these are workers who would have otherwise paid tax in the US!
This was true before and after today.
Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.
But yes, if that path doesn't exist, I don't think that global companies are going to start hiring American, they're going to continue hiring globally but take the path of least resistance towards bringing this talent onboard.
The flipside is that every american industry becomes less competitive globally without the H1b guys.
And it is the 10 times more competitive economy compared to non H1B importing nations.
Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.
Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?
The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.
I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?
https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-ma...
Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.
All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.
You know what would provide job growth in high tech? Economic growth and expanding prosperity in the economy overall.
Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.
I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics
Sure it's sound to argue that wages would be higher with more constraint supply.
BUT: The network effect of all SWE talent from across the globe moving to the US is also huge.
Probably, you'd have a smaller overall tax base without H1B. Make no mistake most countries would like to keep their H1B expats :)
If you really wanted to grow US supply of engineers, you'd have to start by fixing the education system, making it cheaper, and then wait 5 years.
Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.
This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.
H1B holders are paid less for the same job, keeping wages down.
This compares medians across to huge populations. I have seen many H1Bs making less and working more.
See also Understanding H-1B Minimum Salary Requirements for Eligibility - https://day1cpt.org/news/understanding-h-1b-minimum-salary-r...
Cap-exempt H1B holders working for universities are restricted to switching only to other cap-exempt employers, but even then I never felt I had to work 60+ hours a week.
In my experience recruiters saw H1B transfers as routine but would ghost me once I explained that I required a new visa sponsorship since I worked or a cap-exempt employer and could not simply transfer.
Yes: software developer incomes are high. But simultaneously, unemployment amongst CS grads at American universities is also high.
I also am not convinced that those statistics alone can be used to draw such a conclusion; there's more to it than that.
The stats you provide here don't support your claim.
H1B visa holders can be paid more on average while still having a downward effect on wages...
Imagine that some car model costs $200,000 to buy in the US. However, an entrepreneur realises they can can import the same car from a poorer country for just $100,000 then sell it in the US for less than the manufacturer themselves. The manufacturer finds out about this and says, "hey! you're selling my car for less", but the importer says, "no, actually, you'll find the median car in the US is $50,000 so I'm technically increasing car prices".
So what you're saying could be wrong in two ways... One you could be wrong in the sense that even if it does increase median wages, that doesn't mean it necessary increases the median wage of US citizens if now a significant percentage the best employment opportunities are going to H1B visa holders instead of citizens.
But secondly, and the point I was trying to make with the car analogy, is that you could be wrong about the average wages going up too if H1B visa holders are taking jobs which would pay even more were it not for HB1 visas. So if the average wage of a SWE in the US is say $150k, but the average H1B visa holder is being paid $120k, H1Bs are clearly not "dragging wages up".
And realistically it's far more likely H1B visa holders suppress wages given how relatively high US wages are.
I'll end this comment by saying that personally I think this idea that giving the best opportunities to immigrants is probably directly wrong for many reasons. Of course, allowing in businesses and individuals who will create jobs makes a lot of sense, but what you really want is the best opportunities going to your own citizens, then to bring in cheap labour to fill the crappy jobs citizens don't really want to do, but are now increasingly doing when they leave university like working in a bar or becoming a barista. If there's a great job a company can't fill with the domestic workforce perhaps they should train someone for that role or take a risk on a recent graduate like in the old days?
There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.
A few select tech and financial services companies, and their shareholders, benefit the most from the program.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.
Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.
There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306539 - September 2025
Ask HN: Recent unemployed CS grad what do I do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211153 - March 2025
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/job-market-report-c...
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/06/unemployment-job-market-edu...
https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1kcc40j/what_happ...
https://apnews.com/article/college-graduates-job-market-unem...
U-6 (the most inclusive unemployment rate) is 8.1 as of this comment, the highest it’s been in the last five years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
So, start cutting labor visas until the unemployment rate improves. The domestic labor clearly exists.
Millions of Workers Are Left Out of the 'Low-Hire, Low-Fire' US Job Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45414795 - September 2025
The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.
Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.
That’s certainly one version of how events may have been different - a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life” scenario. (Though comparing Elon Musk to the kind and ethical George Bailey would be quite a stretch!) But it’s not inconceivable that other possibilities would have emerged.
Are they underpaid, or are they swimming in cash to buy up all the expensive housing? Make up your mind.
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/home-affordability-in-c...
https://www.uschamber.com/economy/the-state-of-housing-in-am...
"The shortage of housing can be attributed to a range of regulatory and policy failures. These include burdensome permitting processes, outdated zoning regulations that dictate everything from lot sizes to parking requirements, complex legal frameworks, price controls, and restrictive financial regulations."
Level 1 Wage:$65.24 / Hour - $135,699 / Year Level 2 Wage:$77.71 / Hour - $161,637 / Year Level 3 Wage:$90.18 / Hour - $187,574 / Year Level 4 Wage:$102.65 / Hour - $213,512 / Year
(Compared to the all levels $175k occupational median vs the $74k all occupation median.)
Software Developer (15-1252). Eau Claire County. Bachelors degree. 0 experience.
The prevailing wage is Level 1 Wage:$36.54 / Hour - $76,003 / Year
Change it to San Francisco County.
Level 1 Wage:$65.24 / Hour - $135,699 / Year
And so, as noted... it is location dependent.
However, which startup can afford an additional cost of 100,000 dollars for a fresh PhD graduate who is essential for their niche?
The true economic benefit of the H1B visa program for the US economy lies in the long tail of smaller firms that require a limited number of specialized personnel, which, by definition, is scarce.
O1 is unlikely to be granted to a student who has not graduated yet. What are they going to show for evidence? Manuscripts in preparation? Or class grades?
All companies of that size have succession plans. See Apple and Alibaba.
I guess they wouldn't have much to show for evidence. Which is exactly why they would be correctly classified as not being a specialist, and therefore undeserving on an O-1 visa.
These visas are not meant to allow company to hire underpaid employees that quite literally just graduated.
No it was not
What is "mid level talent" though? you're not getting that data from H1B wage filings, they're factually under-reporting compensation.
Creating low cost alternatives and taking advance of lax laws is part of that. If you can import 100k skilled workers per year under a scheme that gives you more power over them. Then you also offshore 300k jobs per year to countries with weaker protections.
It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.
Why's that? The jobs and lives of individuals in those countries are better than the alternatives present otherwise to them. Globalization may hurt certain America jobs but certainly countries like India is grateful for all of the engineering roles.
High consumerism is harmful to the environment but I don't think the link between offshoring jobs is direct to environmental harms and certainly it's helpful to giving more job opportunites.
Instead they'll be made unemployed by AI and a crashing tech economy.
But that isn't the point of this. It's leverage - much like the tariffs.
Big companies making significant donations to the Donald Trump Presidential Aggrandisement Fund will receive carve-outs and exclusions.
It's a grift, like everything else done by this benighted administration.
This could be a tactic to force lower end to go home and accept a lower salary at the same company for their same role.
up or out. or in this cause, over or out...
Let’s look at US imports from China. Last year that was $462bn worth of goods. Suppose the development of China never happened and all those goods were manufactured in the USA instead. That’s impossible, the US doesn’t have tens of millions of industrial workers lying around spare to do those mostly low end, low value jobs and if it did they would cost more and the goods would all be much more expensive. So the cost of living would go up, the economy would less efficient because many workers would be doing lower value add jobs than they are now. The country would be much worse off overall. It would basically amount to enormous government subsidies and protections for vast swathes of lower value assembly work than what many people are doing now.
I support global trade because I think it’s best for the west. Not hyper-liberal ultra free market trade. Negotiated, rules based, moderately regulated trade and investment that is balanced to meet domestic and international needs.
I'm pretty sure my local pizza shop, waitstaff, and other small businesses are happy to have my money spent on their products and services. They don't care that I have a tech job, but they do care that I spend money with them, and spending money with them is only one degree of separation from having a job.
Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.
You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win.
Specifically when you say:
>Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.
We can observe that the Globalist organizations regard not just pollution, but carbon consumption to be something which markets cannot be trusted to manage. Instead they propose top-down regulatory management on a supranational level.
https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...
I think you're assuming here that 'a better deal' means 'more money than someone else', whereas lots of people would define it as 'everyone has more rights/security'.
In the case of bringing in workers; those workers are less likely to join unions or demand good working conditions since they are effectively indentured servants. That also is bad for labor.
I don't quite agree that much with causes: high housing, Healthcare & med bankruptcy, and high education costs (correlating with high housing) are bigger factors. However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.
Now, the top 5% and corps need to be made to pay more taxes... thats another subject.
A couple elderly people i know are quite concerned Trump will take their snap benefits, or decrease medicaid/care etc while the tax reductions were given on the bb bill. Thats not acceptable.
We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all.
No, we aren't! We have statistics on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). Median real income is up substantially since 40-50 years ago, depending on what you count as a generation. And we have stories and records of what life was like in the 1970s, when 80% of households had to hand wash dishes and 50% had to line-dry clothes. The reason people believe living standards haven't risen since their grandparents' day is that they get false nostalgia bait depictions of how a typical person lived in their grandparents' day.
(What is true, and what I'm sure contributes to the power of the nostalgia bait, is that real income stagnated with the dot-com bubble and didn't hit a sustained rise again until the mid-late 2010s.)
While you are correct that real wages are up around 25%, productivity has nearly doubled. While various consumer goods, and technology have seen large improvements - ignoring the measurable and qualitative ways that affording basic aspects of life have become more difficult is not wise.
Sorry for hijacking, but this is quite possibly one of the funniest American poverty markers around.
Its nice to have as a last resort or during winter tho.
Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury.
When one lives in a tiny apartment with no balcony, you better have a dryer. When living with plenty of land, it's not a problem to hang clothes to dry in the sun.
My euro family disagrees, even in places that don’t have a balcony. Get the rack out and dry indoors and it’s pretty dry overnight (in the not so humid places).
I have a dryer but avoid it for most clothes because I think it wears them out.
Consumerism demands that everyone buys a tumble dryer, therefore not having a tumble dryer means you're a povvo!
Meanwhile, in civilisation, I have a washer, a dryer, and a collapsible wall-mounted clothesline in my apartment, and I can choose which piece of clothing goes where to dry depending on need!
Global trade as made consumer prices competitive in many things, but those are a big three.
Nostalgia was not at root of my original comment.
This is why many places in the world no longer produce enough food to feed their populations - refrigeration and cheap oil enable food to no longer be a local commodity. Education is sometimes headed in the same direction. But housing cannot be sourced anywhere but locally.
While this chart shows "real" income increases we apparently also see "real" increases on housing, rents, education, etc.
If your inflation metric is only on rolled oats, then it is not really worth much, is it?
earlier wife beating was „normal thing” leaving abusive partners was not possible or much harder than nowadays.
Then in a lot of places in the world it still is like that.
Do you feel superior or somehow you just make my argument not true because it didn't happen to you or anyone you know?
You definitely seem to be genuine asshole and I don't care what culture you were raised in because there are definitely nicer people from that culture.
Bro but you called.
My grandma slowly squirreled away money in a shoe box over decades as she had no personal bank account and lived on what my grandpa provided while she took care of seven kids. She saw it as her lifeline. Meanwhile he got drunk every night at the yacht club.
When the last of the kids were nearing college she spent that money on classes for clerical work and got a job.
I could not possibly imagine being in her shoes and I can imagine why a woman would be loathe to enter into such dependence on another person, regardless of how fulfilling child rearing and house keeping may be.
And the further you go back from there the worse it looks for women.
I think what people look back and get nostalgia for is the fact that it was possible for one adult to stay at home full time. Now its not possible; we dont have a choice, everyone must work.
Hey it's iPhone Day, "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish"* ---
*-nevermind the $10000 workstation named after a gf or more recently $2000 orange phones (I bought a DEEP Blue because Apple is always threatening to "Care-Deeply" me), $1000 watches and $300 earpieces for errbody. So Hungry. Also, we'll make sure you never work anywhere in Tech again if you even so much as interview for a new job outside of our company and Non-Competes Are No Longer Blocked! But What the Helly..Turtleneck also didn't invent the hungry mantra which is embraced by many other similar brilliant people, from Einstein to Elon'n-on and of course, my dad's gang one of whom brought Turtleneck back to Apple.) Get it? Got it? Good.
"Real income" is measured against the consumer price index (CPI). CPI is used to gauge inflation, "are people paying more for groceries this year than last?", not living standard. Most of the important questions like "how many years of education do you need for a good job?" or "how many average salaries do you need for a good home?" are all massively worse. So are many metrics of despair.
What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less. That what buys you a loaf of bread doesn't buy you a good life anymore. Because median income might be keeping up with inflation, but not with anything else.
Their expectations might be to live in the top few decile neighborhoods of a metro, where land prices have gone up a few hundred thousand in the previous decade.
It doesn’t matter if the stats say income went up 10% if they or their kids won’t be able to land that house they wanted, or can’t make that appointment with the doctor and instead have to see an NP, or worry about having to move to a more expensive metro to reduce income volatility.
Now, it's not really even clear what the good life is, but whatever you think, it's very hard to get it. Schools, commutes, quality housing, health care, stable income, they've all gotten far, far worse for almost everyone, and there's nothing they can do about it.
For example your $1000 oled tv is better than your $1000 crt tv therefore you your purchasing power has gone up. Or your base truck now comes with nav therefore your truck can be 5k more and still be net neutral. The problem with this system is that in order to stay in the same price catagory on the index you continually need to move down the product tiers. So today’s lowest tier is a decade ago mid tier is 2 decades ago high end. Moving down like that makes you feel poorer because wealth is relative.
Consider a more concrete example. In 2005, a 40 inch 720p LCD panel cost $3,500 (https://slate.com/culture/2005/09/it-s-finally-time-to-buy-a...). Today, that same panel in 1080p is $100 at Best Buy (https://www.bestbuy.com/product/insignia-40-class-f40-series...).
My parent's TV never sold any data. My new, much more 'expensive' TV spys on me 24X7. You would not have been able to PAY my grandparents enough to put a TV like that in their house, yet alone consider it an 'upgrade'.
You need to do this with all tech.
But factoring in hedonic adaptation is fine, if general societal trends are also factored in.
30 years ago there was strong social institutions on workplaces that people have to buy into now. More people did manual labor where they need to pay for fitness now.
These things also needs to be factored in.
It may have improved on paper but the quality of the experience has not.
60 year ago, a 20 year old guy with a high school education could support a wife and 2 kids. Today he needs his wife to work and has to wait until 30 just to buy a 1 bedroom apartment. Forget about kids. But they act like we are kings because now we have iphones.
> What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less
One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well.
The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble.
Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target).
[1]: https://wid.world/country/usa/
[2]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
You must be looking at some serious equations and related data.
If you were alive back then you would have watched as inflation appeared "out of nowhere" and before long it was obvious that dollars were going to buy less & less each year for the foreseeable future. Government benefits needed to be tied to inflation under emergency conditions or everyone was going to be voted out by millions that were now underwater otherwise.
So they needed something to gauge inflation by and tie benefit dollar increases to, and ended up inventing the CPI.
The CPI was not expected to be very good, just quick. To say expectations were "highly manipulated" would be an understatement. If people didn't settle for something quite deficient in realism to begin with, who knows how many legislative sessions it might take? People could lose everything in that much time.
The exact purpose of CPI was carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of inflation as much as possible and get away with it. It was plain to see as it went along, like any other slow-motion dumpster fire that lawmakers go through when almost none of their intents are entirely honorable.
And CPI just became more laughable ever since.
But that wasn't enough.
Then one day the GDP comes along, with "reasonable" excuses about how multinational American companies are not like they used to be, so good old GNP can no longer act as the best measure going forward.
GDP was even more carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of non-prosperity and inflation, allowing it to run its course under the radar if it could just be brought low enough (but not low enough to be tolerable all the way back when things were really prosperous). Without knowing if that could even be achieved, it was plain to see when overprovisioning was taking place to try and compensate. There's nothing like a long, deep massage of the figures, and "feelings" can improve remarkably if the most obvious pain points are addressed. Temporarily of course.
You will notice that it is never obvious when the overnight transition from GNP to GDP took place. You had to be there. All the old data has been "refactored" creatively as designed in an attempt to make "comparison more valid". Who would benefit or not if people were still able to compare apples to apples, and who makes the rules anyway? By this time after all these years without recovery, "sentiment" was thought to be the only salvation possible, but even the most positive outlook couldn't help consumers who had lost their purchasing power. But a consumer economy was going to be the only road to "recovery", they had to keep spending just to survive regardless of how anemic it was by then.
Anyway the stock market crashes, continuous devaluation of the dollar for years, millions of layoffs, and consumers (millions of who could not afford US-made cars or other products any more) who were increasingly offered foreign alternatives they would readily purchase as much as they can -- all ran their course and it was not enough to end the most ridiculous part of the madness.
There had to be an oil crash and a real estate crash too, before things could finally level out under that old radar beam.
So what gives with your data set? The data set I give covers wages for full time workers. The data set you gave covers all individuals 15+ with any "income", which includes governments benefits. So what you're likely seeing there is going to be, in part, driven by things like an aging population - with a large number of retirees retiring with social security, medicaid, pensions, etc fattening out the middle part of society where income, after all is accounted for, of around $40k sounds just about right. It's mostly unrelated to the change in wages.
---
Also, unrelated but I found your examples of 'better life' weird. I still hand wish dishes and line-dry clothes. I know Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates also hand wash their dishes. The "nostalgia" people have is for things like somebody graduating debt free, with a decent car, and ready to put a down payment on the first home - on the back of a part time job that put them through school. That really did happen, but now a days it sounds like a fantasy. I think society would happily trade dish washers for that!
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ...
Propaganda is very effective, and Americans are the most skillful propagandists in the world. Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.
That doesn't mean the teflon president isn't just now blatantly silencing the voices of the opposition (Kimmel and then a general warning) so he definitely wants a place in the competition.
We've gone from philosophers like DeBord and Baudrillard painting a somewhat manic vision of the future, to actually living in this hyper-real mirror of some actual society that no longer exists, mostly courtesy of a global American cultural hegemony. People are willing to risk being fatally shot, to engage in anti-social behavior, or to martyr themselves all in the name of some form of second order "engagement".
The current state of propaganda is such that even the more modern concepts taught in a polisci class on ideology & propaganda, such as banal nationalism, are completely outdated, and are about as quaint as a lot of soviet era concepts. Propaganda is now able to be delivered in the form of hyper-personalized content, where the content itself not even need be propaganda, control of the recommendation engine selecting what a person sees and doesn't see is more than enough.
"Immigration" as such is a made up concept. The legal and physical barriers created by immigration policy are pro-capital and anti-labor. If people could freely move around the world, you can bet there'd be much more focus on pro-labor policies.
Especially tech companies making their money from ads and such provide very little real value and just drain massive amounts of money and transfer it to the US economy.
They generally have way more employees in the US relative to how much money they are making domestically.
A valid critique of how globalism was implemented in the US. However, this concern could be heavily ameliorated by policy. For example, making US companies using foreign labor adhere to the same labor standards they must adhere to domestically.
Perhaps a reason you’re baffled is because you are thinking only of domestic labor instead of global labor. Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.
There are already rules in place but no real enforcement. Large software companies save a fortune making workers compete with workers from countries that have dramatically lower cost of living, entirely circumventing the market constraints that favor workers.
In hiring the people the H1B was designed for, 100k is nothing.
> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.
This is a disingenuous argument. Allowing companies to pocket a huge amount of money that would have gone to the people they laid off to hire H1Bs with common skill sets is not pro labor by any measure.
This includes enforcement of the law.
This is an insanely modern take on "pro-labor" movements, especially in the US. Traditionally, pro-labor has been 100% focused on local labor. If you told your average union member that being "pro-labor" meant closing their factories and offshoring their jobs they'd laugh (or more likely, spit) in your face.
If you divide the GDP by the number of employed people (including self-employed and entrepreneurs), you get a bit over $180k/person. The median full-time income is a bit over $60k. In other words, as a gross simplification, the mean worker earns 80% more than the median worker.
The comparable numbers for Germany are a ~€100k, ~€45k, and 35%. If something is hollowing out the American middle class, it might be the high earners rather than the capital.
Unfortunately last several millions came for exactly the opposite. Free full government support, aka communism.
Denmark’s Turn to Temporary Protection Has Made It a Pioneer in Restrictive Immigration Policies
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/denmark-migration-pr...
America is similar. Ignore the homeless, the people who can't afford basic trips to the doctor, the illegal immigrant underclass, hope the crime problem never affects you, and focus on your own money, and it's fine.
I'm guessing you are not (and will never become) a citizen to your birth country. And your parents left because it was not a great place to raise you, you are probably in a better country now.
What's nice about that, getting into debt as soon as one of us gets medical emergency? Or staying in a suburban home 24/7 with a child until they can go to school?
The second sounds great and is (IMO) the proper way to raise a family.
Importing cheap foreign labor to undercut unions and lower wages is one of the spokes of the wheel used by capital to reduce the power of labor (and always has been).
You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....
The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.
As you said, the story is complicated. Even in 2015, a decade ago:
> There is one other stark difference: only upper-income families realized notable gains in wealth from 1983 to 2013.
During the period of analysis then, either consumption among the lower two tiers eliminated their available savings ability, or the real purchasing power over this period declined, leading to the same effect.
That's not to say you shouldn't do it! But the problem is elsewhere.
Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).
It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.
What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.
Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.
Look, if you own a company, or are in a leadership position: the entire world is now open to you, both as source of labor and as potential market. The impact of your decisions has exploded, and the potential revenue and value of your company has also exploded.
OTOH, if you're a line-worker at a factory in Detroit: your competition is now most of the population of the world--and they all expect lower salaries than you do.
What's your argument for why you should keep making 10x or 20x what people in China or India make? Do you just naturally deserve it? Do you figure that companies owe it to you because you share a home country? If so, either the company will bounce and move abroad to one of the many countries willing to welcome them with open arms--or they'll be swiftly replaced by a Chinese equivalent which has 1/10th the labor costs. Either way, your extravagant salary is going to dry up.
American labor in the 50s was simply in the right place at the right time. That's no longer true. There's no way to stop the rest of the world from growing and improving in order to maintain the special status of the American worker. They don't really have a choice: they need to skill up. And yes, push for better social safety nets, though their instinct seems to be in the opposite direction.
And we're debating different worlds if your baseline is shareholder primacy.. While my baseline is a democratic society where corporations are tools to organize people to deliver value to society, and owing obligations to that society, not a mechanism to siphon wealth from the bottom to the top.
This is simple supply and demand. If you restrict the labor supply, the value of labor increases.
The same thing was observed after the Black Death, which killed off 30 to 50% of Europe's population. There were labor shortages, which increased the bargaining power of labor, and increased wages.
It's really funny US companies suddenly start pretending they don't believe in supply and demand when it comes to labor.
If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)
Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.
Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.
Sure, but the vast majority of the wealth of building SpaceX and Google doesn't go to me. It goes to people like Musk and Larry Page.
Also, a lot of the wealth from the tech industry does spill over to the larger community. You're strictly better off having it. If the US had just stuck with their 1970s economy on the theory that any new industries wouldn't distribute their benefits equally, it would be vastly smaller, less powerful and less wealthy. Surely that's obvious?
Of course your country is better off if you have successful companies and high-income jobs.
Though in this position, maybe China gets greedy.
I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.
Also, did you ever spend any time in those post-war homes? Most of us would be appalled at the idea of living in a bare-bones 1000 sqft box (with more than 2x as many children per average family).
Like post post ww2 say we produced 1 car for every American. Also we produced 1 house for every American. Every car and house was produced in America because Europe was bombed to shit. Now 20 years later, Europe has recovered a bit and can start producing cars and houses again. Why wouldn't the US still be able to produce 1 car for every adult? Oh sorry, Germany is no longer a pile of rubble, you and your spouse need to share a car now. Also your adult kids need to move back in with you, no house for them either.
This is obviously absurd. US would be even richer since they no longer had to spend massive amounts of money funding the war effort and then massive amounts of money rebuilding Europe. Hollowing out the US middle class was a choice, not some law of nature.
To do that, they needed cars, machinery, home goods, electronics, etc. They had the labor to produce those things, but not the infrastructure. It takes time to build factories, and a skilled labor pool, and a logistics network, and so on.
So where did you go to get the goods & services you needed to rebuild? There was really only one option. The US was exporting cars, factory equipment, heavy machinery, steel, radio, coca cola, etc. They had an intact industrial plant, and had lost (relatively speaking) very few working-age men in the war. That helped them ramp up quickly with internal demand (fed by pent-up war wages).
For reasons laid out above, it wasn't practical to move factories overseas, or outsource parts, or automate. So workers in the areas with factories were in very high demand, and wages went way, way up in those areas. That had knock-on effects: America was just beginning to import oil in large quantities, so American coal & oil was suddenly in high demand. Same with mining, logging, etc. That caused a general boom--specifically favoring labor.
It wasn't because the rest of the world was poor that the American middle class was rich. It was because the rest of the world was developing, and America had a near-monopoly on the means of doing it. What's happened in the meantime is just that the US has lost that monopoly. Now American workers face relatively fair competition. This has been a huge net positive for the world, with cheaper goods and higher wages pretty much across the board...except for American workers.
Immigrants need houses built, food on the table and many work very hard to pay for that.
That work, that sweat equity makes us all more wealth, a higher GDP.
Natives of the country that are well established in the country are in a better position to capture that wealth than the immigrants.
I am not. I am generally confused at what you would suggest is wrong with the GDP measurement.
We have multiple layers of agencies reporting on GDP and other economic measures the US. There are certainly some troublesome siloed measures (CPI), but I wasn't aware that GDP was one of them.
Your take doesn't seem relevant with regard to my knowledge on the subject.
I also do not care about your "knowledge" on the subject.
So what are the metrics that you’re using other than GDP to justify your position
like, describing GDP as "how rich is your country or state" which I've seen people use to argue that canada and germany are poorer than Mississippi.
They also remain willfully ignorant about the context of GDP - namely that it was derived as a proxy for military productive and research capacity. It specifically isn't just raw industrial capacity because the intellectual research and development work is also very relevant in military match-ups.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
Are you sure it's really been/being hollowed out or are you just repeating something you've heard or read other people state so often that you think it's true?
This doesn't map exactly to "middle class" but it also seems like there's now a lot less ability for people to afford to work in "artist" type careers. It used to be that you could wait tables, get a low cost studio in the city, and work as an artist in the evenings/weekends. Now you have to work multiple jobs and probably still can't afford to live in the city and make art.
H1B is explicitly a dual intent visa.
It’s a non immigrant visa but also a pathway to citizenship.
And this is not just an abstract thing. There are, for example, very specific tax implications of this.
The dual intent nature of the H1B visa means the U.S. government requires H1B holders to pay Social Security and Medicare, precisely because the dual intent nature implies that they will be able to utilize those entitlements in the future.
In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.
For instance one of the key factors in society escaping feudalism and moving onto market based economies was the Black Death. It absolutely decimated society and the labor pool. This gave labor the power to demand more compensation than a share of what they produced. But in times before if they tried that then nobility could simply have said no, as there were plenty of peasants willing to work for little more than food. But when the labor supply was suddenly cut in half? Now they had all the power in the world.
Labor unions can't really combat market forces. I don't even think ethical or moral arguments work either. If somebody, in the country legally, is willing to do your job for less money, and is capable of doing so, then by what right do you have to insist that you should be the one doing your job and getting paid more? It doesn't really make much sense. If you want to increase the power of labor then, by far, the easiest way to reduce so is to reduce the supply of labor. And vice versa for weakening it.
What happened 50 years ago? Hart-Cellar was in 1965. The foreign-born population dipped below 5% in 1970. It’s 15% today. This had major political ramifications. Democrats were able to move to the right economically because they could substitute labor voters demanding structural reforms with recent immigrant voters who would be happy with relatively small handouts from the government, or even just visas for their extended family.
Because power of labor to negotiate is a zero-sum game that doesn't create anything. The only sustainable way to lift anyone's living standard is through improving prosperity.
And guess what. The USA gives much better opportunities for motivated people to build themselves.
Most of the companies that are paying salaries could (and already do!) have offices in other jurisdictions where they could hire the same talent.
Better to bring this talent onshore, where the wages are taxed, than force these companies to hire from satellite offices?
It doesn't make much financial sense for companies to stop sourcing talent globally just because they can't be brought onshore, especially given enough time.
Purely anecdotal, but for me personally this wouldn't change who or how I hire, just the location.
But there's a parallel push around taxing American firms using foreign labor (https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...).
If multiple new policies are put in place at the same time, then... I dunno... it seems harder to predict...
This is not just a hypothetical, this is something that already happens when companies are looking to optimize their tax burden. Corporate structuring and income shifting are big businesses in their own right and serve to find the minimum amount of changes required to be able to legally reclassify income.
In the case of this bill specifically, in the unlikely even it passes, a simple corporate inversion will solve this problem. Instead of the US company owning foreign subsidiaries, the structure is inverted: the parent company becomes foreign, which will own a domestic US corporation. When the multinational wants to hire or retain offshore talent, it simply pays out from the parent company. Again these aren't hypotheticals, these are real tax avoidance strategies that are already in place and are well-trodden paths.
You can come up with an infinite amount of regulation to try to halt this (this problem is also called tax base erosion) but it ends up doing more harm than good - eventually you end up with a tax code and regulatory environment so complex that that alone disincentivizes new investment.
The goal is not just to retain existing capital and talent by forcing them to be locked in - it's to compete for the next dollar, the next startup, the next factory - new investment will follow the path of least resistance, while older companies eventually close up shop due to one reason or another.
If your worldview is one of "We already have the best capital and talent, so we don't need to bother to compete to acquire new capital and talent", the world you live in will stagnate and wither with respect to societies that will bend over backwards for this.
And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”? And what makes you think the “truly exceptional” ones are still going to have any interest in coming here when they see what happens to the people who the current regime deems “not exceptional”?
I sure as hell wouldn’t come to the US knowing I may be deported to a third world prison if I post the wrong thing online.
For example by implementing a $100 000 fee for their H-1B visas, which ensures that companies will only use those visas to contract truly exceptional talent. That's a very small price to pay for a company to be able to hire a person who is among the greatest in the world in her field.
That's a weird definition for "middle class", there are only 65k H1b visas issued every year. If you really are talking about the middle 60% or whatever of all workers, immigrants on H1b's are irrelevant noise. At most, these visas might be seen to impact specific professions (tech in particular, lots of doctors too) that most people don't consider representative of the "middle class".
So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.
Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.
I elaborated more (along with a couple of relevant studies) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311
I have also worked with amazing H1B visa people.
Just make sure they're actually talented.
It’s not because of the other jobs which the H1Bs aren’t even allowed to do abd have seen falling salaries and degrowth.
Can you please share your reading material that links H1B software engineers with decline in middle class jobs from this list?
There's a straightforward solution here. Right now H-1Bs are a way for companies to lock in employees by leveraging the visa status.
It requires changing the law.
Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.
On the other hand, executive orders are very easy.
I wish the better solutions get implemented, but until they are, we have to seek alternatives.
In the current moment the same party controls all three branches of government.
There's a more basic reality that the idea I'm mentioning simply wouldn't be popular. I just think that people talk about market forces in these discussions and the lock-in effect is so clearly something that's affecting the market, yet not mentioned nearly enough IMO.
Still, I can't help but feel a little bit of glee at all the tech companies who did their best to suck up to Trump, and now he stabs them in the back.
Plenty of peeps are being much more factual below, compared to the gvt linguo that you are just rehashing rn
What do the most influential reformists want? The ones who set the extreme agenda that everyone else follows? As I understand it, right now the US is routinely enacting policies that the majority of citizens do not want; from this, could we surmise that the majority of people, and presumably thus the majority of reformists, will receive the extreme H1B policies that they don't want?
I would think healthily so, even if on the upper bands [0]. I personally see "middle class" solidly as $50k-150k household income (2 adults 1 kid)... but I live in the South. Two decades ago I lived in the bay area for less than $100k (electrician)... and that was regionally closer to the lower end of "middle class," even out in Hayward.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Sta...
Now it's "we need to limit the volume" and "don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration".
Forgive me if I am skeptical, especially in a world where ICE is rounding up classic "exceptional" immigrants like biology researchers, or South Korean experts setting up a factory.
In such a world, why wouldn't you see 1. foreign R&D companies, 2. indexed into a thriving foreign equities market, 3. gathering the interest of domestic investors who want to diversify beyond domestic investments, by 4. moving their money and/or investing in domestic proxy investments?
I say this as a Canadian whose managed mutual-fund holdings are apparently largely composed of foreign (mostly American) proxy equities — and who has met many Canadian-based VCs who don't do much investment into Canadian companies. If not for talent immigration, the American investment landscape would probably look similar!
If you want to invest in another country, that's a big change. There's certainly opportunity there, but without knowledge and contacts, it can be very hard to get things done.
One track to investing in foreign R&D is foreign nationals come and work in the US to earn skills, knowledge, and capital, and then they take those earnings and invest them in their country of origin, maybe living here or there.
Sure, investors could just park their money in what few dumb domestic options there are. That's the "patriotic" approach, and in less-aggressive markets, you'll see some investors [esp. big institutional investors] building the hedge parts of their portfolios out of these kinds of investments. But when the only domestic options are dumb/boring, any "smart money" investor will either take their money and leave the country for greener pastures, or they'll pick up the skills required to play in foreign markets.
https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/publicrandd-aspx/
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
(Or, if we really lean into the "alternate history" bit, then the US might not have so many rich investors to begin with, as those investors would have been the ones living in that other global R&D center country, who became ludicrously wealthy when their investments into the domestic R&D companies in that other country bore fruit.)
Well sure, it depends what the counterfactual is. If those countries just physically prevented the people from leaving, and nothing more, I wouldn't expect that countries' outcomes to improve. But what the countries suffering from brain drain presumably want is for there to be attractive opportunities for those skilled workers in their own country.
Other countries are free not to want the things that Silicon Valley talents generate. More for us!
This is a double edged sword given that it means there’s less incentive to invest in US public education and fostering our own talent. Instead of brain drain we’re dealing with brain rot.
As of now, both the K12 system and college education seem in freefall in terms of quality and applicability to careers. No doubt those companies will devote their money to lobbying to keep hiring H1Bs instead of training the talent they need here, since they're just profit-optimizing functions, rather than humans with morals.
Looking at the politics in Europe and Asia today, the question of who is allowed in and why is a central point of debate that rages and threatens to tear apart much of the fabric that was built over generations.
I think some people underestimate the power of those willing to migrate to the US.
I’m in my early 40s and moved from Western Europe to the US 11 years ago, and I feel I was the last generation eager to come, the perception of US is changing fast. This is not an H-1B problem but still a parallel one on how to attract people.
The H1B process is unfair to engineers because it drives down their compensation in a way that doesn't affect nurses or welders. If immigration were completely irrespective of profession and based solely around whether the imported laborers get paid enough to contribute more than they receive in taxes/public services, nobody would have any standing to complain about their wages being driven down because every single person benefits in the long run from the economic growth.
As things stand, tech workers and unskilled laborers get screwed by the current status quo because they don't reap the benefit of cheaper goods and services in all the other industries, but everyone else benefits from cheaper electronics/software and landscaping/housekeeping/food service while their wages grow.
You're not wrong on paper, the current immigration practices are just screwy.
EDIT - The hard statistical proof that most of the H-1Bs are tech workers:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...
Yet again, we have classic HN speculation masquerading as authority.
Should software developer salaries be comparable to accountants or to surgeons? That's an arbitrary value judgment.
Software engineers have less purchasing power than they would without the H-1B visa program, and that's indisputable. 64% of the visas go to IT workers and 52% go specifically to programmers, which implies beyond all shadow of a doubt that their salaries decrease further than the cost of the goods and services they pay for.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...
It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir!
You don't know how competent the software engineers are in Europe, and saying "$140k for a software job is extremely high" is an arbitrary value judgment.
I can think of 2 US companies I know of off the top of my head that deliberately hire Europeans since they get talent at a steep discount (especially if you pay them remotely). From what I've seen Ukraine and Estonia are considered goldmines of cheap talent. I doubt they are the only ones.
Bald speculation and opinion would be that this massive imbalance between earnings is causally tied to merit to a degree strong enough that we can confidently say European software engineers are as a whole a whopping 50% less competent than US counterparts. This to me is ridiculous, not because it sounds offensive or anything, it's just obviously untrue for Europe. This is just how we've set up our geopolitics with downstream affects being massive imbalance between earnings of countries.
Stated another way, the things that software engineers can do with their wealth generally seem like normal middle class things. They can own a home but they can't afford a yacht. They can take nice vacations but they aren't part of the jet set. They can start businesses but generally not in capital intensive areas like resource extraction or heavy industry.
I'd say that software engineers, at least the higher paid ones, are probably on the higher side of middle class; but they are still solidly middle class.
When some hospital board member says "there's a shortage of nurses", they leave out the other part: "there's a shortage of nurses who will get puked on and verbally abused by patients for $40k/year".
When Mark Zuckerberg says "there are not enough good programmers", what he really means is "there are a not enough good programmers who will work 60 hour weeks for $150k in a Bay Area suburb where a 1,300 sqft suburban condo costs $2M".
I'm glad I got what I could out of this profession and started investing before the post-pandemic job market reduced us from "middle class" to "lower middle class". So far since 2018, I've managed to turn $20k into $1.4M by running my portfolio like Peter Lynch if Peter Lynch had experience in software and biotech.
My only regret is that I paid off my $28k car and $45k of student loan debt early instead of starting to invest in 2015, in which case I might very well be holding $10M and instead lamenting the $1k-2k of money I spent as a child in the 00s on N64/Gamecube/Wii hardware/software that could have Apple stock worth $200k today.
You're just passing off your own speculation as authoritative, and you didn't even read my comment to comprehension.
I didn't say we need less immigration in the tech sector. I said it hurts tech workers when there's a deflationary effect on their earnings but not the goods and services they pay for, and hence the same immigration practices should apply to every industry.
On paper, you would think this is the case, but in practice 64% of H1-B workers are in IT and 52% are programmers:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...
Again, it stands to reason that if the deflationary effect on tech workers' salaries is disproportionate to the deflationary effect on all the other goods and services they pay for, then tech workers are worse off from the H1-B program. I've seen claims less ironclad than this accepted as fact in peer-reviewed life sciences-related research.
Your comment is just another classic HN case of speculation masquerading as authority.
Often, the person may not have been as productive, happy, or well compensated in their own country.
Also, over time, some of those people make money in the US and take that, their knowledge and skills and go back home to share there. Everyone is better off.
I was discussing this elsewhere, and dug up something I wrote 11 years ago, and I think I'm still pretty happy with it:
https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...
How are Americans better off in this scenario?
1. An American company benefited from their labor
2. American consumers benefited from the goods / services they contributed to providing
3. American citizens benefited from the services provided by the taxes they pay
4. Other American businesses benefited from their patronage
But if we were to take your argument at face value and I generally do because that's what the economists say and makes sense to me, why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration? China, for example, or perhaps Japan or Korea? What about New Zealand or Switzerland?
Think back to what the person I replied to said about the economic benefits of immigration in general (again which I believe are true based on what I understand).
For that matter we can just say the United States offers temporary work visas for skilled workers through the H1B program. Case closed! In the case of maybe New Zealand or Switzerland they represent less than 1% of the global population, most of the talent lives outside of those two countries. Are they importing enough high skilled foreign workers? I’m not sure. Switzerland for examples seems very expensive to immigrate to and get citizenship. But I’m not an expert there, just what I’ve skimmed through online.
Or is there more to it?
Japan's SSW program has close to 300k workers. The U.S. H1B program has about 700k workers, so by population, Japan's program appears to be a bit larger. New Zealand's AEWV program has 80k workers with a population of 5 million so proportionally that's much larger.
This is already the case. About 30% of Switzerlands population are immigrants (one of the highest percentages in the developed world) and it has a freedom of movement treaty with the EU.
In 2023, resident foreigners made up 26.3% of Switzerland's population.[18] Most of these (83%) were from European countries. Italy provided the largest single group of foreigners, accounting for 14.7% of total foreign population, followed closely by Germany (14.0%), Portugal (11.7%), France (6.6%), Kosovo (5.1%), Spain (3.9%), Turkey (3.1%), North Macedonia (3.1%), Serbia (2.8%), Austria (2.0%), United Kingdom (1.9%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.3%) and Croatia (1.3%). Immigrants from Sri Lanka (1.3%), most of them former Tamil refugees, were the largest group of Asian origin (7.9%).
With respect to Switzerland, what are the immigration rules and polices if you are Indian, or Chinese, or Brazilian, or Indonesian, or Nigerian? I’m just picking on those countries due to a mix of population levels and relevance to immigration in America. It’s rather surprising to me that Switzerland seems to have little meaningful numbers of immigrants from these higher population countries. Why is that? Is there maybe a specific policy we could point to? Do people from Italy really like the Alps and the Chinese don’t?
And going back I think to what is implied by the person I responded to, if what they’re saying is true about the economic value of immigration, and I think it is, why doesn’t Switzerland have, for example, unrestricted immigration from all over the world? Why are half of its immigrants from Italy alone? (Again just going off the Wikipedia article and I am happy to look at any other figures)
Are they immigrants or just Italians living and working in Switzerland because of the EU?
Short term - shareholders win, long term - everyone loses except the country of origin, where they can bring the knowledge back and develop their economy.
It's like outsourcing, just the foreign workers are onshore.
People who are purely consumers (usually living of real estate gains or entitlements) are of course a huge part of the population, and benefit from everything brining consumer prices down - including cheap labour.
And many people are both consumers and workers, so they are benefitted from lower prices at the same time as they're disadvantaged by lower salaries. If they've already got real estate and the biggest expenses in life paid, they are more interested in lower consumer prices.
Then you have the people who have a much bigger interest in higher salaries than in cheaper consumer goods. Primarily young workers who need to get a foothold in life. For them it is of utmost importance that salaries increase, even though consumer goods get more expensive, because without a foothold in life they have nothing to live for.
The companies profits primarily go to the capitalists not to average people.
That seems to apply to, for lack of a better term, consumerist goods and services like TVs and clothing. Which isn't nothing. However, it doesn't seem to apply to things like housing.
America's social safety net is already very weak and only getting weaker.
Same as the first point. The benefits of business success primarily goes to capitalists not workers.
I'm from the US, but lived in Europe for quite a while, and my kids have dual citizenship. I think that people moving to places where they are better off is a good thing.
Suppose I'm not an American--like plenty of HN commenters--or alternatively that (as in reality) I am an American but I have good reasons to think that the personal benefit I derive from the presence of immigrants is greater than the cost to me as an individual, even were I to concede more generic economic arguments about wage competition. Then... why am I supposed to prioritize the interests of American tech workers over foreign immigrants?
I don't in general endorse an "I got mine, screw you" approach, nor one that says "hey GDP is going up so screw the losers", but if someone else is taking exactly that attitude just with a nationalistic inflection, it's hard to extend them a lot of empathy.
For H-1B see report here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306919
Do we need more Facebooks and AirBNBs?
The employment environment in Silicon Valley has been extremely strange since 2022. I haven’t been able to find a job in my field since then, despite being at the top of my game. I’m practically bankrupt and currently making ends meet in a minimum wage job.
A huge reason we have so many unicorns is because doing business and scaling in the US is easier than EU or other places.
A huge part of why the Manhattan Project was successful was also because of substantial brain drain from Europe. I think Scott Galloway wrote about this or may have popularized it.
If an employee is exceptional and a skilled unicorn wrangler... 100K is nothing.
Source: I came to the US on H-1B in 2012. I may be misremembering which stage of the process the mass layoffs affect.
Sorry, it’s just that maybe a LOT of you aren’t understanding the motivation here?
I don't think it's new, I've been hearing it my whole life
"and why is it used to uncritical?"
I ... can't figure out what this means.
Edit:// checked US news. I can see what you all refer to now. To explain media seems to assume the US is having a "brain drain" because of fleeing scientists, some other countries make fun of it and call it their "brain gain"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_Eastern_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
I don't think being against exploitive mass migration - which by its definition is brain drain of other countries, which every bleeding hearter likes to ignore - is the same saying no one should ever immigrate ever.
That's largely a myth, though. The vast majority of smart, driven people have no path to lawfully immigrate to the US.
By a wide margin, the main immigration pathway are family visas (i.e., marriages and citizens bringing in relatives). H-1B visas are a comparatively small slice that's available via a lottery only to some professions and some backgrounds - and the process is basically gamed by low-wage consultancies, with a large proportion of the rest gobbled up by a handful of Big Tech employers. And that's before we even get to the fact that H-1B doesn't necessarily give you a path to permanent residency, depending on where you're from.
For most people who aren't techies, the options are really very limited, basically "be exceptionally wealthy", "be a celebrity", or "be one of the world's foremost experts on X".
There is also EB with National Interest Waiver - including for profession like Doctors and such.
Not to mention a lot of employment based visa, if you work for a US employer - L1, EB1/2 directly etc...
There isn't a permanent resident visa for Driven people - but you can get entrepreneur visas if you run a profitable business.
But only a tiny sliver of what you would consider successful, skilled people can qualify for O-1. To my original point: if you're "merely" hard-working and good at something, you - as a general rule - have no lawful pathway to immigrate to the US.
Here's another way to look at it: let's say that in any country, roughly 10% of people fall into the category of "talented and hard-working" - not superstars, but the kind of people who would conceptually enrich the economy. Worldwide, that's probably what, 400 million adults? Further, let's say that about 10% would be interested in living in the US. And before all the EU folks sneer at that: that's probably a big underestimate, because a good chunk of the world is living in places with a much lower standard of living. So that's 40 million who probably want to come. And the total number of employment visas is ~100k/year. We aim for the global top <0.1%.
This is especially true for immigration that is not tied to employment. If you can choose to only take the top, which America mostly could as it is the most desired immigration country in the world, you would prioritize the top.
If there's a limited amount of spots, why won't you prioritize the superstars over just talented and hard working?
So the top 0.1% of the total population, that's likely a good deal (on top of the employment oriented visa which have less of a strain on the economy).
The same logic applies in reverse: there must be sufficient people to create adequate employment, housing, education, health services, and other infrastructure.
Have you considered that a lot of the people wanting to immigrate are able to provide a lot of those things? (P.S. I wonder why ICE keeps targeting construction crews lately -- and is it possible allowing more immigration might actually help us get more housing? Food for thought.)
And its an easy argument:
The Manhattan Project engaged thousands of scientists, but over 16 notable principal scientists (with major published credits) were foreign-born and either retained their citizenship or became naturalized U.S. citizens only after escaping persecution or war in Europe.
As of 2025, about 10-12 CEOs of the top 50 Fortune 500 (F50) companies were born outside the United States, representing roughly 20-25% of F50 CEOs. This number has grown over the past two decades, reflecting increasing diversity among leadership at America's largest corporations.
Nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies in 2025—specifically 44%—were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, meaning the original founders were not born in the United States or were the first generation after immigration.
These are just three major examples.
A better test may be comparing company performance worldwide instead of only in the F500. That's a different list, the Global 500.
H1B visa is just a rank and file worker with a certain skill.
It's corruption of the government.
Now, by the way I understand H-1B, $100k still seams cheap for essentially getting a slave.
Very chilling to think about.
It's great if you only root for the US, but taking more global perspective, let's have other countries improve their situation as well. There are almost 200 or so countries, I am ok with them improving their economy using their equivalent of H1-B programs.
This is a golden opportunity for others to step in an eat Americans' lunch so to speak, let's see if they capitalize on it.
On the other hand, those working for WITCH companies…
And trust me, I’m in no way “anti minority”. Not only are some of my best friends minorities - so are my parents…
WITCH companies are not hiring the best or the brightest. Their entire value play is contracting out mediocre developers at mediocre wages.
Not so straight forward. Ambitious people leave underdeveloped countries because there are little opportunities. It's not like they are going to build same great product there as in California.
The elephant in the room is that many of these highly successful people who have brought great economic advantage to the US over the years happen to have brown skin.
As for why this policy is being adopted: sometimes an elephant is just an elephant. The huge price increase hurts brown people (mostly), and possibly curbs immigration. It will play well with a certain segment of Americans.
There are many subtleties to the H1-B visa debate, but I don’t think they are at play in this policy change.
Context: 50% tariff has been applied to India. Chabahar port sanctions are reintroduced. And more to come in next few weeks.
H1B program == leverage over the H1B workers due to the employment tie-in to residence, leverage over other non-H1B workers as well, due to the wider talent pool at LOWER wages.
I don't know whether Trump is doing is good, but the H1B program helps Owners more than it helps Workers.
The ethics of emigration is an interesting area that's under explored, especially in non-emergency scenarios. We have obligations to our own societies, for example, but how this affects emigration requires clarification.
We would have to filter for these more. In reality the majority of H1B visa are issued to companies like Infosys or Tata who often have below average people.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3lz...
People with actually talent and intelligence realise how messed up the USA is (and has been for some time) and prefer things like healthcare and gun control.
And if they really want the lack of work life balance and/or high paid roles, they can consult from US company like I do. Now I get the money, but I live in a decent country.
I don't think there is any amount of money you could offer me to move to the USA. Well ok, maybe when it gets to $10 million / year I would have to start considering it.
In reality, this will just be used to show fealty to trump and a fastlane visa will be opened to companies willing to join the fascists.
Again, good faith argument against something that isn't bewing done with a reasonably democratic outcome.
I'm in New Zealand, which is far east of Japan, but still a western country.
Any amount of observing children will show that equal instruction will not net equal outcome.
It damn sure hasn't worked out well for a lot of talented, perpetually underemployed (many deep in perpetual debt) US kids. And I'm pretty sure that what those talented folks learn here in the US has made its way back to those countries, considering (e.g.) the level of competition we see from Asia these days.
The cost is not even close to cover the wage difference (20-30%): https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
Hiring local people was preferable in every way. But the market was hot and it was seemingly almost impossible to actually do that.
No, it has not. And not because the people were not capable. It is because most of those projects depend on having the right kind of ecosystem. Massive venture capital, stable institutions, cutting-edge infrastructure, tolerant regulation, network effects, and huge government spend especially in space, defense, and R&D.
Those elements are overwhelmingly concentrated in the U.S. and particularly in Silicon Valley.
Jan Koum didn’t build WhatsApp in Kyiv he built it in California. Ukraine in the 1990s barely had reliable phone lines, let alone the mobile networks, cloud infrastructure, and capital required to scale a global messaging service. Sergey Brin didn’t found Google in Moscow. Russia had brilliant mathematicians, but no open internet culture, no ad driven funding model, and no free flowing capital markets. No chance of a SpaceX out of South Africa or Canada. Those countries entire annual space budget wouldn’t even cover a single Falcon 9 launch.
These are not just anecdotes, but the proof that without the combination of American capital, infrastructure, and government spending, projects on this scale simply would not have been possible. The brain power was there, but the ecosystem that turns raw talent into global impact was not.
This mindset was always going to backfire and now you are just witnessing it.
Their talents would be simply wasted in Poland. There simply is not enough capital and academic resources are not going to best people but to ones gaming the system.
I bet a lot of talented people move to US because they would have to fight uphill battles in their home countries with lack of funding, nepotism, corruption, caste systems you name it.
So I don’t think it would make much difference for the countries if they don’t have society set in ways to benefit from those talents.
Of course we continued to accept superstars even during immigration restriction, like German scientists fleeing the Nazis. We probably don’t need more than 10,000 or 20,000 carefully selected immigrants a year to continue doing that.
This is how they do it.
What industries are going to get hit hardest? Tech and medicine, two of the largest money makers in the country.
As a fully remote engineering contractor I’ve been building my area of expertise, clients and connections, and so far it’s been alright. It does take work and there’s no one to guide you, but in my experience with ambition it’s doable.
A few hundred? All of the tech companies I've worked for are > 50% Indians in the US. Especially in big tech. I could be wrong, but my understanding is there there is not enough software developers in the US, hence the temp workers. Is there expectation that the demand will drop?
I know for a fact that multinational companies are expanding in exactly those areas (plus India) for exactly the reason that it's become very difficult to hire and move people to the US.
Those workers aren't paying taxes in the United States, and obviously the companies hiring people outside of the US aren't going to hire people for those positions in the United States.
Yes, this new fee will make that more expensive to do, but I'm not convinced it will no longer be worth it for most companies.
I wouldn't mind a new policy that would raise the median "quality" of the H-1B visa holder, even if that meant the total number is lower. Sure, Canada and Western Europe can take the mediocre people we'd no longer be granting visas to, but so what.
But this $100k policy is not going to increase the median quality of candidates. I actually don't think it's going to have a huge affect on things; it's just a token effort to "do something" that Trump's base will eat up, and he'll declare it a success even if there's no improvement or it makes things worse.
Canadian salaries are also notoriously low in tech.
However the ceiling in the US is so much higher that it still makes sense for many to tolerate the chaos and uncertainty of moving here for work.
Surely, that could not possibly be the point!
Why would you pursue a PhD with a 25k/year stipend when you can just start a near 6-figure job and start paying off your student debt?
Only the ones with financial freedom or commitment to research take the PhD pill. Or when you go through a recession and you want to delay the entry to the job searching market.
Most won't be filled at all.
Green cards are almost useless for hiring, as the processing times are too long. "We would like to offer you this position, but conditionally. We still need a year or two to handle the bureaucracy, and we can't say for sure if we are actually allowed to hire you. Please don't accept another position meanwhile."
This has been proposed before and I don't really see any downsides. If your company really needs them, just pay them what they're actually worth.
Which is clearly a good thing, but I fear it signals deteriorating relationships with other countries.
This just made it a little bit harder for american capitalists. No doubt there are nationalist concerns but also national security concerns behind this decision.
Despite what you read in the globalist media, it didn't cause havoc to the economy.
However, H1Bs have been a thorny issue for a while, and this might be the rebalancing sorely needed. If Capital can freely import cheaper labor ad infinitum from abroad (or outsource it), then that deteriorates domestic stability while amplifying a form of Capitalist Imperialism abroad. Thus far, China's been the only country to really take full advantage of this long-term strategy error, and a lot of tech folks have been warning that failing to address known flaws in the visa process will ultimately leave us at a disadvantage in the long run, much like we did with manufacturing.
A high application fee is a start, but the better solution is dispensing with H1Bs entirely in favor of green card sponsorship with associated work contract. If these talented workers are that badly needed, companies would have no compunction sponsoring their permanent residency and, eventually, naturalization. Long-term data suggests none of the tech industry is really doing this, which means these "uniquely talented workers" are just replacing existing American workers at lower wages and higher precarity.
I love my international colleagues, and I want them to be treated with the same dignity and respect I receive. H1Bs do not, and cannot, accomplish this outcome.
Of the both of us, I've been the strong proponent for moving the US. and with each passing day, its getting harder to make a strong case for the pain, and uncertainty of moving here.
Lately everything has been counter to what one would expect from a pro-growth, accelerationist country. But I understand where the reasoning is coming from, though.
That is exactly the goal here by this administration.
Which is why all the people yelling about immigration today, who are second and third generation, need to be quiet.
Consider that, in 1905, my great-grandfather got on a boat in Italy, sailed across the Atlantic, arrived in New York, went through a very simple immigration process on-site, and at that point was legal to live and work in the US for as long as he wanted. He eventually naturalized as a US citizen in 1920, only needing to prove his residency and present the record of his legal entrance 15 years prior.
We're a long way from that state of affairs now. The H-1 program was developed because we weren't getting enough of an influx of skilled work due to the reduction in immigration caused by new, more-restrictive immigration laws enacted over the prior decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Bellingham_race_riot
(and even with that regime, Italians/Irish/Catholics etc. were discriminated LOL).
Today, US is forced to comply with anti-racial position so it can't quite do what it really wants - to open the doors to white-immigrants but to restrict it to everyone else. This happens in the background with the way the green-card process is structured, but frankly, I think everyone is well-served if we stop this farce and just have racial quotas. US empire is failing, so there's no need to keep up such pretences today.
There's quite a bit of research on how anti-racism was a strategy adopted by the US/West after WW2 to prevent the then freed countries (starting with India ironically) from seeking revenge for the centuries of total devastation and mass violence imposed on them.
The nature of the American success story changes over time and with that the nature of immigrant success also changes.
In the last decade or so tech, especially information tech, has been one of the biggest contributors to growth in the US economy, and first generation immigrants have been a big contributor to that. For example, first generation immigrants have founded many of the tech unicorns (although I think he overstated it a little--my searching suggests it is closed to 40-50% rather than a majority).
In earlier decades the biggest contributors at various times included manufacturing, farm technology, defense, the Gulf Coast petroleum industry, and construction.
There were certainly immigrants involved in all those but not nearly to the extent that they are in present day tech, especially at the top.
We are seeing it in real time.
Open your eyes.
It's not just this specific issue, honestly. Throwing wrench on all economies, that my wife and I bet on is what's horrible. Research fund cuts on premium institutes, the wonky arrests etc.
Even yesterday, I had to make a case for why all of this certainty might be worth it. And it was not easy. At this point though, I certainly agree that the US is not in a trajectory for appreciating external contributions.
Similar to what ended up happening with china and manufacturing.
The first country that cracks this will have streets paved with gold.
How do you determine that?
It should be an auction.
The annual salary should match the fee (unless below some minimum).
The original Bloomberg article doesn't state: https://archive.is/tpuut
Some research (okay, okay, I used Claude) indicates that "In summary, while Congress provides the statutory authority and mandates certain specific fees, the specific amounts for most H1B fees are set through the regulatory process by DHS/USCIS based on cost recovery principles and activity-based costing analysis."
Further, "The core authority comes from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) section 286(m), 8 U.S.C. 1356(m), which authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to set fees for adjudication services "at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services".
From the legislation ( https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2024-title8/pdf/U... ):
That fees for providing adjudication and naturalization services may be set at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services, includ- ing the costs of similar services provided with- out charge to asylum applicants or other immi- grants. Such fees may also be set at a level that will recover any additional costs associated with the administration of the fees collected.
I imagine there's a very good argument that the fee is intentionally excessive, and I also imagine that the Supreme Court will decide after a lengthy court battle that the President is due extensive deference in this.
There's a reason Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others have been expanding offices and raising TC in Eastern Europe and India for years.
The main industries that will be severely hit are chip design, biotech, pharma, and STEM academia.
Good for India though, who needs a "Thousand Talents" program when the targets of a brain drain are to cost prohibitive to hire in the US.
I don't know many tech workers who criticize H1B visas, outside of maybe the way that they empower the employer over employees.
Having worked with the recent generation of Indians, I can safely say this can be a good thing. Baseline morality and work ethics for many (not all, but many) in the recent generation of Indians are so low. It’s a generational shift that I can tell. Get rich quick, wannabe try too hard to fit in and have fun with wild Wild West mindset that just has a completely different tone from earlier generations of hard working Indians who helped build some of the major products we use today.
These kids that come from often wealthy or upper middle class families with faith and cultural grounding would be far better off in their life trajectory (and country as a whole with brain drain) if they stayed back, led innovation in their own country, and pushed their corrupt bureaucratic government ecosystem to change. Instead of opting for a mediocre hedonistic lifestyle in the west where they know they have no lasting stability (mind you it is 100+ years wait time for many in the current immigration process to get green card), often get stuck working in the same company and not able to move, can’t start things on their own again because of visa rules.
No one wins in this in the long run. Except maybe some corporations.
This H1B policy will put internal domestic pressure on India to put sanctions pressure on Russia. If so, waive the fees for the Indian consultancy firms. Anytime India lets up on sanctions, the fees will come back.
Either the US will get the sanctions it seeks or it will get a revenue stream from a policy that plays well to many US voters.
That was a stated reason. The real reason was that Narendra Modi didn't want to nominate Trump for a Nobel peace prize for his participation in India/Pakistan conflict and even acknowledge Trumps involvement.
All while Trump keeps talking that he stopped a war and deserves the prize.
I’ll wait till I form an opinion on this.
Pack up, anyway.
1) All countries are free to come up with as strict or as loose immigration/tourist visa requirements as they like.
2) Companies can source remote labor from anywhere with zero government overhead.
3) Companies cannot source physical labor from abroad.
4) Reform local housing laws so that housing is not used for speculation/tied to employment.
Then communities can finally be communities, work can be work, and tourism can be tourism.
The US makes up about 4.5% of the global population and it seems silly to think that the FAANG companies and the new AI startups chasing behind them are going to restrict their hiring to this tiny slice of the global talent pool.
The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.
I myself became a US citizen two years ago after being on a H1B. I was paid the same as all my peers and for all its shortcomings the program worked for me. It stunning to think this has been closed off, killing the main path for skilled immigration into the US.
Is it?
Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts. $100K is actually a surprisingly well-considered number and would still see the intake of legitimate talents, obviously contingent on the specific details. Indeed, those people wouldn't have to compete with masses of consultant trash and the whole lottery system could be done away with.
$100K actually seems perfectly coherent with forcing the program to winnow down to actual talents. People truly good enough to get the employer to pony up $100K to pull them in -- presuming there isn't some kickback fraud happening -- will truly be the best of the best.
> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in
Paradoxically the #1 reason H1B employers bring in H1Bs is to bridge offshoring work. Pull in a dozen Indians and they're your bridge to the big Indian office, which is precisely why Infosys, Tata et al are such H1B users.
These are crazy outliers who would go through a different visa path anyway. US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures. Weirdly O1 visa holder spouses will get an O3 which doesn't allow them to work, making it worse than the H1B/H4 visa for some set of people. (H4s allow spouses to work)
They are. And in the truly talented spaces there are many at all of the ranges in between.
> US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures
$100k for three to six years seems entirely reasonable if it's really such a critical need.
So the one year seems to be the trial policy of the $100K, but it sounds like it's a single payment per visa, then normal visa policy comes into play.
Yes, and there are plenty of US citizens to fill these roles.
Does this utopia come with four-day weekends?
Countries become wealthy because people in them work and make stuff. It's incredible to see people actively advocating for making their country poorer. "No, no, we have too many people working..."
If you just need a normal worker, there are plenty of CS grads and unemployed SWEs you can hire in the US right now. If you need a specialized foreign worker because he or she is not available in the US, then chances are you are going to pay a premium anyway; that's the point.
And what stops those people, best of the best, working somewhere else, with much better living standard(EU) ?
In the past, it's because of salary, but now, the 100k/year will either make company to lower their package, or try to extract much more from the employee.
There's literally millions of talented Americans out of work in the tech industry right now while companies continue to hire H1B.
The companies post impossible requirement job ads in obscure locations..to get around the requirements to hire Americans first.
Says you. I work in Lake Wobegon.
I think there are certainly abuses of the system, but we should be focusing on stamping out that abuse, not just generally "slowing it down". A $100k price tag is not going to affect abuse all that much; yes, it will make it less profitable, but probably not to the point where it will fix anything.
As a US-born citizen working in the US, I would rather work with a smart, motivated person from another country than a mediocre person from the US. The problem is that there are a lot of non-exceptional people being brought in on these visas, so let's focus on stopping that as much as we can. And while there are plenty of exceptional people who are US citizens, there are also many more who are mediocre or worse; we should be importing talent in order to raise that average.
That is, at most, less than half a million people in the field and the majority of those jobs aren't the ones looking for overseas hires anyway. If we take CompTIA's number of roughly 5M tech workers it's 140,000 people, not "literally millions."
If you have better numbers, please, let us know.
Such offshoring was possible before and after today.
Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.
I suspect it didn't happen before because these companies were more focused on growth than efficiency.
That being said, thanks to AI parts of the big companies are again focused on growth at all cost.
Is it? $100k per hire isn't much of a cost to pay for large companies. Smaller companies may -- may -- end up having some trouble with this, but consider that $100k often amounts to less than a yearly base salary (and will pretty much always be less than a year of total comp/total employee cost), not to mention the costs of legal staff that they're already paying to deal with this stuff.
What this may do is cause some of the "body shop" consultancies to drop some of their "low end" business, so they'll focus more on targeting positions with higher salaries. That's... probably a good thing.
And yeah, we may see some higher rates of offshoring, but I don't think that will be significant. And I'm not even really convinced: offshoring is already possible, and in strict dollar terms is already cheaper than going through the H-1B process to bring someone to the US. If companies preferred offshoring, they'd be doing it; clearly the already-higher-cost H-1B program is still their preference.
I agree that this isn't going to fix the H-1B visa system, and is not a reform or even a particularly positive step toward a reform, but I think you're overestimating the negative impact. I really don't think this will change things much at all.
It is $100k per hire per year.
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...
That's almost as much as the media H1B salary. It's a huge cost overhead. I don't understand how you can be dismissive of a number almost as high as hiring another engineer.
Really? 100k on top of a salary per year? Why would anyone do that?
I’m honestly tired of hearing the argument “if we do X then business will move to another state or out of US”.
Good riddance to the companies that flee from jurisdictions enforcing workers rights, don’t allow exploitation, etc.
The most important thing is protecting people, not fearing the cries of money-making machines.
California could introduce a million dollar minimum wage for software engineers, ban electricity on Thursdays, raise corporate taxes to 60% and still probably have more new unicorns founded in the subsequent year than Europe.
L1 has no PWD, no min wage requirements (beyond min wage law in US) and is completely uncapped.
No, this is just another tariff. If it costs $200k/yr to employee an H1B Software Engineer, and you expect them to work for you for 3 years, it raises the cost of employment from $200k/yr to $233k/yr. It'll discourage people from applying on the margins, which will bring the application rate down and acceptance rate up.
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...
From defunding science, fining the biggest universities, defunding green energy, making hiring ambitious foreign workers economically unfeasible, replacing technocratic administrators with incompetent lackies with quite literally zero experience, imposing inordinate tariffs ... It's just win after win for the CCP.
Couldn't possibly be more generous
Even with tariffs, the initial effect was to increase purchases before the tariffs hit. Later the companies started eating from their margins instead of increasing prices right away. So it all resulted in increased economic activity and then increased tax payments into the federal government. However, because this is tax on consumption, it will eventually reduce business profits and personal wealth of the consumers. Meanwhile, Trump can claim that the economy is booming and he is collecting huge tax revenues without any negative effects.
Offshoring can, and ought to be, heavily tariffed.
If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.
Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.
All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).
Of course much of this could be solved by narrowing the gap between the lowest earnings and highest earnings workers so that the tech career path wasn't so high of stakes. Anybody working should have the opportunity to launch into a dignified adult life. There must be a conversation ultimately about where the vast profits of tech firms should sit within our economy.
Amongst other elements that should be fixed:
* Taxation without representation (i'm suggesting adding the latter, not removing the former)
* The H1B worker must be paid at or above the higher of the median rate at the company for the role or at the employee's request by an independent valuation for the role, this ensures workers are not being paid less
* The fee should be prorated, monthly, over the 6 year span of the H1B, allowing the company to spread it over time and manage cashflow
* The H1B worker should only be contractually required to stay for the average tenure of the role in the industry (which afaik is 18mo right now)
* The H1B worker should be able to easily port their H1B over to another employer. The new employer must pay the fee, prorated, on the H1B, the prior employer will be reimbursed prorated unused fees
Happens to permanent residents too, not only employment visas.
I'm not sure the solution, because visas/Perm cannot vote. But at least the latter can (afaik ianal) contribute to political campaigns.
Some counter arguments from the top of my head:
What about tourists? They pay taxes while they are here too.
What about electoral interference? It’s way easier to pay taxes than to gain citizenship; this would create a perverse incentive.
What about allegiance? When you become a citizen you pledge allegiance to the US. Not when you pay taxes. Would incentives be aligned?
What about citizen only duties? (male) Citizens have to sign up for selective service and might have to go to war. Not so with H1Bs (though, to your point, permanent residents have to do it). Would it be fair to offer voting rights to everyone even if they don’t have the same duties?
This is literally the dumbest administration this country has ever seen. Between tariffs and immigration and now this, it’s like they don’t even know what the consequences of their actions are.
This was true before and after today.
Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.
It’s entirely possible some H1b’s would happily pay the $100k if they had a guaranteed visa for 5-10+ years, but the vast majority will simply go home and work remotely.
But I believe the effect of this extortion will be a brain drain on U.S. fortune 1000 companies and that will push those same companies to build off shore offices, completely avoiding the administration’s goofiness.
According to many economists, the presence of immigrant workers in the United States creates new job opportunities for native-born workers. This occurs in five ways. First, immigrant workers and native-born workers often have different skill sets, meaning that they fill different types of jobs. As a result, they complement each other in the labor market rather than competing for the exact same jobs. Second, immigrant workers spend and invest their wages in the U.S. economy, which increases consumer demand and creates new jobs. Third, businesses respond to the presence of immigrant workers and consumers by expanding their operations in the United States rather than searching for new opportunities overseas. Fourth, immigrants themselves frequently create new businesses, thereby expanding the U.S. labor market. Fifth, the new ideas and innovations developed by immigrants fuel economic growth.
Similarly, a recent study found that, between 2005 and 2018, an increase in the share of workers within a particular occupation who were H-1B visa holders was associated with a decrease in the unemployment rate within that occupation. Another recent study found that restrictions on H-1B visas (such as rising denial rates) motivate U.S.-based multinational corporations to decrease the number of jobs they offer in this country. Instead, the corporations increase employment at their existing foreign affiliates or open new foreign affiliates—particularly in India, China, and Canada. A study conducted in 2019 revealed that higher rates of successful H-1B applications were positively correlated with an increased number of patents filed and patent citations. Moreover, such startups were more inclined to secure venture capital funding and achieve successful IPOs or acquisitions.
The available data also indicate that H-1B workers do not earn low wages or drag down the wages of other workers. In 2021, the median wage of an H-1B worker was $108,000, compared to $45,760 for U.S. workers in general. Moreover, between 2003 and 2021, the median wage of H-1B workers grew by 52 percent. During the same period, the median wage of all U.S. workers increased by 39 percent. In FY 2019, 78 percent of all employers who hired H-1B workers offered wages to H-1B visa holders that were higher than what the Department of Labor had determined to be the “prevailing wage” for a particular kind of job.
People want to avoid negative effects from immigration (cultural/language/crimerate)- fine.
But are those people acknowledging how much economical growth was driven by migrant labor over the last half century? Hell no. Would the average alt-righter be willing to sacrifice any fraction of all those compounded gains? Absolutely not- every dollar of tax is too much, even to pay a fraction of the damage that is and will be caused by them (=> energy price/co2 taxation).
As a self-identifying moderate patriot, selfish complainers of that ilk seem a worse plague on their nation than the immigrants they keep whining about.
Meanwhile for the last half century the average American has seen declining wealth and wage growth when adjust for inflation, while elite wealth has grown immensely during the same time period. So who is benefitting from "economic growth"? [1]
This is due to many factors, but I'm wholly unconvinced by the neoliberal notion that high immigration doesn't undercut domestic wages.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
I would be totally fine with this if it was the former, but I would bet that it won't be...
I sort of wish it had been done 15 years ago but better late then never.
Specifically, the thinking "Money coming to us is desirable, therefor people who give us lots of money are by definition not undesirable people".
Well, at least dollars are more easily quantified than ethics.
1)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/19/trump-gold-card-vis...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/the-...
.... As the... head of the executive branch?
It’s bad enough that he’s doing it, we should at least be honest about what’s going on.
Obviously there are very serious civic questions here (like under what law the authority to levy that fee was granted! Congress controls taxation, not the president). But so far congress and the courts are uninvolved.
The attribution is colloquial, but correct. It's routine to refer to the executive branch by the president's name.
1. Hire more American workers (pay more, maybe they don't exist so don't hire)
2. Move their offices overseas (already happening, we should see an acceleration)
Ok, I guess AI could also start replacing more roles, but we won't see that productivity for a year or two.
If companies choose 2 over 1, it will mean fewer jobs overall in the USA (including support and service jobs).
Companies could already hire offshore for 50% of what they pay in America, so I don't expect a dramatic change there.
https://thefactcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/No-T...
H1B visas are for rank and file employees with just a skill.
This allows employers to indenture servitude employees, depresses American wages, increases unemployment, increases rent prices in areas with high levels of immigration, and hurts American culture.
Most jobs are not that hard and a company should invest in Americans instead of immigrants if it want's to continue to do business here and enjoy the fruits of America.
MAGA (and most Americans) don't seem to have any issue with immigration -what they have a issue with is the culture/skin-color/ethnicity of who immigrates. Indeed this is where the country quotas come from - Europe with 20 odd countries has 20x the priority than India or China.
If the US had an ounce of honestly they'd just make this explicit instead of beating around the bush. Since people have better opinion of the Chinese and other "white" East-Asians (admittedly the fairer gender only), just restrict it explicitly to "race" of Caucasians and there "Yellow" races.
It'll save Indians and other "suburbans" a lot of trouble not dealing with this farce of "liberalism" going forward. I genuinely mean this - given how things are going, Indians will find themselves in the place of Jews in Nazi Germany quite soon. And much like the useless British-colonial state that governed Israel then, the vestigial British state in India which is as internet upon Anglo-American triumph today, can't and will do jack shit for them.
> And much like the useless British-colonial state that governed Israel then, the vestigial British state in India which is as internet upon Anglo-American triumph today, can't and will do jack shit for them.
Are you saying that Indian people wouldn't be allowed to immigrate to India?
Minutes of research say current Indian law allows people of Indian descent but not citizens to get Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) — a special immigration status for foreign nationals of Indian origin.
You're eligible if you are:
1. A former Indian citizen (who gave up Indian citizenship, e.g., to get U.S. or UK citizenship), or
2. A descendant (up to great-grandparent level) of an Indian citizen, or
3. The spouse of an Indian citizen or an OCI cardholder (subject to conditions)
With OCI, you can have:
1. Unlimited stay in India
2. Right to work, own property, and open bank accounts.
India could change it's laws, keep all the non-citizens out (or even citizens, what can't we imagine in this fantasy story). India could deny OCI to most every person that applies for its green card like status. But under current laws in your unlikely story, they seem like they'll do something.
I'd expect they'd fly as many Indian people as they could out of the US like many countries do in times of war. Not that this scenario will ever come to pass.
It is absolutely clear that there is H1B abuse and I'm looking directly at the bodyshops like Infosys and Tata. Here's how it goes:
1. Apply for as many visas as possible. This is done primarily for Indian nationals for reasons which will become clear;
2. As the employer you really don't care which ones are approved or how many because what you're going to do is farm out those employees, whether there's 1000 of them or 10,000 of them;
3. Because there is an annual quota and applications have expanded so much, the chance of success is about 1 in 3 currently in the annual lottery. And a Principal Engineer in AI at Google or Meta has the same chance of success as a junior developer at Tata. There may be other options for the first person such as EB1 or NIW or L1 but that's really beyond the scope;
4. As part of this process you have to "prove" you cannot fill a position with a US resident or citizen. There is a whole process for this to minimize the number of applicants and to reject any who happen to find your newspaper ad and apply. This also applies to the Green card Labor Certification too, to a higher degree. Part of this is to make sure the employee is getting paid enough for their job and area. This is called a prevailing wage determination ("PWD"). This process doens't really work, which I'll get into later;
5. So you, as an Indian national won the H1B lottery and your visa is approved. You come to the US and hope Tata finds you a job where they farm you out at $200-500 per hours while paying you $50 or thereabouts;
6. Now the employer starts doing things they're technically not allowed to do, like if they can't find you a job they stop paying you. You may fall below the PWD because of this;
7. A H1B is valid for 3 years, extendable by another 3 for a total of 6 years, after which you're technically meant to leave the country. But what happens is the employer will file for an employment-based green card for you. If they do this in the first 5 years you can remain while that case is pending;
8. There are annual quotas for how many green cards are issued for each employment category. Additionally no more than 7% each year can be issued to any single country, based entirely on your country of birth, not your actual citizenship. And if you're married and have children under age, they will also count against these quotas.
9. So because H1B applicants are disproportionately Indian natioanals, there is a MASSIVE bottleneck for employment based green cards. As such, there is a HUGE backlog. Currently, USCIS is processing green cards for EB3 applicants from India who have a priority date of August 2013. That means their PERM was approved on or before August 2013;
10. So this is how these bodyshops can abuse Indian nationals. Those nationals really can't leave their job. Not easily anywway. There are laws that if they change jobs they get to keep their priority date but the new employer has to file an entirely new green card applications, including doing the entire PERM process again. Oh and if the employer moves area or their jobs changes significantly, it may invalidate their PERM too.
So these bodyshops can keep essentially indentured servants for 15-20+ years and at any time can fire that person. The power imbalance is so massive. This suppresses wages for everyone.
And these people are in the same cateogry as highly paid engineers in tech companies who have substantially better conditions.
Also, at any point along the way the USCIS can simply decide to take a whole bunch of extra time for literally no reason. They have a policy to randomly audit ~30% of applications. Why? They will never tell you. Their arguemnt is to avoid people "gaming" the system by working out the audit criteria so there's a bunch of random "noise" in there. Literally.
Well that doesn't sound bad right? Extra scrutiny? Except now you've added 1-2 years to the processing for literally no reason. You may get a request for evidence ("RFE") out of it too, which might add another year too. This can go multiple rounds too. I know people who spent 5 years going through audits and RFEs. One in particular is an engineering director at Google now.
While tech companies like Google, Meta, etc are better than the bodyshops they absolutely use this system to suppress wages, again because of the power imbalance.
It doesn't have to be this way. Take Switzerland as an example. I'm rusty on the details but IIRC if you're on a B permit (work permit like an H1B, tied to an employer) for 5 or 10 years (EU citizen is 5, otherwise 10, generally), you automatically get a C permit, which is basically a green card.
All this to say is that I have mixed feelings on this $100k fee. It will absolutely cut demand for H1Bs. It will decimate new graduate H1Bs but there's an argument that US residents and citizens should get priority for entry-level positions anyway, right?
If all this comes with much less paperwork, like skipping the whole LC process, then maybe large employers will pay it because they absolutely do spend a fortune on immigration lawyers.
If anything, the entire immigration system needs an overhaul but there's no political will for that. There are no votes in it. Quite the opposite: any serious attempt can be dismissed as "they're stealing our jobs".
I also think layoffs at large companies should absolutely preclude you from sponsoring H1Bs entirely for 2+ years.
There are two variations of the B permit one can get. An unrestricted B permit isn't tied to a specific employer and provides a path toward permanent residence (C permit) within five years for EU citizens or ten years for non-EU citizens. Based on my experience, EU citizens almost always get an unrestricted permit and are treated relatively well by the immigration process: at their first application, they receive a five-year B permit, and at the first renewal five years later, they automatically get a C permit. As a EU citizen you just need to find a job, and your right to work is essentially unrestricted.
The non-EU path is quite different. A non-EU citizen only gets an unrestricted B permit if they prove they have special skills that are not currently available on the local job market. There is a yearly quota for such permits. One can also be unlucky and get an L permit, which is for temporary work only. Moreover, restricted B requires yearly renewal with a demonstration of ongoing employment at each renewal.
If you get a restricted B permit (or L), you don't have any direct path to a C permit, no matter how many years you've lived in Switzerland. You can complete your bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees and continue working for a university as a contractor afterward, and still not be eligible for the path toward a C permit after over a decade of living in the country. To get a C permit, the last two years prior to the application must have been on an unrestricted B permit, working a full-time, unlimited-term job contract. The change to an unrestricted B permit requires you to have become a "special talent" during those prior years; otherwise, it won't be granted.
Isn't this a change USCIS makes? Or does it have to go through congress?
We are in 2025!
Decentralisation is important due to the high cost of living in cities. Bring life to less populated areas.
It’s too bad policy won’t actually track economic needs or fairness; it’s mainly to drive the expansion of the political franchise.
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3l...
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3l...
Unfathomably cruel.
[0]: Oh, it looks like the bsky link has an article with companies advising as such - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/31/immigra...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
> If that is correct, the implications are not as urgent.
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3l...
In important cases like this one should read the bill's text and not watch some random video on the Internet which has no legal power.
Oh, how quaint, as if this significant change went through the normal lawmaking process that involves bills and Congressional approval, instead of the new rule by executive order fiat.
It says that the payment is for H1B visa applicants who are currently outside the country?
Lets not act like this is a good faith adjustment of concerns.
So there is a tension between competition and increased opportunities and wage growth through increased company growth.
But how does this work out in practice? Luckily, there have been a lot of studies about the impact of the H1B program, which you can find on Google Scholar or SSRN. An extremely quick scan shows mixed findings that are hard to summarize, which is understandable because the dynamics are complex. (Contemplating getting Gemini to do a Deep Research report on this.)
So to narrow things down, I looked for empirical studies that focus on the specific counter-factual, "how would native workers fare if there were no H1B?" Interestingly, while I actually found some, even the recent studies (from 2022-2025) rely on empirical data from 2006 - 2008. That was when the H1B moved to a lottery system, creating a natural experiment allowing for comparison between firms that won and lost the lottery. (One study does find that limited data from 2022 corroborates its findings.) Not perfect, but better than hypotheticals.
Here's a government page with a very brief overview of two relevant studies: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12966 (The page doesn't scroll, but the PDF can be downloaded.)
To summarize, the studies find that there was no negative impact on native-born workers in terms of employment, and in terms of wages, some saw increases and others saw decreases in the range of 3-5%, depending on age, tenure and level of education.
But interestingly, the 2025 study also found that winning a lottery also increased the chance by 2.5% that the firm survived. Causation and correlation etc. aside the implications for employment are clear: if a firm does not survive, all employees, native or foreign, lose their jobs. This is an example of the dynamic I mentioned above.
Beyond these studies, I follow a labor economist and it's fascinating to see how these dynamics have been playing out over the last few years in the broader economy. As a relevant example, there is a credible theory that increased immigration was what helped the US manage its inflation crisis:
https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy...
If there was insufficient labor pool as you suggest, interviews would become less selective and wages would rise.
I'm letting my cynicism show here, but I think this is a power move by the capital class to show labor their place after an exceptionally strong labor market during ZIRP. This is much more recent and not related to the H1B program.
However, the unsolved problem is that this could just lead to more offshoring by these same tech companies who are abusing the program now. Not sure if there's any way to stop that.
Post nothing here you would not mind showing to a border guard.
Like seriously, I get this is very impactful, but don't risk your livelihood to argue with internet strangers.
“The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”
More command economy, more opportunity for graft.
Recently Trump also met with Indias arch enemy Pakistan’s de facto leader (military chief) in Washington and shortly following that you had Saudi-Pakistan NATO like alliance announced (of course US is major allies for both of those countries). It is interesting because pre-election Trump touted many Indians and even had Modi joining him in one of the largest Indian gatherings. But I guess Trump admin being the wild card it has always been policy wise had a shift. What that leads to is still to be seen.
Recent SCO summit where India and China had some shared alliance pledges can give some hints what’s to come but it’s interesting he didn’t so far do so with Chinese students and had in fact a U turn on allowing 600000 students with their visas as part of the trade negotiations.
Pulling in smart people from all over the world is good for America.
I’m sure there are US citizens who would have been better candidates if we had a better education system or grew talent. Maybe this will encourage that, but it’s going to take a long time.
All the smart engineers that I know absolutely struggle to find jobs. There are regularly job threads here on HN or freelance subreddits and other places, that are chocked full of great people desperate for work.
But maybe that's really just a small fraction of the people, I can't know for sure.
What about yale CS grads working at chipotle.
So our CS graduates take the same courses, study the same material, and pass on the same grading scales as these international students from countries like China, India, etc that have come to attend American universities. Therefore it seems unlikely that they are categorically incompetent due to a flaw in their education, even if we make some allowance for them not studying as rigorously as their international peers for whatever reason.
However, if the news can be believed, we're now seeing a significant number of CS graduates who are unable to find employment. This is coming on the tail end of a bunch of highly publicized layoffs.
The notion that there "Aren't Americans to do these jobs" just doesn't track. I'm sure that there are lots of corporate executives who are saying that there aren't enough qualified Americans to do these jobs, but they're saying that because it's in their best economic interest to say that, not because it's actually true.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...
The assumption that a lot of people make, apparently including Trump, is that companies are hiring H1B for no good reason. Or maybe because they think it's cheaper? It's not. In virtually all cases, H1B hires are because there simply aren't any suitable American applicants with the necessary skills.
I’m sure people will make the argument about FAANG but there’s plenty of Americans for that too.
Go look at the experience people are having right now with this job market. There were mass layoffs and new grads every year on top of that.
It's transparently obvious that the draw of these employees isn't skill, it's cost. The bottom/middle rung in this field is being hollowed out when it comes to domestic hiring because companies don't care who fills the position so long as they can keep the salary low and the employee locked in, and H-1Bs are the perfect fit for that.
I don’t believe that at all. I believe the opposite, in fact. How do we decide who is right?
There are plenty of American citizens and permanent residents with the necessary skills, just not the willingness to put up with bullshit from B-tier employers.
Would you rather pay your devs a living wage for India, or for the US?
If you remove the option for sponsorship then these workers will still be working their jobs because they're talented and in demand, they'll just be doing it from their home country instead for lower compensation.
I think this move makes it likely companies will hire more expensive domestic workers.
Many H-1B workers request sponsorship from employers despite having the ability to work from local offices because they have in-demand skills that give the leverage to ask for it knowing that it will result in better opportunities.
The question is, if tech companies can't have their Bay Area offices filled with the caliber of people they want (who will accept being forever-renters or super-commuters), will they relent on US remote / small sites, or will they instead try to shift their trillion-dollar Bay Area office cultures to their Bangalore sites? My money's on the latter.
I work for a very small company and we've seen by that stipulation a couple of times on anything _remotely_ close to defense/MIC/security.
And the administration can tighten those screws further if it desires.
(I am the only H1B in the history of the company, now a citizen. It would have been impossible to have taken this path with this alleged financial burden)
If the dollar keeps losing value, this equation might start shifting (since the HC will become more expensive). But I doubt the trend will revert, if immigration keeps getting harder into the US…
Maybe try Brazil's own state media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_YOo9cU_7M
"Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters on a call Friday evening that the administration came to the fee of $100,000 per year, plus vetting costs, after talking with companies.
He noted that the payment structure is still under discussion with the Department of Homeland Security, in terms of “whether we’re going to charge the $300,000 up front or $100,000 a year for the three years.”
The originally stated purpose of the H1-B program was to import top-tier elite talent but anyone who watched it evolve saw that it became terribly exploitative. I've watched as companies that I've worked for have given 1/4 market rate or worse to H1-B hires. They got addicted to cheap talent. It stopped being about talent on the hiring side and more about increasing head-count at a major discount.
Bring in top talent, but pay them what they're worth if you do. A top-talent elite hire should easily be worth double what a native-born top-talent elite hire would be worth if this program can just do what it was designed to do.
When the C-suite moves to India, I'll believe it.
Has there been anything that hasn't had a monkey paw aspect? These guys have ZERO credibility left and its only eight months in.
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3l...
For example, if miscarriages are criminalized, and access to birth control is restricted - both real things that have been attempted or have actually happened in the US as a part of anti-choice policies - the only safe choice is to not have sex, ever. Which means you're probably never going to have kids, instead of before where there was a chance you'd get pregnant and then decide whether to have the child or not. Now it's too risky to even have a chance of getting pregnant if you have no autonomy. I certainly would never risk it in a state with anti-choice policies.
The intent of these policies might be to raise the birth rate, but I'm not sure they're going to do that. We'll see, I guess.
IMO the demographic crisis is more likely to be influenced by other factors, like the rising costs of raising children, the increasing constraints and pressures on parents, etc. But those policies don't help.
The decision to have kids should be a deliberate commitment between the parents, not some kind of lottery where one falls pregnant then decides what to do next.
It's better not to fall pregnant at all otherwise
That’s pretty much the whole point of abortion, by the way.
I've got some bad news for you about, well, pretty much all of human history...
This is an outlandish and ridiculous hypothesis with zero substance to it. All research points to it being the other way around. They higher the economic pressures and the less freedom people have in reproductive healthcare, the higher the birth rates. The moment Germany introduced the birth control drugs, the birth rate dropped.
If a country develops from the level of Somali to something like Germany and the birth rate tanks to somewhere slightly above 1, increasing the birth rate by maybe 0.1 by enabling more personal decisions has literally zero impact.
Of course I'm still a proponent of decreasing economic pressure on parents and enabling reproductive freedoms like pre-implementation diagnostics. The consequences on birth rate is just something we have to deal with one way or another.
Corruption by another name. The canary is already dead.
What would be out of line for you?
But regardless, WHY did the Supreme Court overrule the lower court? We don't know? Why don't we know? That's highly unusual.
The order was stayed because the lower court made a massive overreach they have no business making. There are many lower courts, there is only one SCOTUS. SCOTUS does not have the bandwidth to hear all the cases on the merits docket if lower courts keep overreaching.
Your options are either this or somehow forcing SCOTUS to process the merits cases much faster, which people would also complain about ("justice can't be rushed!"). But of course the complaints only ever come when the decision is one you disagree with. When things are expedited in your favor, people tend to have no problem with that.
Would you like to try again?
The other thing I’ll say is that even if this is struck down by the courts (which is not certain give the Supreme Court’s recent support for the president), that can take a while and this could still have a real impact on people. Many people thought the president imposing tariffs was unconstitutional, but as right now those tariffs are actually in effect. Companies that employ H-1B workers (and the workers themselves) will need to start planning for this immediately regardless of whether or not it is eventually struck down.
The last thing I’m wondering is when you say it’s ridiculous, do you just mean sloppy reporting? Or are you implying that the author has some ulterior motive? And if the latter, what do you think that ulterior motive is?
> Section 1. Restriction on Entry. (a) Pursuant to sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section. This restriction shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.
Could be interpreted to mean that anyone who leaves the country on a _current_ H1B and attempts to return might be blocked if they don't have proof of the payment having been made, despite the fact that no process currently exists to remit said payment.
I'd love to say it's doubtful this administration would do something so callous, asinine, and cruel, but...
Regardless of whether you think imposing a $100k fee on H1Bs is a good idea or not, there is no way that a 2 day deadline makes sense from an implementation perspective. On a weekend too. This is just going to cause panic and confusion at the border.
“(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall restrict decisions on petitions not accompanied by a $100,000 payment for H-1B specialty occupation workers … who are currently outside the United States …”
H1B is ripe with abuse - this article by Bloomberg says that half of all H1-B visas are used by Indian staffing firms that pay significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...
In that case, better to rephrase to "US should close borders for Indians (and China?) workers and companies". Why sugercoat it?
Maybe this 100k thing will fix it and maybe this wont. My main complain with this administration is always the chaos and impulsiveness which doesn't bring much confidence that they are actually capable of actually fixing the problem, as it always doesn't seem well thought through or executed. More like headlines to get some cheering from MAGA crowd.
I think it could also be that they don't want to fix any problems, but they do want the chaos and media attention that provides catharsis to the voting base.
Also, I don't know how many h1bs have you worked with. I have worked with many (hundreds), and it's the same spectrum of talent you'd find anywhere. This is probably not the intent of h1b, but banning a set of countries is not the solution. Changing the criteria is.
So many places were under the yolk of the same historical forces and managed to pull themselves together - India is rather unique in its inability to do so.
Moreover, they openly brag about it. My wife's brings stories from her hair stylist that's very chatty about the ways they literally move their family from India to US and Canada. People fake marriages, divorces, report abuse etc etc. I'm still not sure if it's all true, but the very fact she brags about it is astounding.
You felt it appropriate to jump on your little throne and pass judgement on large groups of people, but cried ad-hominem when I slightly criticized you. Sensitive much?
Mohamed "John" Atalla, raised in Egypt, and Dawon Kahng from Korea, who together invented the MOSFET transistor, which underpins modern electronics and computing. Both immigrated to the United States for graduate engineering education and made their breakthrough at Bell Labs in 1959.
Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research and contributed significantly to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, was a founder and major figure in the creation of the Bell Telephone Company; AT&T, created by American Bell in 1885, later established Bell Labs.
But let's consider one of the biggest innovations of recent times: Artificial Intelligence (transformers/LLMs specifically). Where was it invented? In America. Who invented it? Let's take a look. The seminal research paper that kicked off this revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. So only 25% US-born.
Have you watched OpenAI's demos and how many of their researchers are Asian? Would you prefer for them to remain in Asia and contribute to DeepSeek instead?
Sure. But we are arguing about two separate things here. I am pro-immigration. But I am also against using immigrant primarily to depress wages.
Does it suck that billions of people were born into lesser global economic circumstances? Absolutely. Does that mean we should allow corporations to exploit labor (both imported and citizens who have to compete against that imported labor) at the disadvantage of domestic citizens? No. This is workers vs capital, not immigrants vs citizens.
The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.columbiathreadneedleus.com/institutional/insight...
Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.
India’s total fertility rate is already 1.9, below 2.1 replacement rate. Its demographic dividend (and any potential capital investment opportunities) is already on borrowed time. So capital would rotate and reallocate there, while there is still time, regardless.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/dont-panic-over-falli...
Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.
And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.
https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a...
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-worlds-birthrate-may-already-...
Most of the world will be below fertility replacement rate by 2030. This is important, because the faster fertility rates decline, the faster the light cone of capital returns into the future shrinks (people = profits = returns).
So, to tie this all together: for the reasons I’ve laid out in this subthread (with citations), I’m not too concerned about the need to cater to the demands of capital. It needs returns more than humans need it considering population growth is almost over, and it will continue to slowly exhaust investment opportunities as the global demographics transition continues.
the US is no longer the clear destination for the best and brightest
If the US loses its massive lead in the network effects of a large labor pool, the amount of work in the US will shrink, both by moving to other countries and less overall innovation.
This is not a beneficial move for most software engineers.
How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.
There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US
Hi!
I know I'm just a datum, but I gotta represent myself.
The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.
Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.
Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.
SV labor is largely not different than a skilled trade, except at the higher levels.
That's where the massive salaries come from, that massive wealth creation. It's not just taking larger chunks of a fixed size pie.
Sure some electrical capacity goes to non-productive uses, but much of it is also spent doing things like enabling widespread computer usage.
SV labor is downstream of skilled trades.
/me
I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.
Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.
During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.
Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!
This is inaccurate. The U.S. had a highly restrictionist immigration system from 1921-1965. The foreign born population dropped from almost 15% to under 5% by 1970.
During that time, the U.S. had a small number of highly skilled immigrants, such as German scientists fleeing the Nazi regime. You’re talking about a very small number of truly exceptional people. A $100k/year fee is not going to shut down this kind of immigration.
Source: DHS Yearbook, https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table1...
We have been around 1 million per year for decades. If we still had that policy, adjusted for population you’re talking about cutting legal immigration by one-third to one-half.
And that’s not counting a large increase in “gray market” legal immigration (TPS, asylum, etc.)
Mmmh...How about four countries?US,UK,Canada &South Africa.
As a student,though
As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-
Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.
Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US
US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
20K H1Bs with $30K fee
20K H1Bs with $60K fee
20K H1Bs with $100K fee
unlimited H1Bs with $200K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer
... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)
Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000
Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.By US you mean corporate America? What if they maintain that massive lead on the backs of the US citizens?
The exploitation of the US worker needs to end, if the company does not have 100K to bring in global talent then that company cannot "massively lead" in any domain and the "talent" is neither global nor talented.
"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
> American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
What are you even talking about? Being able to hold more tokens that can buyback the products of the asset class does not make for a "rich standard of living".
Having to run gofundme's for medical care is not "rich standard of living". Them trembling on every unscheduled meeting with their boss is not "rich standard of living"
The American workers' existence is sad.
2) Tell that to the 100K+ unemployed Americans in the IT space.
I think you underestimate the capabilities of the American worker, after all, they have created the circumstances in which your company surrounds itself and succeeds.
If your job cannot exist without an endless stream of underpaid, overworked Third word country immigrants then you don't have a job, you have a mill.
The opportunity created in the US is due to the concentration of talent, high productivity, and extensive networks of people creating innovation that inflated the pie even larger.
Go ahead and move to any of those countries from the US, it's prettt easy, because everybody wants to be like the US! The only possibly better passport was a Canadian one!
Something deeply sick has infected the US when we no longer recognize the source of the wealth of our nation. Nobody could touch us. At least until we started to intentionally make ourselves poorer.
fake news
Of course the visa is a privilege and there are tons of abuses associated with it. There are methodical ways of going about it and actually fixing the problem. Slapping a $100k fee with unclear language and no heads-up uproots while uprooting lives of so many people have lived in the country for years if not decades, maintained legal status, and paid taxes including Social Security and Medicare is "a smart move" according to the top comment.
But we all know what the real problem is. If majority of the H-1B visa holders had the right skin color, they would be welcome with open arms regardless of any abuse of the system. Just like how South African refugees are welcome while other those from the "wrong" kind of country are not.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." ― Lyndon B. Johnson
“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton
maybe it was true before the US became the global propagandist, but almost everyone on earth is a native born american now.
Even the groups who superficially assimilate into the progressive culture embraced by Yankees do so as subordinates, not peers. The Yankee will condemn his own ancestors and discriminate against people who look like him. Most immigrants are happy to be the objects of that pity, but do not behave in the identical manner. They respect their own ancestors and retain their own ethnic attachments.
Virtually everything Hamilton worried about applies to contemporary immigrants to a T.
You wanna say that about the Irish and the Polish of a century ago, too? lol
“The rainbow theorists argue that the machine was a functional body (Merton 1968) that pursued political incorporation of many ethnic groups in the political party. In return for loyalty to the political party, machines delivered a variety of social services to ethnic immigrants, in addition to jobs, friendship, and opportunities for social and economic advancement. The rainbow coalition of mostly white-ethnic groups was sustained through a virtually endless supply of ‘municipal gold’ (Erie 1988) that the machines controlled. This exchange system seemingly guaranteed ethnic loyalty to the machine.”
The remainder of the article shows how Irish domination left the Polish with the short end of the stick: “Through this study we try to show that Polish Americans in Chicago were on the short end of the exchange arrangements in the machine, receiving few rewards, especially as their independence from the Democratic party expanded during the Daley era.” The Poles were punished
This is basically Pakistan, except instead of clans it’s immigrant groups voting for their own co-ethnics and jockeying for advantage. It’s a far cry from the political debates of the founding era, which were based on principles and political theory, not ethnic tribalism.
In terms of what we could do now, we should stop illegal immigration and asylum entirely. We should also end family reunification. And skilled immigration should be spread out around the country (there are top universities everywhere). All that would prevent the development of ethnic enclaves, and over time lead to the weakening of disparate ethnic identities. That’s what happened during the immigration restriction from 1924-1965, when the foreign born population share dropped by 2/3, and the salience of ethnic identity among European Americans was greatly reduced.
Also, the founders were not British. Most of them were second and third generation immigrants.
In addition, I don't think you realize how funny this statement is:
> Ethnic politics had little opportunity to arise in these communities, which were individually mono cultural
I wonder if you can spot the massive gaping hole in this logic. I doubt it.
Indeed, most of the founding fathers were British.
150 years after their inception, assimilation of ethnic whites has largely ended those political machines. But the effects are cumulative. Chicago still lives with the consequences of the machine politics of the Cermak to Daley era. And ethnic politics still plays a large role in Chicago between whites, hispanics, and black people: https://www.hispanicfederation.org/news/new-poll-shows-dead-... (“One interesting finding is that one-third of Latinos think Vallas may be Latino.”).
It comes off a little bit like it would if you claimed that immigration brings with it organized crime, because La Cosa Nostra was dominated by Italians. But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
People share affinities and affinities structure interactions, and naturally some of those structural affinities are going to be ethnic. But if they weren't ethnic, they'd be religious, or political, or economic, which is what US history actually demonstrates.
If you're going to make the case that any of this matters in Chicago politics, though: cite the immigrant bloc that controls and distorts Chicago politics. Which ones are the illegitimate aldermen? I don't like most Chicago alderpeople, so you're not going to hurt my feelings.
Whether or not tribalism exists among white ethnics today is besides the point. Corruption is self-perpetuating. The real question is what Chicago would look like today if it had never experienced mass immigration, starting with the Irish. I strongly suspect it would be a better governed city today, like Toronto before the recent mass immigration.
There is a single well-governed city in the world that has experienced mass immigration from multiple ethnic groups, and that’s Singapore. And that’s got an authoritarian, top-down government, and seems to be engaged in selective immigration to maintain a stable ethnic composition and Chinese supermajority.
> But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
There’s two different things. Mass immigration alone gives rise to ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict, which undermines democracy. Then sometimes you import specific problems from specific places. Organized crime is a bigger problem in Italy even today than in England or Scandinavia. And it was a definitive part of the story of Italians in America. It took decades to eradicate that problem.
Now we're talking about Singapore for some reason. Is that a concession that you can't identify the aldermen who are illegitimated by their immigrant support?
The obvious solution of "stop being a racist douchebag so minorities can actually feel secure enough to be able to act on other priorities" being of course completely off the table as the speaker views such behavior as a birthright and sacrament. It does happen. Now voters of Irish descent take 'is an Irish Catholic' as a nice to have at most instead of an essential.
But the same counterproductive behavior is doubled down upon as their sacred sacrament of racist douchebaggery shall not be denied. Look at how a very religiously conservative bloc, Muslims ended up shifting to the left by necessity from the racism they encountered post war on terror.
Urban-environments in the hyper-individualist age have no culture (no, drinking and watching "football" is not culture). Even Church-attendance is so low that these people you hate are buying up these abandoned buildings to create communities.
What you're complaining is that "they" have a culture, while you don't. I guess it's semi-understandable if it results in mob-violence and ganging-up, but I haven't seen this happen outside some Islamic-communities (even there, I think it's typ. only the S. Asian ones).
I have a culture! I grew up in Virginia, but my parents are Bangladeshi, and this describes me quite accurately: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/cultural-differences-w....
You racists really want all the "benefits" of racism without actually accepting the label. Why is that?
You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.
It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.
It's not a "card", it's reality. And you make it sound like there is something wrong with being emotional.
It's neither politics nor getting back to the law's original intent. It is red meat for wolves like you and others in this thread.
The EO expires in 12 months, so, yes, it's short-term.
Maybe in a year the administration will rethink things. Maybe sooner.
The US competitive advantage is built on us being a destination for the best and brightest. Between this and the crackdown foreign students at US Universities why would the anyone want to come here?
The misuse of H1Bs is a small problem compared to the value it provides.
We pay taxes, we compete for limited schools and jobs, yet far more people want to come here than leave. Americans have become a lot less wealthy the last 40 years relatively thanks to stagnant wages and skyrocketing prices.
The last thing we need is an unlimited supply of competition that only moves in one direction. Average H1B salary is like 60k, rich companies like MS are employing thousands of IT workers. These are jobs that anyone here could do with a 1-2 year online technical degree.
The potentially sad thing/abuse that might come out of this is that employers will keep even higher margins from the H1 person and make them pay back that money faster. Even through some shady deal back in their home country.
I assume that's because the wages are too low, since you have already described your skill level as merely above average. Unless I'm significantly misunderstanding something, Americans would be better off if your company had to pay higher wages, even if the company ended up shutting down as a result.
The rich get richer.
There are big issues with the h1b, particularly how strongly tied to the employer the employee is and how few of these we give away. But this basically closes the door for hiring foreign talent to anyone but BigCo.
It is a sad shotgun shell on the right foot on a long streak of the US feet shooting it's way out of relevance.
> the US wins wins when people move to the US, especially young, skilled people.
I personally lean towards this being true, but it is a claim that needs to be demonstrated comprehensively for your argument to hold water. It is not trivially true.
But me personally, I advocate many fewer student visas.
Again, these are the most talented, most affluent minds that China has to offer. Sure, let’s have them work for the CCP rather than keeping them in the west.
If these people have not defrauded the US then they would not know what to do with a work visa as they'd be hurrying back home as soon as they received their diploma, pulled by those strong ties and the desire to finally put the education to use at home.
Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.
Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.
---
Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?
Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.
(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)
It is your comment in fact that decided to assume I missed the point, while assuming something that’s almost certainly not easy to assume.
What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.
On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.
Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.
Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.
Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.
I'm by no means xenophobic. Bring in all the immigrants you want. But I can't agree that H1Bs are working as designed and pull in labor that doesn't otherwise already exist in the US.
this is a change in the direction of significantly reducing hiring of foreign workers by American companies, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for American companies, because it will reduce their growth. It's bad for American workers because when our companies don't grow, neither does our economy and that hurts Americans. So it's a change, but it's a dumb change.
Changing the statute requires Congress to act.
If there are abuses, then let’s fix them. But this is too heavy handed, and may have an impact on US competitiveness for generations to come.
Is it really? Given the current salaries for AI talent ( or whatever future most desired skill sets are ), 100k seems like a decent enough spot to do the following:
- keep the program limited to what it was intended to do ( bring in the best people in, keep US competitive -- on tech, not on low wages ) - keep populace in a state, where they don't see a reason for a leadership change
Unless, of course, that is not what the program is used for ( and anecdotally, that take does not seem that far fetched ).
So my overall response is: good. Frankly, this made Trump's election worth it.
So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.
I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.
The economy kind of sucks right now but it ain't H1B visa holders that are the problem.
Looking at it solely from a perspective of competition between labor glosses over the fact that insufficient labor is also bad because it keeps companies from growing and hiring more people.
So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.
Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.
I elaborated more here (along with a couple of relevant empirical studies about how H1B actually impacted employment and wages of native workers): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311
Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments
Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.
The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.
The policy topic is irrelevant. This is not normal reform. Looking from the outside, the United States is clearly democratically backsliding and is imposing decree upon decree of emergency measures, without a functioning parliament, with a sand-in-wheels judiciary, along with an enormous cult of personality, without any empathy towards the victims of sudden policy changes and black-bag jobs.
Do you personally know any H-1B visa holders? I can only assume that by your comment that you do not. The ones who play by the system have their entire livelihood and home held over their head while under an H-1B visa.
Punish the companies and staffing firms abusing the H-1B visas instead of creating a blanket, anti-immigration policy that will only bolster those abusing the H1-B visa, because those already abusing are the ones who have the funds to pay this fee. Companies who do things legitimately will not be able to easily absorb this fee.
I will lose friends and colleagues because of this imposed fee. This will kick out all the good people we actually want working in this country. This will further reduce good people wanting to come to this country.
The logic from this administration and it’s supporters is opposite of Benjamin Franklin. Rather than thinking that it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer. They think it is better a hundred guilty persons be punished than one innocent person’s suffering. We have seen this from the South Korea detainees debacle and here too.
There is fraud in H1B system. People do take advantage of it. People do suffer from ghost jobs. But the question at the heart of the matter is what is the basis for a flat 100k fee? Because lots of numbers from this administration seem to be pulled out from thin air. There are reasons fines are set low in comparison to a company revenue but POTUS doesn’t seem to know.
The intent is obvious, but the foresight into potential outcomes is shortsighted.
Labor is expensive, more competition will rise overseas, as it will become more expensive to operate.
It also crushes the opportunities of a gigantic number of individuals who are here today who had a plan in place to exist in this ecosystem. Additionally the institutions that supported them will also be hurt. Although, they might have been aware of the writing on the wall over the past year.
Canada is rejoicing for the new boost to its economy.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2024/09/16/the-micros...
Before you downvote and curse me out, please understand that I have trained dozens of H1Bs throughout my career and helped them be better developers while knowing full well what the overall game looked like. I did it wholly without prejudice.
Deep down, I always knew we would hit that inflection point and we did. I don't think it is fixable at this point. Thus, it makes sense for politicians to finally consider addressing the abuse. I currently counsel young people to not become software engineers/developers. Aside from the lack of jobs, there is the awful ageism that strikes right when family is the most expensive (college aged kids). I'm very fortunate in that I saved like a madman and we inherited some wealth, which we INVESTED and didn't just blow on cars, houses, and vacations the way most dipshit Americans do these days. So when the inevitable career abbreviation took place, I was at least prepared. But I'm no less bitter, and that's the truth.
I've always found it pretty easy to find a new job when I've needed one, even now there are an insane number of openings all over the US. The job market here is an order of magnitude larger then it was in Australia.
I don't doubt there is a deflationary effect on demand/wages due to h1b visas, but I don't connect at all with the catastrophic rhetoric I see in these threads. The United States still has some of the best opportunities in the world for people with tech skills
Otherwise, if its too onerous, we're just training another countries workforce.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
If you don't want to read the pre-amble, you can skip straight to the second "Accordingly" to see the details.
"Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."
Also interestingly, it seems to only explicitly impose restrictions on entry into the US. But most visa holders are already in the country, and atleast according to this proclamation, they'd be unaffected.
American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States."
This speaks for itself.
Meaning now companies can either hire an American new grad for 100k a year or pay 250k a year to import someone. It also still allows companies to bring over highly skilled foreign workers for which there are no American equivalents.
Really happy with the approach and I think it will be a massive boon for US tech and knowledge workers
So, if you already got your visa issued for 3 years, and you didn't have any plans to travel abroad you are good until the end of your current visa term (which might be 2-3 years in future).
Also, apparently Department of State has started a pilot program that allows one to extend their H-1B visa without going abroad to have their passport stamped, so in that case you can get 3 more years in the US without the fee. The biggest limitation of course being that you're stuck in the US for the whole time, unable to leave.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
I was already surprised that he implements one of his campaign promises.
"The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1nlgzzu/trump_signs_p...
> the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025
anyone on a visa who happens to currently out of the country has ~24 hours to get back without a $100,000 bill
if you're in the states, you won't be removed, but you cannot leave and re-enter without paying up
This allows companies that truly want extraordinary talent to pay a premium to acquire it with no red tape . It also makes it far less likely that they can significantly underpay foreign workers to work in the united states and undercut American employees (at a 50% surcharge, you would have to pay 2/3 the prevailing salary to break even (assuming all employees are the same)).
The 50% number is something I made up, I think we can have an honest discussion about what that number should realistically be (and it should probably be different for different industries). But my main point is it should simply be a percentage tax paid on top of all compensation for foreign employees. This is the correct way to balance domestic companies undercutting domestic labor, while allowing them to access genuinely extraordinary talent with no impedance.
100k flat annual fee plus the new minimum 150k salary returns the H1B program to its original purpose of allowing US companies to hire truly exceptional foreign workers who have skills US workers do not. This allows companies to do just that and pay for it and at the same time protects the jobs and job prospects of US workers
I prefer a purely compensation relative approach because it let's the market decide what the actual salary for a software engineer is (with a percent of compensation premium for a foreigner and a 0 extra cost for a native). The market can dynamically adjust what a software engineer makes (not fixed price control) but it just cost more to hire foreign people.
In direct response to your first sentence, I think even foreign workers (who largely work harder and have more on the line than domestic workers) would question the wisdom of working for 50k a year as a software engineer in the US. They are actors in this system as well, and you can't just assume that you could offer 50k and get them to accept.
My understanding is that the H-1B was introduced by the 1990 immigration act, where the H-1B is supposed to be for "specialty occupations" other than nursing. But the same act introduced EB-1 and O-1 for people with "extraordinary ability", which sounds a lot closer to your "truly exceptional" understanding. I think maybe you're projecting a purpose onto the program that was never really there. The H-1B quota when it was introduced was 65k, so it's not like it started out being dramatically rarer than it is today.
Where did you get this from? It is not in the EO passed today: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
You're wrong on the purpose of it. The O-1 visa is for "exceptional" workers. The H-1B is for normal people.
That top companies can offer the highest wages and attract the best talent is desirable -- think how things would be if the opposite was true.
Compare that to a hundred startups wanting to hire 10 people each, who can't compete with Meta on the salary terms above.
I find it hard to argue that the first case above is the desirable outcome of the immigration policy.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wal-mart+associates+inc&jo...
- at that price - in the Bay Area
But certainly they don’t have grounds to say they can’t find citizens to write JS or make apps.
in my team of 23 there were 2 americans
Also, WMT is not "in tech". Global tech is WITCH tier. The business side is run by the same type of MBA personality running Boeing
They're also forcing like half the company to move to Arkansas at the moment, so a bunch of people are trying to gtfo. I wouldn't advise anyone going there, startups are probably a better option
"if H1Bs are supposed to be a means of obtaining labor not available domestically it's curious they're cheaper than domestic labor
an easy way to ensure that they aren't directly substituting for domestic labor would be to add a $100k surcharge per head"
> The Proclamation restricts entry for aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in specialty occupations in the H-1B program unless their petition is accompanied by a $100,000 payment.
Nowhere in there does it say that it's annual. Note that the H1B visa is valid for 3 to 6 years, potentially longer, which dilutes the fee to $16K per year which is small money for an employer. Also, a fixed number does not keep up with inflation either.
Boundless is technically right that a $100k fee exists, but the piece glosses over the narrow scope and leans into speculation. It frames the fee like an ongoing tax on every H-1B, which just isn’t what the proclamation says. The difference matters: a one-time petition fee is brutal enough, but calling it annual misstates the policy and inflates the impact.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
> Section 1. Restriction on Entry. (a) Pursuant to sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section. This restriction shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/work/microsoft-urge...
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/trump-mulls-a...
> Lutnick also repeatedly said on Friday that the fee would be annual for companies, while the White House official said Saturday that it’s a “one-time fee that applies only to the petition.”
> In her Saturday afternoon post, Leavitt clarified that the payment would only be a “one-time fee” — not an annual one.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/20/donald-trump-h1b-vi...
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-ama...
Congress makes laws. The executive implements them.
It could be a fantastic idea. But then make it a law. Give the president the power to do something like this.
Debating the merits without focusing on that first legitimizes this crazy psuedo law making Trump engages in and will enable him to be more arbitrary in other areas.
Judging from the reaction, it's almost like what the program really gets used for is to replace domestic workers with desperate, barely-qualified foreigners.
This was a live a few hours ago on H1B news.
> The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.
(c) The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretary’s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.
"At the Secretary's discretion" means "get your bribes ready". Lobbyists are probably already working the phones on this.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
The companies the admin favors are being given backdoors for every policy that's presented, and the way to become favored is to present bribes, whether they come in the form of gold plaques, lawsuit settlements, crypto investments, or stock market collusion.
You forgot monopolization, power consolidation, etc
We know how decisions are made in this admin, and how shortlived they can be.
Why would someone pay 100k knowing tomorrow this might disappear?
The idea that I left with was to look at the hierarchy of principles not just the set of or claimed principles.
At this point it seems as if the top of the principal stack for those in power isn’t even more power anymore, it’s just grift.
Right?
To me the end game if this is incredibly dark because it is substituting something that can be fought for and won and acquired through malevolent means as a basis for making truth.
I completely disagree with much of what the Trump Administration is pushing, but they seemed to execute on the “street smarts” while policy wonks and others who want to analyze are preoccupied discussing policy.
Frankly it’s embarrassing how gullible and easily tricked much of the intellectual class is.
Amazon 14,365
Tata 5,505 (Tata is an outsourcing company/body shop)
Microsoft 5,189
Meta 5,123
Apple 4,202
Google 4,181
It's interesting to read all the analysis in the comments, but I think people are giving far too much credit to the admin in terms of having considered the impacts, the effects, some kind of desired direction for things to move, etc.
It's really much simpler than that: the mob boss has to get a cut of the action. One clue is the "fee" being annual, not one-time. Another tell is that there are no details as to what the collected money will go towards.
What kind of BS is this :)
What percentage of the AI labs are staffed by either foreign workers or second/third generation immigrants? Look at the composition of high achieving high school students- almost certainly of Asian or Indian descent, certainly many belonging to families of recent immigrants. The pipeline this EO disrupts is immense.
A 90 day pause is next if the markets crash over this next week.
Either way, this is the sub definition of "AGI". Time for the "AI Agents" to prove their worth as advertised and hyped.
Or else...
Secretary-certified investigations, as well as other H-1B-related investigations, are important tools the department will use in Project Firewall to hold employers accountable and protect the rights of American workers. Violations may result in the collection of back wages owed to affected workers, the assessment of civil money penalties, and/or debarment from future use of the H-1B program for a prescribed period of time.
- stomach the cost increase,
- reduce the number of H-1Bs they hire,
- move (the company) out of the US (i.e. to less imposing jurisdictions).
If companies choose the latter, the irony is the resulting reduction in US tax revenue from companies moving out could outweigh the gains in revenue from the $100k H-1B tax, thus resulting in lower US government tax revenues due to the change.
Hire Americans.
Visas are used principally by tech sector
Over 70% of beneficiaries of H-1B visas enter US from India
Latest move in Trump's broader immigration crackdown
Read about innovative ideas and the people working on solutions to global crises with the Reuters Beacon newsletter. Sign up here. "If you're going to train somebody, you're going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs," U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said."
Absolutely. I've seen so many H1-B's doing run of the mill IT work. In the past, some job adds said "H1-B preferred." That's on top of all the Indian outsourcing.
It looks like Trump is one again making it expensive to use a foreign asset to encourage use or development of local assets. If they're truly talented and rare, then the $100,000 will be worth paying. I could see the A.I. field doing that since they're already doing it. Many will consider hiring or training Americans.
It sounds like F1 and TN visa holders will be able to acquire H1B visas without triggering the fee (but no international travel afterwards or the fee would be triggered).
I suspect that the o1 and l1 visas will get more use if this actually gets enforced.
I also suspect that the large tech companies don't overly mind since they all have very active offshoring programs.
What’s stopping them from doing the same for L1/O1 folks and locking them in with days’ notice?
Few of my US colleagues that I know are now abroad, and I cannot fathom how they took the news.
It's my opinion that anyone already here should have a path towards citizenship, or legal permanent residence. The exploitation of people needs to end, and the dignity of everyone in this country should be respected.
Of course we need to have rules, and borders that are secure. It's unreasonable to want to abolish them or close them completely.
On the other hand, I know many highly talented immigrants in the USA whose contributions to society would be missed if they just couldn’t focus entirely on their work - let alone if they were kept out of the country altogether.
My point: They have identified the right problem (H-1B abuse), but the proposed fix is too drastic and undermines sustainable trust between immigrants and the country. I’d like to be proven wrong, though.
Smarter policy would be to looking into targeting the actual exploitation, where it actually exists (if it’s deemed that the externalities are truly negative), like the outsourcing to cognizant. Of course, we are living under the rule of probably the most inept president in any of our lifetimes; so he doesn’t act methodically, only reflexively to once again reduce US competitiveness over the long term.
I’ve seen this happen with just about every friend of mine who has immigrated from China to the US and the effect that it has on their immediate network carries significant weight at shifting their perspective. Xi is not popular at home, and the west should be doing what it can to increase domestic Chinese instability in the same way they’re doing to us (very successfully). Rather, he is hell bent on unifying them to hate America.
There’s an ideological war happening and our president is not only too stupid to play ball but he’s also interested in giving up the hand of cards we already have. He is a true and utter moron and it’s hard to understate my level of disgust.
Come to europe! The taxes are higher, and you have to pick your country wisely depending on what your goals are, but the politics are nicer and you often get healthcare
The issues are philosophical ultimately, and the theorists of Liberalism simply haven't stepped up to the challenge.
Companies like Disney, too, have committed abuses with the H1B. It's not just big tech, it's widespread across the United States. I think Americans privileged with different Visa or residency status will benefit.
I know a few companies that were relying on those heavily and it sure would help if those jobs went to Americans.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/20/538387033/trumps-private-club...
I have worked for many US based startups, all remotely. Timezone difference (I am in India) is a big issue unless the company is very well structured to work asynchronously.
Companies hiring top talent may still hire with a $100K additional charge but even at $250K - 400K salaries, this is a lot of additional cost.
Some saying companies will just offshore the roles but I doubt it. That was always much cheaper… if it was just about cost they would have done that already.
You’ll probably have a 2 hour commute too, and in your free time mostly live in your car because only the big cities have any degree of walkability.
What good is more disposable income if i’m too afraid to walk alone at night.
I want people to come here legally, put down roots, and buy into our way of life. I love to see patriotic first gen immigrants. I don't want our country used as a piggy bank just because we happen to have good paying jobs right now.
Amazon Com Services LLC- 10,044 H1-B visa holders Tata Consultancy Services LLC- 5,505 Microsoft Corporation- 5,189 Meta Platforms- 5123 Apple Inc- 4,202 Google LLC - 4,181 Cognizant Technology Solution - 2,493 JP Morgan Chase and Co - 2,440 Walmart Associates Inc - 2,390 Deloitte Consulting LLP - 2353
I'm going to speculate that this little is lost by hardening the h1b. The 100 000 a year is not going to stop someone from hiring truly "exceptional" talent.
> $36 billion
One new big tech office in India will generate more than this, and all the tech companies are in a hiring spree in India to do this right now.
China: 11.7% of H-1B approvals
All other nationalities: 17.3% combined
Src: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/22/h-1b-fee-hike-whos-...
esalman•4mo ago
nsm•4mo ago
nojvek•4mo ago
Like Americans paying Tariff fees out of their wallets due to price hikes.
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positr0n•4mo ago
Terretta•4mo ago
It's still less than a domestic recruiting fee for many types of roles the H1B was purportedly about, roles where it's hard enough to find someone you need a headhunter's help and the pool is still not exactly what you're looking for.
esalman•4mo ago
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