The Rise and Fall of the H-1B Visa – American Affairs Journal

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-h-1b-visa/

45•bilsbie•2mo ago

Comments

rayiner•2mo ago

The bigger problem with the H1B system is family reunification. 65,000 H1B visas a year is not that many. But because H1B is a path to citizenship in practice, just one skilled worker eventually will bring in many more family members who aren’t filtered for skills.

When we came to the U.S. in 1989–on my dad’s H1 visa—there were under 10,000 Bangladeshis in the country. Today, there are 270,000. Those aren’t 270,000 highly skilled and highly motivated workers. They’re here based on chain migration from handful of original skilled workers.

richard___•2mo ago

How does this work, exactly? What is the law that allows relatives of H1B to become citizens?

cft•2mo ago

Basic US immigration law: once a permanent resident or a citizen, a former H1B holder can bring his relatives, like any US citizen

fakedang•2mo ago

And that's where the trouble is.

Worked well for the postwar periods and the 60s, but not so much today when US economic output (outside tech and white collar services) has been middling at best.

R_D_Olivaw•2mo ago

It always add astonishes me how bots live their lives. Only ever seeing things in terms of fictional economies.

We needn't worry about soulless AIs, we've got heartless Humans running amock.

throaway123213•2mo ago

It becomes a problem when the population of the developing nations outnumber the developed 100 to one. And im not talking about those inside the USA, im talking about worldwide. Id love to let them all in. Ive been to third world countries and I can't fault any individual for doing what they can to leave. But the current system can't support a borderless world.

triceratops•2mo ago

> when the population of the developing nations outnumber the developed 100 to one

Well it's only 7:1 right now. It's never going to be 100:1. Don't worry about it.

harshalizee•2mo ago

So you want talented individuals to come in to prop up the economy for decades with their output, but forbid them trying to establish a normal family life in the country?

DrPimienta•2mo ago

There are talented individuals here that can't establish a normal family life IN THE COUNTRY THEY WERE BORN IN because the government keeps driving down wages by importing third world desperation.

throaway123213•2mo ago

Yes. The 'heartless' people in this equation are the corporate ghouls, like usual!

R_D_Olivaw•2mo ago

Just see the language they use, "third world" countries. .. As if the lead pipe laden cities of USA, the Fentanyl Zombie camps, the disfunctional and predatory healthcare system, the incessant and consistent child deaths to guns in schools isn't somehow "third world".

throaway123213•2mo ago

Notice that your comment doesn't deal at all with the topic at hand or anything I said. Like, what's your point? The USA isn't any better to live in than a country like Nepal? Cause that is just...so ignorant and insulting to people that can't get out of those countries...its really hard to describe how insensitive you are being by saying something like that.

Im fully aware of the 3rd world conditions in the USA. Its why I choose to remain in Canada (which has its own 3rd world conditions if you look for them), and have voted for the far left party each election ive been able to vote in!

throaway123213•2mo ago

Lol no. How do you get that from my comment. There's a huge difference between 0 immigration and uncontrolled immigration and you guys aren't helping anyone by jumping to these ridiculous conclusions.

fakedang•2mo ago

Heartless because we control immigration?

Guess that makes the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Eastern Europeans and most of the stable Middle East heartless humans.

throaway123213•2mo ago

'Heartless" cause CNN told them it was.

JuniperMesos•2mo ago

In the case of the H1-B visa holder's children, the Birthright Citizenship Clause of the 14th amendment.

rayiner•2mo ago

On paper, H1B is a temporary worker program that requires non-immigrant intent. In practice, there is a legal fiction called “dual intent” that allows H1Bs to apply for a green card without violating the requirement of non-immigrant intent. Once a permanent resident, they can sponsor spouses and adult children for permanent residency. Once a citizen, they can sponsor parents and siblings.

The U.S. gave my dad an H1 visa, which resulted in 8 other Bangladeshis moving to the U.S. If my mom wasn’t antisocial, she could’ve sponsored her dozen siblings, who could’ve then sponsored their children. That’s how you end up with ethnic enclaves like Little Bangladesh.

alfonzo227•2mo ago

Let's be a bit clear on the timelines though. Right now if you get an H1B to the US (good luck), it's 10+ years before you could get citizenship, and that's assuming your employer sponsors you and you get an EB- green card. You could then bring your parents within a few years, but it would be like another 15+ year wait to get your siblings in on an F-4 visa.

So it's not like folks are getting an H1B and then shipping over their entire families on the next boat, it's decades depending on their relationship to you.

goodluckchuck•2mo ago

For a family going without relatives, a couple decades may be an eternity. For a nation-state, a couple decades is the blink of an eye.

rayiner•2mo ago

10-15 years isn’t a long time on a social timescale. It’s actually very quick. That means a small number of H1B immigrants can give rise to a large immigrant community within a few decades, as has happened with Bangladeshi enclaves around the country.

triceratops•2mo ago

The family reunification pathway is available to all US citizens and permanent residents. This isn't a "problem with the H1B system" per se.

rayiner•2mo ago

It is a problem with H1B because it undermines the whole idea of selective immigration. H1B is pitched to the public as a way to get "the best and brightest" from foreign countries. But because of family reunification, the decision to admit one skilled worker actually means one skilled worker plus potentially dozens of other people with no qualifications whatsoever.

Bangladesh gets around 50-60 skilled immigrant visas a year, but the Bangladeshi population in the U.S. has someone grown from under 10,000 in 1990 to over 270,000 today. That's the product of family reunification. Voters who supported H1B thought they were voting for a handful of Bangladeshi doctors and engineers, and instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country.

triceratops•2mo ago

> But because of family reunification

There you go. You identified the actual cause yourself.

> the decision to admit one skilled worker actually means one skilled worker plus potentially dozens of other people with no qualifications whatsoever.

"Potentially no qualifications" is doing a lot of work there (strangely). What are the odds that only one person in the family is well-educated? And isn't IQ supposedly heritable? I'm personally neutral on family reunification. It undermines fairness but helps family cohesion. I understand arguments in favor of and against it, and there probably isn't a single right answer.

I'm not convinced family members without any qualifications or a means of supporting themselves in the US would even leave their country. What's the point? And if they're truly useless, their relative who would otherwise sponsor their immigration visa might prefer just sending them some money. It would be cheaper than financially supporting them here.

> instead they got Little Bangladeshes popping up all over the country

From the little research I did, Bangladeshi-Americans have higher educational attainment and household incomes than the median. America has always had ethnic neighborhoods - German/China/Korea/Japantowns, little Italys. What's the issue?

venturecruelty•2mo ago

>From the little research I did, Bangladeshi-Americans have higher educational attainment and household incomes than the median. America has always had ethnic neighborhoods - German/China/Korea/Japantowns, little Italys. What's the issue?

Some people have problems with other people's skin color.

rayiner•2mo ago

The key difference between Scandinavian enclaves in Minnesota and Little Bangladesh isn't "skin color." It's order versus disorder. First world versus third world. Humans aren't just differently colored blank slates.

toomuchtodo•2mo ago

You’re spot on, people are confusing economics and cultural assimilation concerns with racism. I don’t believe you’re racist (based on your comments), you’re just pointing out a loophole that allows mass migration via a skilled worker visa program (whether intentional or not) of a cohort of immigrant who might experience challenges assimilating into their target country culture.

Culture isn’t magic land, it’s people, and their social values and norms. Are mass migrants via family reunification assimilating and adopting the culture of their new home? That’s an important question for those offering residency and potentially a path to citizenship.

Very similar to why many European countries are offering economic migrants a return path to their country of origin when social and economic integration has failed.

rayiner•2mo ago

Here’s a secret: Not only am I ethnically Bangladeshi, I enjoy Bangladeshis! I enjoy weddings where the aunties harass the couple about immediately having kids. I live 10 minutes from my parents and subject my Anglo wife to elaborate and overbearing family obligations and face saving rituals. Seeing Anglos with adult children waiting for grandkids that will never come genuinely fills me with existential dread.

That is an entirely different consideration, however, than the economic and social effects of immigration of people like me in sufficient numbers to culturally reshape parts of America.

triceratops•2mo ago

> Are mass migrants via family reunification assimilating and adopting the culture of their new home?

America has traditionally been excellent at assimilating migrants. Probably best in the world. I don't know why you're suddenly having doubts.

toomuchtodo•2mo ago

"Past performance is not a guarantee of future results." And who is going to guarantee favorable outcomes and results? "America has traditionally been excellent at..." is load bearing considering current state and forward looking projections.

I have doubts because the country and its governance is stumbling towards failure.

rayiner•2mo ago

Is your first sentence true? If you think so--how do you explain the cultural differences between different parts of the U.S. with different immigration histories? I can't help but notice that Minnesota (heavy Scandinavian influence) and Massachusetts (heavy Puritan Anglo influence) are clean, low in corruption, and orderly, while New Jersey and New York (heavy southern Italian influence) are significantly less so--a characteristic that they share with contemporary southern Italy (e.g, Sicily).

It's also worth pointing out that the social infrastructure for assimilation that existed in the early 20th century has since been destroyed. Italians immigrated to a country where there was strong pressure to abandon their foreign culture and assimilate into Anglo norms, attitudes, and customs. Assimilation was also facilitated by restrictive immigration laws adopted in 1921, which dropped the foreign-born population from 15% to under 5% by 1970.

Even then, the evidence we have is that assimilation only worked about halfway: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran.... To this day, differences in social attitudes between European countries show up in U.S. descendants of immigrants from those countries: https://cis.org/Richwine/Still-More-Evidence-Cultural-Persis... ("For example, in Europe, Norwegians are more trusting than Germans, who are themselves more trusting than Italians. Despite over a century passing since their peak period of immigration, those three ancestral groups order themselves the same way in the United States: Norwegian-Americans are more trusting than German-Americans, who in turn are more trusting than Italian-Americans.").

triceratops•2mo ago

Scandinavia is peaceful and prosperous today. Was it like that when those enclaves formed? I haven't been to any Little Bangladeshes personally. What kinds of disorder exist there?

rayiner•2mo ago

The point is that H1B is marketed as selective immigration of highly skilled immigrants, but in practice it enables mass migration. Whether you think mass migration is a good thing is a different, and irrelevant, point. If you put "our immigration policy should enable the formation of places like Little Bangladesh" it would lose handily at the ballot box.

(By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American: "In a 2013, NPR discussion with a member of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the book The Myth of the Model Minority Rosalind Chou who is also a professor of sociology. One of them stated that 'When you break it down by specific ethnic groups, the Hmong, the Bangladeshi, they have poverty rates that rival the African-American poverty rate.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshi_Americans)

triceratops•2mo ago

> By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American

The Wikipedia article is inaccurate. It claims that Bangladesh-Americans have a median household income of ~$59k. The actual sources cited by the article both say it's $78k:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts.... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-a...

I don't know what's up with that. $20k is obviously a big difference.

BriggyDwiggs42•2mo ago

I don’t mind more Bangladeshes. Seems like your whole issue is that they’re a different ethnicity. Kids born in the US are citizens and you have no good reason to think they’re worse somehow.

rayiner•2mo ago

You think you don't because you don't know anything about the culture and any contact you have with the community is superficial and arm's length. I'm Bangladeshi--my family has no knowledge of even a single ancestor from anywhere else. Bangladeshis aren't just Iowans with darker skin. Our mothers socialize us very differently from birth.

BriggyDwiggs42•2mo ago

Okay, but I don’t interact much with Mormons either. Doesn’t bother me that there’s a Mormon enclave. Not my thing.

rayiner•2mo ago

That’s a great example, but with one key difference. Mormons went out and built their own society in the middle of nowhere on land nobody else wanted. But how would you like it if tens of thousands of mormons moved into your town and reshaped it according to their culture?

harshalizee•2mo ago

To be clear, ANY US Citizen or Permanant Resident can eventually bring in some families after an arduous and long process.

This is a non-existent issue with H1-B.

The current wait times for an H1-B from the Rest of the World(ROW) is around 10+ years to be a citizen. For India/China/Mexico, it's around 12-27 years to become a Permanent Resident if they applied for their I-140 before 2020. If they applied after 2020, it's currently estimated at 34-75 years!

BobaFloutist•2mo ago

Why is that a problem?

BriggyDwiggs42•2mo ago

Why wouldn’t they be skilled or motivated? They’re just not tech workers. Even if they were all lazy or whatever, what about their kids?

maxerickson•2mo ago

It's great that all those people without special skills can access rewarding jobs in the powerhouse US economy.

It's demented to think that they are undermining wages when unemployment was basically 0 when Trump and his moronic goons took power.

This idea that we should use borders to keep other people poor is just insane.

hshdhdhj4444•2mo ago

> the H-1B has instead been wielded as a tool by firms to displace American workers and depress wages in the information technology (IT) labor market

This is very hard to square with software professionals being the fastest growing profession both in terms of number of employed workers and earnings in the past 2 decades.

U.S. wages for software professionals are significantly higher than anywhere else in the world and nowhere else has as much software professionals immigration as the U.S.

I’m predicting that the uncertainty and discouragement of H1-Bs will lead to a destruction of jobs in the U.S. and a suppression of salaries as high quality software engineers don’t move to the U.S., allowing the center of gravity of the industry to shift out of the U.S.

Note: This is not to say there aren’t significant issues with the H1B system that need to be addressed. There are. But cutting off the supply of workers in the most remote friendly profession will not lead to an increase in wages. It will lead to an outflow of jobs instead.

hearsathought•2mo ago

> This is very hard to square with software professionals being the fastest growing profession both in terms of number of employed workers and earnings in the past 2 decades.

Just because the wages rose doesn't mean it wasn't suppressed. It's likely wages would have risen even higher without foreign workers increasing the supply of labor. It's simply supply and demand. No?

> I’m predicting that the uncertainty and discouragement of H1-Bs will lead to a destruction of jobs in the U.S. and a suppression of salaries as high quality software engineers don’t move to the U.S., allowing the center of gravity of the industry to shift out of the U.S.

You seem to think that H1-B visas made the US the center of the tech world. It didn't. The US was the center of the world long before H1-B visas existed. Besides, if such a shift were possible, why wouldn't india hold onto their workers and become the center of the industry? Because India is incapable of being the center of anything. What region has the geopolitical clout along financial, cultural, scientific and military importance to become the center of the tech industry? India? Europe? China? Laughable isn't it?

innagadadavida•2mo ago

Statistically speaking if you take a bunch of low-mid level salary / skill folks and move them out of US, the average salary should increase no? R&D jobs in countries like India is still low compared to US. These are the high skill and pay jobs and they will continue to be here.

JumpCrisscross•2mo ago

> predicting that the uncertainty and discouragement of H1-Bs will lead to a destruction of jobs in the U.S.

Do we have any studies pointing one way or another?

Given AI’s existing effects on junior demand, and the post-Covid normalization of remote work (and thus multi-shore teams), I could see the effect going either way.

toomuchtodo•2mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305623

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509

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The Rise and Fall of the H-1B Visa – American Affairs Journal

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