Now Trump needs to go after all the "founders" scamming the US through their O-1 visa. That shit needs to end yesterday.

$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.

We'll see a rebalancing for sure.

I hope that minorities in this country, including wealthy one's who democrats are on the cusp of losing (Asian Americans) realize what Trump really thinks of them and their potential contributions to this country. Unfortunately minorities seem to cheer this on, hence why we had a 20+ point swing away from Harris towards trump by Latinos, giving him an outright majority of latino men and near majority of latino women. Americans love schadenfreude more than the germans who coined that word ever could have.

A lot of people are now legally here and voting here only got that due to their own parents or their parents doing something illegal in regards to the border.

Tech companies are about to learn that Peter and Paul really are worse programmers compared to the people that were on H1B. The only bad thing is that a whole lot of Peters and Pauls who didn't deserve it are about to be put in positions they have no right to be in. Taking the "competency crisis" and squaring it.

Affirmative Action for WASPs. H1bs are already treated like shit/slaves by their situation and they still line up in massive droves for the rare opportunity to taste the soil of this nation. We are cruel to make it even harder on them.

oof, that's a big price increase.

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.

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.

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.

Until anything actually happens there's no reason to take this president at his word.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5815043/

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.

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.

The first country that cracks this will have streets paved with gold.

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.

There's a reason Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others have been expanding offices and TC in Eastern Europe and India for years.

The main industries that will be hit are chip design and pharma.

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.

I’ll wait till I form an opinion on this.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koSby3mzX-E

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.