H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
That's right. To be explicit: I am absolutely, 100% for smart people coming to the US and participating as full, equal peers in our job market. Come on in, friend! I welcome you!
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO of the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
In my experience the FAANG companies don't really abuse their H-1Bs. At Google or Meta the H-1Bs really are just smart people who participate as full and equal peers. And the FAANGs employ plenty of American citizens, they hire all the good employees they can get. The trouble either comes from small companies or from consulting shops.
The simplest solution is just to take salary into account. If someone is making $180k a year then they aren't "owned".
I don't think you can capture the complexity of the world with a single variable. I'm at Amazon. We all make about the same. Some more than me. Some less. However, while I don't have to worry about changing jobs, or _not_ having a job (for awhile), they do. They're working with an entirely different set of pressures and constraints.
For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
It’s pretty easy to change jobs on an H-1B if you are high skill. I love hearing folks, who aren’t on an H-1B, tell me things like this. Or that I’m paid less when I’m paid more.
I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.
you are the edge case. for you, it is easy to change employers. For a lot of folks, it is not, despite being equally skilled. it is pretty crass to hand-wave away the real risk of being forced to uproot your life because of the risk that your visa may not be renewed.
About 20% of H1B visas go to indian outsourcing firms. You know the culprits here. Are you really going to argue that these firms are not abusing the system and underpaying employees?
> If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
I agree, but on the flip side: the point of applying for an H1-B visa is to come and work for a company in a specialised field. If you're trying to use it to get yourself permanently into a country, then that's the wrong visa type to apply for. I've worked overseas on a visa, and it was stressful for this reason, but I was under no illusions about that when I applied for it.
What other mechanisms are there to move to a country that has a quality of life you seek, and work for a company that you feel excited about? Because that's most of the motivation from the people (like me) that lived in an under-developed country, are qualified, and wanted to work on the top of the industry.
You work a bit out of college, some day you get an invite to an interview from a FAANG, you take the interview, and next thing you know you're moving to another country, working for a great salary, and in a huge company. You do life. You meet people, maybe a partner, maybe get married, maybe have a kid (after all, life doesn't stop). All this while on a temporary status with no easy way to progress out of it other than via time.
I have felt this pressure of not wanting to switch jobs and/or having to be extra careful in order to not put myself at risk of losing it. Specially with the current state of the industry. It has put me (and still does) at a disadvantage with my local peers. I am not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but it is a reality. The 'visa choice' is fictional, and not the most relevant part of the process.
A country doesn’t owe you the right to relocate there, just because they offer the top opportunities in your field or your desired standard of living. At its most extreme, if they decide to make you a b**h to their own citizens à la Qatar, and you take the deal anyways, that’s your own fault
In the case of immigrant workers in Qatar, the deal they're offered very often ends up looking very different from their lived experience once it's accepted and they move into the country to perform the work. If the deal was clearly stipulated ahead of time I'd agree with you.
They do hire plenty of American citizens, but the lengths they go to hire people on H-1Bs make me think they get something extra out of it. At FB you'd often see big boards of "public job postings" in internal lobbies that I can only assume were to comply with some arbitrary requirement.
Hiring at FAANGs is hard. A lot of the H-1Bs I worked with got internships somehow, which is a lot less hoops, and they were good in the internship, so you want to give them an offer when they graduate. If they need an employment visa, then you have the experts research their experience and craft a job ad that only they can fill, and place it where it will be least seen but complies with the law.
That's abusing the system, but I dunno, better than abusing the employees that I hear about... Or the straight up fraud where immigrants were paying to get hired on h-1b for fake jobs, or the abuse where job shops would submit 3x the applications for the number of positions they actually had, etc.
That’s for people who already have H1Bs, this is the company trying to keep them long term by getting them a green card. The whole EB green card system is a bit of a mess.
I think there is probably title deflation going on. Yes, every engineer working at a FAANG is well-paid, and the H1Bs are no exception. But my feeling is they're probably at least a level lower than they would be if they didn't have the captive visa. And this only reinforces that they're all great workers.
H1B is not so bad. Many IT people I know came to the US by L1 visa. That is a true modern slavery! Don't like the work? Laid off? Go home, no other options.
If you put a tax on it they, employers, will simply pay even less. There will be enough people to work even for just food and roof. With the hope to get green card in a few years and bring the family. I was working for years with no promotions so that shitty boss could take the credits. I quit right after getting GC.
I understand but this post would of been a lot better if you simply admitted you don’t want H1B slaves who set the work ethics bar so high. I get it. When someone works until 10pm it makes those who work until 2pm looks bad especially if they have similar capabilities. Keep in mind, a lot of the AI talent started off are young people starting from entry regular level engineer roles. If you want the the quantum computer folks, they don’t even need H1B they can do the phd track.
Everyone has their own perspective. Your friend who referred to as “rented mules” probably will question you as a friend because you actually want them to be out of this country lol. Just be real, we don’t want H1B slaves who set the bar so high for work ethics. Just stop fake being nice as if you care about their well being. They chose to stay in the US after college knowing the expectation. You are shutting down the door for those who really could of developed into great tech talents.
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.
I still think that you mix up the "green card" and the "H1B visa".
The green card is a status of a permanent resident. A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it. It costs significant money so an employer usually helps with that.
The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US. That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
If there are qualified American workers who are looking for work and applying for these positions then no, they should not. Legally they cannot either. Now on the flip side, if there is an actual shortage of qualified workers then sure. But right now, there is no shortage of qualified workers in most of these slots, especially if companies are willing to pay a competitive wage.
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, that it'd take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a greencard (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, it'll take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a green card (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
Practically true - but that it’s not permitted to count experience gained while working on an H-1B when applying for a green card.
If an application for a green card is made for a person who’s currently in the USA on a H-1B visa, the person needs to qualify for it based on their qualifications and experience prior to whatever they’ve done in their current H-1B job.
> A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it.
There is no "5 year" requirement to get a green card. A company can even sponsor an employee from abroad (e.g. a satellite office) to get a green card and if approved they will be a permanent resident the moment they arrive in the USA.
Perhaps you are thinking of the five years of a green card needed to apply for citizenship?
No, he is right. Despite common sense, the labor test (seeing if an American can do the job the visa holder is currently doing) is applied at green card application time, not at H1B visa time.
I scraped through PERM before the recruiting phase started getting attention from websites like jobs.now. I'm not against this and would expand the test to non-immigrant visas.
Meta being sued by the DoL was supposed to stop ridiculous gaming of the process [0].
Still I think a points system would be better for America and the RAISE Act is looking better everyday [1].
they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved.
And this explains why I recently heard an ad on KNX radio for a tech job at a winery or brewery or something similar, which specified that applications would only be taken by mail.
It also had a massive list of responsibilities and a pay rate about half of what it should be.
You can report that to the Department of Labor. They are supposed to take applications in the same way they usually do. If they accept online applications for other positions they should be taking them for PERM recruiting too.
They are making these specific jobs tough to find because they are for a PERM test and don't want to get applicants. This video is old, but the same thing is happening today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
Some of these posts make it seem like software engineering is a low skilled job, I beg to differ, it's still a very high skilled job, < .5% of the world knows how to code.
Is it that skilled when it gets taught in 4 years in college while an Electrician has to apprenticeship for 7?
That said, whether software is high-skill or not is tangential to the point I'm making. Which is, H1-B is being used to depress wages and that reworking it shouldn't affect jobs that actually have few people that can do it because O-1 allows them to work that job.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, software development is very complex, but an electricians job isn't, it's very simple but it's high consequence.
Software development may seem simple for a lot of people here on HN, but trust me, I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job. The regulatory environment which requires the "apprenticeship" is a totally different topic and doesn't inform anything on the skill required to do the job. Also, the electrician apprentice gets paid while learning on the job, the software developer in training doesn't.
To the poster (nunez?) who was lamenting about me apparently claiming blue collar jobs are easier (and then deleted it when I was writing this reply):
1. I didn't claim that.
2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
> Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job.
[he said gleefully]
do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)
anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
I think you might be biased by where you live. In Germany an electrician's apprenticeship is ~3.5 years (and can sometimes be shortened). So while I am not an electrician and have no deeper insight than what friends who are told me, I am reasonably sure our electric installations are not 40%-50% as complex as the ones in your country.
I know electricians that were working within days of being hired with no experience. Apprenticeships are entry level jobs, not minimum certifications. They're also used to gatekeep positions by the unions. It has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the position is "skilled" or not.
And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
Apprenticeships are just unions gate keeping. Unions only reward seniority so you have to “pay your dues” in terms of time before you’re allowed to make any money.
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
> I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months
The tech industry like tech stack is broad.
For example, it's nigh impossible to hire an American citizen with professional CUDA or eBPF experience because almost anyone with those skills already has a job. If you have those skills YOU WILL land a job (not remote first though - that era's over).
And it's not like you can retrain a fullstack engineer to understand systems programming overnight - it takes years of experience and knowledge of computer and OS architecture.
And it's not like companies aren't paying top dollar for these skills - they are, but people with those skills simply don't exist in significant numbers in the US.
There's a reason a large portion of the cybersecurity industry shifted to Israel and India - the kinds of table stakes skills in systems development aren't heavily taught in the US anymore compared to 15 years ago, and the only universities where you might have a shot hiring someone with those skills are T10 programs where students can field multiple job offers.
That said, the proposed changes in the H1B program are good - it's easier for a startup or a professional company to sponsor an H1B now instead of dealing with unethical consultancies gumming up the works.
The H1B market is bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups. You want to optimize for the right hand but don't want to make it so hard that you don't end up incentivizing talented people from leaving and returning to India or China or Europe.
That said, I don't envision this having much impact on easing hiring - AI/ML in the hands of experienced devs is fairly powerful AND the economic conditions currently are incentivizing us to limit hiring to only those who are truly critical.
it is not cheaper, you can make an argument that H1B talent pool puts downward pressure on wages in general, but to claim that H1Bs are cheaper is just insulting to everyone's intelligence and is factually not true (unless it is plain abuse of h1b visa through shady schemes by unknown companies, which i dont support)
Yeah, there's plenty of abuse with H1B with those consulting companies operating out of India and shipping people overseas, I don't believe many of them would qualify for the H1B. That said, many folks who come here to study and get hired by companies (usually, for their specialization in a masters degree for most foreign students) also apply for a H1B.
I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
The statute creating the H-1B visa—which allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated workers as well as fashion models from abroad—contains language establishing a “prevailing wage.”4 This prevailing wage requirement is intended to protect the wages of U.S. workers in occupations requiring a college degree from adverse impacts and to prevent college-educated migrant workers from being underpaid and exploited. Corporate lobbyists and other H-1B proponents often cite this prevailing wage requirement in the H-1B law as evidence that H-1B workers cannot be paid less than U.S. workers. However, the reality is that the H-1B statute, regulations, and administrative guidance allow employers wide latitude in setting wage levels....
Although salary information that corresponds to requested positions on LCAs has been made available by DOL for a number of years through the Office of Foreign Labor Certification’s LCA disclosure data, until recently the prevailing wage levels selected by employers were not readily available. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time reported what some had suspected and speculated about but to that point were not able to officially confirm: The vast majority of H-1B jobs were being certified by DOL at the two lowest wage levels.
Fraud should be curbed and punished, but I don't understand why the visa itself is bad because of this, that's like saying people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we must ban vehicles entirely.
Or the ultimate work-around, pay then the same and work them twice as hard. Boom, half the wage and nobody can tell!
How many of these consulting companies just have the most awful, toxic company culture imaginable? I don't think that's a coincidence - that's a purposefully engineered cost saving strategy.
Isn't it directly influencing prevailing wage? When H1-B dominates a sector then I'm competing with H1-B and am forced into that existing wage not the other way around. If I don't want to work in that environment because it fucking sucks well guess who's getting a green card? Whole thing is rotten and software industry is going to become the new "going postal".
I think a tax of at least $100,000 per year per H-1B visa going forward would help eliminate abuse of the system. All current visa holders should get an expedited path to citizenship to keep them from being exploited as well
That's a great way of putting it... if you're going to poke holes in the immigration system to help industry... they should pay for the privilege a high enough value to make sure it's not just about cheap labor.
Is that really true? My impression is that companies tries as much as possible to not use the O-1 route, not sure because the requirements are by design too high or process and cost are not worth it compared to other routes.
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
H1B is also for fashion models, which AFAIK, do not need their employer to prove they can not hire an American person for the role before being granted permission to hire a temporary foreign employee.
Not to mention the EU countries already do effectively the same thing. If your wage is below a certain treshold (based on profession), you can't compete fairly with europeans (i.e. the company has to prove they couldn't find anyone), but if you're above it then you're eligible for the Blue Card program and get to compete fairly. Very similar to Trump's changes in intent
I agree with your broader point about companies abusing H1-Bs. But I'm not sure if the abuse happens through hiring at lower wage. For example, if you look at FANG, they pay as much for an H1-B as they would pay any other employee. Where is this perspective that you can hire someone at lower wage because they come with H1-B? Would love understand the loophole.
You can work an H1-B nearly to death, Elon has all but explicitly said so for instance. If they're fired it's very unlikely that they'll be able to get a new job before being forced to leave the country at which point they're unlikely to ever get the chance to come back and they know this.
But this doesn't really happen in FAANG, as most on this board can tell you. Maybe in Elon companies, but they were well known for overworking everyone almost a decade ago
not every company is FANG. there are tens of thousands of companies operating at sub trillion dollar valuations which absolutely positively do this. FANG (or even "big tech") is far too narrow to draw any meaningful conclusions in the broader market.
Wages are not straightforward, as much as businesses would like to pretend they are. What do you mean by "would pay"? They don't just make up a number. The willingness of applicants to accept a lower wage lowers the wage they "would" pay ("our wages are competitive").
Every controversial and disruptive problem occurring in this administration is solely because an activity was allowed to continue in a controversial and disruptive way for many administrations
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
Any change that hurts WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) is a good change. If they just plain banned those five, there probably wouldn't even be a lottery.
Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.
They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.
Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.
The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
Western society doesn't work well with societies which lie at every turn. There's certain honor expected in our interactions, with India you have to nail them down and in my experience its entirely not worth the interaction at all (broad strokes).
You must have interacted with very low quality people from India unfortunately. Calling an entire nation dishonourable is racist, ignorant and crass. Try to be more respectful next time. Considering the fact that >50% on US population chose a rapist felon as a President - you should get of the ‘my western civilisation is honorable’ high horse.
And considering most US tech companies have huge growing offices in India (Microsoft has 20,000 employees in India) - no, Western society and India do share values of respect and trust. Thinking otherwise is disrespectful and downright insulting to people across continents who work together everyday.
That's almost the impression I got. Their customers on the call seemed to know something was up, but resistance to the idea that they were entirely being lied to about everything seemed like it was enough to prevent them from understanding that in fact that was the situation.
Hearing from multiple sources that there is big uptick in "offshore / global development centers" in India to support US companies who are currently using H1B in sizable numbers.
With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.
So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
Yup this is definitely happening. However, I’m not sure how effective it ultimately is. India is an incredibly inconvenient time zone for US based operations. And salaries are creeping up in Bangalore (the preferred city for this stuff).
If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.
I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
There will always be unscrupulous companies trying to game the system, you just need to sue them into complying. Auctioning is generally the right idea, auction and make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc. My intuition if you auction 85,000 slots in US H1b, the average H1b salary will be around 250,000$. As you reduce the slots, the average will keep going higher. Reducing or increasing the slots can depend on the labor need for the economy.
Its already illegal, you just don't know how India behaves. The body shops in the US don't even behave legally in US, how are you going to get the behavior controlled in India?
Use the action to set the fee to the government, set a salary floor, and hold like 50% of the fee money in escrow that gets refunded back to the company after 5 years provided they retained the employee and tax records indicate the employee was paid at least at the floor level (something like 1.5x the median salary for the that position in that area).
How about "behave or you need to move your company elsewhere if you ever want foreign workers of any kind again."
Just ban organizations caught playing games (that is: "I'll know it when I see it" for labeling) and the ban should include not contracting consultancies that hire foreigners and maybe attached to anyone with feduciary duty as well. It would be very effective.
It depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are just optimizing for making the numbers go up, the yes letting big tech hiring all the available foreign workers so that they can do even more big tech stuff, increase their revenue, lift their share price, produce GDP, increase tax revenue etc. But what if you care about the diversity of the foreign workers in terms of field or specialty? What if for example you have a "Made in America" slogan and want to hire manufacturing workers so that we can have a renaissance in manufacturing?
The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
The issue is that people opposing it don't have a coherent view of what they want. They don't want a free market solution; they don't like the socialist position where the government picks the people; they don't like the lottery either. They want their preferred type of people to get the visa in a manner not too different from quotas/dei/affirmative action etc., which is impossible to engineer. It ultimately ends up creating a compromise brokered by lobbyists and politicians, kind of like how we do everything else in the country.
It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense.
It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper.
If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
That really incentives you to under pay the H1-B though.
The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.
Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources".
It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
I mean, would big tech really buy them all? The argument against H-1B is it's being used to replace American workers with cheaper workers who are locked into their employer.
If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.
Would they? I know that they've engaged in a ton of wage suppression historically but deliberately paying out the nose for H1B visas seems like it wouldn't be worth it.
It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
There are plenty of people that are against both types of immigration, or against one but not the other in each category. The Hive mind is often not that much of a hive.
> Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
Until we hit zero percent unemployment, we have a surplus of labor in this country and have no need to import any more. It is up to employers to pay competitive wages and train people to fill the vacancies.
Zero percent unemployment is viewed as a bad thing by almost everyone with a familiarity of the employment markets.
Zero percent unemployment means that no one without a job is looking for one. It means no new entrants into the job market (since by definition, you are unemployed the moment you start looking for your first job). And it means that no one is transitioning jobs or careers without a firm job offer in hand. It means that no business ever fails. It means that it is remarkably difficult to find employees. It means that there are no employees that quit instead of doing something immoral.
You should look into the different types of unemployment, as well as the definition of "unemployed", and specifically, frictional unemployment since you seem very unfamiliar with the base concepts.
Okay, maybe not literally zero percent unemployment, but my point still stands that we do not have a shortage of labor in this country and we do not need to import any at this time. We should incentivize workers through better compensation and retraining to fill skill gaps.
There is not a shortage of labor in general. There is possibly a shortage of specialized labor (although arguably not in high skilled and technical positions like the H1B intends/typically aims to fill).
Again, people study this and have a name for it: structural unemployment. This is the unemployment level caused by employers needing to hire for skills that the market cannot currently provide. Think of the town with high unemployment due to a car factory closure, but a local business that needs scuba diving instructors can't find one. Plenty of labor, but no scuba diving instructors.
I think this is what you are getting at: If you want to hire someone foreign because the skills don't exist in the local labor market, you should be obligated to prove that the skill is being developed in the local labor market.
The argument (not mine, just an argument) against that is that individual firms should not necessarily be forced to bear the cost of training workers in a portable skill when you can just bring in non-local labor (H1B). Back to the Scuba shop example: it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop. They would much rather pay lower prices and bring in a foreign instructor than run short handed for months while they plow money into training someone in a skill that the worker can take to their competition.
My feeling is that H1Bs are probably useful in much more limited circumstances than they are used in now (probably something more like O-1 visas that are given for people who are leaders in their fields, or demonstrably and uniquely talented). If the H1B job can be done interchangeably, then it should be done by domestic labor. If you want to hire the one guy who just won a nobel prize to work on your time machine, that is when we should allow foreign labor.
> it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop.
I believe the common situation is a company pays for your masters degree but the two of you end up with a contract where you'll stay at the company for X years afterwards.
I don't see why there can't be a non-"At will" situation for the scuba instructor.
If you do this, you'll have unintended consequences:
- You don't allow the US to import skilled workers anymore, and rather than hire locally from a non-existent labor pool they simply move the jobs abroad. What's worse, hiring someone from India on an H1B to work in your AI lab, or moving your AI lab to India?
- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples. Or maybe...they'll just figure out how to automate those jobs or go out of business since no one wants to pay $5 for an apple.
How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?
The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
> The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true
My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.
> My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
There is no evidence that this is actually true. Decades of illegal immigrant labor has suppressed wages and supplanted American citizens, so you have no way of knowing that’s the case.
There are plenty of food and things that have gone out of production because the economics don’t make sense anymore, even with illegal immigration. Apples aren’t going to be different. Demand isn’t somehow magically going to be present at any price.
No, it means the elevator operator just doesn't exist anymore. We didn't pay them more, we got rid of them. If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become. Because your ancestors were white they were permitted a chance to work from the bottom up, but because today's immigrants aren't white, you think its either slavery or exploitation, and they should just stay in poor countries accordingly (a situation that was not forced on your ancestors, for your benefit). Or if it isn’t racism, what is your reasoning for pulling up the ladder today?
> If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
Expand H-2A: Temporary Agricultural Worker visa then.
We shouldn't be encouraging black market activity. If as the US we want to have cheap imported labor pick apples then write it into law. If we as the US want to experience the Baumol effect [1] then don't. I think most people want to experience the Baumol effect as opposed to losing out gains to trade.
> I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become.
You’re the one that’s bringing race into the argument. I don’t care what race they are, I don’t want any illegal immigrants in this country.
America’s obligation is to its own citizens first and foremost. This should not be a controversial opinion. Every country should put the interests of its own citizens first.
So ironic that your post full of racist name calling and wanting to support a perpetual underclass of people stuck in indentured servitude, masquerading as empathy, and then you're the one calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.
Pro tip: in case of actual racism, use the flag button.
>is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country,
What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor?
Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself.
The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them.
So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
> maybe we should focus on other ways of dealing with wealth inequality (improving productivity, education so our kids can compete on the world stage when they grow up, etc...)?
Yes we should. And when politicians are gonna fix those issues first, then people's opinion on importing more competing labor will change. Until then, they'll vote to tilt the supply-demand balance in their favor, as per democratic process because the business class is also doing the opposite so you have a conflict of interest you need to fix.
People not seeing the argument of this side of the isle, are in a bubble who have never had to compete in a zero sum environment against people who will do anything for money, and love writing cheques that other people have to cash. Which is why you're seeing the backlash from this at elections. If you want people to agree with you politically, you have to take care of their grievances first, before you take care of imported people form abroad and business owners.
>it doesn't work now that the immigrants are no longer primarily white?
Nowhere was the skin color part of the argument till you brought that up witch says everything about you and why I'm exiting the convo here.
The issue isn’t race. Typical Americans would be just as against illegal immigration if it were white Europeans flooding into our country.
The uncomfortable reality is that illegal immigration is a net negative for society, particularly when it reaches the numbers it did under the Biden administration.
> It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
The hive mind is greatly exaggerated. The existence of cognitively dissonant opinions on a website is more likely evidence that the site has posters that have differing viewpoints, rather than evidence of a group thought process that is illogical.
At some point the contradiction is so flagrant that the typical "we're all individuals here" dismissal no longer suffices.
Like if you showed up on a homeschooling moms facebook group and half the moms are spewing religious mumbo jumbo and the other half are spewing trans rights stuff it immediately begs the question how the heck are these groups coexisting without fighting at every turn without massive cognitive dissonance or not actually believing what they're saying. Same thing here with immigration, among other things (wouldn't have been my first pick of an issue to highlight the dissonance but here we are).
This is not a homeschooling mothers' Facebook group though. There is absolutely no requirement for people here to agree, and/because the place will not fall apart if they don't - as you can see from its continued existence.
It’s not even clear that an auction would be the most efficient way to allocate H-1Bs if we define efficiency as maximizing long-term economic and societal value, not just short-term revenue. An auction favors companies with deep pockets right now — meaning a startup looking to bring in a world-leading PhD in a critical field could lose out to a much larger firm simply filling headcount. That’s hardly an optimal outcome for innovation or competitiveness.
"O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)"
Or straight to an EB-1a greencard - the criteria are virtually identical. And if they’re that good, they should be able to insist on being sponsored for the greencard not the employment-based visa.
Although for China and India the priority date for EB1a is three years currently so if you’re from either of them O-1 will be a necessary stopgap, but for anyone else EB1a applications are open immediately.
I have met people hired under the O1-A and they fit the bill pretty neatly. Think R1 profs publishing in Nature/Science/domain equivalents. If you have exceptional talent, you can 100% get in.
I think the issue is expecting a masters/phd to ensure access to th US labor market. This greatly distorts the fact that for most software engineering positions a bachelors is enough (if necessary at all), crowding the domestic market.
The US should not allow the pipeline of jr->sr engs to be culled for the sake of accessing cheap foreign labor. Given the necessity of software to run the modern economy, it really is a national security issue.
People want at least the appearance of a holistic process that considers a candidate’s broader value to society — even if that process isn’t perfect. An auction drops the pretense entirely and just says: pay to win.
So nurses, professors, teachers and artists will be in higher demand and they'll have to pay them a better salary to fill positions? which may attract people who currently avoid those career cause they lead to poverty? Yup I'm sold.
And as others said, add a cost factor to train an citizen for every H-1B issued. Actually, slap a 350% tax on all the salaries paid to H-1Bs except for the first 15 people (or, I don't know, 3% of the overall staff, whichever is higher) and make sure it's hard to game with shell companies, body shops and subsidiaries.
Precisely 0% chance it'll happen in the current administration, and it's anyone guess if there will be administrations after this one, but a few hours of additional thinking around this solution (this is the first 3 minutes roughly) could make it work way better. Remove limits, make it really expensive, give some rights to the people who come on it, use the money to address real shortages, and watch companies stop abusing it.
P.S.
European here, with 0 interest in coming to work in the US.
same could be said of famines like the one in China or Soviet Union or ones in Africa: they simply needed to pay up for food, if they were really that hungry
your logic erases nuance of the US labor market and infinity of specializations and niches, on top or large regional differences in labor market.
let's just say that nurses will never be paid on par with software engineers just because it is different specialty, and it is stupid to force nurses to compete with IT for visas
I'm not the person who proposed the auction, but I read it as "let the companies compete for the H1-B visas in an auction," not about the workers buying their way into the US.
For example, if CheapoCorp is looking to replace reasonably well paid US workers with H1-B workers, they won't bid much for the visas. CheapoCorp isn't trying to get good talent from overseas. They're trying to save money, push down wages, have a workforce that they can mistreat (since they can't easily leave the company given their immigration status requires employment), etc.
By contrast, if a company is looking to hire great engineers or scientists from overseas because they're in a growing industry with a shortage of workers, they would be willing to pay a lot more to get the H1-B visas. They're not looking to save $20,000/year on someone's salary. They want top talent.
When companies are trying to replace their workforce with lower-paid foreign workers who can't complain (lest they lose their job and with it their immigration status), that's not what the H1-B system was designed for. It certainly is how some companies are using it. If you're on an H1-B and lose your job, you have 60 days to find a new job or you're gone. That's going to make you a much more compliant employee. You have little leverage to negotiate raises, you aren't likely to quit even if they're overworking you, they can pass you over for promotions and you'll quietly accept it.
But if the employer is competing in an auction for H1-B visas, they're more likely to be companies that are seeking out top talent rather than seeking out workers they can underpay and mistreat.
The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement. The company is just a shell to win the auction and sponsor them. If an auction system were adopted without safeguards, it could turn the H-1B program from a labor-market tool into a plaything for the ultra-wealthy.
> The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
But the golden ticket requires 5mil. Even in the US, even the most talented engineers, probably wouldn't have that much until after 5 to 10+ years of work, and outside of the US, earning that much money as an engineer is probably next to impossible before well over 40+. (And, even then, if all you have is just the 5mil, would you really part with that much money just for a visa?)
Welcome change. I studied engineering at a U.S. university, came here 10 years ago, and still did not make it through the lottery (while the ones gaming the system did).
Ranking by Salary probably makes the most sense if you're going to cap the numbers you want the most productive people who contribute the most to the tax base.
Which is fine... The purpose of the United States is not to be easy to become a citizen of but to better the lives of the people living here. No one is owed a visa or citizenship.
That's great. As an American, she can disagree and vote accordingly. By our constitution, no one is owed citizenship. It's a irrevocable courtesy extended based upon following our laws.
You must’ve slept through both civics and history classes.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution grants unconditional (and thus, irrevocable) citizenship jos soli.
Naturalization indeed is mandated by the nationality law and not the constitution, yet it ain’t a courtesy. There’s a list of requirements, which once fulfilled mandate the US to grant a person a citizenship.
As for revoking US citizenship, this just not a thing: a person can rescind their own citizenship, but this requires a deliberate action from the person rescinding it. And naturalization can be deemed void, which is not the same as revoked, as it requires a failure in the granting, not a decision after it.
Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
So no, it ain’t courtesy. It’s a universal right, that is ratified in the US constitution, US nationality law, and multiple court decisions.
As for Emma Lazarus, she died in 1887, thirty three years before the US constitution was amended to stop denying voting rights from women.
Yeah, that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about naturalization, which is the process of taking someone who is a citizen of another country and making them a citizen of this country.
A child born in this country is entitled to citizenship.
I didn't mention revoking US citizenship. I literally said it's an irrevocable courtesy, which means it cannot be revoked once granted.
> Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
The UN Declaration of Human Rights is subject to the United States constitution when being interpreted by US courts.
I'm not so sure. For example, are partners not owed a visa or citizenship from that point of view? It seems like a cruel barrier if a citizen were to fall for the wrong type of person.
Are they owed it? No of course not. Such a citizenship can be rejected for a number of reasons (national security, criminal background, etc). There is no natural right to citizenship the way there is for speech, personal property, life, etc.
They could but Congress would have to get involved. H-1B visa increase is likely to be heavily unpopular with voters. This American voter for sure would not be thrilled.
you would think so, but the american government has had a consistent track record of sacrificing things that would make economic sense on the altar of racism, and with trump in the white house they are having a "say the quiet parts out loud" extravaganza.
it's a nation whose current immigration policies are largely driven by racism. h1b visas tend to largely go to people from countries the current administration considers undesirable, so the chances of them increasing the allocated number are extremely low.
I’m no fan of most of what this administration does, but in the abstract I don’t think optimizing giving visas to the highest paying workers is the worst idea.
Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.
Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.
This solves the exploitation of H1B visas. However this tilts the scale towards the bigger companies. The small upstart cannot compete with Facebook or Tesla. I guess there is always someone disadvantaged with these proposals. Let’s see how this works and hopefully we have enough will to tweak it later
Time to smash offshoring too. Any American company that offshores jobs should be delisted from all American stock exchanges and banned from doing business in the United States.
> [Microsoft] applied for 9,491 H-1B visas during the last fiscal year, all of which were approved. The company has laid off nearly 16,000 people in total this year, out of a 228,000-strong global employee base.
It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.
At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]
I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.
Obviously not all of those laid off met the new criteria for what Microsoft, et al were/are looking for, but there's no way you convince me that -probably- a majority of them do. The system is so ripe for abuse. I'm not sure I agree fully with the "if you're laying off people, you can't do X" aspect, but I do think sometimes it is cheaper for companies to lay people off, especially those with certain benefits, and hire immigrants than it is to move the original employee around the company. This very obviously happens, all the time.
While I understand from a purely capitalistic view that it makes sense, but Microsoft and others are multi-trillion/billion dollar companies, and they are skimming every last dime while also hurting Americans. The system needs heavy reform, this current change isn't close to enough. To me the rightward shift, especially among college aged men, is partially because of things like this. You can preach that the "replacement theory" is all nonsense, but if you're trying to convince people that have seen their friends or themselves literally replaced at the job with non-Americans...well, it's obvious they are going to start to lean into those ideas.
So much of the right-wing surge could be thwarted by simple policy reforms and it seems like no one wants to do it, or is too beholden to corporations, etc to do it. It's a bit baffling. I've always said politics is a pendulum and it should come as a shock to no one that a problem that is constantly ignored or written off will eventually swing back hard the other way. I think we're seeing that. I think that's why compromise is more important than purity a lot of the time. Unfortunately there will not be much compromise for a long while now.
I do think it's good to curb abuse by the Indian bodyshop companies like Infosys. They spam the system with applicants to the point that they get more than their fair share of visas for what turn out to be relatively low-paid jobs with fairly horrible working conditions.
At the same time, that couldn't happen if we didn't have the artificial per-country limit on employment-based green cards.
This will hurt new grads and non-engineering STEM applicants though.
But part of all thyis should be that if you did layoffs in the last 12 months (maybe even 2 years), you don't get to apply for H1Bs.
Oh and any system that uses artificial performance metrics to force people out should also count as layoffs. By this I mean that some companies will require a quota of 5-15% of the workforce to get subpar ratings and, in the current environment, that means more likely being put on a PIP and fired within months. If the goal is 5-10% of the workforce every year to be ushered out on PIPs, that's a layoff.
Four Indian companies take a large portion of the visas. These companies are using very sketchy practices and should be investigated. If just left to American companies, the entire quota would not even be hit.
Define “Indian companies.” Define “American companies.” I think you will find that the companies you put in either of those categories are actually multinational companies.
> The proposed weighted-selection concept echoes a 2021 DHS plan under President Donald Trump's first administration that had sought to rank and select petitions by wage tiers (OES wage levels IV down to I), an approach that the Trump administration argued would prioritize higher-paid, highly skilled hires. That earlier plan faced opposition, was withdrawn by the Biden administration and saw related regulations blocked in federal court.
This seems like a no-brainer. Why did Biden withdraw the rule?
about 12 years ago I worked at a very large non-tech company that had outsourced to contractors to work on some code. They had a room in the basement for about 20 kids on H1B visas that were clearly right out of college. This was in a major city that had plenty of jr developers around, they just would expect more money.
I forget the contractors company name but they came up on HN at the time for being abusive towards their employees who risked deportation if they stood up for themselves. If I find specific examples I'll add them later, but you can probably just search hn for h1b.
I'm not sure I get it. So you want to have higher positions filled by h1b holders? The quota will be maxxed anyway. I don't have issues with that, personally.
Because the executive doesn't have the authority to do this. Trump also ultimately didn't do it. I don't recall if he lost the suit or withdrew it voluntarily. The new court is different and submissive, so it'll likely get through this time.
Off-topic, the article looks like AI slop: "Why it matters?" "What happens next?" Either AI is now running Newsweek, which is something we could even come to expect from a decaying magazine, or journalists are writing like that to compete with AI and/or sound natural to what readers come to expect lately.
FYI, the number listed in the visa application is only the lower bound on the actual amount paid to the employee. There's no benefit to entering an amount higher than legally required, so you can't draw conclusions about how much people are really paid from this data.
Honestly using an H1B for an accountant or pm seems wrong. These are jobs Americans can do. Accounting can be done remotely as well if it really needs to be
Both boil down to supply, demand, and cost. Every single software job has an American qualified to do it, for the right price. the same is true for other fields.
> Honestly using an H1B for an accountant or pm seems wrong
A PM should be a domain expert first and foremost. Nationality doesn't matter. You cannot build a product roadmap or a business case without understanding your industry. That requires experience. Also, no company skimps on PM salaries - they earn comparable to Staff or Principal Engineers, because most have that level of experience.
For a number of industries like Cybersecurity and DevOps, the pipeline of American talent died out in the 2010s because a number of the core classes were treated as "hard" (CompArch, Systems Programming) or made optional (OS internals, Kernel Development, Distributed Systems). On the other hand, equivalent programs in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India kept requiring those classes for CSE majors. And that's how Israeli and Indian startups and domiciled offices cornered that market - their education programs prioritized fundamental CS skills, incentivized SOC/SecEng/DevSecOps teams to operate in the country, and attracted their diasporas back to found startups in the space or become VCs in the space. It's a similar story in the chip fab industry (Taiwanese) and AI/ML tooling industry (Chinese) as well.
At some point, the finger needs to be pointed at universities and arguably even students themselves.
Most universities offered fundamental classes in computer architecture, OS internals, ML Theory, etc but these classes tend to be optional, and the handful of students who build domain experience in these kinds of subfields end up getting hired very quickly. But most students and universities don't incentivize this kind of foundational knowledge, and you ended up with a glut of Leetcode optimizers with some "frontend" or "backend" experience.
There's a reason that most high paying companies now limit new grad hiring to undergrads come just 8-9 CS programs (Cal/Stanford/MIT/UIUC/UW/UT Austin/GT/UCLA) - they're the only programs where we can trust the quality of graduates. And these are large programs - they graduate around 15k CS/CE/CSE/EECS/ECE majors combined a year. You can limit your pipeline to those programs and do well.
Completely irrelevant for accounting and only kind of relevant for PMs (who are usually not super technically competent at what they're working on).
Also, this lecture, while correct, is mis-aimed. Please respond to the best version of my argument, not a strawman you've concocted in your mind wherein I'm some sort of apologist for the subpar standards of American CS education.
The H1B visa doesn’t compete with American workers as much as it does with the same people working in their home countries.
Especially in today’s extremely remote friendly environment (and H1B visas outside of maybe biomed research tend to be concentrated in remote friendly fields), if a company cannot hire a candidate on an H1B visa, and the candidate has to return to their home nation, why wouldn’t the company not be thrilled to hire the exact same person abroad for a fraction of the cost?
And with RTO failing miserably, and with nearly everyone on HN assuring us that WFH is as good, if not better, than RTO, it’s not like them working abroad is gonna be materially different from them working in a U.S. city.
Do keep in mind.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
That's right. To be explicit: I am absolutely, 100% for smart people coming to the US and participating as full, equal peers in our job market. Come on in, friend! I welcome you!
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO of the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
In my experience the FAANG companies don't really abuse their H-1Bs. At Google or Meta the H-1Bs really are just smart people who participate as full and equal peers. And the FAANGs employ plenty of American citizens, they hire all the good employees they can get. The trouble either comes from small companies or from consulting shops.
The simplest solution is just to take salary into account. If someone is making $180k a year then they aren't "owned".
I don't think you can capture the complexity of the world with a single variable. I'm at Amazon. We all make about the same. Some more than me. Some less. However, while I don't have to worry about changing jobs, or _not_ having a job (for awhile), they do. They're working with an entirely different set of pressures and constraints.
For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
It’s pretty easy to change jobs on an H-1B if you are high skill. I love hearing folks, who aren’t on an H-1B, tell me things like this. Or that I’m paid less when I’m paid more.
I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.
you are the edge case. for you, it is easy to change employers. For a lot of folks, it is not, despite being equally skilled. it is pretty crass to hand-wave away the real risk of being forced to uproot your life because of the risk that your visa may not be renewed.
About 20% of H1B visas go to indian outsourcing firms. You know the culprits here. Are you really going to argue that these firms are not abusing the system and underpaying employees?
> If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
I agree, but on the flip side: the point of applying for an H1-B visa is to come and work for a company in a specialised field. If you're trying to use it to get yourself permanently into a country, then that's the wrong visa type to apply for. I've worked overseas on a visa, and it was stressful for this reason, but I was under no illusions about that when I applied for it.
> that's the wrong visa type to apply for
What other mechanisms are there to move to a country that has a quality of life you seek, and work for a company that you feel excited about? Because that's most of the motivation from the people (like me) that lived in an under-developed country, are qualified, and wanted to work on the top of the industry.
You work a bit out of college, some day you get an invite to an interview from a FAANG, you take the interview, and next thing you know you're moving to another country, working for a great salary, and in a huge company. You do life. You meet people, maybe a partner, maybe get married, maybe have a kid (after all, life doesn't stop). All this while on a temporary status with no easy way to progress out of it other than via time.
I have felt this pressure of not wanting to switch jobs and/or having to be extra careful in order to not put myself at risk of losing it. Specially with the current state of the industry. It has put me (and still does) at a disadvantage with my local peers. I am not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but it is a reality. The 'visa choice' is fictional, and not the most relevant part of the process.
A country doesn’t owe you the right to relocate there, just because they offer the top opportunities in your field or your desired standard of living. At its most extreme, if they decide to make you a b**h to their own citizens à la Qatar, and you take the deal anyways, that’s your own fault
In the case of immigrant workers in Qatar, the deal they're offered very often ends up looking very different from their lived experience once it's accepted and they move into the country to perform the work. If the deal was clearly stipulated ahead of time I'd agree with you.
Going there under that visa with those constraints is a choice. No one owes anyone else a quality of life they seek.
They do hire plenty of American citizens, but the lengths they go to hire people on H-1Bs make me think they get something extra out of it. At FB you'd often see big boards of "public job postings" in internal lobbies that I can only assume were to comply with some arbitrary requirement.
Hiring at FAANGs is hard. A lot of the H-1Bs I worked with got internships somehow, which is a lot less hoops, and they were good in the internship, so you want to give them an offer when they graduate. If they need an employment visa, then you have the experts research their experience and craft a job ad that only they can fill, and place it where it will be least seen but complies with the law.
That's abusing the system, but I dunno, better than abusing the employees that I hear about... Or the straight up fraud where immigrants were paying to get hired on h-1b for fake jobs, or the abuse where job shops would submit 3x the applications for the number of positions they actually had, etc.
That’s for people who already have H1Bs, this is the company trying to keep them long term by getting them a green card. The whole EB green card system is a bit of a mess.
Since H1B has a 6 year hard time limit.
I think there is probably title deflation going on. Yes, every engineer working at a FAANG is well-paid, and the H1Bs are no exception. But my feeling is they're probably at least a level lower than they would be if they didn't have the captive visa. And this only reinforces that they're all great workers.
In that case there’s absolutely no American that can fit that role
But FAANGs lease people from bodyshops which are abusing the system.
Controlling someones immigration status and legal right to stay in the country is a lot of leverage.
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>>had 60 days to find another visa sponsor
H1B is not so bad. Many IT people I know came to the US by L1 visa. That is a true modern slavery! Don't like the work? Laid off? Go home, no other options.
If you put a tax on it they, employers, will simply pay even less. There will be enough people to work even for just food and roof. With the hope to get green card in a few years and bring the family. I was working for years with no promotions so that shitty boss could take the credits. I quit right after getting GC.
I understand but this post would of been a lot better if you simply admitted you don’t want H1B slaves who set the work ethics bar so high. I get it. When someone works until 10pm it makes those who work until 2pm looks bad especially if they have similar capabilities. Keep in mind, a lot of the AI talent started off are young people starting from entry regular level engineer roles. If you want the the quantum computer folks, they don’t even need H1B they can do the phd track.
Everyone has their own perspective. Your friend who referred to as “rented mules” probably will question you as a friend because you actually want them to be out of this country lol. Just be real, we don’t want H1B slaves who set the bar so high for work ethics. Just stop fake being nice as if you care about their well being. They chose to stay in the US after college knowing the expectation. You are shutting down the door for those who really could of developed into great tech talents.
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.
Thanks for the jobs.now!
I still think that you mix up the "green card" and the "H1B visa".
The green card is a status of a permanent resident. A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it. It costs significant money so an employer usually helps with that.
The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US. That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
I updated my comment to clarify what I meant by PERM, which is a green card application.
"The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US."
The H1B visa application has no requirement to try to recruit US workers which makes it easier to game the system to pay the lowest wage possible.
so, you believe that the H1B worker shouldn't get a greencard?
If there are qualified American workers who are looking for work and applying for these positions then no, they should not. Legally they cannot either. Now on the flip side, if there is an actual shortage of qualified workers then sure. But right now, there is no shortage of qualified workers in most of these slots, especially if companies are willing to pay a competitive wage.
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, that it'd take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a greencard (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
If there is an American than can do the job then absolutely not the worker should NOT get a green card
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, it'll take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a green card (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
Practically true - but that it’s not permitted to count experience gained while working on an H-1B when applying for a green card.
If an application for a green card is made for a person who’s currently in the USA on a H-1B visa, the person needs to qualify for it based on their qualifications and experience prior to whatever they’ve done in their current H-1B job.
> A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it.
There is no "5 year" requirement to get a green card. A company can even sponsor an employee from abroad (e.g. a satellite office) to get a green card and if approved they will be a permanent resident the moment they arrive in the USA.
Perhaps you are thinking of the five years of a green card needed to apply for citizenship?
The employee isn’t allowed to pay for it. It has to be paid for by the employer (except premium processing and visa stamping fees (2-3k)).
No, he is right. Despite common sense, the labor test (seeing if an American can do the job the visa holder is currently doing) is applied at green card application time, not at H1B visa time.
I scraped through PERM before the recruiting phase started getting attention from websites like jobs.now. I'm not against this and would expand the test to non-immigrant visas.
Meta being sued by the DoL was supposed to stop ridiculous gaming of the process [0].
Still I think a points system would be better for America and the RAISE Act is looking better everyday [1].
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/facebook-settles-claims-it-d...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act
they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved.
And this explains why I recently heard an ad on KNX radio for a tech job at a winery or brewery or something similar, which specified that applications would only be taken by mail.
It also had a massive list of responsibilities and a pay rate about half of what it should be.
You can report that to the Department of Labor. They are supposed to take applications in the same way they usually do. If they accept online applications for other positions they should be taking them for PERM recruiting too.
A lot of these jobs are from places like Stripe or Big-4 accounting.
Are they hiding jobs?
They are making these specific jobs tough to find because they are for a PERM test and don't want to get applicants. This video is old, but the same thing is happening today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
I live in a remote, low education, low income, low population area and they frequently take out classified ads specifically here.
I haven't bothered to ever apply because to me it seemed obvious what is going on.
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
Some of these posts make it seem like software engineering is a low skilled job, I beg to differ, it's still a very high skilled job, < .5% of the world knows how to code.
Is it that skilled when it gets taught in 4 years in college while an Electrician has to apprenticeship for 7?
That said, whether software is high-skill or not is tangential to the point I'm making. Which is, H1-B is being used to depress wages and that reworking it shouldn't affect jobs that actually have few people that can do it because O-1 allows them to work that job.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, software development is very complex, but an electricians job isn't, it's very simple but it's high consequence.
Software development may seem simple for a lot of people here on HN, but trust me, I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job. The regulatory environment which requires the "apprenticeship" is a totally different topic and doesn't inform anything on the skill required to do the job. Also, the electrician apprentice gets paid while learning on the job, the software developer in training doesn't.
To the poster (nunez?) who was lamenting about me apparently claiming blue collar jobs are easier (and then deleted it when I was writing this reply):
1. I didn't claim that.
2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
> I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job
Watch out. Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job.
> Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job. [he said gleefully]
do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)
anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
I think you might be biased by where you live. In Germany an electrician's apprenticeship is ~3.5 years (and can sometimes be shortened). So while I am not an electrician and have no deeper insight than what friends who are told me, I am reasonably sure our electric installations are not 40%-50% as complex as the ones in your country.
I know electricians that were working within days of being hired with no experience. Apprenticeships are entry level jobs, not minimum certifications. They're also used to gatekeep positions by the unions. It has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the position is "skilled" or not.
And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
Apprenticeships are just unions gate keeping. Unions only reward seniority so you have to “pay your dues” in terms of time before you’re allowed to make any money.
I have personally seen H-1B visas used to displace US workers for labor cost optimization. Bloomberg has even done a piece on this.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025
H1B is ultimately a cost optimization technique from the start. And it is a good thing overall for everyone.
You can technically be forced to hire only citizens by paying them really high salaries but you wouldn’t be able to have that many businesses.
> H1B is ultimately a cost optimization technique
If you don't account for the kickback schemes and terrible results.
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
I suspect the parent-poster meant that in terms of original legislative intent, rather than practical outcome.
> I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months
The tech industry like tech stack is broad.
For example, it's nigh impossible to hire an American citizen with professional CUDA or eBPF experience because almost anyone with those skills already has a job. If you have those skills YOU WILL land a job (not remote first though - that era's over).
And it's not like you can retrain a fullstack engineer to understand systems programming overnight - it takes years of experience and knowledge of computer and OS architecture.
And it's not like companies aren't paying top dollar for these skills - they are, but people with those skills simply don't exist in significant numbers in the US.
There's a reason a large portion of the cybersecurity industry shifted to Israel and India - the kinds of table stakes skills in systems development aren't heavily taught in the US anymore compared to 15 years ago, and the only universities where you might have a shot hiring someone with those skills are T10 programs where students can field multiple job offers.
That said, the proposed changes in the H1B program are good - it's easier for a startup or a professional company to sponsor an H1B now instead of dealing with unethical consultancies gumming up the works.
The H1B market is bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups. You want to optimize for the right hand but don't want to make it so hard that you don't end up incentivizing talented people from leaving and returning to India or China or Europe.
That said, I don't envision this having much impact on easing hiring - AI/ML in the hands of experienced devs is fairly powerful AND the economic conditions currently are incentivizing us to limit hiring to only those who are truly critical.
it is not cheaper, you can make an argument that H1B talent pool puts downward pressure on wages in general, but to claim that H1Bs are cheaper is just insulting to everyone's intelligence and is factually not true (unless it is plain abuse of h1b visa through shady schemes by unknown companies, which i dont support)
Yeah, there's plenty of abuse with H1B with those consulting companies operating out of India and shipping people overseas, I don't believe many of them would qualify for the H1B. That said, many folks who come here to study and get hired by companies (usually, for their specialization in a masters degree for most foreign students) also apply for a H1B.
I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
From https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
Quote
any update since 2011?
> they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
I mean if you follow the law sure.
It's easy to either just pay them below market or hire them at a lower title than the role actually requires.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
Fraud should be curbed and punished, but I don't understand why the visa itself is bad because of this, that's like saying people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we must ban vehicles entirely.
Afaik, the federal rule doesn't propose banning H1-B entirely. Nor was I proposing that.
So, it's more like saying "people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we're going to improve enforcement". Reasonable statement to me.
agreed
Or the ultimate work-around, pay then the same and work them twice as hard. Boom, half the wage and nobody can tell!
How many of these consulting companies just have the most awful, toxic company culture imaginable? I don't think that's a coincidence - that's a purposefully engineered cost saving strategy.
That won't work as well as you think it does. This would come off as them being skilled enough to do the work in half the time an American would.
That said, consulting companies out of India are horrible, I don't think they'd be more productive even if they worked twice as hard.
Isn't it directly influencing prevailing wage? When H1-B dominates a sector then I'm competing with H1-B and am forced into that existing wage not the other way around. If I don't want to work in that environment because it fucking sucks well guess who's getting a green card? Whole thing is rotten and software industry is going to become the new "going postal".
I think a tax of at least $100,000 per year per H-1B visa going forward would help eliminate abuse of the system. All current visa holders should get an expedited path to citizenship to keep them from being exploited as well
or it will move remaining jobs from the US to India.
a lot of these sound like an import tariff on workers.
That's a great way of putting it... if you're going to poke holes in the immigration system to help industry... they should pay for the privilege a high enough value to make sure it's not just about cheap labor.
Is that really true? My impression is that companies tries as much as possible to not use the O-1 route, not sure because the requirements are by design too high or process and cost are not worth it compared to other routes.
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
H1B is also for fashion models, which AFAIK, do not need their employer to prove they can not hire an American person for the role before being granted permission to hire a temporary foreign employee.
Not to mention the EU countries already do effectively the same thing. If your wage is below a certain treshold (based on profession), you can't compete fairly with europeans (i.e. the company has to prove they couldn't find anyone), but if you're above it then you're eligible for the Blue Card program and get to compete fairly. Very similar to Trump's changes in intent
That's the idea, but I don't think it's used like that in practice and is actually heavily abused.
I agree with your broader point about companies abusing H1-Bs. But I'm not sure if the abuse happens through hiring at lower wage. For example, if you look at FANG, they pay as much for an H1-B as they would pay any other employee. Where is this perspective that you can hire someone at lower wage because they come with H1-B? Would love understand the loophole.
You can work an H1-B nearly to death, Elon has all but explicitly said so for instance. If they're fired it's very unlikely that they'll be able to get a new job before being forced to leave the country at which point they're unlikely to ever get the chance to come back and they know this.
>You can work an H1-B nearly to death, Elon has all but explicitly said so for instance.
Interesting. Citation?
But this doesn't really happen in FAANG, as most on this board can tell you. Maybe in Elon companies, but they were well known for overworking everyone almost a decade ago
This happens. It is not explicit, but implicit. We realize this happens only when put someone through such a situation.
not every company is FANG. there are tens of thousands of companies operating at sub trillion dollar valuations which absolutely positively do this. FANG (or even "big tech") is far too narrow to draw any meaningful conclusions in the broader market.
Wages are not straightforward, as much as businesses would like to pretend they are. What do you mean by "would pay"? They don't just make up a number. The willingness of applicants to accept a lower wage lowers the wage they "would" pay ("our wages are competitive").
Perhaps, FAN pay as much. G is alleged to pay less.
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
Are the H1B salary reports self-reported by company, employees or are actual numbers based on W-2s, tax filing?
From my experience hiring as an EM at one company (Stripe) immigration status does not factor into offers.
You’re competing for this talent against every other company. If they’re good, you (and others) want to hire them.
Again: data set of one, at a high-paying company who generally has a strong ethical bent. There seem to be a lot of other experiences with the system.
This is what policy says, but behind doors it is completely different: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gonza-penovi_a-recruiter-play...
Every controversial and disruptive problem occurring in this administration is solely because an activity was allowed to continue in a controversial and disruptive way for many administrations
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
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Any change that hurts WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) is a good change. If they just plain banned those five, there probably wouldn't even be a lottery.
>Wipro
Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.
They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.
Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.
The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
Western society doesn't work well with societies which lie at every turn. There's certain honor expected in our interactions, with India you have to nail them down and in my experience its entirely not worth the interaction at all (broad strokes).
You must have interacted with very low quality people from India unfortunately. Calling an entire nation dishonourable is racist, ignorant and crass. Try to be more respectful next time. Considering the fact that >50% on US population chose a rapist felon as a President - you should get of the ‘my western civilisation is honorable’ high horse.
And considering most US tech companies have huge growing offices in India (Microsoft has 20,000 employees in India) - no, Western society and India do share values of respect and trust. Thinking otherwise is disrespectful and downright insulting to people across continents who work together everyday.
I'm basically quoting the Indians I've worked with. Microsoft is a trashed org I'm not sure they bring you favor.
You were not.
That's almost the impression I got. Their customers on the call seemed to know something was up, but resistance to the idea that they were entirely being lied to about everything seemed like it was enough to prevent them from understanding that in fact that was the situation.
Hearing from multiple sources that there is big uptick in "offshore / global development centers" in India to support US companies who are currently using H1B in sizable numbers.
With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.
So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
Yup this is definitely happening. However, I’m not sure how effective it ultimately is. India is an incredibly inconvenient time zone for US based operations. And salaries are creeping up in Bangalore (the preferred city for this stuff).
If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.
Delhi-NCR welcomes those finding it difficult in Bangalore. Already home to 1 offices of few biggest names in US. [Disclaimer: My City]
Did you read the article? H1B isn’t going out, it just isn’t random anymore
And these companies abuse employee a lot. It is a time government start targeting these 4 sweat shops.
I think this is true as well.
Why not auction H-1B visas? Isn't that typically the most efficient/optimal way to distribute a limited resource?
I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
Salary based auctions would also create a perverse incentive to pressure employees for kickbacks.
"We could pay you more and ensure you're able to get that visa, but then we'd need you to pay 20% of your salary back..."
There will always be unscrupulous companies trying to game the system, you just need to sue them into complying. Auctioning is generally the right idea, auction and make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc. My intuition if you auction 85,000 slots in US H1b, the average H1b salary will be around 250,000$. As you reduce the slots, the average will keep going higher. Reducing or increasing the slots can depend on the labor need for the economy.
> make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc
Its already illegal, you just don't know how India behaves. The body shops in the US don't even behave legally in US, how are you going to get the behavior controlled in India?
Use the action to set the fee to the government, set a salary floor, and hold like 50% of the fee money in escrow that gets refunded back to the company after 5 years provided they retained the employee and tax records indicate the employee was paid at least at the floor level (something like 1.5x the median salary for the that position in that area).
I would simply make it illegal for employees to give money to their own employers while receiving nothing in return.
That something is illegal doesn't stop it from happening, especially at unmonitored scale.
How about "behave or you need to move your company elsewhere if you ever want foreign workers of any kind again."
Just ban organizations caught playing games (that is: "I'll know it when I see it" for labeling) and the ban should include not contracting consultancies that hire foreigners and maybe attached to anyone with feduciary duty as well. It would be very effective.
Surely there is a ceiling for talent you can expect from H1-B, since top talent will get an O1 instead.
If you read the article, that’s pretty much what its going to
Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing.
As the meme goes: "You don't need to sell it to me, I was already convinced!"
I see this brought up as an issue every time distributing H1-Bs by salary is brought up. What is the issue with big tech "buying them all"?
It depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are just optimizing for making the numbers go up, the yes letting big tech hiring all the available foreign workers so that they can do even more big tech stuff, increase their revenue, lift their share price, produce GDP, increase tax revenue etc. But what if you care about the diversity of the foreign workers in terms of field or specialty? What if for example you have a "Made in America" slogan and want to hire manufacturing workers so that we can have a renaissance in manufacturing?
The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
The issue is that people opposing it don't have a coherent view of what they want. They don't want a free market solution; they don't like the socialist position where the government picks the people; they don't like the lottery either. They want their preferred type of people to get the visa in a manner not too different from quotas/dei/affirmative action etc., which is impossible to engineer. It ultimately ends up creating a compromise brokered by lobbyists and politicians, kind of like how we do everything else in the country.
It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense.
It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper.
If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
I've been a proponent of levying an excise tax on H1-B visas equal to the salary amount paid to the person on that visa (including benefits, if any).
If you really need the lower salary worker then sure, you can have them, but it will cost you.
I would also make the company sponsoring the H1-B visa responsible for all relocation costs when they fire someone on the visa.
That really incentives you to under pay the H1-B though.
The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.
> everyone else gets nothing
More revenue for the treasury and efficient allocation of resources
Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources".
It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
I mean, would big tech really buy them all? The argument against H-1B is it's being used to replace American workers with cheaper workers who are locked into their employer.
If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.
Has someone mentioned above, you would have to work hard to make sure that a few companies did not want to applies the H-1B auction.
Would they? I know that they've engaged in a ton of wage suppression historically but deliberately paying out the nose for H1B visas seems like it wouldn't be worth it.
It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
There are plenty of people that are against both types of immigration, or against one but not the other in each category. The Hive mind is often not that much of a hive.
> Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
Until we hit zero percent unemployment, we have a surplus of labor in this country and have no need to import any more. It is up to employers to pay competitive wages and train people to fill the vacancies.
Zero percent unemployment is viewed as a bad thing by almost everyone with a familiarity of the employment markets.
Zero percent unemployment means that no one without a job is looking for one. It means no new entrants into the job market (since by definition, you are unemployed the moment you start looking for your first job). And it means that no one is transitioning jobs or careers without a firm job offer in hand. It means that no business ever fails. It means that it is remarkably difficult to find employees. It means that there are no employees that quit instead of doing something immoral.
You should look into the different types of unemployment, as well as the definition of "unemployed", and specifically, frictional unemployment since you seem very unfamiliar with the base concepts.
Okay, maybe not literally zero percent unemployment, but my point still stands that we do not have a shortage of labor in this country and we do not need to import any at this time. We should incentivize workers through better compensation and retraining to fill skill gaps.
There is not a shortage of labor in general. There is possibly a shortage of specialized labor (although arguably not in high skilled and technical positions like the H1B intends/typically aims to fill).
Again, people study this and have a name for it: structural unemployment. This is the unemployment level caused by employers needing to hire for skills that the market cannot currently provide. Think of the town with high unemployment due to a car factory closure, but a local business that needs scuba diving instructors can't find one. Plenty of labor, but no scuba diving instructors.
I think this is what you are getting at: If you want to hire someone foreign because the skills don't exist in the local labor market, you should be obligated to prove that the skill is being developed in the local labor market.
The argument (not mine, just an argument) against that is that individual firms should not necessarily be forced to bear the cost of training workers in a portable skill when you can just bring in non-local labor (H1B). Back to the Scuba shop example: it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop. They would much rather pay lower prices and bring in a foreign instructor than run short handed for months while they plow money into training someone in a skill that the worker can take to their competition.
My feeling is that H1Bs are probably useful in much more limited circumstances than they are used in now (probably something more like O-1 visas that are given for people who are leaders in their fields, or demonstrably and uniquely talented). If the H1B job can be done interchangeably, then it should be done by domestic labor. If you want to hire the one guy who just won a nobel prize to work on your time machine, that is when we should allow foreign labor.
> it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop.
I believe the common situation is a company pays for your masters degree but the two of you end up with a contract where you'll stay at the company for X years afterwards.
I don't see why there can't be a non-"At will" situation for the scuba instructor.
If you do this, you'll have unintended consequences:
- You don't allow the US to import skilled workers anymore, and rather than hire locally from a non-existent labor pool they simply move the jobs abroad. What's worse, hiring someone from India on an H1B to work in your AI lab, or moving your AI lab to India?
- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples. Or maybe...they'll just figure out how to automate those jobs or go out of business since no one wants to pay $5 for an apple.
How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?
The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
> The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true
My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.
> My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
There is no evidence that this is actually true. Decades of illegal immigrant labor has suppressed wages and supplanted American citizens, so you have no way of knowing that’s the case.
There are plenty of food and things that have gone out of production because the economics don’t make sense anymore, even with illegal immigration. Apples aren’t going to be different. Demand isn’t somehow magically going to be present at any price.
HN hive mind…minimum wage for fast food workers should be $40 an hour.
Also HN hive mind…if we can’t import illegal immigrants working for subsistence wages, who will pick our crops?
>- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples.
That's the same argument used against abolishment of slavery. "Who will pick all the cotton?"
Except today it's not slavery, it's indentured servitude.
No, it means the elevator operator just doesn't exist anymore. We didn't pay them more, we got rid of them. If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become. Because your ancestors were white they were permitted a chance to work from the bottom up, but because today's immigrants aren't white, you think its either slavery or exploitation, and they should just stay in poor countries accordingly (a situation that was not forced on your ancestors, for your benefit). Or if it isn’t racism, what is your reasoning for pulling up the ladder today?
> If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
Expand H-2A: Temporary Agricultural Worker visa then.
We shouldn't be encouraging black market activity. If as the US we want to have cheap imported labor pick apples then write it into law. If we as the US want to experience the Baumol effect [1] then don't. I think most people want to experience the Baumol effect as opposed to losing out gains to trade.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become.
You’re the one that’s bringing race into the argument. I don’t care what race they are, I don’t want any illegal immigrants in this country.
America’s obligation is to its own citizens first and foremost. This should not be a controversial opinion. Every country should put the interests of its own citizens first.
So ironic that your post full of racist name calling and wanting to support a perpetual underclass of people stuck in indentured servitude, masquerading as empathy, and then you're the one calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.
Pro tip: in case of actual racism, use the flag button.
The pie grows guy, it isn't zero sum.
>is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country,
What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor?
Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself.
The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them.
So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
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> maybe we should focus on other ways of dealing with wealth inequality (improving productivity, education so our kids can compete on the world stage when they grow up, etc...)?
Yes we should. And when politicians are gonna fix those issues first, then people's opinion on importing more competing labor will change. Until then, they'll vote to tilt the supply-demand balance in their favor, as per democratic process because the business class is also doing the opposite so you have a conflict of interest you need to fix.
People not seeing the argument of this side of the isle, are in a bubble who have never had to compete in a zero sum environment against people who will do anything for money, and love writing cheques that other people have to cash. Which is why you're seeing the backlash from this at elections. If you want people to agree with you politically, you have to take care of their grievances first, before you take care of imported people form abroad and business owners.
>it doesn't work now that the immigrants are no longer primarily white?
Nowhere was the skin color part of the argument till you brought that up witch says everything about you and why I'm exiting the convo here.
The issue isn’t race. Typical Americans would be just as against illegal immigration if it were white Europeans flooding into our country.
The uncomfortable reality is that illegal immigration is a net negative for society, particularly when it reaches the numbers it did under the Biden administration.
> It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
The hive mind is greatly exaggerated. The existence of cognitively dissonant opinions on a website is more likely evidence that the site has posters that have differing viewpoints, rather than evidence of a group thought process that is illogical.
At some point the contradiction is so flagrant that the typical "we're all individuals here" dismissal no longer suffices.
Like if you showed up on a homeschooling moms facebook group and half the moms are spewing religious mumbo jumbo and the other half are spewing trans rights stuff it immediately begs the question how the heck are these groups coexisting without fighting at every turn without massive cognitive dissonance or not actually believing what they're saying. Same thing here with immigration, among other things (wouldn't have been my first pick of an issue to highlight the dissonance but here we are).
This is not a homeschooling mothers' Facebook group though. There is absolutely no requirement for people here to agree, and/because the place will not fall apart if they don't - as you can see from its continued existence.
But do all the big tech positions need 85K visas? MSFT I think requested less than 3k this year.
Edit: Saw somewhere else in this post it was around 9k, after layoffs, so I stand corrected
That is an argument that the supply of visas is too limited (which it probably is), not against the idea of auctioning
Oh no they’ll have to hire and train American college grads!!
> Because then the bigtechs will buy them all and everyone else gets nothing.
and whats wrong about this? Humans funneled into area with higher added value.
This change basically makes it an auction.
100% should be the way it should be done.
If there is surplus to being physically in the US, then the US should gain some of that surplus.
Let the market decide.
The H1B isn't charity, it is a work visa for specialty occupations.
The status quo is that the H-1B is a charity, given out to companies who don't want to pay what their workers are worth.
Do you have examples of these? they'd be easy targets to be sued for breaking the labor laws.
The WITCH companies are commonly held up as examples
who is contracting to those WITCH companies?
Optimal for who? These are humans not math problems
For the economy. We use money as a proxy for economic value.
It’s not even clear that an auction would be the most efficient way to allocate H-1Bs if we define efficiency as maximizing long-term economic and societal value, not just short-term revenue. An auction favors companies with deep pockets right now — meaning a startup looking to bring in a world-leading PhD in a critical field could lose out to a much larger firm simply filling headcount. That’s hardly an optimal outcome for innovation or competitiveness.
A "world-leading PhD in a critical field" should come under an O1-A visa (see: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...):
"O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)"
Or straight to an EB-1a greencard - the criteria are virtually identical. And if they’re that good, they should be able to insist on being sponsored for the greencard not the employment-based visa.
Although for China and India the priority date for EB1a is three years currently so if you’re from either of them O-1 will be a necessary stopgap, but for anyone else EB1a applications are open immediately.
That's technically true, but I have seen PhDs hired under H1B - I've never heard of, let alone seen someone hired under the O-1A program.
I have met people hired under the O1-A and they fit the bill pretty neatly. Think R1 profs publishing in Nature/Science/domain equivalents. If you have exceptional talent, you can 100% get in.
I think the issue is expecting a masters/phd to ensure access to th US labor market. This greatly distorts the fact that for most software engineering positions a bachelors is enough (if necessary at all), crowding the domestic market.
The US should not allow the pipeline of jr->sr engs to be culled for the sake of accessing cheap foreign labor. Given the necessity of software to run the modern economy, it really is a national security issue.
> meaning a startup looking to bring in a world-leading PhD in a critical field could lose out to a much larger firm simply filling headcount.
Is it unfair that a big company could afford to pay more to hire a desirable employee than a small startup?
That’s not an H1B, there are other visas for that
People want at least the appearance of a holistic process that considers a candidate’s broader value to society — even if that process isn’t perfect. An auction drops the pretense entirely and just says: pay to win.
all visas will go to tech, and no visas will go to Nurses, professors, teachers, artists etc
So nurses, professors, teachers and artists will be in higher demand and they'll have to pay them a better salary to fill positions? which may attract people who currently avoid those career cause they lead to poverty? Yup I'm sold.
And as others said, add a cost factor to train an citizen for every H-1B issued. Actually, slap a 350% tax on all the salaries paid to H-1Bs except for the first 15 people (or, I don't know, 3% of the overall staff, whichever is higher) and make sure it's hard to game with shell companies, body shops and subsidiaries.
Precisely 0% chance it'll happen in the current administration, and it's anyone guess if there will be administrations after this one, but a few hours of additional thinking around this solution (this is the first 3 minutes roughly) could make it work way better. Remove limits, make it really expensive, give some rights to the people who come on it, use the money to address real shortages, and watch companies stop abusing it.
P.S. European here, with 0 interest in coming to work in the US.
I had no idea there was a huge shortage of professors, teachers, and artists.
there is always a demand for a talent in the US
Of course, and perhaps if you're having trouble with supply in famously poorly paid fields then paying better might help.
If they’re not willing to pay up, then there isn’t really a shortage.
same could be said of famines like the one in China or Soviet Union or ones in Africa: they simply needed to pay up for food, if they were really that hungry
your logic erases nuance of the US labor market and infinity of specializations and niches, on top or large regional differences in labor market.
let's just say that nurses will never be paid on par with software engineers just because it is different specialty, and it is stupid to force nurses to compete with IT for visas
If we think those things have positive externalities (such that we want them to happen even if they wouldn't win an auction) we should subsidize them.
Nurses generally can't get an H-1B, and professors are exempt. Your argument makes no sense.
Professors are currently exempt but not for long
https://tiffany.house.gov/media/press-releases/tiffany-intro...
https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-int...
I don't anticipate this will even get a committee hearing, let alone get passed into law.
approximately 500,000 foreign-educated nurses in the U.S. utilize the H-1B visa (per google AI overview)
Google AI is wrong.
I did not even know you can practice nursing in US without US-based degree.
Well canadian medical degrees are recognized fully, even canadian medical residencies are recognized fully in the US
Probably something similar to nursing programs
there are already ways in to the US for people who want to pay
Trump's "golden ticket" for example
I'm not the person who proposed the auction, but I read it as "let the companies compete for the H1-B visas in an auction," not about the workers buying their way into the US.
For example, if CheapoCorp is looking to replace reasonably well paid US workers with H1-B workers, they won't bid much for the visas. CheapoCorp isn't trying to get good talent from overseas. They're trying to save money, push down wages, have a workforce that they can mistreat (since they can't easily leave the company given their immigration status requires employment), etc.
By contrast, if a company is looking to hire great engineers or scientists from overseas because they're in a growing industry with a shortage of workers, they would be willing to pay a lot more to get the H1-B visas. They're not looking to save $20,000/year on someone's salary. They want top talent.
When companies are trying to replace their workforce with lower-paid foreign workers who can't complain (lest they lose their job and with it their immigration status), that's not what the H1-B system was designed for. It certainly is how some companies are using it. If you're on an H1-B and lose your job, you have 60 days to find a new job or you're gone. That's going to make you a much more compliant employee. You have little leverage to negotiate raises, you aren't likely to quit even if they're overworking you, they can pass you over for promotions and you'll quietly accept it.
But if the employer is competing in an auction for H1-B visas, they're more likely to be companies that are seeking out top talent rather than seeking out workers they can underpay and mistreat.
It’s not hard to imagine a loophole here:
• Someone with a lot of money wants to get U.S. residency.
• They set up or work with a shell company that “hires” them under the H-1B program.
• That company uses part of their payment to win the visa auction.
• Once in the U.S., the “employee” does whatever they want — the job is just window dressing.
This is essentially what’s happened in other visa categories when money alone becomes the main filter.
You can basically already do this. https://www.google.com/search?q=self-sponsored+h-1b+visas
how does the "employee" survive here by doing whatever they want? what with the cost of living and all.
The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement. The company is just a shell to win the auction and sponsor them. If an auction system were adopted without safeguards, it could turn the H-1B program from a labor-market tool into a plaything for the ultra-wealthy.
seems wasteful, I'm trying to understand why, what is the "play" here?
> The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
I think there is a big astroturf campaign that is going on on x, reddit etc. that is rabidly anti-Indian.
But the golden ticket requires 5mil. Even in the US, even the most talented engineers, probably wouldn't have that much until after 5 to 10+ years of work, and outside of the US, earning that much money as an engineer is probably next to impossible before well over 40+. (And, even then, if all you have is just the 5mil, would you really part with that much money just for a visa?)
Welcome change. I studied engineering at a U.S. university, came here 10 years ago, and still did not make it through the lottery (while the ones gaming the system did).
Ranking by Salary probably makes the most sense if you're going to cap the numbers you want the most productive people who contribute the most to the tax base.
IF implemented in a sane manner, I don't see how this is worse than a lottery based system.
Instead of it being fair to everyone in the pool it now gives an advantage to the wealthy to buy their way into a H1B. Seems significantly worse.
It’s by salary. Individuals don’t pay for it, the company sponsoring them does. Did you even read the article?
Citizens gripe about H1B, but getting visas or naturalized is getting harder ever year.
Which is fine... The purpose of the United States is not to be easy to become a citizen of but to better the lives of the people living here. No one is owed a visa or citizenship.
Emma Lazarus would beg to differ.
That's great. As an American, she can disagree and vote accordingly. By our constitution, no one is owed citizenship. It's a irrevocable courtesy extended based upon following our laws.
You must’ve slept through both civics and history classes.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution grants unconditional (and thus, irrevocable) citizenship jos soli.
Naturalization indeed is mandated by the nationality law and not the constitution, yet it ain’t a courtesy. There’s a list of requirements, which once fulfilled mandate the US to grant a person a citizenship.
As for revoking US citizenship, this just not a thing: a person can rescind their own citizenship, but this requires a deliberate action from the person rescinding it. And naturalization can be deemed void, which is not the same as revoked, as it requires a failure in the granting, not a decision after it.
Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
So no, it ain’t courtesy. It’s a universal right, that is ratified in the US constitution, US nationality law, and multiple court decisions.
As for Emma Lazarus, she died in 1887, thirty three years before the US constitution was amended to stop denying voting rights from women.
Yeah, that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about naturalization, which is the process of taking someone who is a citizen of another country and making them a citizen of this country.
A child born in this country is entitled to citizenship.
I didn't mention revoking US citizenship. I literally said it's an irrevocable courtesy, which means it cannot be revoked once granted.
> Furthermore, the UN declaration of human rights (ratified by the US, and drafted by one Eleanor Roosevelt), mandates that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality".
The UN Declaration of Human Rights is subject to the United States constitution when being interpreted by US courts.
I'm not so sure. For example, are partners not owed a visa or citizenship from that point of view? It seems like a cruel barrier if a citizen were to fall for the wrong type of person.
Have there been changes to marriage visas?
Checks have become more stringent. The first few search results I clicked didn't indicate other changes/requirements.
This was the first search result for me.
https://www.visaverge.com/greencard/uscis-issues-green-card-...
Are they owed it? No of course not. Such a citizenship can be rejected for a number of reasons (national security, criminal background, etc). There is no natural right to citizenship the way there is for speech, personal property, life, etc.
Can they not increase the amount of visas they can give out?
They could but Congress would have to get involved. H-1B visa increase is likely to be heavily unpopular with voters. This American voter for sure would not be thrilled.
Congress would have to change the law.
increase why?
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Only color that matters here is green
you would think so, but the american government has had a consistent track record of sacrificing things that would make economic sense on the altar of racism, and with trump in the white house they are having a "say the quiet parts out loud" extravaganza.
They may get creative and start doing same thing as do with greencard. X% cap on country of birth.
who is getting it today?
America's a nation; not an economic zone.
Yes it's a nation not an ethnostate. Americans are united by shared values and attitudes not skin color.
What if shared values are correlated with shared ancestry.
it's a nation whose current immigration policies are largely driven by racism. h1b visas tend to largely go to people from countries the current administration considers undesirable, so the chances of them increasing the allocated number are extremely low.
Can you point to another nation whose immigration policies are driven by anti-racism?
I’m no fan of most of what this administration does, but in the abstract I don’t think optimizing giving visas to the highest paying workers is the worst idea.
Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.
Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.
This solves the exploitation of H1B visas. However this tilts the scale towards the bigger companies. The small upstart cannot compete with Facebook or Tesla. I guess there is always someone disadvantaged with these proposals. Let’s see how this works and hopefully we have enough will to tweak it later
Time to smash offshoring too. Any American company that offshores jobs should be delisted from all American stock exchanges and banned from doing business in the United States.
> [Microsoft] applied for 9,491 H-1B visas during the last fiscal year, all of which were approved. The company has laid off nearly 16,000 people in total this year, out of a 228,000-strong global employee base.
It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.
At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]
I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...
Obviously not all of those laid off met the new criteria for what Microsoft, et al were/are looking for, but there's no way you convince me that -probably- a majority of them do. The system is so ripe for abuse. I'm not sure I agree fully with the "if you're laying off people, you can't do X" aspect, but I do think sometimes it is cheaper for companies to lay people off, especially those with certain benefits, and hire immigrants than it is to move the original employee around the company. This very obviously happens, all the time.
While I understand from a purely capitalistic view that it makes sense, but Microsoft and others are multi-trillion/billion dollar companies, and they are skimming every last dime while also hurting Americans. The system needs heavy reform, this current change isn't close to enough. To me the rightward shift, especially among college aged men, is partially because of things like this. You can preach that the "replacement theory" is all nonsense, but if you're trying to convince people that have seen their friends or themselves literally replaced at the job with non-Americans...well, it's obvious they are going to start to lean into those ideas.
So much of the right-wing surge could be thwarted by simple policy reforms and it seems like no one wants to do it, or is too beholden to corporations, etc to do it. It's a bit baffling. I've always said politics is a pendulum and it should come as a shock to no one that a problem that is constantly ignored or written off will eventually swing back hard the other way. I think we're seeing that. I think that's why compromise is more important than purity a lot of the time. Unfortunately there will not be much compromise for a long while now.
> So much of the right-wing surge could be thwarted by simple policy reforms and it seems like no one wants to do it
I am not sure if you are talking about just USA or entire west but this can be said for most western countries.
I'm torn on this.
I do think it's good to curb abuse by the Indian bodyshop companies like Infosys. They spam the system with applicants to the point that they get more than their fair share of visas for what turn out to be relatively low-paid jobs with fairly horrible working conditions.
At the same time, that couldn't happen if we didn't have the artificial per-country limit on employment-based green cards.
This will hurt new grads and non-engineering STEM applicants though.
But part of all thyis should be that if you did layoffs in the last 12 months (maybe even 2 years), you don't get to apply for H1Bs.
Oh and any system that uses artificial performance metrics to force people out should also count as layoffs. By this I mean that some companies will require a quota of 5-15% of the workforce to get subpar ratings and, in the current environment, that means more likely being put on a PIP and fired within months. If the goal is 5-10% of the workforce every year to be ushered out on PIPs, that's a layoff.
A fairly sensible and nuanced take, imo. Thanks for sharing
It should be based on the salary paid to the employee ... but that article / proposal is suspiciously short on the actual weighting info ....
Did they release the salary levels/corresponding weightings?
Does salary mean TC or just base? How are discretionary bonuses handled?
base
best i can tell the rule modification hasn't been published yet
Four Indian companies take a large portion of the visas. These companies are using very sketchy practices and should be investigated. If just left to American companies, the entire quota would not even be hit.
Define “Indian companies.” Define “American companies.” I think you will find that the companies you put in either of those categories are actually multinational companies.
Companies headquartered in India. COmpanies headquartered in America.
> The proposed weighted-selection concept echoes a 2021 DHS plan under President Donald Trump's first administration that had sought to rank and select petitions by wage tiers (OES wage levels IV down to I), an approach that the Trump administration argued would prioritize higher-paid, highly skilled hires. That earlier plan faced opposition, was withdrawn by the Biden administration and saw related regulations blocked in federal court.
This seems like a no-brainer. Why did Biden withdraw the rule?
Probably because someone told him to. That someone was likely using H1b visas to save money instead of because of an actual need.
That's what they all do. The whole H1B program needs to be shelved.
Do you have examples of these people who are saving money using H1B?
about 12 years ago I worked at a very large non-tech company that had outsourced to contractors to work on some code. They had a room in the basement for about 20 kids on H1B visas that were clearly right out of college. This was in a major city that had plenty of jr developers around, they just would expect more money.
I forget the contractors company name but they came up on HN at the time for being abusive towards their employees who risked deportation if they stood up for themselves. If I find specific examples I'll add them later, but you can probably just search hn for h1b.
I'm sure it's ok to give out specifics of something that happened 12 years ago, what makes you think this sort of stuff is still happening?
I think the whole "blocked in federal court" part is why.
I'm not sure I get it. So you want to have higher positions filled by h1b holders? The quota will be maxxed anyway. I don't have issues with that, personally.
Because the executive doesn't have the authority to do this. Trump also ultimately didn't do it. I don't recall if he lost the suit or withdrew it voluntarily. The new court is different and submissive, so it'll likely get through this time.
Was Biden actually running things or was it a Weekend at Bernie's presidency? I don't know if we'll ever know, by the end of it he was very out of it.
Isn't this already done during LCA filing?
Off-topic, the article looks like AI slop: "Why it matters?" "What happens next?" Either AI is now running Newsweek, which is something we could even come to expect from a decaying magazine, or journalists are writing like that to compete with AI and/or sound natural to what readers come to expect lately.
Really concerning.
My experience is if there’s no typos, it’s probably AI. I don’t see any typos.
The legislature is in the right set to eliminate h1bs.. why don't we?
H-1B visas should not be given to software devs. They can work from anywhere with just a laptop and starlink.
And yet they are the primary recipients [0]
>"There aren't any tech jobs in this city..."
[0] http://www.h1bdata.info
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FYI, the number listed in the visa application is only the lower bound on the actual amount paid to the employee. There's no benefit to entering an amount higher than legally required, so you can't draw conclusions about how much people are really paid from this data.
Big tech offers equity too though
> Big tech pays lesser than I expected: I thought they would average at 200k, not 160k
H1Bs aren't just for Engineers - PMs, TPMs, Accountants, PMMs, and other roles can get H1B visas as well.
Maybe filter based on the BLS code to get more granular info into what is causing outlier skews.
Yes, in addition to the fact that big tech pays equity, and more senior people probably end up on green cards, so it skews junior.
Honestly using an H1B for an accountant or pm seems wrong. These are jobs Americans can do. Accounting can be done remotely as well if it really needs to be
Americans can do software development as well
Some particular fields of software development require experts in that field that cannot be replaced by anyone with a CS degree.
Same for accountants.
Both boil down to supply, demand, and cost. Every single software job has an American qualified to do it, for the right price. the same is true for other fields.
> Honestly using an H1B for an accountant or pm seems wrong
A PM should be a domain expert first and foremost. Nationality doesn't matter. You cannot build a product roadmap or a business case without understanding your industry. That requires experience. Also, no company skimps on PM salaries - they earn comparable to Staff or Principal Engineers, because most have that level of experience.
For a number of industries like Cybersecurity and DevOps, the pipeline of American talent died out in the 2010s because a number of the core classes were treated as "hard" (CompArch, Systems Programming) or made optional (OS internals, Kernel Development, Distributed Systems). On the other hand, equivalent programs in Israel, Eastern Europe, and India kept requiring those classes for CSE majors. And that's how Israeli and Indian startups and domiciled offices cornered that market - their education programs prioritized fundamental CS skills, incentivized SOC/SecEng/DevSecOps teams to operate in the country, and attracted their diasporas back to found startups in the space or become VCs in the space. It's a similar story in the chip fab industry (Taiwanese) and AI/ML tooling industry (Chinese) as well.
At some point, the finger needs to be pointed at universities and arguably even students themselves.
Most universities offered fundamental classes in computer architecture, OS internals, ML Theory, etc but these classes tend to be optional, and the handful of students who build domain experience in these kinds of subfields end up getting hired very quickly. But most students and universities don't incentivize this kind of foundational knowledge, and you ended up with a glut of Leetcode optimizers with some "frontend" or "backend" experience.
There's a reason that most high paying companies now limit new grad hiring to undergrads come just 8-9 CS programs (Cal/Stanford/MIT/UIUC/UW/UT Austin/GT/UCLA) - they're the only programs where we can trust the quality of graduates. And these are large programs - they graduate around 15k CS/CE/CSE/EECS/ECE majors combined a year. You can limit your pipeline to those programs and do well.
Completely irrelevant for accounting and only kind of relevant for PMs (who are usually not super technically competent at what they're working on).
Also, this lecture, while correct, is mis-aimed. Please respond to the best version of my argument, not a strawman you've concocted in your mind wherein I'm some sort of apologist for the subpar standards of American CS education.
The H1B visa doesn’t compete with American workers as much as it does with the same people working in their home countries.
Especially in today’s extremely remote friendly environment (and H1B visas outside of maybe biomed research tend to be concentrated in remote friendly fields), if a company cannot hire a candidate on an H1B visa, and the candidate has to return to their home nation, why wouldn’t the company not be thrilled to hire the exact same person abroad for a fraction of the cost?
And with RTO failing miserably, and with nearly everyone on HN assuring us that WFH is as good, if not better, than RTO, it’s not like them working abroad is gonna be materially different from them working in a U.S. city.