There is some evidence of fraud, substitution of native workers with H-1Bs, power imbalances and more playing a part in the labor market. A lot of Americans, including in tech seem to be clamoring for less H-1Bs and immigrants, let them have it and see how it goes. Maybe it really will be better. It should be a win-win where India gets to keep more of its best talent and the US native population has less competition.
Where are you getting "less competition"? The article clearly says that's not what happens. Study after study has shown that immigration generally has a net positive effect on the US job market.
What'll probably happen is a spiral like in the US South and rural/republican areas. The economy keeps getting worse and people keep getting more hateful and anti-intellectual and self-destructive.
I don’t really know what the studies show or how accurately they represent the effect of restricting H-1B today. I do believe there is a chance it could help the native population, partly because a lot more Americans studied CS in the last few years after it became a prestigious and high-paying career compared to its usual immigrant dominated status. I'm tired of the constant slurs and hatred. It’s better for immigrants too to be turned away before getting a visa than live amongst people that hate them. I know many people believe that eliminating it would cause less competition and they have many anecdotes to back this up - including discrimination by some hiring managers, caste system stuff, poor work quality, etc etc. Ive seen enough evidence that this is not just a fake bot created trend - a lot of people really do not want immigrants. Democracy demands that the government run the experiment and gives the people what they want.
Big tech has negotiated this H1B narrative very well.
It kills two birds with one stone -
* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.
* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
Outsourcing has never worked for core products and innovation. Anyone claiming all these jobs will go over seas has never tried to outsource something complex. Zero large cap businesses have succeeded at this. The outsourcing comes in long after the innovation has stalled and the product is KTLO
You don't outsource; you set up an office instead.
The problem with outsourcing is similar to the problem with contracting. You have limited ability to direct the work, the terms need to be specified up front, the contractors can substitute in the B team once they've got the project under way, etc.
With an office and local hiring, you have full control. You can second employees on-site for some time to get the culture and work practices in shape. The bigger issue becomes stuff like timezones. So you try and carve off whole responsibilities, so the team is mostly working locally.
If I charge you a fee of $10000 / month for home internet, while useful, you will prefer to just not use it and find other ways to access it (maybe from a library or a coffee shop).
Similarly the employers will just cut the bleeding edge programs that require specialty skills and will focus on others that the local labor market can cover.
The argument is that companies cannot hire locally the talent they need. The super star devs that make or break a company. And yet they are not worth $100k?
The question of finding cheap competent programmers has already been answered via remote work.
There are tons of agencies who provide access to good to excellent talent from abroad (India, Eastern Europe even Latin America if you prefer same time zone) for a fraction of what the US market offers (even after accounting for overhead).
You can literally find someone vetted to work on your project within hours. No mess with payrolls, insurance and whatnot, you just pay a consulting fee.
So if the H1Bs were not really better than the expensive local and cheap remote talent, why would the companies get into this mess?
Canada has great homegrown software talent (mostly out of schools like UWaterloo and UToronto). They usually come to the US on TN visas, not H-1B.
Canada has given the US so many great people: Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, Rob Pike, Ken Iverson, James Gosling, Rasmus Lerdorf, Matei Zaharia, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, John Chambers, Robert Gentleman...
The reality will probably be hard to discern. Programming has become the new doctor/lawyer "big money" job in the past 25 years. That has drawn a lot of people unsuited for the work. Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
>Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
It's way worse in industries where there's external licensing. If you're a terrible therapist, professional engineer, lawyer, etc, etc, some company will keep you around for your license.
The NBER can cherry pick the data all they want, and change the argument from wages to jobs, but the H-1B system (as it has existed for the last 20+ years) is bad for American workers.
Would a Silicon Valley 30-50% smaller be better for American workers?
That's a rough estimate for how many engineers etc. that have or had a H-1B at some point.
If you think of value creation as requiring fuel, humans are an input to that. The size of the industry and the liquidity of the labor market all contribute to enabling Americans in the Bay Area to acquire plenty of wealth.
I think you mean cheap fuel, and the H1-B program creates artificially cheap fuel to the detriment of American citizens whose parents paid years of taxes, fought in foreign wars, etc. Our children are owed a fair deal. The H1-B program is a moral wrong.
It almost certainly does mean less. Numerous studies have shown that immigration generally has a net positive effect on the US job market. It’s the broad consensus among economists.
Racism is crazy. Everyone can look at the US south and plainly see the results of failed policies .. everyone except the Southerners.
Rates of immigration in US history were small compared to current rates. Their conclusions are based on small numbers. Small numbers over time can "integrate" into a culture. Large numbers over time may also be called an invasion. A lot of the economic papers lead to the conclusion that infinite Somalis will have net positive effects. We need better research.
I mean I don't think it's easy to conclude much here, because economics research is the act of trying to figure out how to look at two different points in time in some way and try as hard as possible to ignore every other of the billions of inputs when looking at a single input.
Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.
Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!
The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:
- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting
- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.
With this change, I'll bet alot of the worlds best talent is coming to Australia. Perhaps we'll be able to set up our own rival Silicon Valley?
The only downside is for the countries these people come from - these countries don't have an immigration problem. Their issue is a much bigger brain drain problem.
Maybe? The Australian tech seen has always felt fairly small to me, at least in Sydney. We've got Atlassian and Canva as the local darlings, and then Google, Amazon, FB, and Salesforce have their offices, though I don't think much real engineering work gets done here. I'm not trying to throw shade at any engineers in Sydney of course, especially at those companies, I just never got the since that the engineering teams were large here.
Maybe I'm too insular, but is there much of a startup seen here, @aussieguy1234? If there is I'd love to hear about it
We live in the age of AI, it takes approximately 2-3 minutes to get a condensed report on why your paper is misleading or incorrect:
Control group mismatch: Treats non-profits as a clean counterfactual for for-profits, but the sectors have very different occupational mixes and shocks—so the triple-diff can pick up sectoral composition, not policy.
Short pre-trend: Only a tiny non-binding window to test parallel trends → weak pre-trend evidence.
Approvals ≠ demand: Uses approved H-1Bs (not applications), so results reflect rationed outcomes and USCIS processing quirks, not employer demand.
Strong wage-equalization assumption: Identification leans on wages equalizing across very different employers; if sector premia move (e.g., recession), estimates drift.
Relative, not absolute, effect: The estimate is “for-profit vs. non-profit”; if non-profits expand (cap-exempt), the “effect” can be reallocation, not a true for-profit decline.
Recession confound: Lottery years coincide with 2008–09; macro shocks can differentially hit new vs. established hires across sectors.
Noisy worker/firm measures: Experience is imputed (age minus stylized schooling ages); employer names are inconsistently harmonized → concentration trends may be artifacts; “large firm” cutoff is arbitrary.
Wage results are shaky: Based on offer wages (not realized), trimmed, and imprecise—tail stories are fragile.
Placebo underpowered/misaligned: Native “no effect” test is noisy and not analogous to “new vs. established” H-1Bs, so it’s weak evidence on substitutability.
Ignores geography: Cells are national; regional wage floors and local cycles could drive composition shifts.
Net: clever design but brittle; treat findings as suggestive reallocation under approvals data, not clean causal effects on demand, wages, or “top talent.”
There is some evidence of fraud, substitution of native workers with H-1Bs, power imbalances and more playing a part in the labor market. A lot of Americans, including in tech seem to be clamoring for less H-1Bs and immigrants, let them have it and see how it goes. Maybe it really will be better. It should be a win-win where India gets to keep more of its best talent and the US native population has less competition.
Where are you getting "less competition"? The article clearly says that's not what happens. Study after study has shown that immigration generally has a net positive effect on the US job market.
What'll probably happen is a spiral like in the US South and rural/republican areas. The economy keeps getting worse and people keep getting more hateful and anti-intellectual and self-destructive.
I don’t really know what the studies show or how accurately they represent the effect of restricting H-1B today. I do believe there is a chance it could help the native population, partly because a lot more Americans studied CS in the last few years after it became a prestigious and high-paying career compared to its usual immigrant dominated status. I'm tired of the constant slurs and hatred. It’s better for immigrants too to be turned away before getting a visa than live amongst people that hate them. I know many people believe that eliminating it would cause less competition and they have many anecdotes to back this up - including discrimination by some hiring managers, caste system stuff, poor work quality, etc etc. Ive seen enough evidence that this is not just a fake bot created trend - a lot of people really do not want immigrants. Democracy demands that the government run the experiment and gives the people what they want.
That's a lot of evidence free speculation. "Many people believe", and you doubt any studies that show the opposite.
Big tech has negotiated this H1B narrative very well.
It kills two birds with one stone -
* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.
* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
Outsourcing has never worked for core products and innovation. Anyone claiming all these jobs will go over seas has never tried to outsource something complex. Zero large cap businesses have succeeded at this. The outsourcing comes in long after the innovation has stalled and the product is KTLO
You don't outsource; you set up an office instead.
The problem with outsourcing is similar to the problem with contracting. You have limited ability to direct the work, the terms need to be specified up front, the contractors can substitute in the B team once they've got the project under way, etc.
With an office and local hiring, you have full control. You can second employees on-site for some time to get the culture and work practices in shape. The bigger issue becomes stuff like timezones. So you try and carve off whole responsibilities, so the team is mostly working locally.
Many companies off-shore without outsourcing (and often with success).
Outsourcing: another company. Hard and a bad idea for your core competency.
Off-shoring: another country. Much easier if you keep it as part of the same company.
Apropos of nothing, I'm really enjoying my TSMC-fabbed microprocessors.
Tell that to the VFX industry
Big tech will likely just employ the same talent but abroad.
Or pay $100k
If I charge you a fee of $10000 / month for home internet, while useful, you will prefer to just not use it and find other ways to access it (maybe from a library or a coffee shop).
Similarly the employers will just cut the bleeding edge programs that require specialty skills and will focus on others that the local labor market can cover.
The argument is that companies cannot hire locally the talent they need. The super star devs that make or break a company. And yet they are not worth $100k?
It depends on who you ask. If I’m a startup with $500,000 in the bank, I definitely don’t have $100,000 cash to spend on the taxman
However, if I’m a trillion-dollar company, why not?
Trumpcards for the 10X-ers.
The question of finding cheap competent programmers has already been answered via remote work.
There are tons of agencies who provide access to good to excellent talent from abroad (India, Eastern Europe even Latin America if you prefer same time zone) for a fraction of what the US market offers (even after accounting for overhead).
You can literally find someone vetted to work on your project within hours. No mess with payrolls, insurance and whatnot, you just pay a consulting fee.
So if the H1Bs were not really better than the expensive local and cheap remote talent, why would the companies get into this mess?
Vancouver is very close to Seattle. Would restrictions in H-1B result in increased hiring in Canada or a higher usage of L-1 visa perhaps?
Canada has great homegrown software talent (mostly out of schools like UWaterloo and UToronto). They usually come to the US on TN visas, not H-1B.
Canada has given the US so many great people: Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, Rob Pike, Ken Iverson, James Gosling, Rasmus Lerdorf, Matei Zaharia, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, John Chambers, Robert Gentleman...
The reality will probably be hard to discern. Programming has become the new doctor/lawyer "big money" job in the past 25 years. That has drawn a lot of people unsuited for the work. Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
>Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
It's way worse in industries where there's external licensing. If you're a terrible therapist, professional engineer, lawyer, etc, etc, some company will keep you around for your license.
The NBER can cherry pick the data all they want, and change the argument from wages to jobs, but the H-1B system (as it has existed for the last 20+ years) is bad for American workers.
Would a Silicon Valley 30-50% smaller be better for American workers?
That's a rough estimate for how many engineers etc. that have or had a H-1B at some point.
If you think of value creation as requiring fuel, humans are an input to that. The size of the industry and the liquidity of the labor market all contribute to enabling Americans in the Bay Area to acquire plenty of wealth.
> requiring fuel
I think you mean cheap fuel, and the H1-B program creates artificially cheap fuel to the detriment of American citizens whose parents paid years of taxes, fought in foreign wars, etc. Our children are owed a fair deal. The H1-B program is a moral wrong.
Of course it doesn’t.
Don’t forget that immigrants are participants in the economy. If they are removed there are fewer customers.
Without immigrants, the US is losing population. That is fact.
The argument makes sense if you value numeric population over culture.
well it don't mean less either.
It almost certainly does mean less. Numerous studies have shown that immigration generally has a net positive effect on the US job market. It’s the broad consensus among economists.
Racism is crazy. Everyone can look at the US south and plainly see the results of failed policies .. everyone except the Southerners.
Why should we care what economists think? Kind of a genuine question.
Rates of immigration in US history were small compared to current rates. Their conclusions are based on small numbers. Small numbers over time can "integrate" into a culture. Large numbers over time may also be called an invasion. A lot of the economic papers lead to the conclusion that infinite Somalis will have net positive effects. We need better research.
I mean I don't think it's easy to conclude much here, because economics research is the act of trying to figure out how to look at two different points in time in some way and try as hard as possible to ignore every other of the billions of inputs when looking at a single input.
Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.
Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!
The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:
- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting
- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.
This is just my own view of the world though
With this change, I'll bet alot of the worlds best talent is coming to Australia. Perhaps we'll be able to set up our own rival Silicon Valley?
The only downside is for the countries these people come from - these countries don't have an immigration problem. Their issue is a much bigger brain drain problem.
Maybe? The Australian tech seen has always felt fairly small to me, at least in Sydney. We've got Atlassian and Canva as the local darlings, and then Google, Amazon, FB, and Salesforce have their offices, though I don't think much real engineering work gets done here. I'm not trying to throw shade at any engineers in Sydney of course, especially at those companies, I just never got the since that the engineering teams were large here.
Maybe I'm too insular, but is there much of a startup seen here, @aussieguy1234? If there is I'd love to hear about it
No thank you - we already face enough racism in the USA. We don't want to deal with something that's 4 times as bad.
A recent survey revealed that 30% of Australians are casually racist... https://youtu.be/DHQRZXM-4xI?si=gsVaLimUuW_g0c6d&t=72
> Australia
Why there, why not Vancouver which keeps the same timezone as SV?
[dead]
We live in the age of AI, it takes approximately 2-3 minutes to get a condensed report on why your paper is misleading or incorrect:
Control group mismatch: Treats non-profits as a clean counterfactual for for-profits, but the sectors have very different occupational mixes and shocks—so the triple-diff can pick up sectoral composition, not policy.
Short pre-trend: Only a tiny non-binding window to test parallel trends → weak pre-trend evidence.
Approvals ≠ demand: Uses approved H-1Bs (not applications), so results reflect rationed outcomes and USCIS processing quirks, not employer demand.
Strong wage-equalization assumption: Identification leans on wages equalizing across very different employers; if sector premia move (e.g., recession), estimates drift.
Relative, not absolute, effect: The estimate is “for-profit vs. non-profit”; if non-profits expand (cap-exempt), the “effect” can be reallocation, not a true for-profit decline.
Recession confound: Lottery years coincide with 2008–09; macro shocks can differentially hit new vs. established hires across sectors.
Noisy worker/firm measures: Experience is imputed (age minus stylized schooling ages); employer names are inconsistently harmonized → concentration trends may be artifacts; “large firm” cutoff is arbitrary.
Wage results are shaky: Based on offer wages (not realized), trimmed, and imprecise—tail stories are fragile.
Placebo underpowered/misaligned: Native “no effect” test is noisy and not analogous to “new vs. established” H-1Bs, so it’s weak evidence on substitutability.
Ignores geography: Cells are national; regional wage floors and local cycles could drive composition shifts.
Net: clever design but brittle; treat findings as suggestive reallocation under approvals data, not clean causal effects on demand, wages, or “top talent.”