A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
> In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization.
> This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers.
> Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance.
> Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
It's the government that controls the immigration law that gives the company the authority to sponsor a visa. Of course the H1-B is mutually beneficial to both the company and the employee, that is why the program is so popular.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Are there 85,000 new hedge fund quants that need to be hired each year? I guess it is more like 1,000. The number of people employed as quants at hedge funds is incredibly small.
Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Google
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Linkedin
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
In that case some technical aspects needs rework...
Currently O1 visa being a nonimmigrant visa have no path to PR/citizenship (unlike H1Bs) and need annual renewal. This make it unattractive to "who possess extraordinary ability".
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
But they would still be higher than a chemist's salary. This has nothing to do with open borders. If you use money as a proxy, some professions will come out ahead. That's just market dynamics. The only way to avoid that is to create carve outs or normalization by profession.
I don't see how you get there. It's harder to move chemistry work than simple laptop use so chemists in the US would have less pay equalization than developers.
Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)
Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
> Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
Could be filled by an American, sure.
Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
Americans would be more willing to do the work if they salary was higher, and the salary would be higher if the supply of workers was reduced due to not allowing cheap imported labor.
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful).
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
From an economic perspective the ideal is no borders if there are no significant differences between countries that would create an infinite surge in mobility. It's like electrical current, if there is zero resistance and a difference in potential, any short circuit will potentially destroy the entire circuit.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
You have highlighted the problem I was not able to articulate. This kind of requirement “open the job to local candidates and only if no one exists will we allow you to hire from outside” exists in multiple places.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
I am not sure if your comment is directed at me but I immigrated to the US. In my case there were probably no more than 1000 people in the whole world willing and able to do my job. It was advertised in the industry job boards along with required by law newspapers. Very few people applied and none of them had been a US citizen or LPR. This is what EB immigration is for. You are welcome to lobby for another EB category based on data and tests, but you should not be allowed to commit fraud in lieu of such a category in the meantime.
EB system is pretty broad. If you really were in a position that only 1000 people in the world were able to do your job, you should’ve applied through EB1, which is designed for such people and also does not require the PERM process and therefore the job listings. EB2 and EB3 are designed for labor gaps in the industry which isn’t the same as extraordinary talent such as yours, and requires the PERM process. EB3 in fact also allows completely unskilled workers to file for permanent residency. Like I explained in the parent comment, the congress put a system to evaluate labor gaps, which is flawed. Following the rules set up by the system isn’t fraud.
Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.
My comment was in response to your claim that EB system was created for people with rare skills, which it clearly isn’t. You were in a job that only 1000 people were able to do, you being one of them. And yet you suggested that EB1 would more laborious and not fit for you.
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.
And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?
As I said, EB-1 does not require rare skills. PERM based EB-2 and 3, though, require that there are no US workers with such skills available so it's highly correlated with skill's rarity. So why and where would I say that the entire EB system is created for people with rare skills?
>> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yep, and I am none of this.
>Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
Yep, because EB2 does not require any exceptional ability, just the lack of a US worker available, willing, and able to do the job and a master's degree.
The lack is established by a good faith recruitment process, not an exhaustive search. This is intentionally vague because it's a non-sensical requirement that is hard to prove one way or the other and was only added as a political compromise. The company is free to tailor the minimum requirements to its liking. Recall that this is a free capitalistic country. So you can establish that you can't fill the req. locally and hence are hiring a foreigner. The reason I'm pointing this out is because you have picked some type of textual or literal interpretation of things ("this is what EB is for"), and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text.
TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team.
~
I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time.
What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.
Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.
This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it.
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
>Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
> As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed?
No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game
>No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
>My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real.
Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
> That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
My point is that issuing h1bs are a service for corporations in the us, ostensibly under the reason that no one in the country is capable of the job.
I am saying that assuming that is true, and assuming that we value brain draining other countries of talent, then we allow for corporations to import workers, but they need to both pay for the cost of the worker and have no control over them afterwards.
I don’t know whether the cost to society that would cover importing a worker is 10 dollars or 10 billion, but whatever is decided on as the amount I am suggesting is paid up front.
Assuming the corporation paying for the import is correct that the immigrant has a unique skill, then we would want them to be generally available to our labor market instead of tied to a single company.
That is my reasoning at least. Again poke holes in this but I do want a system that prioritizes improvements to my society or people in my society. If the benefits for whatever we end up in are centralized primarily in any single private actor, single human or organization, then I am probably against that plan
> Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
I don’t know how to respond to this section. I am either missing some part of the h1b visa rules or we are talking about different things. What you described to me sounds like an agricultural visa or an au pair like J2 visa
You keep insisting that H-1B or any temporary visas are for the jobs that cannot be filled by Americans. This is simply not true. There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
> You keep insisting that H-1B or any temporary visas are for the jobs that cannot be filled by Americans. This is simply not true.
As a de facto description of the current situation in the United States I agree with you.
The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
I am trying to game theory out ways to make the h1b system achieve the ostensible goals. I am not trying to defend the current system as it stands
edit:
I realized this might be our point of contention right now
> There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage” but there has been a surge of activity around these terms the past few months on the internet and I can’t find definitive proof of that. If that fact isn’t true it would modify my view on the system
>The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
There is no such description in law (this is what de jure means) so I have no clue why you think so.
>I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage”
They are. It does not mean they are for jobs, which cannot be done by an American worker, ostensibly or otherwise.
Ok, then I guess what I am trying to figure out is how to build a system that is the same as my de jure description.
I was under the impression that was the case and do not need you to prove to me otherwise. But I agreed with that de jure description and would like a system that achieves that
The ways to build the system you desire are simple; the political challenges though are insurmountable. This isn't rocket science. However, there has been no substantial legislative change in this area in over 30 years. The current morass of H-1B, PERM etc. is a carefully engineered compromise to keep all demanding factions - the restrictionists, the capitalists, the left and the right, acceptably (un)happy.
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
> Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
I work (in Europe) for an American company. All the people in IT we hire in USA are foreigners, they are cheaper. You cannot say it is discrimination on wages because everyone is paid low. The visa system allows the company to pay low wages and hiring foreigners is just a small detail in the scheme.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
A healthy labor pool increase business growth that in turn can push average industry wages higher however.
It’s real phenomena too - US developer wages are so high in part due to the business ecosystem which depends on part on recent graduates and a flexible labor pool.
That is, your analysis is only true in the static case. Starve US startups of talented junior developers and you might kill the next Facebook in the process.
Thats some Wealth of Nations every worker can move the same number of bricks reductive thinking.
I have been in the valley for 25+ years, and worked with a ton of visa holders.
The majority of them were better educated and all well compensated for the work they did. The fact that many of them stayed for green cards and citizenship says a LOT. There is a reason that the boss of both google, and MS came through these programs.
There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of course apply so it’s not like people are unfamiliar with the math here.
Show me the reduction in cost for medical care when 1/4 of the doctors in the US are foreign born medical grads, the bulk of whom came through the H1B program.
Show me the American born doctors on the street going hungry while foreigners take their jobs. Show me the reduction in wages or costs.
> supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs.
Were drowing in data on both of these things and if you want to understand either of these markets from an economic standpoint then your going to need more than a surface level "supply and demand" argument when they look much more like "I, Pencil" levels of complexity.
Im going to say this bluntly, every terrible engineer I have worked with, who has been fired for being bad at their job has been American born and raised. We're not importing dead wood and dummies to fill in roles as cogs on the h1b program. These are smart people who end up in high level roles who end up staying and becoming Americans (agin raising the bar).
This is such a weird example. Doctors are a professions with artificial limits specifically to raise the income of doctors in the profession. There are no starving doctors because they don’t let enough people become doctors to lower the wage.
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
>
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.
At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
The US needs immigrants. We need the best and the brightest. Those are the folks starting the new job creating companies. That’s what keeps us so innovative. The H1B is a good gauntlet through which we can get those immigrants. Ended it is shortsighted.
It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.
It is an exception used to justify the rule. There is a very small percentage that founded companies and the rest are impacting negatively the economy.
So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.
There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.
In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.
I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?
> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
I've also seen this done when the hiring manager, or someone else in the process, already has a candidate to hire and needs to post the job listing for legal cover.
A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
>
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough.
The USA currently potentially hasn't enough programmers. If the market tide changes, one of course wants to be able to send these superfluous work migrants back to their home countries.
Companies are always going to lay people off, because they can and it is in their financial interest to do so when the shareholders or investors demand cutbacks. AFAIK, Amazon even has a formalized stack ranking system where a certain percentage will be laid off every year to make room for new talent. This has nothing to do with visas or immigrants. If you want to stop that, you need better worker protections, but that's a separate discussion.
How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
To assumption that there is a finite amount of work in the economy is called "lump of labour fallacy" in economics. It's not useful to ask "What if X were infinite and we held everything else constant?"
Well yeah, because when you have a much larger working population you have to actually establish rights at the government level or with unions rather than relying on your individual bargaining power.
The two philosophies are not only not incompatible but are necessary to maintain our standard of living. Closed borders, protectionism, and relying on individual bargaining power is another path to a similar end so long as you can keep the US on top.
> This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies.
You ever consider that it's because those people are pro-workers everywhere and not just workers nearby? So yes enabling foreign workers to improve their lives by coming here makes perfect sense.
> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
I mean that's like saying "what do you think is gonna happen to your rights once all the slaves are free". The answer hinges on whether we continue to operate under the government that's comfortable with exploiting its citizens.
The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
This is unlikely to be of use to your friends. Companies hide these job openings because they aren't real: they are filled by a real person right now. If someone applies, they won't be hired because there's no extra headcount. They will just be rejected after a resume review. Companies usually don't even extend interviews to such candidates. Applying only delays the green card process of a foreigner since they will need to rewrite a job description to be even more tailored to that already employed person.
So you’re admitting that applying for jobs they should be able to get, in a place they should be able to apply in, under federal law is not going to work?
Sounds like fraud to me. Or a crime of some sort.
If they do it, and it clearly doesn’t work, it even sounds like something they could take to court.
In fact, something that is perhaps their duty to take to court.
You're reading too much into it. It's a case of bad UX. The jobs do not exist. The actual job application/interview etc. happened years ago, when it did exist, and everyone, including locals, had the same shot at it. When the job existed, someone was hired for it, and it happened to be someone on a visa. In order to keep that person employed in this job and get them a green card, the government requires that the job be advertised again afresh. It's a non-sensical requirement that was added because some politican or lobbyist asked for it. The natural way to add protectionism to this model would have been to add it at the outset, but that clearly wouldn't work for the economy. So a compromise was engineered. Companies can hire anyone generally as long as they are, in principle, temporary. When it comes to keeping them permanently, the government requires that they do this charade of posting ads again and doing a market test etc.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News. Please avoid flamebait and slurs against groups of people. The guidelines make it clear we expect much better than this here.
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I understand, but why is similar moderation not extended when "H1Bs" come up on HN?
To be brutally honesty, why is it acceptable to bash H1B abuse but not B1/2 or VWP abuse on HN. In both cases, it is employers mislabeling and potentially breaking immigration and labor laws, yet it is acceptable to talk derogatorily about those on H1Bs and not on other visas, even though rates of visa misuse are consistent across most large nationalities.
I am of South Asian origin, but I have lived in North America for almost my entire life (aside from 6 months in the old country), but the persistent utilization of "H1B" as a code word for South Asian (primarily Indian) origin tech employees is tiring.
I understand that a lot of ICs are dealing with a significant amount of stress due to the downturn in the tech industry, but there is a nativist current on HN that is starting to morph into anti-South Asian sentiment.
This style of thread comes up almost daily on HN, and is something I have previously brought up to @Dang as well.
It is tiring and demeaning to those of us who are immigrants or the children of immigrants - a number of us who make up a major portion of the tech industry, and have leadership positions in YC as well.
South Asian Americans make up around 2-3% of the US, but almost every post on HN about the job market turns into "H1B"-bashing, which often devolves into bashing people on the visa instead of the companies themselves.
Almost never do I see conversations extending sympathy to those on work visas and also stuck with abusive employers - only nativist bashing that "they took our jobs".
I hope you can moderate these kinds of conversations or update the engagement rules of HN, because HN and the tech industry of 2025 is not HN or the tech industry of 2008.
It is legitimately demoralizing. I worked on the Hill for several years, have advised administrations on how to bring back manufacturing and "American dynamism" (to use the A16Z term), and have built, launched, and funded software products and companies that are used by backbone infra in the US, and even advised a number of YC startups that have exited.
I have done my part for the country, yet to a large portion of HN and the tech industry I and other South Asian Americans will continue to be termed as "H1Bs" until they hear our accent, or if we can pass as some other race or ethnicity.
I would love to have a good faith discussion with you about this, because I do heavily leverage HN and have found it to be a great resource to find technical discussions and have my portfolio companies show share their features, so the toxicity around H1B and work visas in the tech industry is heavily demoralizing.
The distribution of H1B talent is bimodal, on one end is the highly-talented at high wages, on the other end is the mediocre at low wages. In my opinion the highly-talented (which it sounds like you're a part of) are fine and welcome, the latter group shouldn't be allowed because of the suppression of wages and negative effects on domestic labor.
On your comment of nativism, what do you expect? It's a normal expectation for people who are "native" to a region to expect to be able to access the jobs in their region without needing to compete internationally. The lower-tier H1B workers do suppress wages, it's undeniable.
On your comment of "moderation", I think what you really mean is that you want censorship because you're conflating people's distaste of the latter "lower-tier" H1B immigrants as somehow being directed at you. It's really not about you if you're as capable as you've claimed. Can you not see how frustrating it would be if there were available jobs in your area but you could not get those jobs because someone with commensurate skills as you (not better skills, the same) is willing to work for half what you need to survive, because they're from abroad, is getting the job instead of you?
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I understand where you're coming from.
Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
My perception from moderating HN for years is that there is generally much more criticism toward companies (including/especially Silicon Valley companies) for exploiting H1Bs than there has been towards holders of those visas.
But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
If there are patterns or trends of these kinds of comments, then the more you can show us, the better, so we can develop approaches to identifying and dealing with them.
Thanks for the kinds words and being open to listen to my feedback!
> Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
Absolutely and no argument there
> But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
I have done so on multiple occasions, but have seen a number of those comments remain up.
For example, this comment [0].
Additionally, in this very thread, we have an unsourced comment [1] parroting a common trope, which is legimately false in most cases (and as a member of the YC community, I'm sure you can get this validated), and with significant controversial discussion about this
I also see constant mentions of Infosys and TCS, but never mentions of massive European firms like EPAM which do similar shenanigans and advertise it to new hires across the CEE [2] or Globant and LATAM [3]. While the Indian firms are large, and it is acceptable to have not heard about Globant, EPAM is absolutely massive and every F100 uses them.
I can provide more robust data on the general trend, but it is something that would take some time, but I would really really appreciate if the YC employees affiliated with HN do a deep dive into this.
The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
See for example a recent lawsuit accusing Tesla of running a systemic, ongoing scheme to replace or exclude US citizens in favor of H-1B visa employees.[1][2]
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
Yup and it's also worth mentioning that wage theft is the largest source of theft in the United States. Employers steal more wages from employees than shoplifting or basically any other form of theft, combined. Wage theft makes up 4x more theft than the next largest, which is larceny.
the fact that you can imprison people, but the most you can do to a corporation is fine them, is evidence enough that america supports profit over humans
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
Yes, something like this would be great. You could tie the registry to both IRS and SSA databases ensuring a) the job hunters are real, and b) the jobs offered are (eventually) real. It would also be great to carve an exception into liability law and require employers to give feedback to workers about a rejection. I'm sure this leaves lots of room for malefactors on all sides, but it would handle the biggest flaws of the current system.
At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.
Freedom of movement of labour is the principal reason unions and the British labour party had significant brexit support: the view was that EU labour migration was designed to reduce bargaining power.
I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened.
If you don't like H1B rules, organise. But bear in mind who you will be associating with promoting a closed labour market.
Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.
All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.
Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.
I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
Of course. Suppose one month NY had a surge in sales and Ohio had a slump. The company should therefore fire several Ohionian workers and hire several New York. So on every month.
Let me play the devil advocate here:
- first, I don’t think the measures they put in place are unreasonable: publishing on newspapers, mailing your application instead of emailing or using online forms may feel outdated, but they are all standard practice in other countries. You cannot say you don’t know how to mail(!) or that reading newspapers is beneath your dignity, especially if you need a job!
-second, what is wrong with free competition on the job market between US- and non-US citizens? Competition is good for the business, isn’t it?! It should be a competition on qualification and wage, not races, your skin color or some rubber stamp on a paper. Protecting domestic workers by artificially restricting competition risks creating complacency, higher costs, and slower growth.
- I hear you say: but it’s our country! We (or our parents) paid tax to build it. Yes, but if companies hire non-US employees, they will pay good tax, rent housing, spend in local economies, and contribute to Social Security and Medicare, too, while often receiving less in return.
- many foreign students already invest heavily in the U.S. by paying high tuition and living expenses, without subsidies. This is not charity; it’s a deliberate transfer of wealth into American universities and communities. Denying them a fair chance to compete for jobs means taking their money while closing the door to long-term participation, which is both unfair and economically wasteful.
- intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness. High labor costs without corresponding productivity gains make companies sluggish and less adaptive to global competition. The U.S. became great by being open to talent and ideas from everywhere, reversing that openness risks slow growth and stagnation.
The real solution is domestic reform, not exclusion, for example by redistributing wealth more fairly through tax reforms that ensure the rich contribute proportionally.
America grew strong by opening its doors to talent and competition. Shutting out qualified foreign workers to protect wages may feel safe in the short run, but in the long run it weakens our economy, breeds complacency, and wastes the very investment we’ve already taken from those who studied and contributed here. If we want Americans to compete better, fix student debt and inequality at home, but don’t impede the nation by closing the market to global talents.
The problem is the inconsistencies. Fine, if a company wants to source talent from a news paper, great! But to only make postings in hard to find places, away from where the 'good' talent looks is bad.
The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!
> many foreign students
Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.
Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
Something else worth mentioning is that the companies are conferring a valuable benefit that they generally don't have to pay for: The promise of US citizenship for the employee and (eventually) their family.
If that was the case, why would they have to hide the job offer? If no American citizen is going to take the job at the lower pay, there is no need to hide the offer from them. If they are going to take the lower pay, there is no advantage to hire an H1-B.
Presuming we're talking about the job offers from the article, it's for PERM, part of the process for green cards, not for H1B. As far as I know, you don't need to post a job offer to consider local candidates for someone to apply for an H1B, only for them to get permanent residence.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
Even 60 days is a short timescale to find, be interviewed for, and accept a job in a technical field. My last job application took nearly that much time just from the first interview to an accepted offer, and that's without the added complication of transferring visa status.
Still makes being fired a lot scarier. If I knew getting fired meant I’d only have 60 days to find a new job or I’d be deported, I’d put up with quite a bit more from my employer than I currently do.
Oh for sure, it's a very short amount of time to arrange all that. Just want to clear up the time it is, and that people do exaggerate it as having no options at all, which isn't quite true. It's possible and doable, but not as easy as just having the job you already have.
I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
That does make a lot of sense, yes. It's partially the reason why I never wanted to move to the US - I value the labor protection I enjoy in Europe, the ability to switch jobs when I so desire, and a clear path to citizenship.
H1B always sounded to me like a shitty deal for the immigrant, and it also does seem to be detrimental to native workers.
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
Please don't comment in this cross-examination style on HN. The guidelines ask us not to do this. Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I never understood this redefinition of the word...
Racism means prejudice based on race. Period. Thats all it means. Redefining the word like you suggested is moving the political goalposts
I think you've earned a Godwin point. "The Nazis weren't prejudiced" isn't a great start to an argument, even as a strawman of someone else's position.
Ism doesnt mean systenic hierarchy. Does gigantism mean a systemic hierarchy of giants? Does botulism mean systemic hierarchy of botulinum. Hobestly what the hell are you talking about?
Ignoring whether the claim is accurate or not, if Indian hiring managers are preferentially hiring other Indians, yes of course this is racism, because it means they are also discriminating against all other PoC candidates, not just white people.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
You can't compress the complexities of all social dynamics to a single axis. What's the distinction you're trying to make between "act of discrimination" and "racism"? Usually the distinction people try to draw is something like "systematic" vs "one-off" (the difference between one person yelling at you on the street, and lots of people yelling at you in particular throughout the month), but the behaviour alleged here is systematic. I suspect you don't have any particular meaning in mind, instead having taken a habit of language that works well in certain situations, and falsely generalised it outside of its domain of validity.
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
If you're a seasoned manager, you have learned to work across cultural differences. Being a lazy manager who doesn't want to understand how to work with others is shortsighted on its own and is not an excuse for being a racist.
> you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
Because, in general, there is more variance within groups than across groups, so you are generalizing that an individual person within a group is more talented / capable / whatever than an individual person from outside that group. Ergo, you are treating that second person "unfairly" due to his / her group membership or lack thereof.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
For whatever it's worth, that's been a consistent trend with other things Newsom has vetoed with statements that he considers the vetoed item to be already covered by other laws, including some purely technical legislative things. I think it's likely that he sees himself as trying to keep California bureaucracy from growing indefinitely, especially with his push for things like CEQA process reduction/simplification.
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
This is a remarkable claim. Not a single Indian in tech that I know in my personal or professional life - numbering over a hundred - has ever disputed that Indians have strong (sub)ethnic affinities that color their views hiring.
In addition, nepotism is a real thing in Indian culture.
I’d be laughed out of a room with aforesaid folks if I claimed “Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians”. This is either deliberately misleading to “save face” on behalf of the community (another cultural trait), or you’re utterly oblivious in an outlying way to how things work.
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
That might have been the case 200+ years ago but for sure the majority of Indian Muslims these days are just descendants of converted Hindus and Buddhists, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
I've watched HR people break the law discriminating against white job applicants in the name of DEI. One in particular was fired for it, but it'd be foolish to think that it isn't happening more elsewhere.
And the upthread commenter has personal experience with HR people discriminating too. So what? The answer is both cases is clear regulation, which is what DEI is about. Can it be misapplied? Sure. Do people do bad things? Obviously. Is the specific anti-white conspiracy you imagine a direct threat to society? Please.
I’ve personally, repeatedly, and in writing seen HR actively discriminate against white men - as in refuse to hire them, and actively go out of their way to push them out due solely to their skin color and gender. At major fortune 50 companies. For years.
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.
Exactly, those without empathy for their fellow countrymen being unfairly discriminated against based on the color of their skin and gender identity really need to learn a hard lesson about judging others based on the character of the person and not their immutable characteristics.
It's a really good litmus test for finding those with empathy and good intellect, AKA the best kind of co-workers.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
At Amazon how I saw this work out was that we hired African immigrants rather than ADOS African-Americans.
Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.
It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
Software Engineering is not some obscure thing it is a known science that anyone can learn and become better at. I see Juniors who outpace Senior developers all the time.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
How does the green card solve my problem as an employer? Should I also force them to get married with Americans so that they have better chances of working for me?
I just want to sponsor a visa for a worker of rare qualifications. If they choose to become permanent residents of the US it’s their choice, and frankly none of my business.
Why is hiding the jobs necessary? I applied for one of these jobs years ago.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.
If the hiring process is dishonest, wouldn't that be a good sign to avoid them as a potential employer?
I know I'm out here in my own space capsule, but it seems like a non-sequitur. Again, perhaps this is my own bias speaking, but wouldn't you prefer to solve your own business problems as an entrepreneur, rather than battle to be employed by someone who has the intent to screw you, so that you might have the privilege to solve biz problems for them? In both cases you have problems, but only one gives you autonomy.
Alternatively, you might look towards employers who want you and do not desire to screw you.
Corporate crimes punishment is a real joke in the US. Meta/FB was fined a couple of million dollars for the same type of violations of temp work visa. I'm sure, it didn't even register on their bottom line.
We need to put execs behind bar, before they'll ever respect labor or competition laws.
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.
I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm?
I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.
We were advised by our counsel that as part of applying for the H-1B on this person’s behalf, the ads were needed.
Since the advice was given in a clear way and was very procedural, I treated it as necessary, did as told, and moved on to work that has actual impact as fast as possible.. I had actually forgotten about this until now. Hence banal.
I think the hill is trying to create a narrative here. The law specifically states to post job postings in newspapers and it is congress's fault if they have not updated the laws.
As per PERM regulations (20 C.F.R. §656.17):
For professional positions (those requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher), the employer must conduct two Sunday newspaper advertisements in a newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment.
For non-professional positions, at least one Sunday ad is required.
I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is denied, then it is a cause for action against the employer (ideally a fine paid to the applicant that would at least fund further search time). Repeated violations would result in wholesale revocation of H1B access.
Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.
Perhaps that would work, but I'm not so sure. I don't think the employers we're talking about are sensitive to a 20% price premium. And they might find the additional leverage H1B gives them over the employee to be worth the premium anyway. My proposal would give natives a chance to get a real job (not a ghost posting) that was given to a real person (the H1B person), and simply take their place.
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
The only requirement for H1B should be that you must get your degree in the United States. H1B’s should not be given out otherwise. It would solve almost all current shortcomings of the program
Many h1bs get masters degrees in the USA, b/c they are lower cost than undergrad, can be done online/remotely, and are higher chance of winning the lottery.
I don't think requiring a US degree would impact even half the candidates.
That is what everyone is asking for though. As you can see from the complaints in the thread, people are angry about jobs going to immigrants in the US. The alternate is for jobs to go to immigrants abroad, i.e. offshoring. It appears that people are generally happier about the latter.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
> To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
With respect, it seems you haven’t kept up with how people actually use ChatGPT. In discrimination cases—especially disparate treatment—the key is comparing your performance, opportunities, and outcomes against peers: projects assigned, promotions, credit for work, meeting invites, inclusion, and so on. For engineers, that often means concrete signals like PR assignments, review comments, approval times, who gets merges fast, and who’s blocked.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
> they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
No I think the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it. You obviously can’t copy paste its email output, but you can definitely verify what are legal terms, and how to position certain phrases.
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
This doesn't holds water as an argument against labor protectionism, since we can point to China as a contemporary example with the opposite result. Much of the US's industrial base wasn't destroyed by consumer choice, but was intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons. It wasn't even simply about implementing an economic power structure the US could use to extend its influence. The Asian Tigers were built up to facilitate more powerful "strategic partners", a South Korea poorer than Gambia wouldn't be a very useful friend. That Samsung SSD is the product of a need for strategic power balancing in East Asia. The consumer doesn't matter nearly as much as you think they do when policy is the primary agent that shapes cost, often intentionally through second order effects like infrastructural design.
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
> US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits
You have to consider two things in addendum to that:
- Those $0.20/hr jobs come with major financial burdens. Firstly, you now have to organize your supply chain around it as a labor base. That means your logistics are now many orders of magnitude more complex, and more expensive. On top of that, you have additional overhead because you're doing business across international lines, which raises organizational headcount and the kind of bright minds it takes to do that don't come cheap. Quite a lot of money is dumped into making maritime shipping cheap. It's not just subsidies and tax incentives applied to the maintenance and operation of container ships where even the fuel is a tax write-off and heavily subsidized. You need to also consider how much do those ports cost to operate? How much does it cost to maintain shipping lanes? Government attention, influence and dollars are spent at every single step of the way to ensure that foreign labor forces are affordable. A very, very large amount. It becomes apparent when you realize the end to end cost of building a cargo ship, loading it to the brim, and sailing it across the pacific is less than a nice house in Manhattan.
- The disparity in labor cost is also primarily driven by policy which exploits the 'decoupled' nature of local economies driving different costs of living. While this is traditionally framed as only working within the context of underindustrialized people being exploited, you can compare the cost of living in Taiwan with the US, as well as the relative prosperity of the two nations. Large picture, broad spectrum economic comparison is a bad joke because it's simply too lossy to support logical inference, but it's not a mistake that the dollar goes quite far in other places. The inflation of the US dollar was intentionally positioned as the oscillating circuit of the global economy, this way the US would be able to deflate it's currency to prevent bad exchange favorability when needed without suffering long-term economic damage like what happened to Britain in the 1920s.
It's a system of pulleys and levers which were carefully put together to make means to an end. It's not actually cheaper, think about it in a thermodynamic sense. It just looks cheaper because it was structured that way. Costs are hidden by opaque mechanisms that exist in plain sight, all at such a grand scale you can hardly conceive its orchestration. It works because men with a lot of power want it to.
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
> toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people
I am missing your argument.
Moreno’s bill pumps money out of the poor into the pockets of the wealthy. I am wealthy. I would benefit from his bill. My point is the exercise is a red herring. (I am not sure what yours is.)
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
why did it work out that way in the US?
During WWII there were wage freezes so employers started providing benefits:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
> In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization.
> This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers.
> Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance.
> Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.
----
Hysterical raisins strikes again.
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
It's the government that controls the immigration law that gives the company the authority to sponsor a visa. Of course the H1-B is mutually beneficial to both the company and the employee, that is why the program is so popular.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
Option 1: you give a visa to a quant with 2M/y today’s salary
Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.
This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.
This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.
"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Google
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Linkedin
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/
Intel H1Bs are engaged in semiconductor research.
Doubtful.
Well it's Intel... not really selling your case here.
You could make multiple pools, having separate ones carved out for research and advanced technology.
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.
Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
What does overindexing on the swe market mean?
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
The O-1 visa exists.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.
Does the US have such a shortage of artistic talent we have to hire abroad for it?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
There’s an O1 visa for exceptional talent.
In that case some technical aspects needs rework... Currently O1 visa being a nonimmigrant visa have no path to PR/citizenship (unlike H1Bs) and need annual renewal. This make it unattractive to "who possess extraordinary ability".
If you cannot pay for it, it means it is not important enough. Maybe that is the problem, you want exceptional talent for pennies.
Short answer - yes.
There's no long answer.
Where are the H1-Bs working in the arts at the moment?
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
L1 employees require that the company employ the person for a year at an international branch so this is only available to multi-national companies.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
But they would still be higher than a chemist's salary. This has nothing to do with open borders. If you use money as a proxy, some professions will come out ahead. That's just market dynamics. The only way to avoid that is to create carve outs or normalization by profession.
I don't see how you get there. It's harder to move chemistry work than simple laptop use so chemists in the US would have less pay equalization than developers.
Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)
Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
> Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
Could be filled by an American, sure. Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
Americans would be more willing to do the work if they salary was higher, and the salary would be higher if the supply of workers was reduced due to not allowing cheap imported labor.
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful).
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
From an economic perspective the ideal is no borders if there are no significant differences between countries that would create an infinite surge in mobility. It's like electrical current, if there is zero resistance and a difference in potential, any short circuit will potentially destroy the entire circuit.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
You have highlighted the problem I was not able to articulate. This kind of requirement “open the job to local candidates and only if no one exists will we allow you to hire from outside” exists in multiple places.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
I am not sure if your comment is directed at me but I immigrated to the US. In my case there were probably no more than 1000 people in the whole world willing and able to do my job. It was advertised in the industry job boards along with required by law newspapers. Very few people applied and none of them had been a US citizen or LPR. This is what EB immigration is for. You are welcome to lobby for another EB category based on data and tests, but you should not be allowed to commit fraud in lieu of such a category in the meantime.
EB system is pretty broad. If you really were in a position that only 1000 people in the world were able to do your job, you should’ve applied through EB1, which is designed for such people and also does not require the PERM process and therefore the job listings. EB2 and EB3 are designed for labor gaps in the industry which isn’t the same as extraordinary talent such as yours, and requires the PERM process. EB3 in fact also allows completely unskilled workers to file for permanent residency. Like I explained in the parent comment, the congress put a system to evaluate labor gaps, which is flawed. Following the rules set up by the system isn’t fraud.
>you should’ve applied through EB1
Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.
My comment was in response to your claim that EB system was created for people with rare skills, which it clearly isn’t. You were in a job that only 1000 people were able to do, you being one of them. And yet you suggested that EB1 would more laborious and not fit for you.
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.
And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?
As I said, EB-1 does not require rare skills. PERM based EB-2 and 3, though, require that there are no US workers with such skills available so it's highly correlated with skill's rarity. So why and where would I say that the entire EB system is created for people with rare skills?
>> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yep, and I am none of this.
>Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
Yep, because EB2 does not require any exceptional ability, just the lack of a US worker available, willing, and able to do the job and a master's degree.
The lack is established by a good faith recruitment process, not an exhaustive search. This is intentionally vague because it's a non-sensical requirement that is hard to prove one way or the other and was only added as a political compromise. The company is free to tailor the minimum requirements to its liking. Recall that this is a free capitalistic country. So you can establish that you can't fill the req. locally and hence are hiring a foreigner. The reason I'm pointing this out is because you have picked some type of textual or literal interpretation of things ("this is what EB is for"), and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text.
TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team.
~
I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time.
What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.
Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.
I'd rather they cost like 4X the median worker's wage, with at least half of that collected as taxes by the government.
It should be a notable cost, and the worker needs to be making a premium for it to be a rush on immigration.
Further note, this is to also encourage more _entry level_ jobs for local workers and train up citizens to become more highly skilled workers.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.
This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it.
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
>Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
> As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed?
No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game
>No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
>My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real.
Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
> That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
My point is that issuing h1bs are a service for corporations in the us, ostensibly under the reason that no one in the country is capable of the job.
I am saying that assuming that is true, and assuming that we value brain draining other countries of talent, then we allow for corporations to import workers, but they need to both pay for the cost of the worker and have no control over them afterwards.
I don’t know whether the cost to society that would cover importing a worker is 10 dollars or 10 billion, but whatever is decided on as the amount I am suggesting is paid up front.
Assuming the corporation paying for the import is correct that the immigrant has a unique skill, then we would want them to be generally available to our labor market instead of tied to a single company.
That is my reasoning at least. Again poke holes in this but I do want a system that prioritizes improvements to my society or people in my society. If the benefits for whatever we end up in are centralized primarily in any single private actor, single human or organization, then I am probably against that plan
> Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
I don’t know how to respond to this section. I am either missing some part of the h1b visa rules or we are talking about different things. What you described to me sounds like an agricultural visa or an au pair like J2 visa
You keep insisting that H-1B or any temporary visas are for the jobs that cannot be filled by Americans. This is simply not true. There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
> You keep insisting that H-1B or any temporary visas are for the jobs that cannot be filled by Americans. This is simply not true.
As a de facto description of the current situation in the United States I agree with you.
The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
I am trying to game theory out ways to make the h1b system achieve the ostensible goals. I am not trying to defend the current system as it stands
edit: I realized this might be our point of contention right now
> There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage” but there has been a surge of activity around these terms the past few months on the internet and I can’t find definitive proof of that. If that fact isn’t true it would modify my view on the system
>The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
There is no such description in law (this is what de jure means) so I have no clue why you think so.
>I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage”
They are. It does not mean they are for jobs, which cannot be done by an American worker, ostensibly or otherwise.
Ok, then I guess what I am trying to figure out is how to build a system that is the same as my de jure description.
I was under the impression that was the case and do not need you to prove to me otherwise. But I agreed with that de jure description and would like a system that achieves that
The ways to build the system you desire are simple; the political challenges though are insurmountable. This isn't rocket science. However, there has been no substantial legislative change in this area in over 30 years. The current morass of H-1B, PERM etc. is a carefully engineered compromise to keep all demanding factions - the restrictionists, the capitalists, the left and the right, acceptably (un)happy.
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
What is the problem with green cards?
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
> Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
I work (in Europe) for an American company. All the people in IT we hire in USA are foreigners, they are cheaper. You cannot say it is discrimination on wages because everyone is paid low. The visa system allows the company to pay low wages and hiring foreigners is just a small detail in the scheme.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).
A healthy labor pool increase business growth that in turn can push average industry wages higher however.
It’s real phenomena too - US developer wages are so high in part due to the business ecosystem which depends on part on recent graduates and a flexible labor pool.
That is, your analysis is only true in the static case. Starve US startups of talented junior developers and you might kill the next Facebook in the process.
Thats some Wealth of Nations every worker can move the same number of bricks reductive thinking.
I have been in the valley for 25+ years, and worked with a ton of visa holders.
The majority of them were better educated and all well compensated for the work they did. The fact that many of them stayed for green cards and citizenship says a LOT. There is a reason that the boss of both google, and MS came through these programs.
No it isn’t.
There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of course apply so it’s not like people are unfamiliar with the math here.
Show me the reduction in cost for medical care when 1/4 of the doctors in the US are foreign born medical grads, the bulk of whom came through the H1B program.
Show me the American born doctors on the street going hungry while foreigners take their jobs. Show me the reduction in wages or costs.
> supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs.
Were drowing in data on both of these things and if you want to understand either of these markets from an economic standpoint then your going to need more than a surface level "supply and demand" argument when they look much more like "I, Pencil" levels of complexity.
Im going to say this bluntly, every terrible engineer I have worked with, who has been fired for being bad at their job has been American born and raised. We're not importing dead wood and dummies to fill in roles as cogs on the h1b program. These are smart people who end up in high level roles who end up staying and becoming Americans (agin raising the bar).
This is such a weird example. Doctors are a professions with artificial limits specifically to raise the income of doctors in the profession. There are no starving doctors because they don’t let enough people become doctors to lower the wage.
> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.
At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
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The US needs immigrants. We need the best and the brightest. Those are the folks starting the new job creating companies. That’s what keeps us so innovative. The H1B is a good gauntlet through which we can get those immigrants. Ended it is shortsighted.
> The US needs immigrants.
At the expense of the citizenry?
It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.
It is an exception used to justify the rule. There is a very small percentage that founded companies and the rest are impacting negatively the economy.
So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.
There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.
>Those are nonsense hypotheticals.
In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.
I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?
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> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
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Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
I've also seen this done when the hiring manager, or someone else in the process, already has a candidate to hire and needs to post the job listing for legal cover.
Usually it’s a newspaper in the middle of nowhere too, in fine print, in the classifieds.
A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
> We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough.
The USA currently potentially hasn't enough programmers. If the market tide changes, one of course wants to be able to send these superfluous work migrants back to their home countries.
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> it is still nowhere near the required amount.
How do you reconcile that with all of the SWE layoffs in the past few years?
Companies are always going to lay people off, because they can and it is in their financial interest to do so when the shareholders or investors demand cutbacks. AFAIK, Amazon even has a formalized stack ranking system where a certain percentage will be laid off every year to make room for new talent. This has nothing to do with visas or immigrants. If you want to stop that, you need better worker protections, but that's a separate discussion.
How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
How dare that loser want a cushy, well paying job. This is America, that's not allowed for them. We like our workers desperate.
This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies.
What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
To assumption that there is a finite amount of work in the economy is called "lump of labour fallacy" in economics. It's not useful to ask "What if X were infinite and we held everything else constant?"
Well yeah, because when you have a much larger working population you have to actually establish rights at the government level or with unions rather than relying on your individual bargaining power.
The two philosophies are not only not incompatible but are necessary to maintain our standard of living. Closed borders, protectionism, and relying on individual bargaining power is another path to a similar end so long as you can keep the US on top.
> This, I cannot believe how all the most pro-workers rights people I know also support "open borders"-like philosophies.
You ever consider that it's because those people are pro-workers everywhere and not just workers nearby? So yes enabling foreign workers to improve their lives by coming here makes perfect sense.
> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
I mean that's like saying "what do you think is gonna happen to your rights once all the slaves are free". The answer hinges on whether we continue to operate under the government that's comfortable with exploiting its citizens.
The frustrating part is that this isn't some loophole getting accidentally exploited, it's baked into the system
The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
I've got out of work friends that would love to see this guide. Please share.
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
https://jobs.now
This is unlikely to be of use to your friends. Companies hide these job openings because they aren't real: they are filled by a real person right now. If someone applies, they won't be hired because there's no extra headcount. They will just be rejected after a resume review. Companies usually don't even extend interviews to such candidates. Applying only delays the green card process of a foreigner since they will need to rewrite a job description to be even more tailored to that already employed person.
So…. Locals shouldn’t delay or poison the process for a foreigner that would take ‘their’ role, while bored on unemployment - why exactly?
Locals who are trying to get jobs for themselves shouldn't be told that they can get a job through this process.
So you’re admitting that applying for jobs they should be able to get, in a place they should be able to apply in, under federal law is not going to work?
Sounds like fraud to me. Or a crime of some sort.
If they do it, and it clearly doesn’t work, it even sounds like something they could take to court.
In fact, something that is perhaps their duty to take to court.
You're reading too much into it. It's a case of bad UX. The jobs do not exist. The actual job application/interview etc. happened years ago, when it did exist, and everyone, including locals, had the same shot at it. When the job existed, someone was hired for it, and it happened to be someone on a visa. In order to keep that person employed in this job and get them a green card, the government requires that the job be advertised again afresh. It's a non-sensical requirement that was added because some politican or lobbyist asked for it. The natural way to add protectionism to this model would have been to add it at the outset, but that clearly wouldn't work for the economy. So a compromise was engineered. Companies can hire anyone generally as long as they are, in principle, temporary. When it comes to keeping them permanently, the government requires that they do this charade of posting ads again and doing a market test etc.
Unfortunately they will not hire Americans even if they're qualified because what they really want are slaves.
With H1B fired means deported.
The people following the guide are just making it impossible to review all of the applications.
So what if it comes from 4chan? I think it's a good thing for citizens to try and get jobs that should be going to them, no matter the source
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You can't comment like this on Hacker News. Please avoid flamebait and slurs against groups of people. The guidelines make it clear we expect much better than this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Please don't post in an inflammatory style or make swipes at the HN community. We don't know what "a large portion of HNers" think about any topic. Controversial topics bring out the people who feel the strongest about that topic, but the people commenting are only a tiny share of the whole community. Your point about the different reactions people have to different kinds of immigration controversies is valid, but topics like this need to be discussed with sensitivity.
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I understand, but why is similar moderation not extended when "H1Bs" come up on HN?
To be brutally honesty, why is it acceptable to bash H1B abuse but not B1/2 or VWP abuse on HN. In both cases, it is employers mislabeling and potentially breaking immigration and labor laws, yet it is acceptable to talk derogatorily about those on H1Bs and not on other visas, even though rates of visa misuse are consistent across most large nationalities.
I am of South Asian origin, but I have lived in North America for almost my entire life (aside from 6 months in the old country), but the persistent utilization of "H1B" as a code word for South Asian (primarily Indian) origin tech employees is tiring.
I understand that a lot of ICs are dealing with a significant amount of stress due to the downturn in the tech industry, but there is a nativist current on HN that is starting to morph into anti-South Asian sentiment.
This style of thread comes up almost daily on HN, and is something I have previously brought up to @Dang as well.
It is tiring and demeaning to those of us who are immigrants or the children of immigrants - a number of us who make up a major portion of the tech industry, and have leadership positions in YC as well.
South Asian Americans make up around 2-3% of the US, but almost every post on HN about the job market turns into "H1B"-bashing, which often devolves into bashing people on the visa instead of the companies themselves.
Almost never do I see conversations extending sympathy to those on work visas and also stuck with abusive employers - only nativist bashing that "they took our jobs".
I hope you can moderate these kinds of conversations or update the engagement rules of HN, because HN and the tech industry of 2025 is not HN or the tech industry of 2008.
It is legitimately demoralizing. I worked on the Hill for several years, have advised administrations on how to bring back manufacturing and "American dynamism" (to use the A16Z term), and have built, launched, and funded software products and companies that are used by backbone infra in the US, and even advised a number of YC startups that have exited.
I have done my part for the country, yet to a large portion of HN and the tech industry I and other South Asian Americans will continue to be termed as "H1Bs" until they hear our accent, or if we can pass as some other race or ethnicity.
I would love to have a good faith discussion with you about this, because I do heavily leverage HN and have found it to be a great resource to find technical discussions and have my portfolio companies show share their features, so the toxicity around H1B and work visas in the tech industry is heavily demoralizing.
The distribution of H1B talent is bimodal, on one end is the highly-talented at high wages, on the other end is the mediocre at low wages. In my opinion the highly-talented (which it sounds like you're a part of) are fine and welcome, the latter group shouldn't be allowed because of the suppression of wages and negative effects on domestic labor.
On your comment of nativism, what do you expect? It's a normal expectation for people who are "native" to a region to expect to be able to access the jobs in their region without needing to compete internationally. The lower-tier H1B workers do suppress wages, it's undeniable.
On your comment of "moderation", I think what you really mean is that you want censorship because you're conflating people's distaste of the latter "lower-tier" H1B immigrants as somehow being directed at you. It's really not about you if you're as capable as you've claimed. Can you not see how frustrating it would be if there were available jobs in your area but you could not get those jobs because someone with commensurate skills as you (not better skills, the same) is willing to work for half what you need to survive, because they're from abroad, is getting the job instead of you?
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I understand where you're coming from.
Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
My perception from moderating HN for years is that there is generally much more criticism toward companies (including/especially Silicon Valley companies) for exploiting H1Bs than there has been towards holders of those visas.
But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
If there are patterns or trends of these kinds of comments, then the more you can show us, the better, so we can develop approaches to identifying and dealing with them.
Thanks for the kinds words and being open to listen to my feedback!
> Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
Absolutely and no argument there
> But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
I have done so on multiple occasions, but have seen a number of those comments remain up.
For example, this comment [0].
Additionally, in this very thread, we have an unsourced comment [1] parroting a common trope, which is legimately false in most cases (and as a member of the YC community, I'm sure you can get this validated), and with significant controversial discussion about this
I also see constant mentions of Infosys and TCS, but never mentions of massive European firms like EPAM which do similar shenanigans and advertise it to new hires across the CEE [2] or Globant and LATAM [3]. While the Indian firms are large, and it is acceptable to have not heard about Globant, EPAM is absolutely massive and every F100 uses them.
I can provide more robust data on the general trend, but it is something that would take some time, but I would really really appreciate if the YC employees affiliated with HN do a deep dive into this.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228366
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224087
[2] - https://www.epam.com/careers/epam-without-borders/usa
[3] - https://stayrelevant.globant.com/en/culture/globant-experien...
The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?
> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
The process forces everyone to act like they are
> anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.
"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"
See for example a recent lawsuit accusing Tesla of running a systemic, ongoing scheme to replace or exclude US citizens in favor of H-1B visa employees.[1][2]
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71325887/taub-v-tesla-i...
[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/lawsuit-say...
FYI to anyone reading this, this is not what wage theft means. Wage theft is an employer not paying wages they owe to an employee.
Yup and it's also worth mentioning that wage theft is the largest source of theft in the United States. Employers steal more wages from employees than shoplifting or basically any other form of theft, combined. Wage theft makes up 4x more theft than the next largest, which is larceny.
Americans are waaaay too corporation friendly.
the fact that you can imprison people, but the most you can do to a corporation is fine them, is evidence enough that america supports profit over humans
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
Yes, something like this would be great. You could tie the registry to both IRS and SSA databases ensuring a) the job hunters are real, and b) the jobs offered are (eventually) real. It would also be great to carve an exception into liability law and require employers to give feedback to workers about a rejection. I'm sure this leaves lots of room for malefactors on all sides, but it would handle the biggest flaws of the current system.
At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.
The fact that Instacart threatened legal action against jobs.now is proof that you're correct
Freedom of movement of labour is the principal reason unions and the British labour party had significant brexit support: the view was that EU labour migration was designed to reduce bargaining power.
I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened.
If you don't like H1B rules, organise. But bear in mind who you will be associating with promoting a closed labour market.
That tension between protecting labor rights and promoting open markets is real
Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.
All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.
Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.
I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
It's HR. HR should just be headhunting, handled externally to the company. Legal can handle the rest.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Or you tariff work done offshore and work done by foreigners onshore. We do that for manufacturing and agriculture, why not tech?
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
Of course. Suppose one month NY had a surge in sales and Ohio had a slump. The company should therefore fire several Ohionian workers and hire several New York. So on every month.
Let me play the devil advocate here: - first, I don’t think the measures they put in place are unreasonable: publishing on newspapers, mailing your application instead of emailing or using online forms may feel outdated, but they are all standard practice in other countries. You cannot say you don’t know how to mail(!) or that reading newspapers is beneath your dignity, especially if you need a job!
-second, what is wrong with free competition on the job market between US- and non-US citizens? Competition is good for the business, isn’t it?! It should be a competition on qualification and wage, not races, your skin color or some rubber stamp on a paper. Protecting domestic workers by artificially restricting competition risks creating complacency, higher costs, and slower growth.
- I hear you say: but it’s our country! We (or our parents) paid tax to build it. Yes, but if companies hire non-US employees, they will pay good tax, rent housing, spend in local economies, and contribute to Social Security and Medicare, too, while often receiving less in return.
- many foreign students already invest heavily in the U.S. by paying high tuition and living expenses, without subsidies. This is not charity; it’s a deliberate transfer of wealth into American universities and communities. Denying them a fair chance to compete for jobs means taking their money while closing the door to long-term participation, which is both unfair and economically wasteful.
- intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness. High labor costs without corresponding productivity gains make companies sluggish and less adaptive to global competition. The U.S. became great by being open to talent and ideas from everywhere, reversing that openness risks slow growth and stagnation.
The real solution is domestic reform, not exclusion, for example by redistributing wealth more fairly through tax reforms that ensure the rich contribute proportionally.
America grew strong by opening its doors to talent and competition. Shutting out qualified foreign workers to protect wages may feel safe in the short run, but in the long run it weakens our economy, breeds complacency, and wastes the very investment we’ve already taken from those who studied and contributed here. If we want Americans to compete better, fix student debt and inequality at home, but don’t impede the nation by closing the market to global talents.
The problem is the inconsistencies. Fine, if a company wants to source talent from a news paper, great! But to only make postings in hard to find places, away from where the 'good' talent looks is bad.
The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!
> many foreign students
Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.
Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
> the wage suppression
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
Something else worth mentioning is that the companies are conferring a valuable benefit that they generally don't have to pay for: The promise of US citizenship for the employee and (eventually) their family.
FWIW the large companies usually do pay for much of it, including dedicated immigration lawyers.
If that was the case, why would they have to hide the job offer? If no American citizen is going to take the job at the lower pay, there is no need to hide the offer from them. If they are going to take the lower pay, there is no advantage to hire an H1-B.
Presuming we're talking about the job offers from the article, it's for PERM, part of the process for green cards, not for H1B. As far as I know, you don't need to post a job offer to consider local candidates for someone to apply for an H1B, only for them to get permanent residence.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
As far as I understand it, it's not just that they need for no American citizen to take the job. They need for no American citizen to apply for it.
Well that's precisely what they say on the visa sponsorship "we can't find the talent", no you can't find the talent at that price.
This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
Even 60 days is a short timescale to find, be interviewed for, and accept a job in a technical field. My last job application took nearly that much time just from the first interview to an accepted offer, and that's without the added complication of transferring visa status.
Still makes being fired a lot scarier. If I knew getting fired meant I’d only have 60 days to find a new job or I’d be deported, I’d put up with quite a bit more from my employer than I currently do.
Oh for sure, it's a very short amount of time to arrange all that. Just want to clear up the time it is, and that people do exaggerate it as having no options at all, which isn't quite true. It's possible and doable, but not as easy as just having the job you already have.
I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
That does make a lot of sense, yes. It's partially the reason why I never wanted to move to the US - I value the labor protection I enjoy in Europe, the ability to switch jobs when I so desire, and a clear path to citizenship.
H1B always sounded to me like a shitty deal for the immigrant, and it also does seem to be detrimental to native workers.
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
Bingo.
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Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
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Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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Please don't tell your lived experience, its inconvenient.
The guidelines apply equally to everyone. It makes all the difference whether a comment is worded in a way that promotes curious conversation vs rage.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
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Only because the politics of most common idiot id the cheapest for monied interests to manufacture.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
That’s extremely racist to assume that Indian execs are all D tier or worse.
That's clearly not an assumption that this sentence is based on: > The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams
There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
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Please don't comment in this cross-examination style on HN. The guidelines ask us not to do this. Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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That's a made up deffinition only recently invented. Racism is hating another group of people based on physical or cultural background.
The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?
Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?
This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?
Such a bad take.
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This is an incredibly weird hill to die on.
I never understood this redefinition of the word... Racism means prejudice based on race. Period. Thats all it means. Redefining the word like you suggested is moving the political goalposts
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How do the nazis qualify as not prejudiced?
I think you've earned a Godwin point. "The Nazis weren't prejudiced" isn't a great start to an argument, even as a strawman of someone else's position.
Ism doesnt mean systenic hierarchy. Does gigantism mean a systemic hierarchy of giants? Does botulism mean systemic hierarchy of botulinum. Hobestly what the hell are you talking about?
So are you saying that if you were to put white people into a country that is systemically ruled by non-whites, they can’t be racist there?
At certain companies and it’s org structures yeah
What about these cases happening outside of the US?
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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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Ignoring whether the claim is accurate or not, if Indian hiring managers are preferentially hiring other Indians, yes of course this is racism, because it means they are also discriminating against all other PoC candidates, not just white people.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
That’s simply an outlandish claim. Most people are not in control of any level of the government.
I mean there is that one group.
Which group? Politicians?
Illuminati, mole men, lizard people.
You can't compress the complexities of all social dynamics to a single axis. What's the distinction you're trying to make between "act of discrimination" and "racism"? Usually the distinction people try to draw is something like "systematic" vs "one-off" (the difference between one person yelling at you on the street, and lots of people yelling at you in particular throughout the month), but the behaviour alleged here is systematic. I suspect you don't have any particular meaning in mind, instead having taken a habit of language that works well in certain situations, and falsely generalised it outside of its domain of validity.
If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.
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I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
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How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
If you're a seasoned manager, you have learned to work across cultural differences. Being a lazy manager who doesn't want to understand how to work with others is shortsighted on its own and is not an excuse for being a racist.
> you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
Because, in general, there is more variance within groups than across groups, so you are generalizing that an individual person within a group is more talented / capable / whatever than an individual person from outside that group. Ergo, you are treating that second person "unfairly" due to his / her group membership or lack thereof.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
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Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
For whatever it's worth, that's been a consistent trend with other things Newsom has vetoed with statements that he considers the vetoed item to be already covered by other laws, including some purely technical legislative things. I think it's likely that he sees himself as trying to keep California bureaucracy from growing indefinitely, especially with his push for things like CEQA process reduction/simplification.
It’s capital, political and financial. Everything costs, got to pay for gerrymandering somehow.
Vetoing costs. More than half the legislature voted for it.
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
What do you think the intersection between HN and Blind is?
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Does caste discrimination still exist in India?
If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
> I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
Unless they have any personal advantage in doing so.
This is a remarkable claim. Not a single Indian in tech that I know in my personal or professional life - numbering over a hundred - has ever disputed that Indians have strong (sub)ethnic affinities that color their views hiring. In addition, nepotism is a real thing in Indian culture. I’d be laughed out of a room with aforesaid folks if I claimed “Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians”. This is either deliberately misleading to “save face” on behalf of the community (another cultural trait), or you’re utterly oblivious in an outlying way to how things work.
that is definitely part of it
Yep. And caste based discrimination is legal in the USA. Its not a protected EEOC class, as much as that doesn't matter in our legal environment.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
What’s the evidence? I remember seeing allegations but all the court cases resulted in nothing, because there was no evidence of such discrimination.
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How so? There are 172 million Muslims in India.
I think he means since they aren’t originally “Indian” but are colonizers of India who arrived through invasion.
That might have been the case 200+ years ago but for sure the majority of Indian Muslims these days are just descendants of converted Hindus and Buddhists, etc.
So are the brahmins. The indigenous religions of India are basically gone. Only remembered in various folklore.
Where can I read more about this? That the indigenous are gone?
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
This reminds me of the aphorism "The purpose of a system is what it does."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.
Much the opposite. They are usually the weaker animals in the herd or people who flipped out of corporate finance to negotiate benefits.
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
I've watched HR people break the law discriminating against white job applicants in the name of DEI. One in particular was fired for it, but it'd be foolish to think that it isn't happening more elsewhere.
And the upthread commenter has personal experience with HR people discriminating too. So what? The answer is both cases is clear regulation, which is what DEI is about. Can it be misapplied? Sure. Do people do bad things? Obviously. Is the specific anti-white conspiracy you imagine a direct threat to society? Please.
I’ve personally, repeatedly, and in writing seen HR actively discriminate against white men - as in refuse to hire them, and actively go out of their way to push them out due solely to their skin color and gender. At major fortune 50 companies. For years.
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
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One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.
Exactly, those without empathy for their fellow countrymen being unfairly discriminated against based on the color of their skin and gender identity really need to learn a hard lesson about judging others based on the character of the person and not their immutable characteristics.
It's a really good litmus test for finding those with empathy and good intellect, AKA the best kind of co-workers.
This is why DEI is so important. It’s a blunt tool, but still a tool, to short circuit the basic human desire to be within their network.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
At Amazon how I saw this work out was that we hired African immigrants rather than ADOS African-Americans.
Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.
It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
Or ‘even better’, someone in the same circle who can somehow check the box you need. Harvard grads hiring other Harvard grads, etc.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
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What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
I didn’t say non existent. But in short enough supply at the appropriate level of skill to have different skews without any discrimination happening
Software Engineering is not some obscure thing it is a known science that anyone can learn and become better at. I see Juniors who outpace Senior developers all the time.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
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For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
So, I think your point is moot.
How does the green card solve my problem as an employer? Should I also force them to get married with Americans so that they have better chances of working for me?
I just want to sponsor a visa for a worker of rare qualifications. If they choose to become permanent residents of the US it’s their choice, and frankly none of my business.
The system we have is insane.
> She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans)
Is this not by itself a problem?
Americans don’t go to graduate school.
With a bachelors in an engineering field as an American you can be making close to 6 figures the day after you graduate.
With a huge student debt and the clock ticking, do you get a job or do you join a PhD program to get a stipend of 25k/year for at least 5 years?
Grad school becomes attractive to Americans only during recessions.
Cries in 2008
For every job like that, there's 100 jobs that are "Write basic Java CRUD app against RDBMS backend"
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You can find jobs that corporations tried to hide on jobs.now: https://www.jobs.now/
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
Why is hiding the jobs necessary? I applied for one of these jobs years ago.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
> Why is hiding the jobs necessary?
Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.
I’m not sure why. Because they’re usually at salaries that you wouldn’t accept. Like paying 30% below market rate.
Is instacart a lowballer employer? levels.fyi suggests software engineers at L3 are getting 222k
"You have just committed visa fraud and I am calling a labor lawyer"
“What do you mean it’s not available to me?”
They don't have to answer this. The lady told me the job posting was in a "weird system" and quickly moved the conversation to other open roles.
If the hiring process is dishonest, wouldn't that be a good sign to avoid them as a potential employer?
I know I'm out here in my own space capsule, but it seems like a non-sequitur. Again, perhaps this is my own bias speaking, but wouldn't you prefer to solve your own business problems as an entrepreneur, rather than battle to be employed by someone who has the intent to screw you, so that you might have the privilege to solve biz problems for them? In both cases you have problems, but only one gives you autonomy.
Alternatively, you might look towards employers who want you and do not desire to screw you.
Corporate crimes punishment is a real joke in the US. Meta/FB was fined a couple of million dollars for the same type of violations of temp work visa. I'm sure, it didn't even register on their bottom line.
We need to put execs behind bar, before they'll ever respect labor or competition laws.
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
It’s much more banal than it seems.
Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.
I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm? I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.
We were advised by our counsel that as part of applying for the H-1B on this person’s behalf, the ads were needed.
Since the advice was given in a clear way and was very procedural, I treated it as necessary, did as told, and moved on to work that has actual impact as fast as possible.. I had actually forgotten about this until now. Hence banal.
https://archive.ph/LCAqn
I see everyone is for maximizing shareholder value until they are reminded they are workers first.
I think the hill is trying to create a narrative here. The law specifically states to post job postings in newspapers and it is congress's fault if they have not updated the laws.
As per PERM regulations (20 C.F.R. §656.17):
For professional positions (those requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher), the employer must conduct two Sunday newspaper advertisements in a newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment.
For non-professional positions, at least one Sunday ad is required.
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I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is denied, then it is a cause for action against the employer (ideally a fine paid to the applicant that would at least fund further search time). Repeated violations would result in wholesale revocation of H1B access.
Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.
Perhaps that would work, but I'm not so sure. I don't think the employers we're talking about are sensitive to a 20% price premium. And they might find the additional leverage H1B gives them over the employee to be worth the premium anyway. My proposal would give natives a chance to get a real job (not a ghost posting) that was given to a real person (the H1B person), and simply take their place.
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
America is a god awful place. It's time to abandon ship. I intend to get out of this increasingly authoritarian naziesque hellhole.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
To "use" a post office?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
Ah crap, here I've been trying to walk into the side of the building for the past 3 hours.
"Midvale Post-Office for the Gifted."
I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
Right, imagine if the same posting was onlinen in a legitimate-looking spot, but for some reason the process required credit-card validation up front.
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
One popular trick was to advertise the jobs in newspapers. The dead-tree edition only.
We effectively replaced 43 h1b’s with AI. Looking to do more soon.
HN beat The Hill to this story by 5 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45151086
What's wild is how blatantly some of these tactics skirt the spirit of the law while technically staying within its letter
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
The only requirement for H1B should be that you must get your degree in the United States. H1B’s should not be given out otherwise. It would solve almost all current shortcomings of the program
Many h1bs get masters degrees in the USA, b/c they are lower cost than undergrad, can be done online/remotely, and are higher chance of winning the lottery.
I don't think requiring a US degree would impact even half the candidates.
Good point, definitely no online/remote, must reside in the US minimum 2 years to qualify
Has anyone started to think that tech industry in the USA is going the way of the manufacturing industry?
And by that I mean mostly gone/offshored?
That is what everyone is asking for though. As you can see from the complaints in the thread, people are angry about jobs going to immigrants in the US. The alternate is for jobs to go to immigrants abroad, i.e. offshoring. It appears that people are generally happier about the latter.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
This crime has yet to be addressed.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
Posted my response below, you have no idea how impactful this is going to be
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That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
First call should be to an employment attorney and the EEOC, no matter what, before you sign anything.
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
> To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
With respect, it seems you haven’t kept up with how people actually use ChatGPT. In discrimination cases—especially disparate treatment—the key is comparing your performance, opportunities, and outcomes against peers: projects assigned, promotions, credit for work, meeting invites, inclusion, and so on. For engineers, that often means concrete signals like PR assignments, review comments, approval times, who gets merges fast, and who’s blocked.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
> they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
No I think the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it. You obviously can’t copy paste its email output, but you can definitely verify what are legal terms, and how to position certain phrases.
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer
Do you have any preliminary statistics that suggest you're right? AI is mature enough that we should be able to track this.
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
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Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://h1bdata.info/
https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
This doesn't holds water as an argument against labor protectionism, since we can point to China as a contemporary example with the opposite result. Much of the US's industrial base wasn't destroyed by consumer choice, but was intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons. It wasn't even simply about implementing an economic power structure the US could use to extend its influence. The Asian Tigers were built up to facilitate more powerful "strategic partners", a South Korea poorer than Gambia wouldn't be a very useful friend. That Samsung SSD is the product of a need for strategic power balancing in East Asia. The consumer doesn't matter nearly as much as you think they do when policy is the primary agent that shapes cost, often intentionally through second order effects like infrastructural design.
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
USA got S&P500 chart going up
China got industrialization
> US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits
You have to consider two things in addendum to that:
- Those $0.20/hr jobs come with major financial burdens. Firstly, you now have to organize your supply chain around it as a labor base. That means your logistics are now many orders of magnitude more complex, and more expensive. On top of that, you have additional overhead because you're doing business across international lines, which raises organizational headcount and the kind of bright minds it takes to do that don't come cheap. Quite a lot of money is dumped into making maritime shipping cheap. It's not just subsidies and tax incentives applied to the maintenance and operation of container ships where even the fuel is a tax write-off and heavily subsidized. You need to also consider how much do those ports cost to operate? How much does it cost to maintain shipping lanes? Government attention, influence and dollars are spent at every single step of the way to ensure that foreign labor forces are affordable. A very, very large amount. It becomes apparent when you realize the end to end cost of building a cargo ship, loading it to the brim, and sailing it across the pacific is less than a nice house in Manhattan.
- The disparity in labor cost is also primarily driven by policy which exploits the 'decoupled' nature of local economies driving different costs of living. While this is traditionally framed as only working within the context of underindustrialized people being exploited, you can compare the cost of living in Taiwan with the US, as well as the relative prosperity of the two nations. Large picture, broad spectrum economic comparison is a bad joke because it's simply too lossy to support logical inference, but it's not a mistake that the dollar goes quite far in other places. The inflation of the US dollar was intentionally positioned as the oscillating circuit of the global economy, this way the US would be able to deflate it's currency to prevent bad exchange favorability when needed without suffering long-term economic damage like what happened to Britain in the 1920s.
It's a system of pulleys and levers which were carefully put together to make means to an end. It's not actually cheaper, think about it in a thermodynamic sense. It just looks cheaper because it was structured that way. Costs are hidden by opaque mechanisms that exist in plain sight, all at such a grand scale you can hardly conceive its orchestration. It works because men with a lot of power want it to.
If either way I'm homeless, I'd at least rather have a chance at having the job rather than have my own government work against me.
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
If you're a US company that wants access to the Italian market you can hire in Italy.
I find this very reasonable.
This bill is a hunk of Swiss cheese. Great for lawyers and bankers and possibly global tech companies, depending on how it parses out in court.
I'm willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere.
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
>… I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
> toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people
I am missing your argument.
Moreno’s bill pumps money out of the poor into the pockets of the wealthy. I am wealthy. I would benefit from his bill. My point is the exercise is a red herring. (I am not sure what yours is.)
Sorry, I was making an oblique reference to the part of the OBBB that increased ICE’s budget to 170 billion.
My point was that I think the powers at be agree with you that this playbook is unstable and are preparing for that eventuality
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
As of January 2025, the U.S. has an immigrant population of 53.3 million people, making up 15.8% of the total population.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
https://usafacts.org/immigration/
And of the remaining 300+M virtually none are native americans ;)
Wrong.
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
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That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
From your link
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
What percent of tech jobs?
Don't have a percentage handy, but these resources are likely useful for your inquiry.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
> About 400,000 H-1B applications for high-skilled foreign workers were approved in 2024
That's more than I thought!
Compare to https://layoffs.fyi/
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
This is hilarious.
It isn't just corporations, its the federal government. The same ones hiding the rampant student rape issue at UIUC Champaign